So my beloved Muxtape is off line, whether by RIAA fiat or money troubles or both or whatever, I know not. That news kinda sucked although it was not unexpected, being and how the illegality of it was more or less blindingly obvious.

But a great idea and great for the music industry whether it knows it or not. But hark! In the dust of Muxtape, a new service launched called 8tracks which claims to do the same thing but -- gasp! -- legally. I've seen it called "Stracks" too, but I think the squiggly thing is offically an 8. I've signed up but haven't made a mux-er, a ... mix yet. There seem to be more restrictions that with muxtape -- you can't see the whole list before listening for instance -- which are presumably to keep it within the legal requirements. It does look like you can officially create multiple mixes and have them all up at the same time. Which is good, although I was kinda digging the zen-like process of destroying your mux before you could create a new one.

I'm encouraged that it looks uncluttered and simple, but also adds some functions muxtapes lacked -- I like the simplicity of "following" a user and also the ability to add comments to mixes. Will try and maybe get one up tonight.

Update: Did my first 8tracks mix. Painless process and one improvement on Muxtape is you can queue up all your songs to upload rather than have to do them one by one.

Shaun just reminded me about the new Lucinda Williams album which I forgot was coming. A quick tool around the forums brings up a lot of very, very, very promising* info. It's called Little Honey and is set for October 14th.

The track list:

Real Love
Circles & X's
Tears Of Joy
Little Rock Star
Honey Bee
Well Well Well (with Charlie Louvin & Jim Lauderdale)
If Wishes Were Horses
Jailhouse Tears (with Elvis Costello)
Knowing
Heaven Blues
Rarity
Plan To Marry
It's A Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna Rock N' Roll)

This article:

Little Honey not only collects some of the leftover songs from West that didn't fit into that record's heavy themes of death and betrayal, but also includes some much older songs that never made it out of the studio such as the 23-year-old ballad 'Circles & Xs' and 'Well Well Well', a fresh recording of an old demo Lucinda cut for her 1992 album Sweet Old World.

Session photos.

A Rolling Stone update.

Paste Magazine: Lucinda/Elvis duet on "Jailhouse Tears" number five best ever country duets (!!!!).

This is one of those classic Lucinda Williams swampy country songs about missing a lover as he's gone off to jail that you don't think could get any better--then Elvis' voice pops up unmistakably. Too cool.

Potential album art on Amazon.

* ie. I might not hate it like West. ;-(

A new muxtape of female artists.

Under the Rug -- Nani Bregvadze Georgian singer big from 60s onwards in Soviet type places, lovely crisp but dramatic voice perfect for soppy Russian "romances." Here is my favourite song of hers, perhaps he most beloved but I don't have it on MP3: "Snegopad" ("Snowfall"). Fur coats and Aeroflot - so evocative!

Enta Omri -- Mahmoud Fadl with Salwa Abou Greisha Sudanese interpretations/hommages to the great Umm Kalthum. Enta Omri is "You Are My Life" in Arabic.

Stretch Out -- Sister Rosetta Tharpe with Marie Knight About 20 years earlier than the YouTube I posted earlier today but just as powerful.

Nobody Wants You When You're Down and Out -- Carrie Smith Carrie is a bit of a more obscure blues shouter but does not at all deserve to be. This is from 1977.

A Grand Night for Swinging -- Mary Lou Williams Great jazz composer/arranger/pianist.

Pace, Pace mio Dio - La forza del destino -- Maria Callas I only got this the other day. It makes me want to have a bath in the dark and have this drift in from the other room. Just me? OK.

High on a Mountain -- Ola Belle Reed Classic mountain music, she was part of the folk revival phase in the 60s.

Osain -- Merceditas Valdes A great name in Afro-Cuban music. I was a bit suss about the flute or whatever at the beginning but once she started singing I was hooked. On YouTube.

Nibari (My Grandchild) -- Umalali, The Garifuna Women's Project The Garifuna are a community of descendants of African slaves shipwrecked in Belize. The sadly late Andy Palacio brought the music to the world with Watina and this is the follow up.

