Various Artists - Live At CBGB's (1976) (@256)

Every September I strive to be present to the maximum possible number of movies shown at the Athens International Film Festival of Cinema magazine. Of all its sections, Music & Films is my favourite one. Although I missed the movie that was awarded (Until The Light Takes Us), my personal award went to the movie Burning Down the House: The Story of CBGB.


The trailer

I guess there is no meaning in trying to explain what CBGB means for music. Its closure is just another major loss in NY's cultural heritage. As we've seen in the film, many musicians rallied to prevent the club's closure, but once more some financial aspects and some paperwork proved to be much stronger. Apart from that, as Jonathan Demme correctly stated in the film, CBGB was a venue where many unsigned bands could play; now that it doesn't exist, it'll be far more difficult for them to find a place to present their music. It was more or less the same situation with the Ramones, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, Television, Suicide, Blonde, Heartbreakers and Richard Hell to name just a few. It's for sure that without CBGB all these outcasts would have faced much more difficulties to find their way. The result would be that music would be totally different, and definitely much poorer from what it is now. Finally, I felt a little bit uneasy when I saw CBGB's original facade in a sterilised art gallery. I could propose this gallery to take the notoriously dirty toilets of the club as well.













This upload is a compilation of live recordings from CBGB during June 4, 5, 6, 1976. As Joe Viglione explains in allmusic: "This is it, the classic double LP from CBGB's that was instrumental in putting national focus on the "new wave," a brilliant handle comparing the next generation of garage and underground rockers to French cinema (...) It was a historic moment in rock & roll, and this document is a time capsule treasure of the musical movement as it was evolving."
Tracklisting:
A1-Tuff Darts - All For The Love Of Rock 'N' Roll
A2-Shirts - Operetico
A3-Mink DeVille - Cadillac Moon
A4-Laughing Dogs - I Need A Million
B1-Shirts - Poe
B2-Mink DeVille - Let Me Dream If I Want To
B3-Tuff Darts - Head Over Heels
B4-Manster - Over, Under, Sideways, Down
C1-Manster - I'm Really Not This Way
C2-Sun - Romance
C3-Stuart's Hammer - Everybody's Depraved
C4-Miamis - We Deliver
D1-Mink DeVille - Change It Comes
D2-Shirts - A.V.M.
D3-Laughing Dogs - It Feels Alright Tonight
D4-Tuff Darts - Slash



The Ramones - Blitzkrieg Bop Live at CBGB 1977


The last song ever played at CBGB - Patti Smith "Elegie" October 15, 2006

See also:
Sonic Youth's video clip of Do You Believe In Rapture which is filmed inside the CBGB
CBGB virtual tour
The History of CBGB written by Hilly Kristal, the man that ran the club for all these years
Richard Hell's article about CBGB in the NY Times

review link: here

download link: here

OST - The Wizard of Oz - The Deluxe Edition (1939/1995) (@256)

I was thinking to have an upload about the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, but there isn't much to upload after the recent glorious 6-cd release from Rhino. And although Woodstock's anniversary had all the tributes it deserved, I think that the 70th anniversary (on August 12) of the first screening of the Wizard of Oz has somehow been neglected. Someone could argue that both the movie and the soundtrack are a little bit dated, but then I don't think that there are many movies with such enormous impact on pop culture. The same applies to the soundtrack. The music of Harold Arlen (a mysteriously underrated composer as compared to Gershwin, Berlin, Rodgers/Hammerstein-Hart or Hoagy Carmichael) and the lyrics of E.Y. Harburg, offered not only the legendary Over The Rainbow for which they won the Academy Award for Best Original Song, but also a bunch of great songs such as Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead, You're Off To See The Wizard, If I Only Had A Brain, among others.
The merits of (again) Rhino's deluxe edition of 1995, which is uploaded here, are explained by Bruce Eder in allmusic: "There were at least two versions of The Wizard of Oz on compact disc before Rhino issued this double-CD deluxe version. Those earlier CDs had been mastered, respectively, from the original LP master created by MGM Records in the mid-'50s, or used a restored version of the finished film as the source for most of its content. But this set represents the first occasion on which the original unedited studio recordings of the score — derived from the "angles" captured by various microphones used in the recording process — have been assembled for commercial release; and, indeed, the first time these uncut recordings, of the music as it was conceived and written, before being edited to fit the final release cut of the movie, have been heard since 1939. The results are astounding, to say the least — in addition to giving us a full account of the underscore for the movie in all of its finest nuances so that one can appreciate the action on the instruments and the fine details of the orchestration, it also reveals a wealth of subliminal detail in the music writing, a match in its depth and range for the finest operas of Verdi and Puccini. In fact, hearing the complete first disc and the first half of the second, which together comprise the soundtrack of the movie, is the equivalent of finding a new way to absorb the movie, regardless of how well one has known it up to this point: on that basis alone, fans of the movie will find this set essential. Additionally, the second CD contains alternate versions of portions of the score, and unused portions of the score that will be a revelation to anyone who enjoys the movie."

