Here is an aural tradition that I only occasionally follow – a mix of some of the many remarkable musicians, singers, composers, and arrangers who left this planet during the last year (now itself good and dead, 2016). For the dozen or so people still listening to these podcasts, I had at one time intended and promised to post this in the last weeks of the year. A lot of factors made that into much less of a priority when the time rolled around, but there was also the uncomfortable hunch that we weren’t quite out of the woods yet regarding celebrities reaching their expiration dates. I even considered a horror movie type scenario where any still-living musicians who just happened to play on these tracks might be put at risk, or even worse, some Ring-like scenario where just listening to the podcast might kill you. So I quite reasonably decided to hold off until the year had safely passed to finish it, and now here it is, completely free of demonic powers.
It is by necessity incomplete: there were just too many stiffs to work with. I opted not to include Muhammad Ali’s perplexing rendition of “Stand By Me” from 1963, for example. I also couldn’t find the right moment to fit in a track from the bootlegged 1977 studio session where Paul Kantner briefly fired Grace Slick and Marty Balin from Jefferson Starship, and replaced them with Carrie Fisher and Blowfly. The abandoned album was tentatively to called “Blowfly Against the Empire ’77”. It was a concept album, of course, and hard to take any one song out of context…(*edit: I legitimately forgot Buckwheat Zydeco, and I even had some of his records pulled. Boo, hiss…)
A few artists from Part One (done way back in October) were repeated here, but most were not. So if you are wondering where are Natalie Cole, Gato Barbieri, The Brothers Johnson or Phife Dawg, have a look back in the archives. I don’t recall if I ever mentioned Rudy Van Gelder by name during either show, but surely he recorded at least a couple things in there somewhere. A playlist will be uploaded in a few days time.
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