Working on Beale Street and Crying -- Denise LaSalle Her speciality is NSFW blues which go from the risque to the downright obscene. Sadly, "Lick It Before You Stick It" is not on YouTube. This one is pretty safe except for some straight talk at the end.

I'm Through Trying to Prove My Love To You -- Millie Jackson She is new to me, this is from her best known album of cheating songs (side A from the POV of the wive, side B is the other woman). She can also cuss like a cussing thing and makes a lot of those worst album covers ever lists.

Cansada De Esperar - Angelica Maria Dunno anything about her but this is a cover of The Kinks' "Tired of Waiting."

for Monday morning uplift purposes.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

And a solo version of the same song.

Make sure you stick around for the guitar solo at about 1.40 but if Sister Rosetta can't hold your attention ... friend, this is not the blog for you!

Time for a new muxtape, and time for another straight out country one.

Also good listening at Iowafan's muxtape.

Gurrumul from Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu has been getting quite the buzz in the last few months and I finally got the CD from the label, Skinnyfish and it is indeed as beautifully astonihsing as they say. He sings in various languages of the Yolŋu Matha accompanied and produced by Michael Hohner (who also owns the label) who gives just the right amount of musical support, but of course it is the soul deep voice that gets everyone excited. The harmonies throughout are also something special.

Apart from the music itself, I'm very impressed with what Skinnyfish has done to promote it and make getting it simple. Easy to use multimedia links at the label page, easy online payment options, his own YouTube channel and the traditional mark of care, a very beautifully put together CD digipak with booklet (including the lyrics and English translations.) Lotsa much bigger labels could learn from it.

Flop Eared Mule give Gurrumul a "strong buy" rating.

Combined June/July eMusic downloads list, over the fold.

Went to the monthly Balmain Ukulele Klub meetup on Monday night over at the Gladstone Park Bowlo. It was Dylan night! I do not play the ukulele and don't anticipate taking it but it was a lot of fun and it warms me to know these thriving subcultures exist across the city. The house band of friends of mine (buy the CD) did a great job with some Dylan songs, including a clever Red Sails in the Sunset/Beyond the Horizon medley. Then there was a ukulele tutorial on more Bob songs, then an open mic of Bob songs. All on uke, of course. Col Joye was there, big uke man apparently.

* Joke totally stolen.

Muxtape, World Youth Day edn.

Further: How awesome is it that Mick/Proddy doctrinal stoushes are back in the papers? Party like its 1953!

My probably libellous and ignorant impression of Wynton Marsalis, based entirely on message board scuttlebutt, is that he is some kind of intense jazz purist who bags out other jazzbos for defiling the artform via crass commercial cross over. But here he is with the ever picky Willie Nelson for an album, Two Men With the Blues. The snippets there sound alright, although they stopped working for me after the first couple. "Georgia on My Mind" with solo trumpet can't be a bad thing. The YouTube DVD preview there is most enticing. Noice work as always, Mickey Raphael. Think I'll pick this one up soon.

PS. This is my 100th post on the new site.

I mentioned before I'm liking "El Esquimal" the cover of Quinn the Eskimo by Los Chijuas. I knew they were Mexican but didn't know when it was recorded til I just went looking. 1968, turns out. It's on my muxtape and also an MP3 is here.

I got the rerelease off eMusic where it has this random fugly cover which gives you no idea of the era, the contents or anything else of consequence.

So after googling I find the original 1968 cover which was deemed too ... appropriate I guess for teh cutting edge of now. (Is that Peter Sellars????)

Bah. Shut up, Musart-Balboa. You might be a cheapie rerelease factory without even a website but surely you could find some other royalty free clip art? I hereby banish you from my Cover Flow!

PS, on eMu it's also on this "Mexi-delico" compilation which is very cool.

I'm back on the right side of the digital divide. To celebrate, I did a new muxtape just of stuff I listened to in my first couple of hours of plugging the thing in. The opening song is a Mexican cover of Quinn the Eskimo.

