日志

Sun 29 Jun – Emir Kusturica & The No Smoking Orchestra, Stole & the Black Train Band

It was a night of craziness at the Opera House: I suspect that there haven't been too many occasions that a performer climbed from box to box looking for beautiful women to dance with!

The music was frenetic and fantastic but, sitting up in the front row, I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd crashed a wedding and was surrounded by a culture I didn't really understand. Our little group of four was well and truly surrounded by Serbs who knew all the words, got every joke and were having the time of their lives. I had fun but, I suspect, not nearly as much as everyone else!

Sun 1 Jun – Sonny Rollins
On Sunday night, Sonny Rollins played his first ever concert in Australia at the Sydney Opera House. It was his only date in Australia as part of his world tour and giving his advancing years this may well also be his last performance over here too.

Sonny's band consisted of Bob Cranshaw on bass, Clifton Anderson on trombone, Bobby Broom on guitar, and Kimati Dinizulu on congas, and Kobie Watkins on drums. Of these I enjoyed the Anderson solos the most. Kobie was impressive on drums, although judging from the faces he pulled it seemed to demand considerably more effort than Sonny's playing! Broom was also rather prone to pained expressions, but plucked some compelling swing improv from the strings of his Gretsch (I think that's what it was—I could just about read the name from the third row!) It was really only Cranshaw's solos that didn't quite work for me. They were just a bit too sparse.

Of course, Sonny himself just blew and blew. It was extraordinary that a man of his age, who struggled to walk on stage could solo for 10 to 15 minutes at a stretch with such strength and clarity. It was a night to remember.

The support act, a three-piece consisting of piano, bass and drums were very good too, although I have no idea who they were. Anyone?

Finally, since I recently started blogging, I'll take this opportunity to spruik myself and point you to my blog entry on Sonny. The content is pretty similar to this post, but drop in anyway!

Sat 19 Apr – DJ Shadow, Cut Chemist
"Hard Sell" is the name of the third outing of DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist, mixing exclusively on 7 inch 45s. It follows on from Brainfreeze and Product Placement, but no hard sell was required to get me to turn up to the Big Top at Luna Park in Sydney...you couldn't keep me away!

A couple of DJs took turns to spin some discs as a warm-up. The first focused on classic funk, such as the classic For The Love Of Money, while the second was a bit more eclectic. Once they were done, their decks were cleared away in preparation for the main event. When Shadow and Cut did come out a little after 10:30pm, they began by explaining a little about what we were about to hear. They were clearly very flattered at having been asked to headline at the Hollywood Bowl with reprise of Brainfreeze. To do justice to such a prestigious invitation, they decided instead to devise an entirely new show. That was Hard Sell. At that point, they left the stage for a screening of the Hard Sell intro, all about the 7 inch 45, scratching, looping and their 8 deck set-up.


The "Hard Sell" Intro

Then they came back to start the mix, promising musical styles ranging from rock, hip-hop, country and even zydeco (apparently a genre favoured by Cut). There were plenty of classics in their mix, including Apache, Mistadobalina and Strong Island. But they were digging deep and wide for their sources and some I picked were Pop Music, Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat), I'll Be Back, Rock Around the Clock, Eye of the Tiger and, to my astonishment, 59 to 1 -- Tuxedomoon and DJ Shadow are two extremes of my musical taste I never expected to be combined! The mixing was flawless and inspired: for example, combining Stairway to Heaven with the theme from Gilligan's Island was a bizarre juxtaposition that just worked.

Throughout the show, dual video screens alternated between animated pastiches and feeds from cameras pointed at Shadow and Cut, which allowed the audience to see just how fast their hands were moving. A wrist-cam on Cut provided an unusual and slightly vertiginous angle on proceedings.

After a set lasting almost an hour and a half, they stopped to ask whether we wanted the full show...Perth had had the full show...did we want it too? Needless to say, the crowd did want more and so the two DJs launched into another set, this time much heavier, with more electronic beats and frenzied scratching. As part of the climactic finale, they both strapped on portable turntables and ripped up Jimi Hendrix's Star Spangled Banner. Now that I would have liked to have seen at the Hollywood Bowl.

What a show!

Back in the 80s I was partial to making the odd mix tape, so I was pleasantly surprised to find these two sites for creating the online equivalent:

Muxtape - you upload your own mp3s
Mixwit - you find mp3s on the search engines SkreemR and seeqpod

I'm not sure how long these sites will last, as they might be on shaky legal ground. In the meantime, they're a bit of fun. To get the ball rolling I've created a couple of mixes:

A Jazz Sampler - a selection of some of my favourite Jazz classics

Concert Sampler - which has an eclectic mix of tracks, linked only by the fact that I have seen all of these bands recently

Try it yourself, and post the results!

Sat 8 Mar – CocoRosie The CocoRosie concert at the Factory in Marrickville was sold out and, although it's not a very big venue, this meant a decent-sized and fairly eclectic crowd for the show. The support, Sui Zhen are a local band whose sound is very much in the CocoRosie or Joanna Newsom mould, although admittedly while they were playing we were putting more attention into spotting the zaniest outfits than watching the band.

