Festivity, Revels, and Nocturnal Dalliances
Clora Bryant only recorded one album, but you can hear her trumpet alongside some of the greatest to ever take the stage: Billie Holiday, Josephine Baker, Charlie Parker, Louis Armstrong, and her mentor, Dizzy Gillespie.
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Before he was “King,” he was Nathaniel Adams Coles. In the 1930, he put together a rowdy jazz trio that was a lot different than the Nat King Cole most people know.
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The Slow Grind Fever series is a fascinating collections of creepy, crawly R&B in a minor key; some songs and artists major hit makers…others mysterious and obscure. It’s proper music for smoky juke joints, rowdy house parties, and dangerous liaisons.
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In the 1950s, film began to move away from romantic or bombastic orchestral scores and toward a more varied landscape. One of the styles that started making its mark on cinematic soundtracks during this period was jazz.
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A pioneering work of “space age pop,” Music out of the Moon was a collaboration between arranger Les Baxter, composer Harry Revel, and theremin player Samuel Hoffman.
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This is no unique story. Soul Discharge was the gateway for a lot of people who, like me, saw it one day and wondered what the hell it was.
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In October of 1938, Germany invaded Czechoslovakia. Amid this air of paranoia, Orson Welles stepped behind the microphone for another broadcast of a radio drama, CBS’ The Mercury Theatre on the Air.
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For every Martin Denny , there were dozens of other, independent musicians plying their trade in exotica, with strange, stunning, and spooky results. It is these musicians that Technicolor Paradise celebrates.
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Power pop fans sometimes try to swell the ranks of their chosen obsession by widening their nets to include within it acts that are not necessarily deserving of the label. Take for example, The Quick.
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Reparata and the Delrons were a girl group that spent a career plumbing the lower echelons of the pop charts. Their early repertoire was heavy on teenage melodrama and heartbreak.
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Burt Bacharach’s soundtrack is probably the least maligned aspect of producer Charles Feldman’s 1967 film version of Casino Royale. One doesn’t have to love the movie to enjoy the soundtrack.
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Francoise Hardy may have been the most stereotypically French of the Yē-Yē girls: Aloof, sophisticated and beautifully melancholy. Nevertheless, her sound was one that was largely made in England.
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Honey Ltd. got their start at Detroit’s Wayne State University. With a gift for seamless four part harmony, the group’s sound was essentially a timely update of the classic girl group sound of the early 60s
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At the height of the Yeh Yeh Girl craze, here were many girls compelled by external forces to seek fame. Yet, as the brief and quite odd career of Clothilde demonstrates, the results were not always bad.
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It’s easy to write off the Sonics’ primitivism as the usual combination of lack of proficiency and hormonal enthusiasm. But delving into their history and discography quickly reveals just how conscious it was.
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