Friday, October 30, 2020

Cohen of Protection


One by one, the guests arrive
The guests are coming through
The open-hearted many
The broken-hearted few
And no one knows where the night is going
And no one knows why the wine is flowing
Oh love, I need you
I need you
I need you
I need you
Oh... I need you now
And those who dance, begin to dance
Those who weep begin
And "Welcome, welcome!" cries a voice,
"Let all my guests come in."
And no one knows where the night is going
And no one knows why the wine is flowing
Oh love, I need you
I need you
I need you
I need you
Oh... I need you now
And all go stumbling through that house
in lonely secrecy
Saying "Do reveal yourself."
or "Why has thou forsaken me?"
And no one knows where the night is going
And no one knows why the wine is flowing
Oh love, I need you
I need you
I need you
I need you
Oh... I need you now
All at once the torches flare
The inner door flies open
One by one they enter there
In every style of passion
And no one knows where the night is going
And no one knows why the wine is flowing
Oh love, I need you
I need you
I need you
I need you
Oh... I need you now
And here they take their sweet repast
While house and grounds dissolve
And one by one the guests are cast
Beyond the garden wall
And no one knows where the night is going
And no one knows why the wine is flowing
Oh love, I need you
I need you
I need you
I need you
Oh... I need you now
Those who dance, begin to dance
Those who weep begin
Those who earnestly are lost
Are lost and lost again
And no one knows where the night is going
And no one knows why the wine is flowing
Oh love, I need you
I need you
I need you
I need you
Oh... I need you now
One by one, the guests arrive
The guests are coming through
The broken-hearted many
The open-hearted few
And no one knows where the night is going
And no one knows why the wine is flowing
Oh love, I need you
I need you
I need you
I need you
Oh... I need you now

Leonard Cohen
Concertgebouw
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
10.30.1980

01 Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye 
02 Who By Fire 
03 The Window   
04 Passing Through
           05 The Guests           
06 There Is a War
07 Suzanne
08 The Stranger Song
09 LC speaks
10 Chelsea Hotel #2
11 The Partisan
12 The Story of Isaac
13 The Gypsy's Wife
14 poem: The Music Crept By Us/improv: Concertgebouw
15 Diamonds In the Mine
16 Famous Blue Raincoat
17 Lover, Lover, Lover
18 LC speaks
19 Memories
20 So Long, Marianne
21 applause/LC speaks
22 One of Us Cannot Be Wrong
23 Joan of Arc
24 I Tried to Leave You
25 applause/LC speaks
26 Do I Have to Dance All Night?

Total time: 2:06:00
disc break goes after Track 13

Leonard Cohen - guitar, recorder & vocals
Roscoe Beck - bass
John Bilezikjian - oud & mandolin
Bill Ginn - keyboards & accordion
Raffi Hakopian - violin
Steve Meador - drums
Paul Ostermayer - reeds & winds
Mitch Watkins - guitar
Sharon Robinson - vocals
Jennifer Warnes - vocals

declicked master cassettes of the original VPRO-FM pre-broadcast reels
794 MB FLAC/October 2020 archive link

No one alerted me this killer show was 40 today!!! Possibly the best recorded and most essential Leonard Cohen ROIO, liberated and declicked from the original Dutch Radio reels, and now here for your Halloween weekend jams! You're welcome!! Boo!!!--J.

9.21.1934 - 11.7.2016

Sunday, October 25, 2020

Convenience Story


Happy Sunday and welcome to the 7th anniversary of this page! Today we have a big birthday -- well, another big birthday besides my own! -- that we'll use to celebrate two people who have known each other since childhood and were born just a few weeks apart in the same town.

For once upon a time, 45 years ago, in a small city in Norway, two eventual classmates would come into the world.

They met, if I have the story straight, as competing projects in a grade school Science Fair.

At age 16, while still at school together, they formed their first band, which was a fairly standard electric rock outfit.

The band broke up when they graduated, but the two stuck to music as a standalone acoustic duo, naming themselves Kings Of Convenience for the easily transported, portable nature of what they were doing.

If I had to describe their music, I would say they are what Brazilian bossa deity João Gilberto might sound like, had he been born in the frozen, wintry half-light of Bergen, Norway.

One of them -- he is on the left in the picture above -- is called Eirik Glambek Bøe, and he is 45 today. The other, Erlend Øye, will be the same on November 21st.

Perhaps even stranger than Norwegians who sound like a Brazilian Simon & Garfunkel is the way I found these cats.

It all happened because my friend worked in the Metreon in San Francisco and they had some sort of Christmas party there, at the end of 2001.

There was, apparently, a little Secret Santa moment, where my friend reached into a sack full of gifts and was fortunate enough to pull out one of these guys' CDs. At the time, they only had two out, and one was of DJ remixes of their stuff.

We spent the first part of 2002 obsessed with them, and later on we even got to see them play when they came to the Bay Area.

We'll celebrate this duo with a half hour of footage from the beloved German program Rockpalast, plus a little secret Easter Egg below that after the fold, for the intrepid readers who stick with my drivel through to its merciful conclusion.


