Listen: New track from Mystikal (along with rave review from NY Times)

Coastal Sounds, and Bass Thump From Up North

By JON CARAMANICA

Mystikal

 

“Hear that, Helen? He’s tearing it up, that fella. I’d love to get my hands on those acapellas.” About 45 seconds into “Hit It” Mystikal takes on the voice of an older white woman who is watching him perform the song, which is a stunningly good update of vintage James Brown funk. He’s catching feelings, riding the speedy beat, virtually speaking in tongues. He’s in the song and then outside it, calling out instructions to the band — which includes the New Orleans musician Trombone Shorty, according to the Twitter feed of DJ Don Juan, who produced the song with KLC — and talking about all the instruments he’s in charge of. His rasp is intact from his mid-1990s heyday, and his energy is stratospheric. The song is a leak; it may or may not appear on his coming album on Cash Money, his first in more than a decade, a span that included time in jail. 

Whatever happens, though, “Hit It” — or “Hit Me,” depending on whose Twitter feed you believe — is either a late contender for best song of 2012, an early contender for best song of 2013 or proof that time travel to and from 1968 is possible and happening right before our ears.

Web link: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/arts/music/new-cds-from-capital-steez-the-departed-and-too-short.html?_r=0

NY Times: A City Pays Its Respects [for Uncle Lioen]

See full slideshow HERE

The drums could be heard first and then the brass, and then, far down the street in the twilight, people could be seen dancing and swaying, the bells of sousaphones above them like halos. New Orleanians paraded in homage to Lionel Batiste, known to everyone for decades as Uncle Lionel, to many simply as “Unc.”

 Credit: William Widmer for The New York Times

 

NY Times: New Orleans Celebrates the Life of a Bandleader

Read full story HERE.

NEW ORLEANS — The drums could be heard first and then the brass, and then, far down the street in the twilight, people could be seen dancing and swaying, the bells of sousaphones above them like halos. Shuffling back and forth at the front of the parade was a paint horse named Sunshine that somebody taught how to dance.

This was Day 2 of the party that has lasted over a week in the Treme neighborhood. On some nights there have been small, informal parades like this one; on other nights people from around the city and even tourists have flocked to this neighborhood, New Orleans’s cultural and musical heart, to see or be a part of a certain kind of celebration that takes place almost nowhere else.

On the nights between the death and the burial of one of their colleagues, musicians gather to play and remember. This culminates in the funeral procession, one of those local traditions that is featured in the city’s marketing materials but is no less old and true for it. People still talk about processions from years past, but in terms of size, the one coming up this Friday may be among the largest in recent memory.

“The way things is going, this is probably going to be the biggest,” said Action Jackson, a D.J. who follows cultural events for the local radio station WWOZ.

The man being laid to rest is Lionel Batiste, known to everyone for decades as Uncle Lionel, to many simply as “Unc.” Mr. Batiste, who was 80 when he died of cancer on July 8, was the singer, bass drummer and assistant grand marshal for the Treme Brass Band. He was also one of the great New Orleans personalities, the face of Treme and a consummate man about town.

NY Times: New Orleans Saint’s Brooklyn Revival

By BEN RATLIFF

A NEW record by Mac Rebennack, a k a Dr. John, the blues-and-roots potentate, is no big thing per se; it happens every few years. Neither is Dr. John returning to his late-’60s coordinates of super-informed funk, representing the rhythmic trip of West Africa to the Antilles to the American Gulf Coast; he did that recently on “Tribal,” released a year and a half ago. 

But “Tribal” probably didn’t go far beyond Dr. John’s own specialized listenership. What’s newsworthy about “Locked Down,” his new album, to be released by Nonesuch on April 3, is that he’s being nuzzled by someone young and much listened-to: Dan Auerbach, singer and guitarist of the Black Keys, the post-garage band that recently sold out a Madison Square Garden show in 15 minutes. Mr. Auerbach collaborated with Dr. John in a set at the Bonnaroo festival last June that I liked very much, with two drummers, backup singers and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. In it Dr. John sang old songs with twisted histories, and the show vibrated with bass, organ, low brass and quiet funk. 

