Sunday tunes: Whities dancing edition

Lest I offend, let me first preface by saying that some of my best friends and family are honkies...

Living in Austin, TX, many moons ago I caught a great show from South African "township jive" or "mbaqanga" group Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens at a club that I'm pretty sure no longer exists called Liberty Lunch. The belated "Lion of Soweto," as at least his promotional material dubs him, was on his first American tour and put on one bass-and-drum heavy, kick-ass show. During a break between songs, Mahlathini addressed the crowd:

Mahlathini: Thank you, thank you, thank you. It is great to be here on our first American tour!

Crowd: Woooooooooo!!!!

Mahlathini: I have to tell you, when I told my friends that I was coming to America, they said "No, no, don't go to America!"

Crowd: Woooooooo..... Waaaaah?

Mahlathini: And so I said, "Why not go to America?" And they said, "Because in America, everyone dances like this!"

(Mahlathini does hilarious physical caricature of Caucasian Benign Arrhythmic Dance Syndrome--or C-BADS)

Crowd: awwwww....

Mahlathini: But! But! But! I am so very happy to say that is not true!

Crowd: WOOOOOO!!!!!

Mahlathini: For some of you!

The following is not Mahlathini performing for honky Texans, it is instead the late, great Fela Kuti performing for some Europeans of unknown variety (and on an unknown date). Yet, it appears to my eye that C-BADS is a perhaps a transatlantic disease.

Sunday Tunes: Wattstax edition

Some tunes from the documentary Wattstax, centered around the August 20, 1972 concert at the Los Angeles Coliseum on the occasion of the 7th anniversary of the Watts Riots, but also including commentary from Richard Pryor and, somewhat oddly to later eyes, Ted Lange (who would go on to play Isaac, the bartender from "The Love Boat"), as well as a panoply of Watts residents. Put on by the premier label of southern soul, Memphis, Tennessee's Stax Records, home of Otis Redding, Booker T. and the MGs, William Bell, The Mar Keys, Johnnie Taylor, the Sweet Inspirations, Eddie Floyd, and many others, including of course everybody below.

The rest of the vids are live performances, but the movie opens with The Dramatics: What You See Is What You Get, one of my favorite tunes from that era of Stax, so I include it in spite of my general predilection for live music in these posts:


The rest of these are presented out of chronological order due to rationales that I will explain. Rufus Thomas, here doing The Funky Chicken, was part of duet that first garnered Stax the attention of Atlantic Records, which led to a distribution deal allowing Stax to expand much more than they might have in the earlier years and also led to Atlantic artists Aretha Franklin and Sam & Dave to come record in the Stax studios with house band Booker T. and the MGs, producing a number of hits for the former and almost all the significant charting tunes for the latter. So, Rufus gets first ups (nothing bad happens to the dude at end, I'm pretty sure):


The other half of that early duo with Rufus? His daughter Carla Thomas. Here she is with Pick Up the Pieces:


Appearing for the second time here at Sunday Tunes, the Staple Singers, with Respect Yourself, garner the middle slot by process of elimination solely:


The headliner for the evening was Isaac Hayes, who prior to his own recording career taking off with Hot Buttered Soul, his second album, was songwriter with David Porter for many of those aforementioned Sam & Dave hits and, after Atlantic severed its relationship with Stax and pulled Sam & Dave out of the Stax studies--basically never to be heard from again, the Soul Children, among others. Some of you young'uns might remember him better as the culinary artist forced to abandon his vocation because of his religious beliefs. Anyway, here he is near or at the height of his popularity with the Theme from Shaft, introduced by Jesse Jackson:


Finally, if you thought Isaac's look was 70's outre (how does one add accent egouts in blogger?) check the Bar-Kays in the following. But, what do you expect from "the son of a bad..." "Shut your mouth!"? Son of Shaft is the tune, which explains its placement (fans of Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back might recognize a sample or two from this clip):

Belated Sunday tunes...

Sugar Minott: Herbsman Hustling


Barrington Levy: Here I Come

Sunday tunes

The Minutemen, live in '85.

Sunday Tunes: Hip hop edition

Even though I'm a Gen-Xer, I have a pretty curmudgeonly view of music videos, which is the reason the bulk of the Sunday Tunes are so far and will continue to be live music clips. But I also love the hip hop and I'm afraid I have to make an exception for hip hop because the live performances one can find on the Web are perhaps interesting for those already familiar with the particular piece but have sound quality that sucks so bad it's difficult for the unfamiliar to get a real sense of the music being performed.