download link (part1 - the soundtrack): here
download link (part2 - supplemental material): here

P.S.1 For those seeking for more Judy Garland, an older post with her legendary 1961 performance at Carnegie Hall can be found here.
P.S.2 Thers is also the original cast of The Wiz here.

Ravi Shankar & Ali Akbar Khan - In Concert 1972 (1972) (@256)

Ali Akbar Khan sadly passed away recently. He was a true master in sarod (a smaller relative of the sitar) and one of the musicians that introduced Indian classical music to western audiences. He first played in the US in 1955, while he was the first Indian musician to appear on an American TV broadcast.
This upload finds him performing live along with his brother-in-law Ravi Shankar at the Philarmonic Hall of New York, on 8 October 1972. The result is absolutely mesmerising.

download link: here

London Sinfonietta - Warp Works (2006) (@256)

Let's put another one in the series of the Warp tribute. This time, a very interesting project: Between 2003 and 2005, the London Sinfonietta gave a number of performances where they presented their own version on a number of compositions of Warp label artists (Aphex Twin and Squarepusher) and of some of the most important avant-garde artists of the 20th century. Their aim was to explore the connection between these two sides since the former are considered the developers of what the latter had started. Here, since the tribute is for Warp, I've chosen to separate the two sides and to upload only the Warp related part of this release. Even under this case, the classical perspective on top-rated electronic music is definitely intriguing.

Tracklisting:
Clive Williamson - Jynweythek (Prepared Piano Piece 1) (Aphex Twin)
Clive Williamson - Hy A Scullyas Lyf Adhagrow (Prepared Piano Piece 2) (Aphex Twin)
London Sinfonietta (arr. David Horne) - The Tide (Squarepusher)
London Sinfonietta (arr. Fraser Trainer & Sound Intermedia) - Conc 2 Symmetriac (Squarepusher)
London Sinfonietta (arr. David Horne) - AFX237 V7 (Aphex Twin)
London Sinfonietta (arr. Kenneth Hesketh) - Polygon Window (Aphex Twin)

album info link: here

download link: here (mirrorcreator) or here (rapidshare)

Baaba Maal & Mansour Seck - Djam Leelii (1989) (@256)

This is the second upload about the various/uncategorised genres part of the Island records tribute; it was released by Mango, a subsidiary of Island.
Djam Leelii was recorded while Maal and Seck were living in Paris. The result of the accompaniment of their voices with a super session team of musicians from West Africa is simply staggering. It is, as John Peel said, "like hearing Muddy Waters for the first time".

review link: here

download link: here

Taksim Trio - Taksim Trio (2007) (@256)

There are some albums I liked very much recently and since it's been some time from my latest reference to recent releases, some of the posts to follow will be dedicated to them.
The first one is Richmond Fontaine's "We Used To Think The Freeway Sounded Like A River", an album that is the last dot in the music line that has been drawn from Neil Young, Springsteen, R.E.M. and the likes. Apart from the quality of the music, this album proves once more that Vlautin is among the best, if not the best, lyricist of his era.











Although there were many albums that could be used as a reference to Richmond Fontaine's album, I chose to upload an album which is some light years away from its sound, but amazingly their covers are based on the same concept.
Taksim Trio comprise of three Turkish virtuoso instrumentalists: Husnu Senlendirici on the clarinet, Ismail Tuncbilek on the baglama and Aytac Dogan on the quanun. The group decided to enter the studio after their triumphant appearance in Womex festival and this album, apart from its huge success in their homeland, entered the World Music Chart Europe. They offer a magical journey that travels us from their country's music tradition to... jazz and Latin through a number of amazing compositions that are based heavily on improvisations (or taksims...) and are presented with great subtlety and without excessive use of self-assertive pompous solos.

download link: here