Saw Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story at the Sydney Film Festival on Saturday. It was very good but this Internet cafe is charging $3 a half hour and with 11 minutes left I'm not going to tell you about it.

Here's the trailer, the headphones here don't work but I suppose it sounds good:

I first sought out jazz great and all round hoyden Anita O'Day ( real surname: Colton. As she explains in the movie O'Day is Pig Latin for "dough" - "and I wanted to make some!") earlier this year after picking up a remaindered copy of Da Capo Best Music Writing 2002 and reading Matthew C Duersten's article "The Moon Looks Down and Laughs: The wonderful, horrible jazz life of Anita O'Day." Jazz has never been my main thing but it seemed odd I had never even heard of her, especially as at the time of her 2006 death she was described as the "greatest living jazz singer" and one of the only deemed special enough to be spoken about next to Ella and Billie.

The doco on her which sceened at the Sydney Film Fest on the weekend (official trailer at YouTube here and a longer version here) was highly enjoyable, informative and lovingly done. I hope it makes its way to the telly so everyone can see it, and I can see it again. It covered her musical career - including the innovations she brought to the role of swing band "canary" and her unique singing style - plus her embrace of not just jazz music but "the jazz life." Early busts for marijuana got her tagged "The Jezebel of Jazz" (a boon for PR and ticket sales) and a long period of heroin addiction followed. This is an important part of the story but I'm glad it didn't dwell voyeuristically on other aspects of her personal life. I've ordered her autoiography High Times, Hard Times so I'll get the rundown then. Opening lines: "Getting pregnant while single was something I don't think my mother ever got over. That was a really heavy situation in 1919. Girls killed themselves, became prostitutes or got married and carried the guilt with them all their lives. Mom took the last route." Dad left and married ten more times after that.

Interspersed with excellent archival footage, comments from jazz musos, jazz critics and friends there is Anita herself on home video at about age 85 or 86 larger than life, hanging out at a dusty Californian racetrack, detailing Charlie Parker's prefered method of prepping dope, and narrating the improbable story of her survival. Footage of her smackdown of Bryant Gumble in an 80s interview brought cheers from the crowd. She's pretty much a full blown James M. Cain character, and loving it. That would be fun, but she also happens to be an endlessly fascinating and moving musician too. There's a lot of interest music talk in the doco, stuff about singing on the eights and vibratos and beats and whatnot which poor little me doesn't get fully, but there is much enlightenment. For instance how she would study each instrument's part until she could improvise each one. They feature this Four Brothers example, a piece written for four saxaphones but performed with three plus Anita. After rock and roll swept aside the jazz vocalists in the early 60s, she recorded and toured extensively in Japan through the 1970s and it's this period which I know best (because that era is on eMusic but the earlier Verve stuff isn't - still much exploring to be done.) She does a fantastic version of Leon Russell's "Song for You" on one of those records.

If I ever get my computer back I'll post a couple of my fave songs.

In absence of a home computer, I can't mux. ;-( But here are some good ones:

Shaun and and Phineas and Phineas' mixtape collective all have Jesus-themed comps.

I quite like this one from We Are Color.

Radio Milwaukee has a Mixwit of "black rock" for Black Music Month.

Randomly I found this from a French blog: "psychpopyéyésoul'njazz." "Better Change Your Mind" by William Onyeabor is on a Luaka Bop compilation of 70s African psychadelia/funk but only got to listen to once before computer death. Noice.

"Some Jazz #3: 1954-1964" with notes here.

The muxtape of Congo music I posted about before (from Extra Extra) is still there and still awesome

Had a decentish initial listen over the weekend to the new Emmylou Harris All I Intended to Be. It is more or less in the style of the last two, with a lot of watered-down gauzy Lanois touches to the production. These are nice but I personally gravitate towards the simpler arrangements. A couple of songs are lingering this morning; "Broken Man's Lament" which I still need to listen to a bit more to fully understand, the Hag cover ("Kern River"), "Old Five and Dimers" (on YouTube, I could have sworn the liner notes have Mike Auldridge on the duet but I'm probably wrong) and a very moving Emmy original, "Not Enough." The Tracey Chapman cover does rather drag on though, I thought.

