At least twice a week I walk to the village. On Wednesdays I pick up my order of bread and a newspaper. On Saturdays I get a newspaper again and a large bottle of whole milk. I generally buy other stuff as well. Eggs. Matches. Maltesers.

It’s a good village shop. Non-profit, run by volunteers. It’s very small but it has a lot of stuff. In summer my sister needed a protractor. They had one.

Some days it’s raining and I delay my visit. Some days I go and it rains. It can be pretty miserable.

Today it was a glorious walk.

The bread was good too. So fresh.

Jazz on flickr, flickr on Jazz.

Most photographers are pretty precious about their photos of Jazz musicians. They won’t let anyone use them because they’re saving them for a coffee table book to retire on. The problem with that is that the world of the internet needs pictures of Jazz musicians. Tom Marcello is one of the few people with excellent photos of great musicians who is happy to put them up on flickr with a creative commons license, so anyone can use them. He has some superb pictures.

Hurk has recently put an excellent picture of Miles up on flickr, with a story to go with it. Also these photos of Miles capture him in a very light mood.

You can find some great photos of your favourites on flickr, you just have to search a bit to get past all the scans, rips and cover photos.

(Photo by Tom Marcello)

Sweet Talks – Osode Medley (Drum Break) 1976

A bunch of great African LPs came in the shop this week, so you know I had to take half of them home with me. Sir Shina Peters, Super 5 International, Sonora Gentil, Tony Grey and the Black Kings etc.

Many of the LPs are end-to-end listeners, top quality duelling guitar and grooving polyrhythms but the highlight of the whole pile is this two minute drum break in the middle of an eighteen minute medley. It appears on Sweet Talks‘ ‘Spiritual Ghana’ LP and its everything that is good in percussion. All at once.

The credits list the hitters as J.Y. Thorty (Drums), Yaw Samuel (Conga), Max Cozy (Percussion) and Pope Flynn (Percussion). I salute them.

Ernest Hemingway – The Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech 1954

Ernest Hemingway – Second Poem To Mary Written 1944

Caedmon’s Ernest Hemingway Reading LP sounds an awful lot like Colonel Walter E. Kurtz’ recordings in Apocalypse Now. The gatefold sleeve contains extensive notes on the recordings, written by Mary Hemingway and Hemingway’s biographer A.E. Hotchner (subject of the film King Of The Hill). Unlike almost all Caedmon records which are of superb sound quality, this LP contains home recordings. A.E. Hotchner writes:

One of Ernest Hemingway’s deadliest enemies was The Microphone. The Camera ran it a close second, but The Microphone was the blackest villain that stalked his life, and despite the persistent blandishments of radio stations, television producers and record companies, he successfully fended off all efforts to put him in the grips of The Demon Mike.
But Over the years, under special circumstances, Ernest did record a few things for me on an old Webster wire recorder the he kept in his finca in Cuba, and on a transistorized pocket recorder called a Midgetape which we took on our travels. These wires and tapes, imperfect though they are, are virtually the only record we have of his voice. (The one exception is his acceptance of the Nobel Prize which was recorded by a Havana radio station.) This album contains, in addition to the Nobel acceptance, five recordings made during 1948-1961, which was the span of time I knew him.

The homemade feeling of the record carries over to the sleeve, with cover photo taken by Mary Hemingway and the candid picture of the couple attending a bullfight in Pamploma. This record is strangely personal and a bit disturbing but I guess that fits the profile we have of Hemingway. Regardless of his opposition to microphones he has a real character and presence when reading his work, something many authors that record profusely lack entirely. If he hadn’t terminated himself (with extreme prejudice) at 61 we might have heard more from him.

It doesn’t seem to be available on CD at all, the tapes belonging to Hotchner rather than Caedmon’s now parent company Harper Audio, but copies do pop up on Musicstack and Amazon sellers from time to time.
Recommended.

A week or so sunburning near the equator and then a couple of weeks of meltdown back down in the big smoke had left me too fried to cook any blog patties. The cold snap brings respite in spite of it not being all that hot before? Oh snap.

Random heat/cool stuff:

My favourite Lord, Hurk, is reinternetted and dropping burners on brown paper “every day, daily”. The above mugshot of TKONY is merely the biggie small tip of the drored iceberg (not slim). Looksee.

