unpiano: music

Somehow this post took a month to complete. I was sort of waiting around for more audio or video clips to surface, but it looks like it was a pretty tight show security wise. Either that, or everyone has finally realized how fucking annoying it is to have the person in front of you taking a video of the whole show. Well that’s the reason I didn’t take any photos anyways.. sometimes it’s better just to be there.

The show pretty much blew me away. He didn’t go on till near 1am and it was so casual it felt like I was in someone’s living room. The band blew through different genres, changing things up as they went along. They would start out with a jazz version of something like Stakes Is High, then flip it into the hip hop version but swap out different lyrics. It was fun just trying to catch up. I think the high point in the show may have been their cover of Radiohead’s ‘All I need’, which he started using a single drum sample played by hand as he sang. I have had no luck finding it, but hopefully it will be somewhere soon since they were videotaping the whole performance. I have to mention the band as well. Robert Glasper (of the Dilla tribute fame) and Chris Dave led a crew of amazing musicians including bass and trumpet. Sometimes when hip hop incorporates a band it can become hokey or else it starts to all sound the same (someone tell ?uestlove to change him drum sound once and a while). This time around however, everything sounded fresh a summer’s day, or in this case midnight on a cold April night. Chris Dave has this thing where he seeming fucks up and falls off rhythm but instead just keeps playing that way. Let me repeat that. He is so good that he can play off beat and still make it sounds good. Wow. Anyways, it was a little pricey at $60 and though I didn’t pay for it, I gladly would have. You know you’ll be getting show full of songs that you won’t hear again anytime soon. Equally amazing was Mos Def’s ability to take a calendar date and tell you whose birthday it is that day. He must have done twenty before he got stumped. Lastly and I guess most importantly, the thing that I took away from seeing the show was that everything is so lovely right now. When you hear music like that, nothing can phase you. Since I could only find one crappy clip of the Yoshi’s performance, I decided to find a bunch of clips of the trio that sort of summed up what the show was all about. You can also listen to the trio’s hour long Dilla tribute at the University of Michigan by going here.

Robert Glasper feat. Mos Def – Stakes Is High (live)

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Video:
Mos Def – Live at Yoshi’s Oakland (video)
Mos Def, Chris Dave, & Robert Glasper – The Message (video)
Mos Def, Chris Dave, & Robert Glasper – Thieves In The Night (video)
Mos Def, Chris Dave, & Robert Glasper – Thelonius (video)
Chris Dave & Friends feat. Mos Def – “E=MC2″ (video)
Mos Def – Live at The After Party (video)

I first started getting into Brazilian music when a friend, who used to travel to Brazil for skateboarding (and to hunt down Volkswagon parts to sell to collectors), used to come back with piles of Os Mutantes, Caetano Veloso, Rita Lee and other Tropicalia records. Not long after, Aquarius Records in S.F. was pumping the U.S. reissues of those and the crazy history of this revolutionary 60’s movement started to circulate. I grabbed up as many Brazilian records from that era as I could, stumbling across this awesome jam after finding Brazil Classics Vol. 1, from David Byrne’s Luka Bop label, in a local dollar bin. Jorge Ben’s work covers a wide mix of styles. The album this originally came from, Africa Brazil, is my favorite by him (and of course, the hardest to find for less than 10 million dollars on fucking E-Bay).

Jorge Ben – Ponta De Lanca Africano (Umbabarauma)

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Here’s a little slice of early 80’s minimal art-funk for the Spring. Just percussion jams and bass for the most part, with some NYC weirdo having at it with the mic. And yeah, Grandmaster Flash sampled “Cavern” for his classic “White Lines (Don’t Do It)”. I always loved Liquid Liquid’s repetitious grooves (probably the thing I liked most about Can), perfect for long drives, bike rides or breaking out of a long winter hibernation, hopping a train and heading to the club. That club being The Attic in S.F. tonight, where Jesse DJs the Tuff Town night with Jay Howell.

Liquid Liquid – Out
Liquid Liquid – Optimo
Liquid Liquid – Cavern