Soon after that they recorded “Locked Down” — Mr. Auerbach produces and plays guitar — which is a bit more preening and academic. It’s all original songs, clearly grown out of studio jams. There’s a single drummer here, one of the two from the Bonnaroo show: Max Weissenfeldt, of the German rare-groove band Poets of Rhythm. The keyboardist and bassist, Leon Michels and Nick Movshon, are from the El Michels Affair, one of the bands associated with Dap-Tone records from Brooklyn and the world of retro-funk that brought you the sound of Amy Winehouse’s “Back to Black” record. (They’ve also both played in the touring version of the Black Keys.) The guitarist Brian Olive, once of the Soledad Brothers, whose own solo album “Two of Everything” was produced last year by Mr. Auerbach, is part of the same fraternity of backward-looking obsessives. 

This record will find some fans among those who loved “Back to Black,” and it should. But have you ever wondered how hip is too hip? “Locked Down,” with its down-cold James Black drum rhythms, distorted Fender Rhodes keyboards and free-range, organically farmed reverb, is a useful test case. (By the way, go back and listen to Dr. John’s complicated, spaced-out record “The Sun, Moon & Herbs,” from 1971, when all recordings were analog: are we trying to out-hip that on its own terms?) If Dr. John weren’t grounding it with his casual essence, it might collapse under the weight of its own studied scuff. 

But some of it is beautiful, and I look forward to hearing it live. One can do that right around the release date of the record, when Dr. John comes to the Brooklyn Academy of Music for “Insides Out,” a residency spread across three weekends. March 29 to 31 he’ll perform in “A Louis Armstrong Tribute,” which is just what it sounds like but different, including performances from Arturo Sandoval, Rickie Lee Jones and the Blind Boys of Alabama. April 5 to 7 he’ll be performing “Locked Down” with Mr. Auerbach and band; and April 12 to 14 he presents “Funky but It’s Nu Awlins,” with guests from his hometown, including Donald Harrison, Davell Crawford, Ivan Neville, Irma Thomas and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band.

Bluegrass and Jazz Bands, With More in Common Than You’d Think

By BEN RATLIFF

Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

Del McCoury’s bluegrass group and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band did the proper adult thing on Wednesday night: they resolved their differences, surrounded by expensive claret.

On “American Legacies” (McCoury Music), their recent joint album, they’ve explicitly made their traditions melt together. This is an old story. Louis Armstrong did it with Jimmie Rodgers; Wynton Marsalis did it with Willie Nelson. The pairing is not a stretch, though it can seem to be. For the first half of the 20th century bands from putatively different traditions implicitly understood their common origins and points of crossover. And their repertories overlapped. Type in the song title “Corrine, Corrina” on YouTube and you’ll get Red Nichols’s jazz version, Bo Carter’s string-band blues version, and various shades of country into rock ’n’ roll from the Collins Kids, Ray Peterson, Brooks & Dunn, Big Joe Turner, and Jerry Lee Lewis.

Or you could do the same with “Milenberg Joys,” which the combined bands played near the end of their set at City Winery on Wednesday. It’s a song that Mr. McCoury — raised in the Black Mountain region of North Carolina — knew because he used to play it in Bill Monroe’s band, and the jazz group knew because Jelly Roll Morton wrote it. (The dynastic Preservation Hall band, from New Orleans, was founded in 1961 by Allan and Sandra Jaffe, parents of its current tuba player and director, Ben Jaffe; it has no original members, but the current lineup is full of familial and professional ties to the group’s past.) In that song, and in a few other places, the musicians did right by the audience: they made music subtly pan across the stage, from one band to another, so you could hear the difference in rhythmic temperament, whether in grooves or in solos.