DJ Jazzy Jeff + The Prince Of The Roc = Fresh

Can we have some Peedi and Freeway albums instead of another Hov album? Nowplease!
That “Blue Magic” is nice though, in a “Hey Pharrel, that Clipse album was well recieved, you think you could…..?” kind of way.

Percee P vs. Lord Finesse Live @ The Patterson Projects, 1989 Youtubed at last. Perc’s album is out now btw and it’s really not a let down. Madlib produced (more Madvillain than Lord Quas) and full of highly skilled rapping uninterrupted by ice cream mans. Highly recommended for the trad-rap crew.

While I were sleeping the ha-funny Hiphop magazine Fat Lace is back as a blog. It seems to be funded by RawkusCorp but don’t hold that against Drew Huge & Dan Large as they’re uploading ancient Tim Westwood show rips. Gotta’ catch em all.

Maaaaaaaaan seeing Hurk’s Biggie (Copyright Lord Hurk 2007) makes me think how we were gonna do Fat Lace but better but never got round to it. It would have been the shit though right?
Maybe we can do at least a T-shirt one day.

Maybe.

So anyways I’ll get back to the regular stuff tomorrow. Pez!

I love record labels.
While most music fans hate them and blame them for everything from Prince falling off to record sales slumping, I defend their place in music today, and obsess over their back catalogues.
Some labels are favorites because they are synonymous with musicians I love. The Isley Brothers and T-Neck or John Coltrane and Impulse.
Some are favourites for issuing a handful of niche records. Fondle ‘em, Prism, Childrens Television Workshop or SoundInk.
I even have love for some large labels. Atlantic still means something to me even with Ahmet Ertegün gone and the strings being pulled by the Warner Music Group. They still put out some great music, sixty years after they started. I’m even kind of fond of the the first record label, Columbia Records, despite no one having anything good to say about them. I like that their name has lasted from Wax Cylinders to MP3 downloads.

I’ll get round to writing about more of my favourite labels, but to start I’ll do a few posts on the phenomenal American literary label Caedmon.

Founded in 1953 by Marianne Roney and Barbara Holdridge (omg women!!), Caedmon initially released recordings of well known authors reading their own work. This line included works from such literary stars as W.H. Auden, Dyland Thomas, Gertrude Stein, Tennessee Williams and T.S. Eliot.

The above record contains the only recordings of Ernest Hemmingway and is, frankly, pretty nuts indeed.

Caedmon went on to issue records covering all areas of literature. Their children’s line featured the astonishing storytelling skills of Carl Sandburg and renditions of dozens of classic kids stories, read aloud by the likes of Boris Karloff, Carol Channing and Maggie Smith.

The “Shakespeare Recording Society” line saw recordings of the most celebrated stage actors of the 50s and 60s doing everything from Macbeth to The Rape of Lucrece. Many of them released as large box sets with lavish booklets. The “Theatre Recording Society” line featured the cream of 20th century plays, with casts to match. Caedmon recordings regularly featured Michael Redgrave, Jessica Tandy, Montgomery Clift, Anthony Quayle, John Gielgud, Ian Holm, Richard Burton and the RSC.

Caedmon released three volumes of Edgar Allan Poe (read by Basil Rathbone!), Homer, Hardy, Emily Dickinson, Beowulf and the Canterbury Tales. They even had a Social Studies line that featured Carl Sandburg on Abraham Lincoln and Eartha Kitt and Moses Gunn reading Black Pioneers in American History – 19th Century.

The label is a favourite because it had Vincent Price reading Shelley and Ossie Davis reading Langston Hughes, but its also a favourite because of the care they took in packaging the records. Looking through my stack of Caedmon LPs, the only one that doesn’t look great is a Tolkien album, cursed with a photo of the old wizard. Every other LP I’ve seen on Caedmon is a thing of beauty.

I don’t think they ever pressed records for the UK market, so all the copies I find are imports. This means they have the chunky card “paste up” covers Americans were treated too from the 50s to the 70s. Some UK record types hate them and prefer europe’s laminated thin card sleeves but not me. I love American pressings and Caedmon are amongst the swellest with their green and blue labels on thick vinyl and their intelligent liner notes.

