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- New music: Tribes – Walking in the Streets (live)
Rumours of rock's death have been greatly exaggerated, as this live track from hotly tipped London band Tribes proves
With all this talk about the "death of rock", it's heart-warming to find a band still enthralled to it. Firstly, members of Tribes have cut their teeth in bands on the periphery of the Camden rock scene, practically a rite of passage for post-Libertines, vest-wearing indie urchins. Secondly, they're resolutely old-school in terms of buzz building, handing out eight-track demos at gigs and only launching a MySpace page in the past few months. It seems to have worked – the band supported the Pixies after only six headline gigs of their own.
Influenced by American groups – Nirvana, early Kings of Leon, Girls – as well as Blur circa their 1997 eponymous album, Tribes may not be hugely inventive but they do have infectious enthusiasm. The loping, grungy Walking in the Streets – an exclusive live performance filmed at London's XOYO last week – shows promise, all scratchy guitar lines and a hook-laden chorus that Frank Black would be jealous of.
For more videos from the Curated by Lyle & Scott show, click here. Head to myspace.com/tribesband for more on Tribes
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Pyongyang goes pop: How North Korea discovered Michael Jackson
Despite efforts to smuggle pop music into North Korea, most people still have no idea who Michael Jackson is. And sometimes the biggest fans turn out to be government spies ...
During North Korea's "arduous march" of the 90s, brought about by the collapse of the USSR and a series of natural disasters, illegal markets of smuggled goods sprang up across the country. It marked the beginning of a slow influx of outside culture still enjoyed by North Koreans today.
Charles Jenkins, a Korean war veteran who was captured and detained for 40 years, has witnessed this cultural transition. As a propaganda tool he was kept close to the elite and – weirdly – forced to become a film star. He escaped in 2004 and now lives in Japan. When I met him in 2008, he told me the only non-Korean music he came across before the 90s would be nationalist tomes imported from Soviet Russia. As a result, it wasn't until the mid-90s that he discovered who Michael Jackson was, when a smuggled Jacko cassette tape found its way into Jenkins's hands.
Although most North Koreans are still oblivious to MJ today – leaving them ill-equipped to offer an opinion on the authenticity of his posthumous releases – those who are allowed to interact with foreigners consume pop music enthusiastically. These days most students on the foreign relations course at Pyongyang's Kim Il-sung University will at some point encounter MJ, while the penetration of South Korean pop music (and TV dramas) in North Korean cities is widely reported, with both enjoying a wide following despite the act of consuming them being an imprisonable offence.
On a recent trip to Pyongyang, a guide by the name of Mr Oh took great relish in his regular party trick of "accidentally" confusing North Korean revolutionary songs for flashy South Korean pop. "Whoops! It's North Korean after all ... what a shame, I mean South Korean is much better, just don't tell any one," he would say. We later discovered he was not a tour guide at all, but a government spy keeping an eye on the "evil" Americans in our entourage. He'd done tae kwon do at the Mass Games and is pictured in the official Pyongyang guide book. The guy was an absolute gun. The North Korean Arnold Schwarzenegger. No wonder the government let him listen to South Korean pop and wear a Paul Smith shirt.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Hip-hop's superstars owe DJ Kool Herc more than just respect
Few artists are true architects of their genre – but DJ Kool Herc has that distinction. It's time for hip-hop to pay him back
It's hardly a surprise that Clive "Kool Herc" Campbell is struggling to pay medical bills after an undisclosed condition required his hospitalisation. In the past year alone, Them Crooked Vultures played an extra gig on their UK tour to raise money to pay for cancer treatment for their friend Brian O'Connor, bassist with Eagles of Death Metal; jazz musicians Eddie Gale and Calvin Keys staged a festival in California to raise money for musicians with healthcare needs; three drummers formed a coalition to raise money to pay for Clyde Stubblefield, the man who played on James Brown's oft-sampled Funky Drummer, to have kidney surgery; and after Alex Chilton's death last April, his wife told the New Orleans Times-Picayune that, although unwell, he had not sought medical help partly because he did not have insurance. In a country with no free-at-point-of-delivery health service, those with unpredictable incomes will often consider health insurance an expense they cannot afford, and costly illness a risk they are forced to take. But there is something different about Herc's situation.
