It has been a year of extravagant packages. Hell, the damn Beach Boys SMiLE box lights up, literally. It anthologizes every sound syllable of a legendary work, and thank you very much. I still think it would have been less good than Pet Sounds. And all the Pet ounds box really told me was that I could listen to every inch of tape, learn what was done, and that you'd have to be Brian Wilson to have the ideas in the first place.
(But it lights up and has an impressive book.)
You wanna know what made my knees freeze and my bladder spatter?
(Sorry, it's Little Richard's birthday.)
I'd never heard of Rev Johnny L. Jones. Philly had enough local and near-local gospel that I never had to look for much. It wasn't my primary focus, and you couldn't knock over a dead cat in a thrift store without knocking over records by the Famous Ward singers, Shirley Caesar, Clarence Fountain etc etc etc. Jones put out a few albums for the Jewel label, out of Shreveport, LA (as did Fountain and quite a few other great gospel artists). But he recorded all his church services from 1957, and Dust To Digital went through a heroic amount of music, coming across with The Hurricane That Hit Atlanta, a set that collects sermons, songs, and even commercials into a kind of document of the life of this performer and his congregation. This is true music. It was not made with any sort of eye to a marketplace. This is social music in its element. This is really the true vine.
There's no video expressly for Songs For he Jewish American Jetset: The Tikva Records Story 1950-73, which anthologizes a low budget Jewish music label who put out more really good records than you might imagine. The label had never been given the benefit of a formal discography. Nobody who made records for Tikva gave interviews to speak of. Yiddish music as a rule went into a black hole until Henry Sapoznik's pioneering scholarship in the 1970's. And even those years back, much had been lost and many of the great musicians of the boom period had passed away, most notably Naftule Brandwine and Abe Schwartz. Researching the labels themselves was no easy task, and we've been left with a whole new diaspora to where the recorded history of Jewish music is spread to the four winds. The Idelsohn Society seeks to correct this by making a life study of Jewish records, and their anthologies and reissues have been a mitzvah to anyone seeking to know more about a type of roots music the Blasters might not have covered. This and their Jewface volume are staggering.
The Tompkins Square label has gotten most of its recent accolades for putting out Frank Fairfield's records, but they've put out so much of the best underground roots music that I am immediately curious about stuff I never before considered just because they put out a two disc set of it, and there's never a bad cut. To What Strange Place : The Music of the Ottoman-American Diaspora, 1916-1929 covers a subculture that is even more in the past than Yiddish. This stuff fascinates me.
For those less internationalist, the label's two antho's of postwar indie underground gospel singles is truly staggering. Fire In My Bones and This May Be My Last Time Singing have each spent weeks at a time in my CD player. They're comprehensive but not academic, and liner notes literally open us up to a music world here in our country that most of us never bother to ask about.
Elder Roma Wilson is intense.
Soundman Shots: The Downbeat/Caribou Story was an impulse buy. I'm a sucker for that transitional time in Jamaican music. These two Jamaican labels were owned by the same guy, and he licensed rhythm'n'blues and some jazz for the downbeat label, and late mento-into-ska on Caribou, Which means that we get more mento-era Lord Tanamo than has ever been issued in one place before (which is a very good thing). Thing is, as you can hear, he had fantastic taste, so both discs ran by faster than a scared rabbit.
So I don't really have a Top Ten for the year. Big Sandy is still my favorite singer, Nick Lowe's The Old Magic and Randy Newman's Songbook Vol 2 were my two favorite albums of the year, and Allison Anders' Don't Knock The Rock rock on film series at the Silent Movie Museum was my favorite fall-back every week, and I saw more good music on film -- everything from the Seattle funk of the 70s capped by Wheedle's Groove to Elvis On Tour. Aside from LA, my home, Tucson was kind of my favorite city, not least of Al because of Al Perry, songwriter/performer/genius local treasure and musicologist whose hospitality has opened the town to me. Favorite new movies I saw was the George Harrison doc, and Errol Morris' Tabloid.
This year was more fun than last, but there's room for growth. Here's hoping...
