Sunday, 8 May 2011

When the late British musical icon John Martyn sat down at the keys, veteran music producer and good friend Jim Tullio sighed. Martyn, an innovative guitarist and singer, had just finished a suite for the London National Ballet Company, which Tullio was mixing, but insisted he needed to lay down a keyboard part. Tullio prepared for hours of noodling, but Martyn made one pass and left. As Tullio incorporated the track into the mix, he was blown away.
“It worked perfectly,” Tullio recalls. “I learned a lesson then, to trust his instincts. John was a genius. He made music more naturally than anyone I’ve ever met, as effortlessly as the way you and I speak.”
Tullio is not alone in his assessment. Martyn, a cult-status musician’s musician, was admired by everyone from Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page to Lee “Scratch” Perry and Bob Marley. Martyn’s groundbreaking guitar technique, tape delay, and recording approaches inspired Brian Eno’s ambient sound and The Edge’s shimmering, delay-drenched strings. He was lionized by Bristol trip-hoppers and chill-out DJs.
After Martyn’s passing in early 2009, Tullio and co-producer Gary Pollitt put Martyn’s last musical testament in order, transforming rough-edged vocals, expansive takes, and complex guitar work into Heaven and Earth (Hole in the Rain; May 3, 2011). Martyn’s voice and striking songs reveal the depth and perception of a musical elder, with his signature grit and sprawling panache.
Several close friends and long-time musical collaborators—including Phil Collins—contributed elements to Heaven and Earth. But the heart of the album—felt on tracks like “Gambler” and “Bad Company”—beats in Martyn’s intuitive, idiosyncratic sense of the blues, filtered through his earthy feel for roots- and jazz-inspired songwriting and his raw voice.
Sounds like: the gritty yet sparkling last word from a neglected music legend who transformed rock, reggae, club music, and folk.
“John didn’t think about much until he was there doing it. Making music was a spontaneous process, not preconceived. He had a cool vibe,” reflects Tullio, a longtime fan and musical collaborator. They first met in Martyn’s native Scotland, thanks to a colleague from the band Supertramp. “We stopped in this village behind a church and knocked on a cottage door,” Tullio remembers. “And there was John. My friend had set it up and surprised me.”
Before long, Tullio became Martyn’s American connection, reuniting Martyn with old friends like Levon Helm of The Band (whom Martyn met during a late-60s sojourn in Woodstock) and working on several of Martyn’s albums and composition projects. Martyn hung out for months at Tullio’s home and studio in Chicago, making music and becoming practically part of the family. “The personal and musical weren’t separate for John, as they aren’t for most brilliant artists,” Tullio notes.
The personal was complex, and involved a tragic addiction to drink. Martyn lost a leg to alcohol poisoning, yet continued recording, performing, and pushing his music in new directions. An admirer of Pharaoh Sanders for decades, Martyn had a project with Sanders scheduled for early in 2009. But illness took him first.
Tullio and Gary Pollitt, felt they owed it to their friend to put together the pieces of his last works. Tullio had first-hand experience with weaving together the recordings of a talented musician who died before his time, having crafted a Grammy®-winning final record by Steve Goodman (of “City of New Orleans” fame).
His experience didn’t make the labor of love before him any easier emotionally, though he and Pollitt shared a sense of how Martyn approached arrangements and of how best to honor his memory.
“We didn’t do any editing. A lot of the tracks are long—even rambling—but we left them that way, as John last heard them,” explains Tullio. “We knew this was it, so we made a conscious decision to keep everything, every morsel.”
In addition to instrumental tracks and backing vocals by some of Martyn’s favorite backup singers, Phil Collins, a close friend and avid supporter of Martyn’s, sang background vocals on his song “Can’t Turn Back The Years.” Martyn covered Collins’s song, in part as a tribute to their bond, forged as the two men were both grappling with divorce in 1980. (Martyn crashed at Collins’s home for a spell.)
“John wanted to do one of Phil’s songs to repay him,” said Tullio. “After John passed, I spoke with Phil and he really wanted to sing on the track. He said he had always wanted John to record one of his songs. You can hear the emotion in both their voices.” It’s a haunting feeling that pervades all of Heaven and Earth.
Via

You can listen to a couple of tracks at the link above. Sounds pretty good to me...