There are few pioneers of any musical form who could truly be considered the master architect of a genre – but Herc has that distinction. Hip-hop doesn't just have a family tree, it has a birth certificate: the hand-drawn flyer for the party Herc threw in the basement of 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx on 13 August 1973, which so many people turned up to, they had to move it outside, to the nearby Cedar Park. His "merry-go-round" approach – extending the percussion break by playing a second copy of the same record on one turntable as soon as the break had finished on the other deck – gave the world the concept of the breakbeat. Breakdancing, rapping over breakbeats, sampling and loop-based dance music all began that night. Although he is generally seen alongside Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash as one third of hip-hop's founding "holy trinity", Herc is first among equals. While Bam was the "Master of Records", his encyclopaedic knowledge of different music adding to the emerging genre's stylistic and sonic palette, and Flash was the innovator whose aptitude for electronics enabled his invention of cutting, cueing and (perhaps: his protege Grand Wizard Theodore claims the invention, though Flash demurs) scratching, Herc was the one who laid the foundations on which they built.
Yet unlike practically everyone who followed him, Herc did not manage to monetise his innovations. Bam and Flash both formed groups with rappers, got signed to key independent labels, and made worldwide hit records. By contrast, Herc was more about the size of the sound system and the atmosphere of the parties he threw, neither of which were things he could duplicate and sell. He stayed in the rec rooms and parks, rocking the beats for the people of hip-hop's epicentre, paying little attention to DJ innovators or the politics of the record industry. Maybe he paid the price for not trying to forever stay on the cutting edge of the genre he accidentally founded: but if you were putting it in the sort of language rappers have tended to use down the years, he never sold out, and he kept it real. His prize for this was a ton of respect, but virtually no cash.
I first met Herc in New York some time in the mid-90s. He was irascible to start with, and it didn't take long to find out why. Just that morning he'd popped in to the offices of Hot 97, the New York radio station that claimed it was the biggest outlet for hip-hop in the US, to speak to his friend, Kool DJ Red Alert, whom he'd known since the early days of the Bronx block parties. But instead of the respect that ought to be afforded someone of Herc's stature, he'd been made to sit in reception while staff tried, not terribly hard, to find Red Alert. At the time, the station's slogan was "Where Hip-Hop Lives", and this had just infuriated Herc all the more. "They say that's where hip-hop lives," he complained, "but I built their house – and they won't even let me through the door."
He had plans, but they never came to fruition. In interview, he wouldn't speak about the incident in which he was stabbed during one of his parties, or his subsequent relocation to Jamaica, right at the point when hip-hop started to become a business – he was saving that for an autobiography, which still hasn't materialised. He gave me a cassette of a half-hour breakbeat mix he'd made, which was supposed to be released by a German label called Public Attack, but never came out. He appeared on a 1994 LP by Public Enemy DJ Terminator X, and there was talk of a stint in A&R – but his highest-profile work since the block party era remains his collaboration with the Chemical Brothers, who also brought him and Theodore over to the UK to support them on tour. He has some involvement in the merchandise company Sedgwick & Cedar, named after the location of that epochal 1973 party, but it would take more than royalties from T-shirt sales to pay for comprehensive health insurance.
With the honourable exceptions of Public Enemy and the Chemical Brothers, it looks like pretty much anyone involved in the business of hip-hop, breakbeats or sample-based music owes Herc big time. Jay-Z once rapped that his approach to the industry was to make it pay for the way it mistreated hip-hop's innovators ("I'm overchargin' niggas for what they did to the Cold Crush," he wrote in Izzo, referring to the Cold Crush Brothers, whose leader, Grand Master Caz, had his rhymes used by the Sugar Hill Gang on the first ever rap single) – but words only go so far.
If rap icons wanted to have a greater and more lasting impact, there's a quick and easy way: when Herc is over his present bout of illness, take a leaf out of the Chemicals' and PE's books, and book him to DJ on tour, have him appear on records, pay him to make a cameo appearance in a video. And the radio stations, magazines, record labels and management outfits that deal exclusively in the music he created ought to be looking at both donations and consultancy roles too. Even the labels whose funk back catalogues have been revitalised in the marketplace by sampling, hip-hop and breakbeat DJ-ing owe Herc a debt. Entrepreneurialism is important, and Herc hasn't been the most adept at that part of life in the era he helped shape: but without him, none of these people would have had an arena in which to build a career. The hip-hop industry needs to realise that their debt to him goes beyond thanks and kudos: it should also be paid in billable currency.
