Month: July 2018

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Herbie Mann – Do The Bossa Nova (1962) (Atlantic 1397, Mono pressing)

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Herbie Mann
Do The Bossa Nova
1962 Atlantic 1397
Mono pressing

Before bossa nova became the semiotic index for the synthetic happiness of mass consumer culture and alienation (and long before it was featured in the supermarkets and the Commander’s dinner parties in the current adaptation of A Handmaid’s Tale), bossa nova was  associated with the cool and cosmopolitan, with goatee-sporting hep cats like Herbie Mann.  For this record, he went to Rio and actually recorded with a bunch of the leading lights of the movement, which sets this apart from a lot of the contemporary North American jazz-bossa crossovers of the time.  The personnel includes Baden Powell, Paulo Moura, Tom Jobim, and Sérgio Mendes. A fun version of Clifford Brown’s ‘Blues Walk’ gives it a Brazilian twist.

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Larry Coryell – Coryell (1969) – Special Blog 10th Anniversary Post!

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Larry Coryell – Coryell
1969 Vanguard Apostolic VSD 6547 | Vinyl rip in 24 bit 196 khz | Art at 600 and 300 dpi
Jazz-Rock / Jazz-Funk / Soul / Fusion / Psychedelic

I’ve been holding back on posting about this album until I could commemorate the 10th ANNIVERSARY of this blog.  It’s a very special record to me from the great guitarist Larry Coryell, who passed away in 2017.  It’s unique in that it captures him in a kind of transition between his time playing in the psychedelic rock group The Free Spirits and his future as an icon of jazz fusion, in the pre-Bitches Brew era when that genre was still fresh and nascent.  And it’s soul-shaking, mind-melting grooviness from start to finish.  I like to imagine that Hendrix heard this album and  decided to shelve the Experience on the spot and start up his Band of Gypsies.  Bernard “Pretty” Purdie on the drums and Chuck Rainey on bass are holding down a solid soul groove  here, which just elevates the vibe to transcendent levels. Continue reading

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Flabbergasted Freeform #19 – The “Lost Episode”

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It’s been a year since the last Flabbergasted Freeform, and ten months since the last “Focus” podcast of old calypso and soca.  There are a bunch of reasons why I didn’t feel like doing them any more, but I won’t go into them here.  But since this month marks the TEN YEAR ANNIVERSARY of the blog, I thought it called for some special commemorations.  This Freeform mix was done in December of last year and was only circulated privately.  It’s a good time, though, so I’m sharing it with the world now and hope the world enjoys it.  The first person to find the couple bars of “Them Changes” quoted in another song gets a free Secret Decoder Ring. That is, as soon as I get them from the magazine I ordered where I ordered a dozen of these powerful devices, which happened to be a back issue from 1958, so please be patient.

You can stream the podcast at Mixcloud or get it directly from the link below the widget.