Kings of Convenience
"Rockpalast"
ZAKK
Düsseldorf, Germany
11.29.2004

01 Love Is No Big Truth
02 I Don't Know What I Can Save You From
03 Sorry Or Please
04 Stay Out of Trouble
05 Know-How
06 Misread
07 I'd Rather Dance with You

Total time: 29:11

Eirik Glambek Bøe: guitar & vocals
Erlend Øye: guitar, keyboards & vocals

PAL DVD of a digital capture of the original Festival satellite broadcast of an episode of "Rockpalast";
originally aired 11.30.2004

As a treat -- I believe in giving the best gifts to others for my birthday -- I have placed cloudward, alongside the main share, a compilation of Kings Of Convenience that I keep in my phone, which contains all or most of their best B-sides and rare tracks as well as a few of my choicest LP selections from them.

I hope you can get next to these guys -- their music is extremely special to me and is never far from my mind or my ears -- as we celebrate their Scorpio advent upon the world 45 years ago! And of course I thank everyone reading this for these seven years of Blissness, and promise to try and keep this page flowing for as long as there is unissued music to share.--J.

Saturday, October 24, 2020

Warsaw Delight II: Cherry On Top


OK, I lied. I said today's thing would be different from yesterday's. It isn't. Much.

Heck, it isn't even in a different venue. Or decade. I'm such a liar.

What can I do? The thing I planned for today is gonna take more work and will be posted in December.

Plus, this bad boy is 40 today. And I just don't post nearly enough Polish Jazz. Or videos. Or videos of Polish Jazz.

This one's a burner too.  Janusz Muniak is maniac enough, he's one of the mainstays of this music, even gone four years. But you place the Don Cherry -- who coincidentally also passed 25 years ago last week -- atop it and you get a tasty burner indeed.

The untitled pieces in this might be improvised, I'm not exactly sure. But no matter, music is music and you can Call It Anything, as Miles once said.

So let's hit it, shall we? This is perfect Saturday afternoon fare if you ask me.

Janusz Muniak Quartet + Don Cherry
23th Jazz Jamboree '80
Sala Kongresowa
Warsaw, Poland
10.24.1980

01 unidentified title
02 Body and Soul
03 Malinye
04 unidentified title
05 Full Moon
06 Guinea/Mopti
07 Race Face
08 unidentified title
09 Malinye (reprise)

Total time = 1:03:58

Janusz Muniak - tenor & soprano saxophones
Pierre Pausgen - piano
Andrzej Cudzich - bass
Jerzy Bezucha - drums
Don Cherry - pocket trumpet, melodica, percussion & vocals

mpg file made from a PAL DVD of a digital capture of a 2009 TV Kultura satellite rebroadcast

I'll be right back tomorrow with the finale of this fearsome foursome, conveniently of course. But don't hesitate to clock this 64 minutes of unclassifiable fun, coming to you courtesy of two absolute pillar performers and their cohorts.--J.

                                                                 11.18.1936 - 10.19.1995        6.3.1941 - 1.31.2016

Friday, October 23, 2020

Groovin' Is ECM: Warsaw Delight


Damn, is he fine or what? Jan Garbarek is making the blood shift in my body when I'm supposed to be innocently blogging one of his very most incredible live performances.

Our latest episode of Music That Time Forgot involves this Norwegian saxophonist -- OK, he's technically Polish but his family fled the occupation during WWII when he was really small -- hypnotizing yet another audience about 37 or so years ago in Warsaw.

This bad boy -- worked over by the experts to make it sonically almost indistinguishable from a standard, immaculately-recorded Manfred Eicher ECM platter -- features one of our hero's greatest bands on an 80-minute voyage to stormy serenity.

I dunno if this band was ever recorded in the studio -- the Wayfarer record this tour is meant to support has Bill Frisell on it instead of David Torn -- but we thank the ROIO gods that someone (the soundman at the desk?) captured it in this sort of quality.

Speaking of David Torn, he tears this show up like a bundle of confetti at a ticker tape parade and cascades it -- in the form of highly processed notes on the guitar -- over the audience until they are marching down the Fifth Avenue of their minds in perfect step.

That said, it's time to cut the chatter and, once again, spin the platter.

Jan Garbarek Quartet
Jazz Jamboree
Sala Kongresova 
Warsaw, Poland
10.23.1983

01 Skygger
02 Kite Dance
03 The Last Stage of a Long Journey
04 Footprints
05 Red Roof
06 Witchi-Tai-To 
07 Entering

Total time: 1:18:41

Jan Garbarek - tenor & soprano saxophones, flute
Eberhard Weber - bass
David Torn - guitar & electronics
Michael Di Pasqua - drums 

Valleybird/Tom Phillips remaster of a soundboard capture of indeterminate origin

I'll be back tomorrow and Sunday with stuff that couldn't be more different than this one if it had been imported from another galaxy.

Do thrill, through, to this 78 minutes of utter mayhem, delivered by musicians as skilled and sensitive as any who were alive at the time of its making.--J.