Music Will Wait For You - There's No Rush
Friday is fun, because it's music. So there's links and playlists galore. Today, some older albums I just heard for the first time this week!
You know, I’m getting sick of all this pining for the good old days of music journalism. It’s not coming back. And that’s rather freeing. If this was a regular column in a magazine or newspaper I’d be telling you about music regardless of whether it was good or not. It would be new music, and I’d be desperately trying to keep up. I’d be spitting out 150-250 words on an album I’ll never listen to again and maybe only heard once or twice, or maybe even not at all, at least not all the way through. Sometimes you’d get a link to 15-second teasers of songs and be expected to write about it off that. None of that is relevant anyway, because you can hear the music as soon as any reviewer.
The cool thing about choosing to write about music (now) rather than clinging to the idea reviews of new albums are coming back, is you can write about whatever you want.
One time I bored you lot shitless with an examination of the music of Paul Hertzog:
That’s the guy that wrote the soundtracks for Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicles Bloodsport and Kickboxer. He struggled, sadly, to get many other gigs composing for films, so became a teacher and kept his keyboards in his spare room for his downtime…
I would never get to write about that for the local rag, instead it’d be 2.5 stars to an album by Brooke Fraser that no one really liked that much, probably not even Brooke Fraser.
Anyway, fuck all that negativity. I thought, this week, how lucky I was to find out about music from a variety of places, and catch up on it in a variety of spaces - according to mood. My favourite thing about covering music in any way, shape, or form, has always been the conversations you get into with other fans, the recommendations that come from it, the rabbit holes they point you to, the never-ending tunnels of (and to) music. And you know what? Music is there for you. It sticks around. Earlier this week I was reminscing about Allan’s Compact Discs. It would later become Smoke CDs.
Allan’s opened in 1989 - I first visited it in 1993, down to Wellington on a school hockey trip. I bought my own copy of John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme - which I’d been introduced to a couple of years earlier, by my brother. That album had been released in 1964, more than a decade before I was even born. That album, still, blows my mind…
And this is it. Exactly. Good music will wait for you. It is there. It’s not going away. All that needs to happen is for you to be pointed to it. So, with that in mind, here’s what I got pointed to this week - and I’m sure glad I did.
Yene Mircha is a 2020 release by Hailu Mergia on the excellent Awesome Tapes From Africa label. I picked this up on a whim because it was smiling in my direction on a routine stop-in at Wellington’s Central Public Library. And because I know and like the Awesome Tapes label and ethos. Mergia was new to me, an accordion and keyboard player and the music on her is an amalgam of jazz and soul, filtered through the lens of Afrobeat. It’s a no-brainer for me. An absolute winner. You might like to give it a whirl too.
A work colleague half my age asked me if I’d heard Heaux Tales, and I said no. She then said, it’s by Jazmine Sullivan, like that meant something. She said she would throw me the link. I at least knew what that meant, and walked home listening to it the other day. Bloody good too! Not my usual thing at all, really, but this sort of hip-hop informed modern R’n’B can totally be my jam. Even if I’m stuck using outmoded expressions like, ‘that can totally be my jam’. These are funny, fitlthy, and forthright songs - often all of the above and all at once too. There are spoken-word segues linking the songs with stories, and I like that sort of concept. This is a 2022 album (this being the deluxe edition of a 2021 album release). So new enough, but it wasn’t anything I knew about until a day ago. I love this about music!
I was scrolling through Instagram earlier in the week when someone popped up mentioning this album in a reel. It was like a wee retro-review segment, and the person doing the plug said that this was nice summery Brazilan-jazz and soul-jazz vibes. Or something like that. At any rate, I decided to take that bait entirely. And immediately I was hooked. Now, I do know about Cal Tjader, he’s popped up on albums by Dave Brubeck and Charles Mingus and is in my collection as both a sideman and a leader, but I didn’t know a thing about this, a late-period album. Tjader was primarily a vibraphonist, but also played across drums and all percussion, and piano also - so, you know, a bit Lionel Hampton-like. Although Tjader is also known as the most successful not-Latino Latin musician. A dubious sort of a claim and title, I’m sure, but he’d have been dubbed that in an era that wasn’t as worried about such optics, nor how they came to be. Tjader is most certainly the real deal, musically. And Amazonas is like the cocktail party soul-jazz primer for a proper yacht rock shindig. If that doesn’t mean a thing to you, and maybe it shouldn’t, it’s also just bloody good times yo! It reminds me of a more chilled, soulful version of an Ahmad Jamal album I have. It also makes me want to dig out some of the bop-era Tjader I have.
Now, on a similar ticket, and in fact maybe it was the same Instagrammer, this album is funky jazz with a hint of the cornball about it; spectacularly so. And in only ever the very best way, right. So, the Instagram reviewer was all pumped that Dizzy Gillespie and Lalo Schifrin had collaborated. As they told the tale, it’s the guy that recorded A Night in Tunisia and the guy that composed the theme to Mission Impossible - and they couldn’t believe they’d ever worked together. Well, I could actually. And knew that. But, it was only seeing that kind of gushing that reminded me I’d never actually heard this 1977 album. And it’s such great fun(k). I’ve played it a bunch this week. I love Dizzy Gillespie, and, as with Miles Davis, I love not just their legendary stuff, but some of the end-of-career oddball material. For Dizzy that’s 70s and 80s stuff, for Miles that’s 80s and very early 90s stuff. I’m also a huge Lalo Schifrin fan, and my go to is always his score for Enter The Dragon. Anyway, this album gets a bit Michel Legrand. And that’s okay with me. Very okay actually.
Finally, you lot know I’m a soundtrack-nutter. And one of the areas I’ve been creeping towards is video game soundtracks. I am no gamer whatsoever, so it’s all new to me. That’s the lure, it’s literally music I’ve never heard. Ludvig Forssell isn’t a name I knew, and the game Death Stranding means nothing to me. My emails sometimes try to sell me on expensive vinyl reissues - but the international shipping is nearly as expensive as the item, so I mostly delete them without even getting my hopes up these days. Though, sometimes, I’ll sneak a John Carpenter vinyl into the cart eh. Cos, you only live once. So, this score, apparently, was released in 2019, and is about to get the deluxe 3-LP reissue. This took me straight to Spotify to sample it. And it is a really love set of music. A new favourite for me instantly.
So, there you go then. Music from 2020 and 2021 and 1976 and 1977, and then from 2019. Music from Africa and Latin America. Music from jazz and for videogames. Music that tells stories, music that supports stories being told. There’s so much out there. And it waits for us. I truly believe that. One day we find it and overnight we’re fans of something new that anyone else might have finished raving about a long time ago. That’s so cool. So much cooler than just desperately seeking through whatever has just been released - and all because you feel you have to keep up with the brand new releases.
This, also, is no diss on new music. Half of what I heard for the first time this week is new enough to almost be brand new - and all of it was brand new to me. But there are cool new things being released all the time.
This live Yussef Dayes Experience EP is super great. One of the very best. I heard this for the first time last week or so. Right when it was released.
So what things are brand new to you that you’d like to recommend?
All this talk of music I’d never heard before this week, and that’s all good and well, and I hope you found something ‘old’ but new to you there to check out. But here’s a playlist of all old and well known things this week - well, known to me, maybe some are new to you too still, but I liked this vibe. It’s vol. 154 of our regular/recurring playlist. See/hear anything you like?
Happy weekend. And thanks again for reading. And listening.
