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Having just spent 45 minutes inside the coil of an MRI, I find it hard to believe that anyone could play anything during a brain or upper spinal scan! Not only is the tube horribly small, the machine is deafeningly loud - I had headphones and could barely hear the music for all the pounding. (Though I was "playing" some West African percussion riffs in my head to keep my mind off both the noise and claustrophobic thoughts - I'd love to know how that might be interpreted! )

Have you checked the Bola Sete site? Sadly, almost everything he ever did is o.p. and - unless his family is able to buy rights to various recordings - likely to remain so. There's a nice discography section on the site... and I'd also recommend checking the Loronix blog... Edu Lobo: Again, so much of his material is o.p. - do you have any of his early albums? (They've all been reissued at various times, and DG usually tries to stock them.) His 70s material is especially hard to find... very little of it has ever come out on CD, and then only in very limited pressings. You might try eMusic.com for some of his more recent work, though. And DG has been stocking a recently-released live concert DVD (on Biscoito Fino).

Hey - first time I've seen your site - nice! I'll be looking forward to new work (no pressure, Noj! ) I like your sense of humor, too - something that (I think) is neglected in a lot of contemporary art...

I'd love to see an interview with Dick Spottswood on these topics. Should be very interesting!

Mike's right about their service - and if you so much as look at their in-print, in-stock titles by/with Silva, you're going to spend quite a bit of money, MG.

You get an "Amen" from me - I'm 1/3d of the way through this book and can see why it would upset people ... The mythologizing behind a lot of "received wisdom" about any number of things is one of the main points she (and Elijah Wald, reviled though he may be by some here) are after. I think their books compliment each other quite well... And that I now need to go back and read a lot of material (especially Zora Neale Hurston's) for a contrasting view. Interesting how she shows Hurston and Jean Toomer inveighing against the evils of phonographs and mass-produced records, right along with their white semi-counterparts of the same era. (I say "semi" because I can't imagine Hurston, Toomer - or any of their colleagues - romanticizing the antebellum era as some sort of now-lost golden age!!!) Hamilton is also critiquing a lot of things that lie behind the idea of sociology (and related disciplines) as some sort of exact science(s). I have to say that a lot of the pronouncements by a lot of the people she quotes (very much including Odum) are enough to make me feel literally sick to my stomach - SO much racism is involved, in a very overt way. Hmm.

I know! You might really enjoy this book by Chris McGowan and Ricardo Pessanha - (it's available in a lot of other languages, too.) It's quite an accomplishment, and very easy to read - although their publisher needs to spring for a revised edition, since this one is over 10 years out of date... but the bulk of the material is just as accurate now as it was when it came out.

I understand that, but the point of my friend's remark is that there really is a phenomenon of this kind - in pop music at large, as well as in "niche" genres. Said friend has encountered it a lot in "Latin" music, and I do think it's applicable to people like Scott Hamilton and Warren Vaché as well. It took *me* a long time to start being able to appreciate a lot of jazz from the 30s and 40s (and I'm in their age bracket), so - I found out that a lot of the music my parents grew up on was pretty good after all. if you start checking around in the music blog world, you'll see a *lot* of very young people who are hooked on all kinds of things (from R&B to psychedelic rock) that either their parents or grandparents (or both) were fond of. You could, I think, see a lot of the current "psych folk" trend as coming from that same impulse/source. I can't remember who wrote the song "Everything Old is New Again," but the title makes sense in this context.

Not really. Byron was trying IIRC (heard the record back then but don't own it) to do an eccentric, more or less post-modern take on a chunk of the musical past that was already felt to be rather eccentric at the time of its initial flowering. Indeed, Raymond Scott's music was heavily fueled by that sense of eccentricity, both in terms of Scott's creative impulses and how that music was received by the public back then. As for Byron himself, already drawn to the clever-weird wedge of the cultural spectrum (he'd already done Mickey Katz, right?), the move to Scott was pretty logical. In particular, if we take Byron at face value, he wasn't involved here in moving back and away from the present to a supposedly Edenic past but was instead kind putting his name (and, he had reason to hope, a price tag) on a collage made up of weird photos from 1938. \ Bug Music has more Ellington tracks (I believe) than Scott - along with material from John Kirby's book. I *really* like the Ellington and Kirby material on that album. A lot of that stuff has been that old for a long time I think it was the mid-eighties when Booker T & the MGs "Green onions" became a big hit over here (for the first time), because some firm had used it as a TV advert. All my daughter's friends were shocked, (my dear, SHOCKED!) when she told them that her dad had a copy from twenty-odd years before. MG An acquaintance of mine describes this phenomenon as (more or less) discovering that your grandparents were pretty hip after all...

She's had some hit records in the past, but I'm not sure if she was ever what we would consider a "star" - her album Álibi was a hit, I think, but apart from that, I'm not sure. (Will have to ask some friends for their take on this.) She's always been "quirky" re. choices of material (includes a lot of songs written for her by her brother, Caetano Veloso), and her live shows are *not* the kind of thing that make promoters happy - lots of poetry recitation, etc. I think David Byrne's PR for the whole Tropicália movement has given something of the wrong impression up here, in terms of us tending to believe that Caetano, et. al. are big stars in Brazil - which they're not. Well-known, yes, but I doubt any of them have ever had truly large audiences... Again, though, I need to ask around before making anything like a definitive statement on this!

Check here for a brand-new reissue of one of his early 70s sessions. Descarga.com is one of *the* best sources for Latin/salsa, in the US, at least. (And no, i don't have any connection to them, although they've been very helpful in tracking things down for me.)