Needless to say, once CocoRosie came out they outdid the audience in the fashion stakes: Bianca Casady was sporting a head-scarf topped with a baseball cap. A few songs in Sierra Casady took this further when she stripped down to a bizarre over-sized bikini type thing crudely-fashioned from what looked like inflatable kids toys. Apparently Bianca had thrown it together before the show.

In addition to the sisters, there was a third member to the act who played grand piano and sometimes swapped with Bianca to play the synth. The music sounded fantastic, just what you would have hoped for. Although most was from the most recent album, The Adventures Of Ghosthorse And Stillborn, there were a few older songs in there too. By Your Side was a particular stand-out that has developed a much stronger groove than the original recording on La maison de mon rêve.

The only disappointment was that the show was pretty short: including the single song encore, it lasted about an hour. Maybe I've been spoiled lately (The Triffids gig comes to mind--they played for 3 hours!).

One last gripe: it does amaze me how many people seem to need a mediated experience: if they haven't taken photos, maybe they weren't really there! There was one woman in front of us who couldn't stop: she'll now have a large collection of very blurry photos of the action on stage!

The mathematician in me enjoyed this article by Antony Liekens (there's nothing like a bit of Principal Component Analysis!). The article summarises the results of data mining last.fm data available through the AudioScrobbler Web Services. Interestingly, the article suggests that some of the most common last.fm tags (such as "rock" and "alternative"), which are often dismissed as being too broad as to be meaningful, actually have significant explanatory power to classify musical taste. Last.fm users appear to be clustered into listeners of the following genres: "indie", "rock", "metal", "hip-hop" and "electronic".

The analysis is based on users' top 50 artists and the tag cloud for my top 50 would indicate that I straddle inde, rock and electronic. I imagine that The Beautiful South and They Might Be Giants, both in my top 5, were significant contributors to my "indie" score. I do also have a reasonable appearance by "electronica", so maybe I should use that to tip the scales and place myself in the electronic camp (although admittedly DJ Shadow is my only top 10 artist with these tags).

Tag Cloud for smc2911

80s alternative alternative rock ambient blues british chillout classic rock downtempo electronic electronica experimental folk hip-hop indie indie pop indie rock jazz new wave pop post-punk rock singer-songwriter trip-hop

In 1986 I turned 18, had my last year at school and would have been pretty familiar with the following tracks:

Top 10 for 1986
1. Wa Wa Nee - Stimulation
2. Diana Ross - Chain Reaction
3. Bananarama - Venus
4. Billy Ocean - When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Going
5. Samantha Fox - Touch Me (I Want Your Body)
6. Berlin - Take My Breath Away
7. Dionne Warwick - That's What Friends Are For
8. Lionel Richie - Dancing On The Ceiling
9. Cyndi Lauper - True Colors
10. The Bangles - Manic Monday

First time around I mistakenly entered the charts for 1988 (thanks slimduncan, so I may as well leave them here.

Top 10 for 1988
1. Robert Palmer - Simply Irresistible
2. Salt-N-Pepa - Push It
3. Billy Ocean - Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car
4. Cheap Trick - The Flame
5. Bill Medley & Jennifer Warnes - (I've Had) The Time Of My Life
6. Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up
7. Louis Armstrong - What A Wonderful World
8. Crowded House - Better Be Home Soon
9. 1927 - That's When I Think Of You
10. Fairground Attraction - Perfect

If there's a year that interests you, let me know and I can tell you what the Top 10 singles were in Sydney for that year...

On Friday night, Sydney's Enmore Theare hosted the Clash Of The Titans, bringing together showcasing three rather different Australian bands whose glory days spanned the 1970s to the 1990s.

The night started with The Stems. Hailing from Perth, The Stems only recorded one EP and one album (until this year's new release, that it), but they made a big splash in the Sydney pub music scene in the mid 80s. It didn't matter that I only knew a couple of their songs: the band's driving energy fired us all up. It was a great warm-up for what was to come.

Next up were 70s Australian punk pioneers Radio Birdman. More than 30 years after their heyday, these guys still know how to tear into a set! The drummer was obviously a new recruit (he was well under 50 years old). By the time they got to Aloha Steve and Danno the crowd was going wild and I was pogo-dancing for the first time in years. Sadly, I'm paying the price now, with aches and pains everywhere.

Hoodoo Gurus were one of the most successful Australian bands of the 80s and 90s. Although they disbanded in 1998, they reformed about five years later. Nothing they have released since has sold particularly well, but their live shows are still popular for the oldies. In this spirit, the Gurus opened with one of their old hits I Want You Back. Leilani was always my favourite Gurus song and it didn't disappoint: easily the best song of the night (and probably the main reason I'm feeling sore today). They played a lot of the Guru favourites: Bittersweet, What's My Scene, Wipeout and even Tojo (another personal fave). After their encore, a young woman jumped on stage and managed to persuade them to play one more, so My Girl was the finale.

All told, it was an excellent night, and the "Titans" did a great job of transporting me back to my youth.

Here are a few sampler clips.

The Stems - Sad Girl (1987)


Radio Birdman - Aloha Steve and Danno (late 1970s)


Hoodoo Gurus - Leilani (1984)