The Magnificent Goldberg

I thought it was called a thingamajig...... Nah, it's a dongle, 'cos it sticks out. MG

MG

It MAY ALSO have something to do with your computer's gubbins. I got a terrible signal upstairs in the diagonally opposite corner of the house from the router with my old computer, which didn't have an integral wireless thingy. I bought a wireless dongle for it after we got my wife's computer and that's how I used it until I replaced it a few months ago. I complained to my ISP about poor service (it's their router) and they said that the type of dongle I was using wasn't one they supported. When I asked them which ones they did support, they gave me a list of one - not one brand; one MODEL. When I got the new computer, I was worried that the wireless thingy inside might be one that my ISP didn't support, but crossed my fingers and took a chance. It's OK, but maybe you should ask your ISP about the wireless connections they support. MG

I'm not sure what CDDB is but, when I imported the CD into iTunes, all the tracks came up as per the sleeve of the CD. It wasn't wrong from the point of view of what was on the CD sleeve; it was the sleeve note that was different to what was on the disc. Another of the five from my recent batch that I've imported so far had the correct titles on the sleeve, but what came up in iTunes was different. I know you have lots of African recordings and I'm sure you appreciate that accuracy is the least of the concerns of the record companies in the African recording industry (well, the African indies, anyway, which represents almost all of what I buy - as in jazz, I buy hardly anything on major labels). I'm just about to import two CDs by UCAS Band de Sedhiou - 'Takussaanou Ndakarou' vols 1 & 2 and find that there's nothing at all coming up on iTunes; just track number and timing - but it said it was accessing Gracenote database. Obviously this isn't CDDB. How do I get iTunes to access CDDB (and maybe give me a better chance of getting correct information)? What software do you use to check for duplicates, title inconsistencies, orphaned or missing tracks? Can it check for artist inconsistencies? Does it recognise an inconsistency between 'latin' and 'Latin' (because iPods think they're different genres)? MG PS I see from Wiki that Gracenote is the new name of CDDB, so I'm not going to get any better info out of it.

I agree. I have about 200GB on HD. Managing and finding stuff requires incredible discipline. Look at Rod's statistics: 1,743 genres! OK, we know he has loads of strange music, but 1,743 must be the result of spelling mistakes - not necessarily his, but whoever puts these tags onto tracks. And there are loads of other errors; sometimes on the original CD; one of the CDs I got in August had all the track titles offset by one; I had to listen most carefully to the words of each to divine what the titles really were - in fucking Mandinke! Whenever I rip a CD to my HD, it takes ages to get all the information spelt correctly and consistently on the tags - and get the right artwork etc; much longer than doing the rip itself. MG

Senegal Fatou Laobe - He Laobe/Rewmi - Origines (FCA twofer) (No image of CD on web) Fatou Laobe - BARA Mamadou Lamine - Tabala (No usable image on web) Fatou is a fairly new diva on the Senegalese scene, following very much in the wake of Kine Lam but singing much more forcefully than Kine (if you can imagine that). She divides her work between traditional Islamic Mbalax and more modern secular work. Pascal Dieng & Super Cayor International - Khewel - Origines (Lampe Fall) (No image on web) Pascal goes back a LONG way in the music of Senegal. He was one of the founder members of Canari de Kaolak, a pioneering Mbalax band of the seventies. Super Cayor is a fairly well known more recent band, specialising in Salsa material (the band was originally called 'Super Cayor et son Salsa Mbalax'). This is as good as anything they've done. El Hadji Faye - Pastef - Boubarte (Lampe Fall) El Hadji Faye also goes back decades; he was a member of Etoile de Dakar, then when the band were fired in favour of new star Youssou Ndour, of Etoile 2000. Their recording of 'Boubou ngaari' (Dakar Sound CD 001) was an overnight hit and has become a standard in Senegal. Assane Mboup - Tresor - Jololi Assane Mboup - Xaleyi - Lampe Fall Assane is a singer who came along in the nineties, under the wing of Kine Lam, whose style is similar to his. If you have Orchestre Baobab's 'Made in Dakar' Assane takes a vocal on one of those tracks. He's a remarkably consistent artist. Mapenda Seck - Adouna tey - Jololi Mapenda is Thione Seck's brother, who replaced him in Orchestre Baobab in the seventies, because Thione was a bit unreliable. If you have the Sterns CD 'Bamba', there's quite a bit of Mapenda on that. Always good quality stuff from Mapenda. Ouza - 20 ans ? - Lampe Fall OK, Ouza is my all time favourite. This CD has new versions of some of his past successes plus a few new numbers and I love it, of course. Abou Djouba Deh - Yewende - Lampe Fall (No image on web) Abou hasn't made many albums; I only have two of his K7s, so this is the third I know about. He comes out of the same Peul tradition as Baba Maal, but he doesn't make records specially for white people. Kine Lam - Mame Bamba - Origines I thought Kine had retired in the late nineties, but here she is again. One of the great Mbalax singers, as good as ever. Coumba Gawlo - Ma Djinn - Sabar (No image on web - pity, she's wearing absolutely stunning clothes!) Coumba Gawlo is beautiful and can sing. She is, I think, Thione Seck's daughter. She's made lots of records and Sabar Records is her own company. She made one album for RCA in the late nineties and it was, as one might have guessed, pretty crappy. Otherwise, she's wonderful and lovely. MG

