And the winner is...

Okay, so it’s the end of another year and that means the lists roll out. Who am I to break with tradition? There’s been a plethora of music tumbling through the doors of the funhouse – some old, some new, some just plain bad nostalgic wanderings… but these are the 2005 releases that caught my ear the most.

By far the best release for 2005 was (drum roll) The Yearlings – Wind Already Blown. (Check the review for the full details but I love these two – music for the soul)
Honorable mentions - in no particular order other than whatever CD is on top of the pile.

Stuart Busby – Drift only recently came to me otherwise it would have been a strong contender for the top title but hell you need to own it anyway!
Billy Eckstine – Jukebox hits 1943-1953. This series purports to give you the best of the R&B/race charts from the 40s and 50s. With some classic Billy this 21 track comp is a good place to start.
Jon Dale – Son D’Or. Charlemagne meets Frehley? Lush drone’n’wash from a much under appreciated local muso/man about town. (Heck, jon himself doesn’t realise how good he is)
Richard Hell – Spurts. OK, best of’s shouldn’t count I know but shit, Hell still whips all the young punkers asses and this does have a couple of bonus tracks so there!
Laughing Clowns – Cruel But Fair. 3CD set of the complete Laughing Clowns recordings. Despite their insistence that they weren’t a jazz band I beg to differ. Awesome.
GG Alan Bindig – Pirate Lullabies. Acoustic travails of pirates young and old and some interesting choices for covers make this the sleeper of the year. Let it creep up on you.
Fast’n’Bulbous – Pork Chop Blue Around The Rind. Captain Beefheart tribute, all instrumental. Who knew the Captain could swing so hard?
Sir Richard Bishop – Improvika. Sole Sun City Girl shows just what he can do with one string on a wooden guitar. Sublime. (and I’m still kicking myself for not going to Melbourne last year to see him play.)

So there you have it. Too many compilations for my liking but that's what i was buying/finding. There were some other great finds - Irr. Apt. Ext. Caroliner Sun City Girls etc but they weren't technically new releases just found in 2005. If you're really concerned bland out with the wire - i'm sure they'll have it all covered.

Buy buy buy

As I sit here planning (at least in my head) to do a best of 2005 listing I thought I’d first wet everyone’s appetite with a little look at my last half a dozen musical purchases. If nothing else it will let people know where my head is right now (other than up my arse).
KC & The Sunshine Band – Best Of. I was going through my old 45s – dusting them off and playing them and then my nine year old daughter and I started dancing around the shed to KC and Joe Tex and I realised all I had of KC was one single. In the late 70’s before disco became so popular it threatened to kill off live music, KC & The Sunshine Band were the kings. Motherfunking grooves that hooked you and had you swaying your honky white arse while hummin’ "…I’m your Boogie man, I’m your Boogie Man… turn me on…" He wasn’t disco per se he was dance. He still is. (and yes, my daughter dances better than I do – hell, everybody dances better than I do.)
Exodus – Fabulous Disaster. My fave late eighties thrash metal band. I’ve worn the tape out a couple of times, the records scratched to shit – now I got it on cd and it still brutalises. Fast enough to thrash to but still rock enough to bang yer head to and you can even understand the odd word! Plus a kick arse version of AC/DC’s Overdose and a very twisted Low Rider. This is my kind of metal.
Stuart Busby – Drift. Actually Jon Dale gave me this. Stuart’s last disc "Breathe" was top of my list for 2004 and had I received this a little earlier it would probably top 2005. More ghost world taps from the only trumpeter worth a pinch. Mournful, low and eerie, Stuart creates his own haunted palace of broken dreams.
Various Artists – Motown Classics Gold. The Gold series is a best of series of everyone from Rod Stewart to Kiss to Hank Williams. Some of it’s good, some of it just treads water in a brackish cesspool of regurgitated turds. The Motown classics collection though kicks arse! 40 tracks from the best of Motown, sure there aren’t any rarities or alternate takes (get the box set arsehole) but this has damn near everything you could want to get the party started. I’ve been playing this so much the last three weeks that my daughter already hates it! (Revenge is mine!)
Hellacopters – Payin’ The Dues. I’ve had a dubbed cassette copy of this for years but I never quite got around to buying it. It was my last purchase at Big Star and I’m damn glad I pulled my finger out. The ‘Copters have never bettered this slab o’ garage/blues/drawl. This is what Guns’n’Roses were supposed to be but never had the balls to be. Owing as much to the ‘Stones as to the New York Dolls, the boys never sounded better and probably never will.
Various Artists – American Primitive Vol II. We’ve been waiting since 1997 for the second volume and boy was it worth it. A double disc of obscure and dark poor boy blues, faith healings and prayers to unseeing gods, this has the power to make you doubt everything else you’ve ever heard. There’s the blues and then there’s this. Next time some dumb-arse parasite tries to tell you that bb king or albert collins or (god help us) jeff healey is a blues man, play them this, then when they finish weeping, tell them to get the fuck out of your house!

