Brass Trax
By
Rick Sawyer
January 7th, 2009
Jazz legend Freddie Hubbard passed away at age 70. Brass Trax wanted to take a moment to remember Hubbard through the music that he made so meticulously.
Brass Trax
By
Rick Sawyer
January 4th, 2009
It was a time when hip hop samples came from your parents’ record collection. The early nineties was a golden age for beat digging. Producers and rappers in all the big cities were checking for the rare and the unusual, the doper and the dopest. No sample better typifies the period than the Skull Snaps break.
Brass Trax
By
Rick Sawyer
December 19th, 2008
Critical theory on wax? The Leeds post-punk scene turned Marxist propaganda into mutant funk.
Brass Trax
By
Rick Sawyer
December 15th, 2008
Rather than sounding the death knell of British independent music, the quick decline of punk set the stage for post-punk, one of the most feverishly creative moments in rock history. This first in a series of post-punk primers focuses on the birthplace of the genre: London.
Brass Trax
By
Rick Sawyer
December 4th, 2008
John Coltrane’s sound changed modern jazz. Not merely his compositions or his recordings or his live dates, although those did, too. But Coltrane’s sound, that almost ineffable quality of a jazz performer’s playing that cannot be copied convincingly by anybody else, altered the music and its study forever.
So runs the argument of New York Times [...]
Brass Trax
By
Rick Sawyer
November 21st, 2008
It’s hard to like the Fall, but it’s easy to love them. The first thing that you need to know about the band is that you are not going to understand half of its songs. Even when bandleader Mark E. Smith’s lyrics are crystal clear, they are riddled with in-jokes and asides, jibes at his [...]
Brass Trax
By
Rick Sawyer
November 13th, 2008
Whither the British MC? It’s the question posed by An England Story: The Culture of the MC in the UK 1984-2008, a new compilation from Soul Jazz Records that charts the lineage running from the overlooked British dancehall and hip-hop scenes of the eighties and nineties to the relatively well-known grime crews operating today.
In fact, [...]
Brass Trax
By
Rick Sawyer
November 7th, 2008
Afrobeat was born in the United States.
The word was coined by Fela Kuti to describe the formula he had devised along with his drummer Tony Allen and their band of Nigerian jazz musicians. It was a powerful fusion, taking elements of African pop music, particularly Ghanaian high life of the type made funky by E.T. [...]
Brass Trax
By
Rick Sawyer
October 30th, 2008
If there was any doubt that disco producer, cellist, record label owner, and composer Arthur Russell worked in every conceivable mode of popular music, the new release Love is Overtaking Me should put it to rest.
Brass Trax
By
Rick Sawyer
October 23rd, 2008
When the Arabian Prince cut his first record, few people east of San Bernadino had ever heard of the City of Compton and nobody had California in mind when they mentioned rap about street gangs.
To an outsider, the scene in L.A. might have looked corny. Jheri curls, drum machines and dudes dressed in purple. Rap [...]
Brass Trax
By
Rick Sawyer
October 16th, 2008
Nobody would have guessed, in the years before MTV, that the children of the United States would surrender so much of their waking life to experimental art. But, during the 1980s, that’s essentially what music videos were. And few videos were as unrelentingly experimental as those by Manchester band New Order. It didn’t hurt that [...]
Brass Trax
By
Rick Sawyer
October 9th, 2008
It helps to know a drunk if you want to understand Lee Hazlewood’s music. Hazlewood was a modern-day troubadour, painting in broad strokes the lives of drifters, losers and boozers with a wry and knowing hokeyness.
Hazlewood himself may have been one of those characters. After a life spent flitting from western town to western town, [...]
Brass Trax
By
Rick Sawyer
October 2nd, 2008
It was 1970, and jazz was poised for another stylistic revision. During the previous decade jazz had been freed from the obligation to be danceable or popular. It was music to move your sentiments, not your ass. Herbie Hancock and Donald Byrd would eventually reverse the process.
Brass Trax
By
Rick Sawyer
September 25th, 2008
Here’s the short version. Caetano Veloso (Caetano if you’re nasty) masterminded Tropicalia, the stridently popular political and cultural movement in the late 1960s. North Americans best remember Tropicalia for its sound. Caetano, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, and Os Mutantes developed an iconoclastic language for Brazilian popular music. They scandalized both the liberal musical intelligentsia and [...]
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