unpiano: music

I know it’s not like she needs my help promoting this new video, but holy shit.. I’m kind of blown away. I have never really been a fan of her music and the song is growing on me, but the whole package as a spectacle is pretty amazing when you stand back and take a second look. And since spectacle is here thing anyways, it works perfectly.

Lady Gaga – Telephone (video) (Watch it really big)

This video is cracking me up.. What more could you ask for in the new year. Big Boi, Walmart, a great video and a too sick track that you can play everyday for your mama, your sister, your cousin and her friend.

Big Boi – Shine Blockas (ft. Gucci Mane)

I grabbed this off Woooooo the other day and it totally floored me (EDIT: I had to replace the orig video with a worse quality one because the first one was taken down). I guess maybe it had been a while since I saw the Monterey Pop Festival footage, but this version of ‘Today’ is a heart-stopper. Grace Slick is so haunting and beautiful up there that I don’t even want to talk about it anymore. I ripped the audio out of the video but also included another live version that has better audio quality since it comes off their live album Someone To Love. To be honest I like the crappy raw version better.

Jefferson Airplane – Today (live at Monterey Pop)
Jefferson Airplane – Today (live)

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Bonus:
Tom Scott – Today

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)

Have you seen the new video for Matt & Kim’s song ‘Lesson Learned’? So rad..
(you can see the the post we made about their new album here)

I don’t know what took me so long, but I’ve started tracking down all my favorite music from the show Samurai Champloo that was on television a while back. Most of the stuff used on the show was written by Nujabes and Fat Jon (of Five Deez fame) who both have a very cool-out jazz influenced style of making beats. I’ve also noticed that there is a very distinctly Japanese version of hip hop that producers hailing from there see to adapt to (see DJ Honda, DJ Krush, etc..). Very clean, very subtle, but always with content. Anyways, this could have been a much more comprehensive blog since both of those guys have extensive catalogs, but I’ll let you dig that stuff out for yourself. And go watch that show if you haven’t seen it already. You girlfriend will probably hate it, but what does she know anyways (ps.. you know you’re a total geek right?)

Nujabes – Latitude Remix (ft. Five Deez)
Nujabes – The Final View
Nujabes – Kumomi
Nujabes – Feather (ft. Cise Starr & Akin)
Nujabes – Next View (ft. Uyama Hiroto)

Bonus:
Samurai Champloo Opening (video)
Samurai Champloo Closing (video)

I’m not even going to speak on this one. The video is enough.

Snoop Dogg – Sensual Seduction

Still away on the east coast and still without Photoshop or a FTP program. Sorry.. I get home next week though, and I should have a bunch of good stuff going up. For now, please enjoy these videos from the insatiable Leslie Hall preforming with her band Leslie and the Ly’s. For like, 100 more awesome videos from Leslie, just visit her site. If she and Dan Deacon ever had a baby, I would post the baby’s songs here and then probably jump off a bridge or something.