Mali Ganda Fadiga - 2007 (vol 1) - CK7 Ganda Fadiga - 2008 (vol 2) - CK7 Ganda Fadiga is regarded as the greatest of the traditional Soninke musicians. I have lots of his stuff which is very, very bluesy. You may be familiar with his wife's recordings; she was Hawa Drame and Ganda often accompanied her. She appeared on one of Ganda's early K7s, too. Diadia Fadiga - 2011 - CK7 Diadia is Ganda's brother. He has only started recording in the last few years. I first heard him on a private tape some soninke workmen were listening to on the street outside an internet cafe I was in. Thought it was Ganda, but no, it was Diadia. Very similar style. Ami Koita - Africawe - Mali Music (FCA) Ami Koita - Sanou lolo - Akom (No image on web) Tata Bambo Kouyate - Djeliya - FCA (No image on web) Ami and Tata are both so well known no intro is necessary. These albums are as good as anything they've done before. Abdoulaye Diabate - Makan - Syllart Abdoulaye is well known as a singer with the Orchestre Regional de Sikasso/Kene Star Sikasso, who accompanied him on many of his post Kene recordings for Syllart. Yoro Diallo & Sali Diagbawara - Dunia kadi - CK7 Yoro is not well known. He's a sound exponent of kamelengoni music. He has one CD issued in the US ('Pekos' on the Yalla Yalla label). I think there's a bit more on CK7 and will have to look into that. MG

Guinée Conakry Sekouba Bambino - Innovation - Syllart Sekouba Bambino - Diatiguyw - Syllart Sekouba Bambino - Ma Guinée - SBD (Sekouba's own company) Bambino needs no introduction, so I shan't give him one. All of these are wonderful. The two Syllart albums were released this year. The other is undated. Djanka Diabate - Ayan-don - Fanta Keita (No image on web) Djanka should need no introduction. She's the wife of Sekou Bembeya DIabate, the great guitarist from Bembeya Jazz National. Her records under her own name are all quite poppy, but very attractive. I always hope she'll make a record as I know she can, using her great djali voice, but she only uses is when she's singing backup vocals. Djessou Mama Diabate - Mansaba - Super Selection (FCA) (No image on web) Djessou is less well known outside Guinée. I only had one of her K7s before, from the nineties. This shows her even better than that. Her voice is quite rich, rather than piercing, as most lady djali voices are. Aminata Kamissoko - Kognoumalon - Emedia BKS Aminata Kamissoko - Ambition - TAT Audio Visuel Drame (No image on web) The only K7 I bought. Aminata is one of the greatest djali singers of all. If you have 'Wamato' by Les Amazones de Guinée (Syllart/Sterns) you'll have heard her. These two recordings, both quite recent, are her best so far. I don't think there is a djali singer with a richer voice than Aminata. Fode Baro - Liberation - Lusafrica (the only album from a major company) Fode Baro - Debrouillons-nous - Syllart Fode is a very good arranger in the Boncana Maiga mould. Like Maiga, he understands a wide range of West African music and uses all of it in his work. The BMG album is, predictably, more like pop music, but not too much for my taste. But he should have stayed at Syllart Aboubacar Diaby - 2Diaby - Gris Gris (Syllart) Never heard of this guy before. I asked for a recommendation and this is what I got. The sleeve looks as if he might be verging into Hip Hop but no, it's a production much like many others done in Conakry by Gris Gris records and I'm very happy with it. MG