take this job and shove it

Yeah it has been awhile ‘tween postings but I haven’t been sitting on my butt… well, okay maybe I have but… I’ve also been… um… working, reading, drinking, quitting… Yep, it’s been a little golden period of discovery the last few months. First, no more radio (well not for awhile)… I’d lost the drive to really get to the station every fortnight, program a show, face the drunks left over from the previous shift (urban cowboys – is there anything dumber? Oh yeah, aussie homeboys who think they live in the Bronx!) Anyway, the show was suffering from my lack of enthusiasm but then GM Holden solved my problem – my car broke down and it just wasn’t worth fixing. Now, this may not seem an obvious out to you but believe me it was enough for me to jump ship. The radio station was too far away and the shift too late at night to rely on Adelaide’s "splendid" public transport system so Matt Krieg is currently handling all duties on the fine ship "Esoteric Circle". Anyone want to give him a hand? I’m sure he’d appreciate it. This doesn’t mean the CDs I get sent don’t get played though – I still pass them on to Matt for airplay and review so keep the good shit coming. The other big news – I quit my job! Yes, that’s right – as of 23rd December 2005 I am now a house husband/professional lounger/ freelance writer. After four/five years at Big Star (not actually sure how long I was there – how sad is that?) I’d just had enough. I like the folk I was working with but the music was no longer fun it was now just a product. Or as Raven at Confederate Mack Zine put it… "commodity masquerading as art/ a substance lacking heart…"
And that was another turning point – a few months back Dann Lennard from BP (bettypaginated.blogspot.com) sent me a couple of copies of Confederate Mack and I immediately identified with this crazed, dreadlocked, 30 something southern white boy/lounger called Raven who sat at an old word processor and let his thoughts on everything from politics to beer to wrasslin’ to philosophy to music to life filter through his beer addled mind and paint stained fingers onto paper and ultimately to me. He struck a chord. I don’t agree with everything he says or likes but damn he’s on the money a lot more than not. He got me thinking - what am I chasing? Skirt, money, power, recognition? I really don’t know but I know what I don’t want (to overuse a very old cliché) and I didn’t want to keep working to make some record company fucker rich who doesn’t even appreciate music, who just sees it all as product, as chart success and another prefab band to milk the kids with. Fuck that. And how’s that for contradiction anyway, since I write for ACP, run by the Packer family – talk about rich fuckers who see everything as a product. Still, it’s one step at a time. If I can drop out even just for a little while I might just get that novel written (or re-written), I might just get time to listen properly to all the good music I have managed to pick up over the last year or so, I might just start to enjoy life. Already after only a week I can feel that something has changed, at least at home. I’m enjoying my daughter’s company, my wife’s company a lot more. I’m cutting down on the drinking (not a bad thing trust me) I’m staying home, I can feel the batteries recharging, the words forming in my head (just need some judicious editing), just little things, but I have the feeling I've made the right choice. As for Raven, well apparently no-one has heard from him for awhile. I know his website is down but who knows, maybe he’s recharging too. 2006 could be a good year or I could go stir crazy, time will tell. One thing I know, I won’t be going nuts worrying about getting shitty product on the shelf and out to the other stores. Fuck Wolfmother, fuck Bernard Fanning, fuck the big day out, fuck the stooges (both on and off the stage)
I quit!! And damn did it feel good (:
kami

The New Cool

John Stevens Quartet: ‘New Cool’ Emanem 4117
Byron Wallen: trumpet & flugelhorn; Ed Jones: soprano & tenor saxophones; Gary Crosby: double bass; John Stevens drum set rec. August 5th 1992
Here’s a very welcome reissue of a magnificent outdoors concert held at the 1992 Outside In Festival in Crawley, south of London. Jazz / Free Improv drumming godhead John Stevens was in his pomp at this gig, proudly sitting at the back of the tent but very much ‘out front’, driving his talented young lions to great heights of impassioned and intelligent playing, introducing his new group and the glorious ‘freebop rhythmelodics’ that was their stock-in-trade, to the true believers.
I’ll admit, in a moment of pure self-indulgence, that I was there, a gob-smacked twenty-something standing in awe of the great drummer, opening my young ears to the wonderful world of British improvised music and its’ cast of colourful characters and mavericks. John Stevens was a one-off, uncompromising in his music-making ideals, a sometimes difficult individual by several accounts, but ultimately a musician whose buoyant and irrepressible desire to enter the music and its making, yielded many varied and rich musical expressions. Strange to look back and realize that my first and only witnessing of Stevens’ Freebop quintet was, for him, a gig towards the end of a sadly foreshortened career. Stevens died suddenly in 1994, leaving a legacy of intensive experiment, education and inspiration behind.
The John Stevens Quartet marked a departure of sorts for the drummer, with a move back to the music that was knocking him out in the late fifties and early sixties from a number of pivotal and undeniable sources: Ornette Coleman’s early quartet albums, the mid-sixties modal melancholy of John Coltrane ( in this particular case, Lonnie’s Lament provides the inspiration) and the direct contact with the expatriate South African Blue Notes, of whom the late saxophonist Dudu Pukwana was a dominant and much-loved influence.
‘Do Be Up’ is a track that pretty much sums up the musical mindset of Stevens’ band. I mean, why would you bother doing it if your life didn’t depend on it? If you didn’t love peeling back the moment and squeezing out the very marrow of existence? This music is clearly made with joy, and that’s what it clearly expresses, too. Check the sleeve photo of Stevens’ gleeful grin (or is it a jazzman’s so-sweet-it-hurts grimace?) as he eggs the lads on. The Freebop that they play looks simultaneously backwards and forwards, so there’s something here for jazz aficionados who sit on either side of the modernist fence. Byron Wallen and Ed Jones dive in head first with energetic gusto and positively blaze with great warmth and joy throughout the eighty minute set. Gary Crosby’s bass lines trawl the halls of the old masters and remind you that jazz used to be music you could dance to. Stevens seems to lap it all up and spit it back out at us eager listeners, with a diamond geezer’s rough’n’ready sparring that starts with a shove and ends with a lung-busting bear hug. ‘The New Cool’ is great music made by a great band for us to enjoy over and over again.
We can acknowledge, with some gratitude, the dedicated sequence of Stevens reissues (mainly in the form of his evolving collective The Spontaneous Music Ensemble) that Emanem label head Martin Davidson has steadily put back into circulation over the past decade. The New Cool adds one of the last chapters to this vital musician’s tale. Go ahead John Stevens.

Matt Krieg