It's typical Emmylou, which is to say quite sublime in places.

I'm going to see that Anita O'Day doco at the Sydney Film Festival this Sunday so check out some classic Anita at the Newport Folk Fest 1958:

Comment moderation is still on so please continue to leave comments but be patient about them appearing -- especially over the weekend as I am still without my beloved Mac at home. ;-( Most of my music listening is done via the computer, either the digital files or the inbuilt CD. Without it, the only CD player I have is the DVD which I haven't tried but I don't expect the TV speaker quality to be that great. I'm still going to try and pick up the new Emmylou Harris record today or tomorrow. Particularly keen to hear her version of Old Five and Dimers Like Me, one of the great country songs. I've also heard good things about the new Al Green record.

Go Socceroos! and hope you all have a good weekend.

Check out the Bo Diddley themed muxtape that Shaun did.

I consider myself very fortunate to have seen Bo Diddley live last year at the Basement. He was clearly a bit frail, seated the whole time but still had the licks and was backed by a really good, mostly female band. A few weeks after that he had a serious stroke and I don't think performed publically again.

Lots of YouTube goodness to choose from. Let's try this one:

And a New York Times slideshow.

And a Stones cover:

Here in full is the 2/5 stars "review" by Bernard Zuel of Hayes Carll's "Trouble in Mind" from the Metro this morning:

You can see the attraction for the label. Here's someone who can be a lightweight-but-far-less-troublemaking cross between Ryan Adams and Steve Earle, with alcohol-soaked ballads and punchy mid-tempo country rock. It's easy to digest and has more grit than the Nashville-Tamworth axis but the trouble is when you take away the "troublesome" parts of Adams and Earle, you get by-the-numbers-alt.country.

The SMH reviewers, including BZ, generally do a good job in giving coverage to Music I Like and props to them for it, but I have a serious pet hate about their some of their critical MO. Namely: The constant and utterly unnecessary relating of everything slightly rootys to top 40 country and taking up space with irrelevant comparisons instead of talking about the music. In his excellent jazz reviews, John Shand never feels moved to mention that Mike Nock is not like Kenny G, but the blokes on the country/folk beat can't resist but shoehorn a reference to Keith Urban into damn near everything. Long time readers know I have ranted about this before. End the country critical cultural cringe!

I like this record (review coming this weekend) and he doesn't: fine, I'm not talking about that. The Adams/Earle comparisons while on the surface more appropos than Urban are misplaced too. Firstly, talk about the damn record. You've got about 50 words, why waste two of them on "Ryan" and "Adams", especially if you're not going to provide a meaningful comparison for potential purchasers? Hayes Carll is really very little like Ryan Adams musically, even when Ryan was at his most country. It seems Ryan is only mentioned because he provides a drug abusing songwriter bookend to the Earle reference which is more fitting, but still a waste of precious words. Why are we even mentioning drug abuse again? Ugh, who the hell knows.

Secondly, I strongly doubt the stated motivations apply to Lost Highway. It's just another the imposition of a random narrative that suits a lazy journo. (cf. the political op-ed columns every day of the week.) The easy-too-see attraction for the label is not that he isn't an vainglorious junkie, it is that he had already released a couple of critically acclaimed, award winning and successful Americana records and something of a reputation for being a genuine heir to the Texas country/folk songwriter tradition of Townes Van Zandt. These are the qualities that drew me to Hayes Carll three years ago.

If the new album doesn't live up to the promise, by all means say so. Don't just make shit up.

A further pet hate is the insidious definition creep of the term "alt.country." I see not the slightest reason to call Hayes Carll that, unless "alt.country" now simply means anything that doesn't chart on CMT and if that is what it now means then: over my dead body it does.