Donations can be sent to: Kool Herc Productions, PO Box 20472, Huntington Station, New York, NY 11746.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - 50 great moments in jazz: Keith Jarrett's The Köln Concert
This record-breaking album still gets a chilly reception from jazz fans. But the inspiration behind its inception lives on
Thirty-six years ago, Keith Jarrett, the now 65-year-old pianist and composer from Allentown, Pennsylvania, crossed a chasm usually unbridgeable for either jazz or classical performers – and this virtuoso happens to be both.
Jarrett's message from the keyboard took off from the small enclave of an informed and dedicated minority audience, and reached the huge worldwide constituency of listeners. His albums would turn up in the collections of people who would otherwise cross the street to avoid buying a jazz record. From the mid-70s on, his concerts began to resemble religious rituals, attended by flocks of devotees for whom his music had a meditative, spiritual and transformative power. And all this stemmed from the recording of a single album – conceived as a live concert by a sleep-deprived Jarrett on a faulty grand piano – made in Köln, Germany, on 24 January 1975. Sales of The Köln Concert, on Munich's fledgling new-music label, ECM, broke records of all kinds. It remains the bestselling solo album in jazz, and the bestselling solo piano album in any genre.
From the glistening, patiently developed opening melody, through sustained passages of roaring riffs and folksy, country-song exuberance, the pianist is utterly inside his ongoing vision of the performance's developing shape – a fusion of the freshness of an improvisation with the symmetries of a composition that's central to the album's communicative power. Harmonically and melodically, it wasn't a particularly "jazzy" record by the piano-jazz standards of that time, which might also have eased its progress across the sectarian divides of jazz, pop or classical tastes. There had been, however, an earlier clue to the possibilities of this journey into the largely uncharted waters of improvised solo-piano performance. The great pianist Bill Evans, one of the young Jarrett's jazz models and an artist similarly steeped in classical music, had recorded the meditative solo improvisation Peace Piece 16 years before, and built it around a simple two-chord vamp in which the harmonies stretched increasingly abstractly as the performance progressed. Much of Jarrett's playing on The Köln Concert similarly developed around repeating hook-like motifs, instead of unfolding over song-structure chord sequences as most bop-based jazz solos did.
Jarrett's improvisation was also hypnotically rhythmic, bordering on mantra-like. He was unafraid to locate a compelling idea and stick with it, building intensity on a single rhythmic notion in a manner that still sounds urgently contemporary. A pop-like deployment of repetition, and a reassuringly anchored sense of tonal consistency – the latter occasioned by the pianist's hugging of the acceptable middle-register of an otherwise tinny piano he had almost cancelled the gig to avoid – contributed to the music's astonishingly organic feel.
Jarrett's desire to make a solo-piano album had led to his earlier departure from Columbia Records, and to his relationship with the compatible Manfred Eicher of ECM (with whom he was travelling around Europe, jammed into a Renault 5, on the tour that included Köln), a visionary producer who heard new music in the same eclectic way. Though he was only 29 at the time of The Köln Concert, Jarrett had already had a brief flirtation with electronics in Miles Davis's fusion band (declaring afterwards that he wouldn't touch a plugged keyboard again) and rich regular-jazz and early-fusion experiences in the popular bands of saxophonist Charles Lloyd and drummer Art Blakey. He had also made some compositionally distinctive and now highly regarded postbop recordings of his own, in the legendary early-70s "American quartet" with saxophonist Dewey Redman, bassist Charlie Haden and drummer Paul Motian. But Köln was Jarrett's moment, and a turning point for the immensely influential ECM label too, which the album helped to bankroll for years to come.
The Köln Concert isn't universally admired by jazz listeners. Some find it close to easy listening in its repetition of catchy melody, or a irreconcilable split from the jazz tradition in its avoidance of many of the genre's familiar materials. But Jarrett's remarkable output in the years since, his interpretations of classical works, reinvention of the Bill Evans-inspired conversational trio, engagement with everything from symphony orchestras to cathedral organs, and through it all an enduring popularity that sells out the world's great concert halls months in advance, testify to his creativity and eloquence.