Actually, I don't think hit "her prime" until about 5 years ago! (After she signed with her current label, Biscoito Fino.) She now has full creative control, which has worked tremendously in her favor. And she's established a small label of her own, which is also handled by Biscoito Fino. All of their Moacir Santos discs are great - probably the best things in their catalog. (To my mind, at least!)

I hear you - and I have a feeling that the early rollout of Vista was problematic, but by last September - not so much. It actually is running better for me than any version of XP ever did. (In fact, i desperately wanted to "downgrade" to XP, but... there are too many advantages to Vista to make me want to do that!) I also have 2 GB RAM.

Joyce is amazing - fine composer, lyricist, arranger, guitarist, singer... DG tries to keep all of her in-print releases in stock, though that's not easy. (I did get burned once there, with some supposed reissues of some of her rarer material that turned out to be pirated; taken straight from vinyl.) One of my favorites that's o.p. is Ilha Brasil - Feminina (1980) is also great - Two of her best from recent years (also at DG) - Edited to add: I'm not sure which song you're referring to, as I've got several here that open with scatting... She's good at it

If you want to go for something *not* in that line (bossa nova, samba jazz, early MPB) - but for something like samba, choro, etc. - you might want to start here: http://choro-music.blogspot.com/

Go out and buy that Joyce & Tutty CD, young man! Edited to add: TTK, you have much more in the way of releases from that general style/time period than I do. I've concentrated more on choro, samba, some regional music (mostly from up in northeastern Brazil) and MPB, overall.

Thanks for the link! Great recs there, though most of them are very hard to find... The board at http://loronix.blogspot.com is probably one of the single best places to find out about sources and recordings - and a lot of the conversation is in English, too. Joe Carter and Jim R. can be found there.

I'm still holding out on back catalog suggestions, but... this album is great (and new). Joyce is, as some of you know, one of my favorite musicians, and Tutty Moreno is one of the best set players I've ever heard, from anywhere. (They're married.) More (including samples) at www.joyce-brasil.com

I bought a laptop with the Home Edition Premium preloaded, back in Sept. - after I learned how to tweak a few settings (like turning off the "permission" and "admin" stuff), I've found it very easy to work with. (MUCH easier than XP in many respects.) Now, all the good things about Vista (and there are quite a few) have more or less been directly copied from various Mac OSs, so... And I hasten to add that I'm *not* a tech type - I just looked up some things via Lifehacker.com and Google, and then followed the (very simple) directions to change a few settings. The worst part of everything was installing software on the new machine, as every time you reboot, you have to log back on.

I'd like to help, but I think you might need to tell us (me) a bit about what you already have, no? Seriously - the categories you're mentioning are very broad. and more than likely, Jim R (who posts on the Loronix board, as well as other places) would be far better for bossa nova recs than me. It's his focus, and he knows the music and musicians far better than me.

I will say that when "authenticity" is the main goal, it seems to be very much about the listener's experience *of* the music, as opposed to *the music itself - and the people who create it.* I think that's equally true of the approach many ethnomus types take in trying to understand music from other cultures, too. The quotes in question address some aspects of this, though certainly not all. [/end threadjack]

Was it the interview with Elijah Wald on Afropop.org, maybe? If so, here it is. Judging from the reactions to Wald elsewhere [clears throat], he's Satan's son-in-law, or something like that. Edit: I'm completely serious about not wanting to slug it out with anyone who thinks Wald is a crazy revisionist or worse. Been there, done that already. It was exhausting. Edit edit: Wald references the Fisk U. study of music and listeners in Coahoma Co. MI, done in 1941 (somewhat in conjunction with Alan Lomax's 1st trip to the Delta). What the Fisk people found is very revealing; includes lists of peoples' fave songs, lists of what was on all the jukeboxes in the area, etc. etc. (Plus many trenchant comments from older interview subjects about the blues being some kind of newfangled thing that ran the older, nicer music out of town - a paraphrase, but it's very close to several of the quotes cited in Wald's book.) i really need to get my hands on a copy of the Fisk study. (which I promised myself I would do, back in January of this year.)

Oh... I am so not ready to talk about anything re. the blues and "authenticity" at this point! have mercy, papsrus! (I'm only half-joking.)

Langeland is new to me, too. I haven't heard the entire album, but it seems to fit into the ECM definition of Scandinavian music - a bit dark, avant, moody, etc. What I have heard has been pretty impressive. Here's some copy from the label: "Starflowers is the striking ECM debut of folk singer and kantele player Sinikka Langeland from Finnskogen, Norway's 'Finnish forest'. It features her settings of the poems of Hans Børli (1918-89) and is performed with an outstanding ensemble that opens up the songs to improvisation. In its inspired intertwining of folksong, literature, and Nordic 'jazz' it may be considered a characteristic ECM production, but it is also a logical extension of the work Sinikka has been developing over the last two decades."

Not to sidetrack this discussion, but I heard her interviewed on a D.C.-area radio station about 8-10 years ago and was very impressed by her intelligence, sense of humor and all-around ability to get into an engaging conversation. Re. "detouring" into other kinds of music, my take is that that's the nature of how things work IRL, period - even if there's a certain awkwardness at first (say, in the earliest Cu-Bop recordings), that can change - and musicians all over the world are constantly trying to do just that. I guess it's our (US people) sense of being "first" and "best" at certain things that that can confuse the picture slightly...