I haven’t mentioned in this thread so far the material I got a few weeks ago in Paris. I wanted to take some time to absorb it all. Well, I haven’t really absorbed it all but I’ve listened to them all a half dozen or so times and I thought it would be interesting now to say something about them. The first thing to say is that I bought very conservatively, in the sense that all but two of the artists whose albums I bought were ones I already had one or more albums of. One of those two was someone I’d heard on the street in West Africa in 2000 or 2002, the other was someone I’d never heard of but simply accepted the store owner’s recommendation (once he’d got the message that I knew a thing or two about the music). The second thing is that only one of the albums I got was not available on CD. That’s a measure of how far the CD has come in Senegambia, Guinée Conakry and Mali, in that pretty nearly everything now comes out in both CD and K7 formats. Of course, the fact that something’s on CD doesn’t necessarily mean it’s easy to get outside the regular markets for these kinds of music. I’m posting a list later on with the images of these albums; those for which there’s no image on the web are likely to be at least very hard (and maybe impossible) to find outside the regular markets, at least for a good few years, until a lot more Africans start using the internet for trading purposes. The third point arises naturally from this: these albums are typical examples of the contemporary (well, the earliest album I got was from 2004) popular music of these countries, intended for domestic consumption (plus consumption by émigrés elsewhere), not for the delectation of outsiders. They’re neither classics (except in the making, perhaps, in some cases), nor particularly ‘World music’ friendly. All but one of the albums I got are on indigenous labels, run by Africans, and whose markets don’t include the likes of us, except to take those of us who don’t know what they’re doing for a ride. (Conversely, those who DO know what they’re doing know that prices are negotiable and that it pays to offer a shopkeeper ten or so Euros less than the total amount of the bill. This is as true in Paris, Brussels, Newark and Little Senegal in Harlem as it is in Africa. But it doesn’t work on-line (quel dommage).) Finally, listening to this material, I’ve been reminded of a conversation I had in 2004 with Nick Dean, proprietor of NATARI, http://www.natari.com/ who sold me heaps of K7s in the nineties. He had given up the K7 business and was concentrating on dealing in CDs of classic albums, mainly because he perceived that much of the new material he was getting from Africa was pretty well identical to European and American pop music. Now Nick is a man of MUCH wider experience than I am – he’s about my own age but has NEVER bought any music other than those from every part of Africa. So I have little doubt that, for other parts of Africa, what he said is true (and I’ve noticed it myself when I’ve got other stuff than the music of Senegambia, Guinée and Mali). But these albums I got in Paris are pretty well what the different kinds of music were twenty-odd years ago. Of course, they’ve moved on a bit, but moving on in the cases of these countries doesn’t seem to have meant moving West. Why this should be so, I’m quite uncertain. But it’s quite clearly true, so these are good countries to continue to follow musically. There are three businesses where you may be able to get some of this stuff online. The best bet for Malian music is Camara Productions (for CD - CK7 on K7). http://www.camara-production.com/ Kalle Camara has been in business since about 1989 and specialises in Mali (with a few Guinean albums as well). He is about the only producer making recordings of the music of the Soninke (a Mande people who formed the first empire in the Sahel in the third century AD). I’ve been looking over his CD catalogue (which is a bit awkward as a lot of the sleeves don’t come out) and there’s a lot more there than what I’ve got. CDs cost 10 Euro each. I’ll certainly order stuff from them in the next few months. Back in the early nineties, Kalle was also selling groceries, lamps, batteries and kola nuts. His Paris shop (he has branches in St Denis and Bamako) was a wonderful emporium of all sorts of stuff. Nowadays he still sells kola nuts; when I was there there in August was a continual stream of people coming in to buy them. Lampe Fall is a good place to visit. Specialty is Senegalese music, but there is a lot from elsewhere. Like Camara’s, it’s a record company, too. The website is quite unhelpful; few CDs are on the website database, but some I never noticed in the shop look good, so I’ll order one or two. They’re 13 Euros on the web, but only 10 in the shop (negotiable). NATARI, http://www.natari.com/ is Nick Dean’s site. He has tons of stuff. Most of it isn’t for sale, but some is. Prices of CDs trend to be a bit higher than you’d pay at Amazon UK. But a lot of what he’s got is old stuff that you can’t get anywhere on K7s. None of these businesses is a fly-by-night. Next 3 posts set out what I got and what I think of it. MG

Howlin' wolf - Howlin' Wolf vols 1 & 2 - Chess (Chess PRT UK) Two twofers containing the LPs Moanin' in the moonlight Howlin' Wolf The real folk blues More real folk blues Damn good value sets from '83 Ramsey Lewis - Goin' Latin - Cadet (Chess UK) MG

Lots of vinyl today Ray Charles - Ray's moods - ABC/Tangerine Milt Jackson/Ray Brown - Montreux '77 Jam - Pablo Live (UK) Perri Lee - A night at Count Basie's - Roulette (DGmono) Odell Brown - Odell Brown - Paula Stanley Turrentine - The look of love - Blue Note (Lib - bought when it came out; a lovely soft album - every bit as soft as Sil Austin's 'Honey sax') MG