If I said I wanted to collect the whole catalogue I’d be a fool but I don’t leave many in the racks. Either the subject or the cast manages to sway my wallet or failing that the cover art will. Probably all three.

I’ll be doing posts on some of my favourite releases and possibly including some sound clips but be warned that Caedmon was sadly swallowed up by Murdoch’s Harper Collins and may now have a stain of google wielding lawyers. “HarperAudio/Caedmon” now releases items such as Neil Gaiman’s Stardust and The Reagan Diaries, in the finest tacky jewel cases. Some might see this as carrying on in the same direction. I don’t.

In the 50s and 60s Caedmon had that feeling of great intelligent Americanness. Warm and unselfconsciously in love with culture. A feeling I, sadly, don’t get from HarperAudio.

These are records I will bore my future kids with.

Further reading: Caedmon 50th birthday on NPR (National Public Radio)

The Elephant – Do What You Love 1975

Da-dum, da, da-dum, da-daaaamn!

One Mr. Ronald “Tubby” Zeigler on drums and purcussion. Feel it in your stomach.

The cover rescued this LP from a box of “Don’t wants”, and its a good job, cos this track is a motherfucker. The rest of the album unfortunately sees our man Tubby chained up, locked in a casket and thrown into an Ocean of MOR. I can’t imagine anyone ever enjoying swimming in this ocean. It smells.
Thankfully his bandmates let him out of his cage, gave him back his broken wings and he learned to fly again, albeit for one track at the end of side one, then back into the sea for side two.

I can’t find much on the band, just a lot about Elephants (endangered, except in the areas where they are overpopulous, wherin they are a pest) and frankly I don’t care to know more about them. The LP is on Big Tree Records, a label that was at one point home to Hot Chocolate AND Demis Roussos. You know?
Tubby played trap on a Stephen Stills album and maybe a few more things here and there in the mid-70s yadda yadda etc…

This track though… daamn.

For a few decades it did. It came in the form of 45rpm vinyl records and it came in a company sleeve made of the best god damn paper in the world.

Record labels in the 50s and 60s would print up the occasional picture sleeve for seven inch releases, mostly for EPs but the rest of the time the singles came in generic paper sleeves baring the label’s name. The paper they used for them was most like newspaper. Pulpy and very thin. The ink would bleed a little giving a blurred look to design, especially on the less shiny American sleeves. The label would generally run one design for years, sometimes decades without changing it. Some labels changed their company sleeves all the time and some (especially in the UK) ran adverts for all kinds of crap on the back.

Company sleeves, specifically the pulpy matte ones of the 60s and early 70s are one of my favourite things about collecting records. They often feature great period design and have that indefinable aesthetic magnetism that you feel as a kid for blister packed toys or foil-wrapped chocolate.
Some record collectors are only interested in picture sleeve sevens, many only collect albums but for me the tastiest looking chocolates in the box are always the sevens in their original company sleeves. If I ever get round to releasing records on my own label you can bet I’ll research the paper stock for so long I’ll probably never put the records out.
Here are just a few of my favourites…

Atlantic subsidiary ATCO company sleeve, Late 60s / Early 70s. Gorgeous sleeve.

Casablanca company sleeve, 70s, think Parliament and Donna Summer. The camel turns into a movie camera! This is quite a late sleeve and the paper is too thick but I still like it a lot.

Chess Records company sleeve, mostly 60s, used across all the great Chicago label’s subsidiaries including the great Cadet Concept label, home of the Rotary Connection.

Hi Records company sleeve, early 70s, think Al Green and Ann Peebles.

Oriole company sleeve, early 60s UK sleeve, later became the UK arm of CBS records.

PSO (?) company sleeve, no clue on this one, Eastern european/baltic? I don’t have a record in the sleeve. Just check the closeup…

RCA Records company sleeve, 1971, Elvis came in this Care Bears lookin’ az sleeve?

Scepter Records company sleeve, 60s, think Dionne Warwick and the Shirelles.

Smash Records company sleeve, 60s, think Jerry Lee Lewis, Jimmy Castor and some James Brown.

UNi Records company sleeve, early 70s, home to Bill Cosby, Strawberry Alarm Clock and the Foundations.

I’m gonna do another post soon on some of the big labels that went through multiple sleeve designs cos it’s really nice to see them laid out next to each other. Hope you like these papery sweets as much as I do.