At full strength 12 musicians stood onstage, jazz guys to the left, bluegrass to the right. The Preservation Hall band used funk and parade beats and slid into the beginning of each bar, making the “one” indistinct; by contrast, Mr. McCoury’s group bit down hard on it.

Although Mr. McCoury filled half the set with his high, clean, no-nonsense voice, there was a lot more Preservation Hall in the mix; trumpet, trombone, saxophone and tuba walked all over guitar, banjo, mandolin and string bass. (The singing styles of the Preservation Hall musicians — the trumpeter Mark Braud and the saxophonist Clint Maedgen — take up more space than Mr. McCoury, through various shades of showiness.) And the Preservation Hall band’s strong drummer, Joe Lastie, stamped an irrefutable, seductive groove deep into each song.

There were lessons and discoveries in all of that, but you wouldn’t want to overthink it; the music was too amiable and easy to like.

NY Times: At 100, [Lionel Ferbos is] Still Keeping Time as the Leader of the Band

By DAVE THIER

NEW ORLEANS — At midnight last Saturday, friends and well-wishers sang “Happy Birthday” to the trumpet player who led the band that night at the Palm Court Jazz Cafe. When they finished, the trumpet player turned to a few young women sitting behind him.

“Have you ever kissed a hundred-year-old man?” he asked.

The next night, jazz royalty from around the city turned out for Lionel Ferbos’s birthday party, amazed that one of their colleagues could have made it a full century. The wide Ferbos brood of tan-skinned Creoles with thin faces, pointy noses and impossible grace dominated the room, but men in seersucker suits with white straw hats and other appropriate characters filled it out. It being New Orleans, there was also a sparkly gold top hat, a red feathered sash and copious fleurs-de-lis.

Mr. Ferbos himself, with a brown suit, thick plastic glasses, deep jowls and bushy eyebrows, held court in the middle of the room, collecting birthday cards and hundred-dollar bills to pin to his chest in the New Orleans birthday tradition.

After a little while, he took the stage the way he has done every Saturday night for two decades, crooning old standards in a smooth, muddy voice. The bands are smaller than they were in the 1930s, he says, but most everything else is the same.

“It’s the same music,” he said. “We’re playing the same numbers we were playing 80 years ago.”

In a city obsessed with keeping its particular past breathing into the present, Mr. Ferbos stands as a rare example of the long journey that early jazz has taken to come to 2011 intact. He and his songs have stayed the same not just through Hurricane Katrina, but through Hurricane Betsy and the flooding in 1995 as well. They saw Vietnam, World War II, the Great Depression (he is the last surviving member of the New Orleans Works Progress Administration jazz band) and the invention of rock and roll. His face shows some of the wear of eight decades of playing. His music does not.

After the break, some local celebrities in attendance took the stage and modernized the music by a couple of decades. James Andrews, “The Satchmo of the Ghetto,” worked the crowd as audience members pulled out parasols and napkins and started parading. Irvin Mayfield, a bandleader and club owner, joined him in a slim-cut black suit and a white shirt with no tie.

Mr. Ferbos stayed in the corner, his knees bouncing in time with the music, his face occasionally appearing behind the outsize personalities dancing in front of him.

Mr. Ferbos was never a star. Until his considerable talent for longevity eclipsed his musical prowess, he was always an ensemble player. He played dance halls when his music was pop, and sit-down restaurants like the Palm Court later on. Unlike nearly every other musician in the city, he still reads his melodies off sheet music. He started playing before Louis Armstrong made improvising popular.

He was a worker, and still is, practicing every day to stay sharp. At his party, much younger men were yawning while he was still receiving a near-endless stream of birthday wishes.

A man went up to him and said, “Hope to make it next year!”

“Me too,” Mr. Ferbos replied, and laughed.