How do you get that to fit your screen, Bill? I can get 'Paint' to centre 'Spider Man', but have to redo it every time I alternate, which is a pain in the arse. So I shove it into the middle of a ready-made black background. MG

Daughter and kids gone home now. Digesting Chinese takeaway. Very nice day. MG

I have to agree with Bev about most of the complaints on his list. It must have been in the summer of '73, my former boss who owned a record shop in Brighton, got a load of unsold seats for Richard Strauss' 'Ariadne auf Naxos' at Glyndebourne, so we got my mother-in-law to babysit our daughter and, with a couple of friends, went one beautiful afternoon. I thought the opera stank but the ambiance was sublimely decadent. We picnicked in the park of Glynde House (but we couldn't afford champagne, though there was lots in evidence) and crept into Glynde House and had a long look in the library, which was full of books of my favourite French 19th C authors, even J-K Huysmans. It was such a beautiful occasion, I didn't really mind that the opera stank. MG

When I first started listening to jazz in the late 90s, I read this kind of commentary on a regular basis. And I still think it's out there, unfortunately. I certainly don't disagree with you on critics. However, at least in the UK (but I'm sure in the US, too), the people who have to buy their own LPs didn't dismiss the music beginning in the early eighties. Pathe Marconi, no doubt noting before I did the price rises for Blue Notes, began reissuing them in 1983 and included in the first batch Don Wilkerson's 'Preach brother', which had been played a lot by the deejays at soul/dance 'weekenders'. I recall a review in Blues & Soul of the Easter weekender at Caister holiday camp in which the phrase 'Don Wilkerson is God' was fair currency. Despite reissue programmes by Pathe Marconi and Ace, the prices of original 'Acid jazz' LPs rose into the multi hundreds of pounds - an incredible price for that time. A year or two earlier I'd been able to buy these LPs for peanuts - well less, actually, as peanuts aren't all that cheap - so I was a bit pissed off at the sudden popularity of the music I'd been collecting for over 20 years. Some records I hadn't got around to buying (or had never seen, these things never having been around much in the UK) suddenly became uncollectable for me, because I wasn't going to pay those prices. Then CDs came out and lots of that stuff did come out on CD, thank goodness. I think that has pretty well died down now, but for about 20 years or so, this music was well appreciated by the dance crowd. Soul Jazz musicians came over here, not to play at Ronnie's or other 'jazz clubs' but to play one nighters in some of the largest and hippest dance halls in Britain and would attract audiences numbered in the thousands. You've seen films of the big bands of the thirties and early forties playing to packed dance halls - that is what it looked like in front of people like John Patton, Jimmy McGriff, Hank Crawford, Charles Earland, Jimmy Smith, Mel Sparks, Lonnie Smith, Reuben Wilson and others. The parallel with the short excerpt I quoted in the Eric Hobsbawm thread a few days ago is very precise. MG

I'm not sure vinyl has a plural at all. It's a word like mud. I don't know if there's a specific grammatical term for that kind of word, but vinyl and mud are two of it. MG PS - and oxygen, hydrogen, helium... MG

Thanks Brownie, but you have to wait for me to learn how to pay you MG

Interesting. Course, you can wipe someone's disk drive, but not iPod or external hard drive, if they're not connected. MG

When I got my new computer a few weeks ago, of course, the desktop background didn't fit because the screen is a different shape to the old one (it's 1366x768 now). SO I messed around with a couple of pics which I alternate, according to mood. That's a view of part of Tonyrefail, that I took from halfway up Trebanog Hill. MG

Mildred Clark & the Melodyaires - Lord, help me to hold out - Savoy (no image on web) now Otis Rush - So many roads - Delmark next Curtis Amy - Mustang - Verve (mono, feels like a DG - is that possible for 1967?) MG

How does this match with this? The Beatles were on Parlophone. MG Part of the deal is that the Beatles' catalogue would stay with EMI and go to Universal as a consequence. Hur hur. MG

Dare say they got a sub out of the olympics money, but it wasn't enough for Monk, or even Pops. MG If they'd had that sort of money you could be sure it would have been spent on The Beatles. Nah; George Freeman. MG

I'm waiting for my daughter and grandsons to turn up. They said they'd come, but not when... Thanks you all. MG

How does this match with this? The Beatles were on Parlophone. MG

Dare say they got a sub out of the olympics money, but it wasn't enough for Monk, or even Pops. MG