In 2006, he released a similarly unpremeditated solo-piano concert from Carnegie Hall that ran to 90 minutes and five encores. When I discussed it with him for the Guardian, Jarrett said: "My glasses were falling off, my pants were twisted up, I was sweating, crouching, standing up, sitting down, and I was thinking 'nothing can stop me now'." He also said he'd had the same feeling – of total trust in his imagination – on The Köln Concert more than 30 years before.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - John Barry: a life in clips
Film composer John Barry, who died yesterday aged 77, remains an inspiration to many. We look at some of his finest work, from Beat Girl to Bond
Already a successful band leader, with the John Barry Seven, the movie world was introduced to the composer when he provided the music to Beat Girl, a movie starring his friend Adam Faith. The result was the first soundtrack album to warrant a UK release, the launch of a five times Oscar-winning film career for Barry, one of the first examples of rock music being incorporated into film scores and, best of all, a killer, world-class opening title sequence.
Barry won two Oscars for his astounding work on Born Free, one for the soundtrack and the other for his collaboration with lyricist Don Black for the classic Matt Monro title song. Amazingly, this signature tune, a chart topper even in cover versions by Roger Williams and a surprisingly faithful Vic Reeves almost didn't make the final cut.
It's impossible to discuss Barry's legacy without mentioning his music for the James Bond films. Uncredited for his work on Dr No (the source of some controversy for years) Barry's music quickly became synonymous with Bond. When it was time for Connery to be replaced by George Lazenby, it was up to Barry to deliver a score that would reassure audiences that, despite appearances, as this Bond clearly wasn't "the other fella", it was still business as usual for 007. His score for On Her Majesty's Secret Service is perhaps his finest Bond work, how could this be anything other than a Bond film when it had music like this?
Back in the 60s and 70s, television made full use of artists and technicians from the film world. For the Roger Moore and Tony Curtis ITC series The Persuaders, Barry delivered one of his most memorable pieces. There's no feeling that this is a second-tier work; you hired Barry you got the full Barry experience. It's a testament to how he never went for the obvious; the show was a light a frothy romp concerning two bickering playboys getting into japes and scrapes across Europe, the theme music provides all the depth. It's an emotive slice of melancholia that manages to sound both wistfully nostalgic and adventurous.
Movies don't always turn out as expected. Barry was often associated with films that didn't perform as well as expected either financially or artistically. Films such as The Game of Death, King Kong, Somewhere in Time, The Specialist, The White Buffalo and many others. Whatever shortcomings these films suffered, Barry's work on them is seldom, if ever, criticised. On one occasion, though, enough was enough. Hired to deliver the score to what he was told would be a big budget Italian science-fiction film called Starcrash, the producers hid the low budget by having him score to grainy black-and-white footage. Less than pleased (to say the least) when he saw his great work accompanying Star Wars rip-off imagery, Barry re-orchestrated the score and reused it for Out of Africa, salvaging one of his best pieces and earning himself another Oscar in the process.
It's no big shock that a musician responsible for many memorable and catchy tunes would appeal to sample-hungry musicians. Fatboy Slim's Rockafeller Skank, Sneaker Pimps' 6 Underground, Chapterhouse's Mesmerise, House of Pain's Legend, Smoke City's Underwater Love and many others have ridden in on Barry's coat tails. My favourite bit of Barry sampling has to be the Beta Band's It's Not Too Beautiful, an appropriation of his sterling work for The Black Hole. When Barry's music comes tearing in it pushes everything else out. This isn't a sample to be built on or competed with, rather the song just fades away and admits defeat. The first time I heard this it took me completely by surprise, I thought something had broken in my brain.
As sad as his passing is, Barry has not left us without making his mark (to say the least). There are few composers, in any field of music, as immediately identifiable as Barry. There are, of course, many other noteworthy examples of his work; The Ipcress File, Mary Queen of Scots, Zulu, Dances With Wolves, Walkabout, Midnight Cowboy, The Lion in Winter, Chaplin. His soundtracks provided the backing to our lives as much as they did to the films he scored (no exaggeration), his music is everywhere and always will be.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать
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