NY Times: New Orleans Horns, Raw and Funky

By NATE CHINEN

The Rebirth Brass Band ended its full-throttle show at Brooklyn Bowl on Thursday night more or less swarmed, yielding the stage to an eager throng. This of course was a handy bit of showmanship, timed to coincide with several of the band’s best-loved New Orleans anthems (“Feel Like Funkin’ It Up,” “Cassanova,” “Do Whatcha Wanna”) and with the climax of accumulated energies in the room. But it was also an affirmation of core principles. A stage is little more than a platform for the Rebirth Brass Band, and the distance it imposes on an audience is a passing inconvenience, even on the road.

Rebirth, as the band is often hailed at home, has barely deviated from the formula set by its leader, the sousaphone player Phil Frazier, in 1983. Commingling parade-band protocols with the more ragged aspects of jazz and funk — “junk music” is Mr. Frazier’s term for the crossbred result — the group chases down euphoria one boisterous groove at a time. In New Orleans the band plays most Tuesday nights at the Maple Leaf Bar, where the main space accommodates about as many people as the Brooklyn Bowl stage.

This was a stop on the road in support of a sturdy new album, “Rebirth of New Orleans,” on the Basin Street label. (The band is traveling most of this month, before returning home in time for the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. This summer it will headline “A Night in Treme,” a tour pegged to the HBO series.) At times there was a hint of the routine in the show’s pacing, but never a flagging of intensity. And the newer songs held their ground against the classics: “I Like It Like That,” with a churning beat, a blaring trumpet lead and a puttering riff for saxophone and trombone, was as exhilarating as anything else in the set.

Rebirth’s trademark is loose precision, unruly at the granular level but cohesive on the whole. Mr. Frazier and his brother, Keith Frazier, who plays bass drum, held down a resilient low end; the tenor saxophonist Vincent Broussard and the trombonist Corey Henry maintained the mid-range, often sparring on the fly.

Two assertive trumpeters, Glen Andrews and Derrick Shezbie, carried most of the melodies, arranged in fortified octaves or a resplendent unison. (In “What Goes Around Comes Around” they also traded eight-bar solo bursts.) As for the snare drummer, Derrick Tabb, his second-line rhythms and syncopated rudiments gave the music its kinetic thrust, riveting and funky.

Thursday’s show happened to precede Bowl Train, a weekly late-night D.J. set by Questlove, the drummer with the Roots. Specializing in myriad strains of R&B — one stretch had him transitioning from Sunshine Anderson’s “Heard It All Before” into the Heavy D remix of Soul for Real’s “Candy Rain,” into signature hits by Experience Unlimited and Soul II Soul — he made at least one nod to the occasion. His first track was a brass-band version of Michael Jackson’s “Human Nature.” It was probably the one by the Youngblood Brass Band, not Rebirth, but the resonance was clear enough.

NY Times Popcast: Aaron Neville Sings in the Studio

For this week’s Popcast, The Times’s music podcast, we were happy to have the one and only Aaron Neville visit our studio, where he sang two songs from his new gospel album, “I Know I’ve Been Changed,” and discussed his faith and the making of the record.

Also on Popcast this week, we review “Loud,” the latest album by Rihanna. After last year’s tough, angry and highly personal “Rated R,” “Loud” is Rihanna’s “back to business as usual album,” Jon Pareles says. “She’s resuming her persona as the party girl with the glint of danger.”

Aaron Neville performs (mp3)

NY Times: New Orleans’s Gender-Bending Rap

If “gay rapper” is an oxymoron where you come from, how to get your head around the notion of a gay rapper performing in a sports bar? What in most cities might seem plausible only as some sort of Sacha Baron Cohen-style provocation is just another weeknight in the cultural Galapagos that is New Orleans. Sometime after midnight on the sweltering Thursday before Memorial Day, the giant plasma-screen TVs at the Sports Vue bar (which “proudly airs all major Pay Per View events from the world of Boxing and Ultimate Fighting”) were all switched off, and the bar’s backroom turned into a low-lit, low-ceilinged dance club, where more than 300 people awaited a return engagement by Big Freedia, who by day runs an interior-decoration business and who is, to fans of the New Orleans variant of hip-hop music known as “bounce,” a superstar.