'Patti Smith - Horses' review by Lester Bangs

Patti’s heroes may be gone, but she is both with us and for us, so strongly that her music is something, finally, to rally around. For one thing, she has certain qualities that can make her a hero to a whole generation of young girls; Patti has done more here for woman as aggressor than all the Liberation tracts published, and has pushed to the front of the media eye that it is just as much a process (ordeal) learning to “become” a “woman” as it is for men wrestling with all this ballyhoed “manhood” business. It’s this tough chick who walks like Bo Diddley and yet all is all woman like we’ve been waiting for so long, a badass who pulls off the feat of being simultaneously idol of women and lust object of men (and women, no doubt).
And even more than that, Patti’s music in its ultimate moments touches deep wellsprings of emotions that extremely few artists in rock or anywhere else are capable of reaching. With her wealth of promise and the most incandescent flights of and stillnesses of this album she joins the ranks of people like Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus, or the Dylan of “Sad Eyed Lady” and Royal Albert Hall. It’s that deeply felt, and that moving: a new Romanticism built upon the universal language of rock ‘n’ roll, an affirmation of life so total that, even in the graphic recognition of death, it sweeps your breath away. And only born gamblers take that chance.
(Creem) February 1976
Via

Shaking The Dust (Hip Hop speaks the truth)

“Shake the Dust” is a must-see feature documentary by Adam Sjöberg that kicked off production in late 2009, and tells the stories of break-dancers in struggling communities around the world.
Although many of them are separated by cultural boundaries and individual struggles, they are intrinsically tied to one another through their passion for break-dancing and hip-hop culture

Yemen

Somalia

Uganda
Via

Shake The Dust

Face That Screamed War’s Pain Looks Back, 6 Hard Years Later

Writing on the wall

Buy it here (€9,95)
(Thanx HerrB!)

The Kills - Pull A U 04/14/11

Plan B - Love Goes Down

Noam Chomsky: My Reaction to Osama bin Laden’s Death

Saturday, 7 May 2011

'Co-ordinated attacks' hit Afghan city

Loud explosions and gunfire have been heard in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, where witnesses say the provincial governor's compound as well as other sites are under a co-ordinated attack.
Sounds of gunfire and explosions were heard coming from near the provincial governor's heavily guarded compound on Saturday, as well as from four other locations in the city. Hospital sources in the city told Al Jazeera that 12 people had been injured in the attacks so far - three of them were members of the police, and the rest were civilians.
Gunmen were holed up in a five-storey shopping mall, and traded fire with security forces at the governor's compound, with the Associated Press reporting that fighting was focusing on the rear of the compound, near the governor's residence.
An Afghan government spokesperson said that in all six suicide attacks had taken place across the city.
"So far there have been 10 explosions in Kandahar today. We have confirmation that six of the explosions have been suicide attacks," Zalmay Ayubi told AFP.
"Small arms fire is still going on. Two RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] have been fired onto the [governor's compound] so far. The northern and eastern sides of the compound are under direct attack," Ayubi said.
An explosion was heard at governor Tooryalai Wesa's compound, while another was heard several minutes later in the west of the city. Black smoke was seen rising from the compound, a witness told Reuters.
James Bays, Al Jazeera's correspondent in the capital, Kabul, reported that the RPGs landed 300m from the compound. It was not immediately clear whether Wesa was in the compound.
Local authorities have blocked journalists from accessing the site, as fighting is continuing.
Bays reported that shooting had also been reported from near the city's intelligence headquarters, from an Afghan Civil Order Police (ANCOP) compound in the city's eastern District Five, and also from near a jail in the west of the city where the Taliban had last month helped hundreds of inmates escape.
Firing was also reported from near a school and police station on the road to Camp Gecko, a US Special Forces base built on the site of Osama bin Laden's former home in Kandahar. That gunbattle was taking place in the northwest of the city, in District Eight.
It was not clear if the shooting near the Kandahar headquarters of the Afghan intelligence service was targeting that building, or the nearby traffic police headquarters.
At the ANCOP compound, police said they shot two would-be suicide bombers, Bays reported.
Ahmed Wali Karzai, the chairman of the provincial council, told Al Jazeera that authorities were attempting to bring the situation under control, but that Taliban fighters were still hiding at some of the attack sites.
'Spring offensive'
Last week, the Taliban announced the start of their "spring offensive" against US-led coalition troops and the Afghan government.
Kandahar, the Taliban's birthplace, has been the focus of military operations for the last year, with commanders saying they have made gains, but qualifying successes by terming them "fragile" and "reversible".
In a message released on Friday, the Taliban warned that this week's killing of Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda's leader, would give their fight against foreign and Afghan forces "a new impetus".
@'Al Jazeera'