Daily Listen by Brian Brock

The Real Ambassadors (hear “Remember Who You Are”)

This is a mostly out-of-print collaboration between Dave Brubeck and Louis Armstrong, along with a few other people.  The liner notes claim that this is a musical written by Dave and Iola Brubeck, but many of the high points consist of Armstrong singing very Satchmoey tunes - I suspect he contributed compositionally.

He was clearly the kind of guy who turned any group of people into “Louis Armstrong and a bunch of other people”.  It’s amazing to witness myself growing agitated listening to the chorus/Brubecky parts, only to be pulled right back into it by Louis.  I love Brubeck, I used to listen to Time Out, Time Further Out, Quiet as the Moon (Brubeck playing the Peanuts music), a live album or two.  It’s not that Brubeck fails (although the chorus does offer some screechy cacophonies), but that Armstrong is just such a bright light he casts shadows off everyone around him.

“Remember Who You Are” (side 1, track 4) is a killer.  I love the drums.  There’s so much reverb on the vocal, sounds like a plate reverb to me.  Trombonist Trummy Young sings the second verse.

Side 1: http://www.mediafire.com/file/jyzdgqfdlji/real_ambassadors_side_1.mp3

Side 2: http://www.mediafire.com/file/yi5ogohxzmj/real_ambassadors_side_2.mp3

Dominic Duval’s String Ensemble - Live in Concert

It’s a spider web of extruded aluminum.  Minnows and geese are caught up, bubbling and squawking while the Mrs. winds them up, and the goose tries to eat the fish.

Listen to this stuff loud, if possible.  The amount of attention you give to good free jazz is directly proportional to the enjoyment you can reap from it.  It sounds like shit if you don’t pay attention.  This is only true up to a point - the good associations developed from listening to it eventually overwhelm the disorienting squall and you can do the dishes or cook while it plays.

The texture changes clearly from track to track in this music, which signals that they are not just hacking away at “free jazz” but actually doing something specific in each piece.

There’s some odd dated liner notes in this CD (from 1998) about cyberspace.  Check it out in the next post.

Smog - Knock Knock (copied from original Daily Listen)

This is one of my favorite albums, so I’m only going to say one thing about it: this album has almost no information beyond lyrics listed in the booklet, or printed on the CD tray - even online there’s very little. That’s awesome. I really think it is part of why the album works so well.

When I first got this, it was because I was a huge Cat Power - Moon Pix fan. I guess I had heard that Cat Power’s Chan Marshall and Bill Callahan of Smog had been on friendly terms, and so I bought it without further thought. The music didn’t impress me at first - if I had known it was a Jim O’Rourke production, I would have paid a lot of attention, and heard all the awesome detail that puts this album next to Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Airplane Over the Sea, OP8’s album (Calexico, Howe Gelb and Lisa Germano together at Wavelab studio in Tucson in 1997), and the Beatles’ Revolver. As it is, however, ignorant as a mucus-mite, when I finally began hearing the music I heard something much more incredible than the buried background vocals you can hear in the sample above. I heard the songs, one day with my wife, after she discovered Knock Knock in my collection of CDs which I knew were great but hadn’t discovered yet.

That was a good year.