The following clip by Mr. Lif, of Live From the Plantation, demonstrates some of what annoys me about the genre. Here Lif has constructed a great story rap in the tradition of Slick Rick, for which the sounds and the lyrics create all the imagery necessary and, I find, that the video imagery detracts from the mental picture painted by the song.



Not that I'm posting that as an exemplar, I'm just saying. The following serves as nice counterpoint, however. If you do have to make a video, this is how I think you should do it. Mr Lif again, with Because They Made it That Way. Here the imagery is a bit more subtle and, yet, more concrete. It's a case where pictorial imagery, if it has to be there, adds rather than detracts. (As a side note, I should mention that Lif has forced me to readjust my NY-oriented snobbery towards Boston hip hop, if not Boston itself)



I think you probably get my gist. I won't comment on the particular visual characteristics of the rest.

Blackalicious, Deception, another great story rap.



While looking for that, I found this great example of the freestyle skills of Blackalicious's Gift of Gab. Having seen him live a few times, I'll tell you that, as amazing as it is, this is par for the course for him.



The album Illmatic by Nas is one of my favorites (Don't tell anyone that I presented Boston and Cali tunes before I got to the NYers!). This is The World is Yours off that album.



Let's finish this edition of Sunday tunes with a few of the tunes that got me so excited about hip hop in the first place:

I remember being about 12 years old or so and sitting in the very middle class living room of my tenured professor parents (lest anyone think I'm try to construct a false NY urban gritty past for myself in any of the above commentary) watching 60 Minutes, as seemed to be the weekly ritual of "concerned liberals" in my world. I can't recall a single detail of what the report was attending to but I can still see clearly in my mind's eye two girls from one of the over-bridge boroughs (i.e. Queens, Brooklyn, or the Bronx), a year or two younger than me, sitting on a park picnic table rapping, "Don't push me/cause I'm close to the edge/I'm trying not to lose my head/a-huh-huh a-huh-huh/it's a jungle sometimes/it makes me wonder how I keep from going under." It stuck in my head, but it would be at least a year or so before I would first hear the original: Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's The Message (1982).



The following are two of my favorites from the era that I began to get an inkling of the full glories and promise of hip hop.

Eric B. and Rakim: Follow the Leader (1988)



Finally, here's the very first Public Enemy tune, appropriately titled, Public Enemy #1, from Yo, Bum Rush the Show (1987). (no video, just listen to the music, dammit!)

Bonus Belated Sunday Tunes

R.I.P. Oscar Peterson (15 August 1925 – 23 December 2007)

Oscar Peterson and Ben Webster - Perdido (1973)

Belated Sunday Tunes

Them, with a young Van Morrison: Mystic Eyes and Gloria.


The Band, doing The Weight, enhanced by the soul-gospel stylings of the Staple Singers, Mavis Staples stepping in first, followed immediately by her father Roebucks "Pops" Staples. (From Scorsese's The Last Waltz, which is the best concert movie I've ever seen.)

Excuses...

I won't bother with 'em. I'm doing this more for me than anyone else, but for those who may actually be reading this thing: a perfunctory apology.

'Til I get a bit more time, forecasted to be this weekend, have some fine Marvin Gaye as a belated Sunday tunes.

This is Marvin doing Got to Give it Up in 1980. It's funky as hell and he gives it a nice workout. He's also clearly having more fun on stage than he seemed to have during much of the 1970's (although Live at the Palladium remains a great slab of vinyl), based on what I've seen.

Sunday tunes

Here's the bomb I promised (other promises are delayed-bills, bills, bills): Charles Mingus live in Norway, 1964, in seven parts. This is from the same tour that resulted in one of my favorite Mingus albums of all time, The Great Concert (Paris, 1964). With the exception of half of one song, apparently edited together on the record from more than one performance, Johnny Coles's trumpet was missing on that album, apparently due to a perforated ulcer (in Coles, not the trumpet). Below, Coles is present for the whole proceedings. The other performers are: Charles Mingus on bass, Jackie Byard on piano, Eric Dolphy on alto sax, Clifford Jordan on tenor sax, and the great Dannie Richmond on drums.

(pre)Sunday tunes

Tomorrow I'll bring you the promised second part of the post discussing estimated excess deaths in Iraq as well a BOMB of a Sunday tunes entry.

Until then, have some Nina Simone.

"Ain't Got No... I Got Life."

Sunday tunes

Sunday tunes is anticipated to be a weekly feature of the resurrected blog. Aside from the fact that I'm unlikely to enjoy jingoistic anthems or bland corporate schlock, there will be no political considerations taken into final account for Sunday tunes.

For our first installment, we have Johnny Cash doing Kris Kristofferson's Sunday Morning Coming Down.