Spotted this track in the background of the trailer for the new movie about Facebook, and had to buy it immediately! It’s a young women’s choir called Scala performing Radiohead’s “Creep.” You want to listen to this, trust me.
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How did I miss David McAlmont for so long? He’s got an incredible three-octave range, and he’s been singing as an OUT gay man since the early 90’s. WTF!?
He’s shown above in a still frame singing a James Bond cover song, “Diamonds Are Forever.” The video is below.
Monday night February 8 at Beat Research (at the Enormous Room in Central Square), dj’s Flack and Wayne’n'Wax are hosting dj/rupture. I’ve mentioned rupture on the blog here before. He was one of the founders of the Toneburst collective, with whom Noise Laboratories had the pleasure of collaborating back when we were all so much younger…
Via dj/rupture comes Auto-Tune the News’ songification of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech in Memphis, the night before he was killed:
Lorin Bassnectar has done it again! If you don’t absolutely love his remix of the Pixies’ Where Is My Mind?, then… where is yours??
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An amazing night last night at the Lizard Lounge! Malick Ngom and Aziz Faye joined Lamine Touré & Group Saloum for a rollicking night of Senegalese mbalax. In the picture above you see Malick (seated, left) and Aziz (standing, center) playing sabar drums in the foreground; between and behind them, Paa Seck is also playing sabar, while Lamine (right) is singing. You can catch a glimpse of Hiro Sakaba playing bass, behind Malick and Paa, and Masa Sasaki (far right) playing guitar.
Not pictured above is world-renowned djembe player Billy Konate, who’s in town teaching workshops with The Drum Connection. Billy sat in with the band for a few minutes and shared some amazing licks.
It was incredible to have such a confluence of West African percussion talent gathered in the basement of the Lizard Lounge! I’m grateful to be connected with such an amazingly talented group of people from around the world.
Malick and Aziz are members of the Sing Sing (Faye) family, who are the hereditary géwël of the Cap Vert peninsula, where Dakar is located. Friend of the blog Professor Robert Sipho Bellinger has a web site that explores the significance of the Géwël Tradition in Senegalese music and culture. Professor Bellinger is the Director of Suffolk University’s Black Studies Program; in that role, he has brought members of the Faye family to Boston as Distinguished Visiting Scholars (see more information about the program, which is open to the public). Sipho is also the producer of several CD’s that feature members of the Sing Sing family, including the eponymous Sing Sing Juniors release from 2007.
As an added bonus, check out the video below; it shows Paa Seck and his brother Babacar Moha Seck tearing up the sabar in Providence this fall. Enjoy!
Jamie Foxx… singing the theme song to The Brady Bunch. In a variety of soulful styles.
ROFLMAO!
Some songs never get old. People, on the other hand, do. And, given that I’m now older than I’ve ever been*, I still like some of those songs, but I like ‘em slower:
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Picked that one up over at the excellent ISO50 blog.
*(and now I’m even older!)
Barbara Ehrenrich writes an op-ed for the New York Times that tries very hard to wake up the paper’s elite readers to the desperate reality of poverty in America:
Al Szekely… A grizzled 62-year-old, he inhabits a wheelchair and is often found on G Street in Washington — the city that is ultimately responsible for the bullet he took in the spine in Fu Bai, Vietnam, in 1972. He had been enjoying the luxury of an indoor bed until last December, when the police swept through the shelter in the middle of the night looking for men with outstanding warrants.
It turned out that Mr. Szekely, who is an ordained minister and does not drink, do drugs or curse in front of ladies, did indeed have a warrant — for not appearing in court to face a charge of “criminal trespassing” (for sleeping on a sidewalk in a Washington suburb). So he was dragged out of the shelter and put in jail. “Can you imagine?” asked Eric Sheptock, the homeless advocate (himself a shelter resident) who introduced me to Mr. Szekely. “They arrested a homeless man in a shelter for being homeless.”
The viciousness of the official animus toward the indigent can be breathtaking. A few years ago, a group called Food Not Bombs started handing out free vegan food to hungry people in public parks around the nation. A number of cities, led by Las Vegas, passed ordinances forbidding the sharing of food with the indigent in public places, and several members of the group were arrested. A federal judge just overturned the anti-sharing law in Orlando, Fla., but the city is appealing. And now Middletown, Conn., is cracking down on food sharing.
Of course, Michael Franti had this beat well-covered back in 1994:
Enjoy the artwork of Mark Weaver.
Enjoy the beautiful design and music at ISO50.
Enjoy the generative art of Robert Hodgin at Flight 404.
Enjoy the inspirations and artwork of James White at Signalnoise.com, who compiled this collection of design inspirations from the 70’s and 80’s:
