Library of Vinyl Experience

Insane news of Guru’s coma today threw me for a loop. I thought there would be a lot of people out there in shock and figured it might help to hear some of the old tapes from before things got complicated. For those needing an update, the whole history has been recounted today by Dart Adams.

Here again (but this time set to video Ken Burns style) are the tapes Keith sent to Magnus at the Lecco’s Lemma show on WMBR in Cambridge in 1986. Among all the tapes in the boxes, he had the most by far (maybe next to DJ Prime – a strange coincidence actually). Its a sad day in Boston hip-hop whenever one of our own gets felled for any reason. Hopin’ for good outcomes and listening to these tapes is helping. Hope it helps you too. We know Guru always had Boston in his heart and recent years proved it. Peace.

Here are two of the tracks

Epitome Spree

Take a lesson

P.S.
SUCH great news that he pulled out OK. Man, I was praying hard in my way over here and I know a lot of others were too. Hopes for a fast and full recovery and many more years of dopeness!

This weekend, my pal Rob reminded me of the incredible book, Modern Dancing. The first time he showed it to me, I got obsessed and did some lame animated gifs from a photo I took. Since then I married a modern dancer and got a scanner. The combination was irresistible so I spent my weekend immersed again in this incredible tome. Here’s what I uncovered rediscovered.

Back in the teens, a high-society dancing couple named Vernon and Irene Castle made a name for themselves in Europe performing and teaching African American derived dances like the Turkey Trot and the Grizzly Bear. Returning to America in 1913, they found that social dancing and ragtime music were the rage in New York and quickly assembled a show to capitalize on the craze. As the story goes, because their dances “required syncopated music of a type that few New York bands were playing at the time” they needed a band that could cut the mustard. They found one in Europe’s Society Orchestra, an African American band playing a syncopated kind of driving ragtime that was circulating just prior to the first Jazz recordings.

James Reese Europe was already a successful African American band leader in New York when the Castles saw him performing with his band at a private party. The pairing of the au courant dancing of the Castles with the syncopated ragtime of Europe’s Society Orchestra created an extremely popular show which went on to break some important color barriers in American pop culture. In 1914, when the Castles were asked to perform at the top New York venues, white musicians objected to having black performers share the orchestra pit. The Castles refused to compromise and solved the problem by having the band join them on stage. Apparently, this was the first known appearance by an African American band in a major vaudeville theater. Their 1913 Victor recording was also the first by an African American band on a major label. More on that in a minute.

As part of all this excitement, in 1914 the Castles published a book called Modern Dancing, which was an instructional manual complete with plates from a film (perhaps the newsreel Social and Theatrical Dancing 1909-1936). The book is available from a few locations including Archive.org and Google.

Unfortunately, none of these sites provide a re-animation of the plates themselves. I could not resist. Here are some simple re-animations of the classic Castle plates showing Europe’s Society Orchestra playing along. While I have not been able to sync them up to music yet, the following MP3 of Castle House Rag and Castle Walk will give you a good sense of the vibe.

A note on my methods may be of interest here. Because these plates are probably excerpts from longer segments, the frames are not always continuous. Nevertheless, I decided it was worth having all the plates for a given dance together even if it adds some choppiness. I also used really low tech approaches (e.g., an orange highlighter and time) and certainly don’t claim any film restoration expertise. If it looks amateurish, that’s because it is. Here’s what I did.

First, I cracked a bottle of wine and put on some appropriate music (the awesome Victrola Favorites worked perfectly). After scanning the plates, I adjusted them to get each one as vertical as possible. Then I used Photoshop to chop out each frame, trying to get them all the same size. I created a folder for each dance and saved all the jpgs for that dance in order in the folder. Then I used Adobe Image Ready to “import a folder as layers”.

This got them into Image Ready as a set of frames, but I still needed to line them up (register them). This proved a little harder than expected. Not only are the images different sizes, but they are not all continuous frames. Therefore, the image jumps around a lot. Since I was most interested in the music, I decided to stabilize them around the band and let the Castles dance where they would. I found a few spots that seemed to work as registration points (highlights on chairs, corners of tablecloths and the nicely positioned circle on the bucket in front of a table). Using a highlighter pen, I marked these. Then I stepped through each frame (and often back and forth) moving things around until the highlights were all lined up.

Voila. Very analog in a way, but pretty effective.

There are two things that are especially fascinating to me about the Castle/Europe story. The first is the apparently close synergy between the dances selected by the Castles and the songs recorded by Europe’s Society Orchestra (Castle Walk, Maxixe, etc.). It serves as a powerful reminder that the cultural artifacts we study as “firsts” are themselves the result of complex processes of gatekeeping, meaning-making, status and so forth. The second is the obviously international flavor of these plates.

From the Cortez, to the beautiful Tango to the Brazilian Maxixe, the Castles certainly seemed hip to the latest global dance trends. They even provide some historical guideposts. “The Tango is not, as commonly believed, of South American origin. It is an old gipsy dance which came to Argentina by way of Spain, where in all probability it became invested with certain features of the old Moorish dances”. What’s more, the first recording made by Europe’s Society Orchestra was the tune Maxixe (though it’s rarely never included on Europe comps). I don’t know the story behind the selection of this Brazilian themed tune for the first song recorded by an African American band on a major label, but I’d love to hear it. In any event, with my pals tracking more recent/rapid diffusions of global dance/music trends, I love finding antique examples that seem so similar (if kind of slow mo) in their features.

So there you have it folks. The first real reanimation of these important documents of American pop culture history. I am on a quest now to find the original newsreel and have a good angle on its whereabouts. But if you know of a copy available somewhere, please let me know.

Meanwhile, here are some additional links and background info I used for this post.

James Reese Europe
@redhotjazz
@jass

Modern Dancing
@ Archive.org
@ Google books

A tasty mix of rastahouse, dubby breaks and screwed ragga tracks with a sugary pop coating. Live from decks to tape through my kaoss pad ca. 2006. Deal with it.

Electro_Ragga_Defcon Mix

I almost entitled this post “I discovered the first rap song” as a bombastic attempt to get some new readers over here while poking some regulars in the eye. Cooler heads prevailed, but it still seems a benign bit of bluster compared to say, James Chance/White’s claim to have “invented rap” (which was obviously an insane claim for a white punk/no-waver in New York to make in the 1980s). Certainly, titling a blog post something like, “I discovered the first rap song” pales in comparison – even if its just as big a fib. But its just too misleading for too many reasons. The truth is that I just want to share a song that a friend shared with me that he described (with a wink) as “the first rap song”. I think what he meant was, “here’s a tune in which someone rhymes over an open breakbeat that most people don’t know about.” Needless to say, he got my attention.

Just to be clear, I don’t actually believe there was a “first” rap song. The first one that most people heard was certainly Sugarhill’s Rapper’s Delight in 1979. It was definitely the first one I heard. But others in the know were obviously aware of Fatback’s King Tim III which barely beat Sugarhill to the presses (but was far less well known in the end). But of course, these were just the first “recorded” rap songs. There were obviously countless earlier versions being performed at parties and less formal settings way back into the 1970s. Still think there was a first rap song?

At this point, academic approaches start to trace sources of the practices and things get dicey. Of course, there seem to be similarities among things like Jamaican toasting, the blues tradition of the dozens, the rhythmic vocal talkovers of R&B radio jocks, the slick street talk of pimps, jazz scat singing and even the musical storytelling of West African griots. But we need to be careful about holding these too closely. In particular, that last turn toward the motherland is particularly tricky as it gets you pretty close to reaffirming some ugly old stereotypes about racial origins of “the funk”. So looking for the first rap song is at best quixotic quest and at worst an affirmation of old racialist stereotypes. In fact, all of these practices probably played some role in creating the cultural foundations for the song form that would eventually come to be called (and more importantly marketed as) rap.

All I am really doing here is tracing the history of a song that is less often mentioned as one of these many potential sources. Specifically, the tune/routine “Here Comes the Judge”.

Pigmeat Markham – Here Comes the Judge

While it was “discovered” by the mass market when it appeared in the late 1960s as a skit on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In in the 1960s, this routine had already been circulating around for some time in the “chitlin circuit”. Specifically, it was a signature routine for Pigmeat Markham, an African American comedian and performer who had been active since the 1930s and eventually became one of the most regular performers at the famed Apollo Theater. While Pigmeat was apparently annoyed that his routine had been appropriated by Sammy Davis Jr. for use on Laugh In, this exposure led to increased national recognition for Markham. In a strange twist, a novelty version of the song was recorded by Shorty Long and reached number-four on the R&B charts and number-eight on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1968. Later that same year, Pigmeat himself hit the Billboard charts with a “cover” of the Shorty Long version of his stage routine (which had itself become popular through being “stolen” by Sammy Davis Jr. on Laugh In). If these layers of appropriation and commercialization are not complicated enough, it gets a good bit deeper friends.

While Pigmeat seems to have claimed the routine as his own, research suggests that he may have borrowed it himself. I think most will agree that its hard not to hear strains of old minstrel tropes in the Pigmeat version of the song (and certainly in the Laugh In routine). Knowing that this tradition included some fairly standard routines that were widely versioned (for example, Louis Armostrong’s versioning of the Bert Williams’ Elder Eatmore routine). It got me wondering if there was an even earlier version of this routine lurking in the history of minstrelsy.

Sure enough. A little digging uncovered an old routine by Bert Williams called “Twenty Years” in which he plays cruel judge Grimes who doles out unreasonable punishments for non-crimes like “slipping on a banana peel”. Not only are there similarities in the content of these routines, they are both done in rhyme. While the 1917 Bert Williams routine does not use a funky breakbeat as an intro, it does feature a similar rhyming pattern. Pretty cool. Not only that, apparently Bert Williams was an early mentor to Pigmeat Marhkham. It seems likely that he would have known this routine.

Bert Williams – Twenty Years

Apparently, the courtroom skit was one of the scenes used in minstrel shows as early as the middle 1800s as part of a larger set of parodies of professional occupations. Willaim Mahar’s Behind the Cork Mask (p. 75) suggests that the Christy Minstrels had a judge routine for example. Given the extent of standardization in minstrel routines, it seems likely that the judge skit has a long history indeed.

OK. To recap. Here is a song that was described to me as “the first rap song” that starts with a funky breakbeat and a rhythmic rhyming vocal that likely traces its origins directly to a routine done by one of the most famous early African American performers, Bert Williams. Phew. But imagine this, it gets deeper still.

Some googling and crowd sourcing found examples of the “here comes the judge meme” in reggae as well. Specifically, in 1967, the year before the Shorty Long and Pigmeat versions, Prince Buster did a tune with a very similar theme called Judge Dread. However, in this version, the judge is now a righteous force judging real world rude boys for crimes like killing other black people. Finally, there is the Wailers version which continues to transform the message to one of righteous judgment of all oppressors. This version flips the silly and cruel judge of minstelsy into a divine and righteous judge sentencing a long list of oppressors including Francis Drake, Alexander the “so called” Great and in an interesting similarity with the minstrel tradition of ironic lyrical inversions, Christopher Crumbulous.

And around it goes.

Folks, what can I say. I had so much fun at the All American City Beard and Moustache Contest this weekend that I had to share some YouTube links pics and stories! Not only was it packed with supportive onlookers and fans, the facial creativity was in full effect (as the videos will attest). Two particularly awesome moments included the 12 year old kid with the barely started fuzzstache who won second place in the mustache contest and the elderly Sikh gentleman who won in the natural beard category with his wonderful whispy white beard. So great! Somerville was certainly showin’ the love this Sat.

Along with all the nice community feeling, it also gave me an excuse to play some classic rock tunes and drink free Naragansett tall boys in the afternoon. What could be better? Well, how about an impromptu DJ lesson for the kids to wrap it all up?

I have often noticed this when I play family style events. The kids always seem fascinated with the DJ rig and often come up wanting lessons. At one wedding, I was literally swarmed with a ring of Lilliputian onlookers all decked out in their finest. Of course, being a teacher at heart, I am always glad to mess up the mix to explain the technique to inquiring little minds.

All in all, a pretty sweet weekend. Hope to see you all next year.

I’ll be spinning a rare afternoon set at Precinct in Union Sq. Somerville tomorrow, Feb 13 from 3-6. Its a facial hair party/competition, so expect plenty of classic beard rock (ZZ top, Allman’s, Steppenwolf, etc) sprinkled into my regular sonic salad. I’ll be getting itchy and scratchy all afternoon.

I know some of my local people just culled, but come represent even if you are bald faced by choice or necessity. Whatever your follicular situation, come give the hirsute among you some love! In this age of increasingly plastic people, you know we need it.
–
Get Your Beard On Saturday
Saturday, Feb. 13, 3-6pm
Precinct, 70 Union Sq.

Sponsored by the Somerville Arts Council

A contest & party sure to tickle your chin. Previous contests have been held in other parts of the world but nothing like this has happened in your own backyard. Jimmy DelPonte will emcee; a panel of bearded judges will issue the verdict; and DJ Pace will create the scratchy sonic backdrop. We will nibble, drink and hob-nob within a roomful of artistic facial hair. What better way to spend a winter afternoon? Contestantswill vie for prizes in 5 categories: natural full beard, free-style full beard, free-style moustache, free-style partial beard, (which includes goatees, sideburns and any other creative combination of the above), and for follicle challenged, best fake beard. To register/questions: GetYourBeardOn@gmail.com Co-produced with Todd Easton.
—
Here’s a little youube to get you in the mood. Reminds me I might want to bring some classic Greek Orthodox tunes too.

Short notice but I wanted to shout about a benefit tonight for DJs for Peace (a new initiative being brought to you by local peace/hip-hop activist Cindy Diggs). As a local DJ/Peace and Global studies graduate and Cindy fan I am definitely there. Not only that but the lineup looks amazing.

Here are the deets. But even if you can’t go, send some love Cindy’s way. She is doing amazing work as always.
______
Every year since 2006, Peace Boston has premiered their promotion for the year in celebration of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday dubbed by Peace Boston as The Ultimate Peace Weekend. This year is no exception.

On Thursday, January 21, 2010, The DJs for Peace – seventeen of New England’s best – will light up the wheels of steel, demonstrating the art of DJ battle and old school tribute as a benefit for youth fundraiser and danceoff The Beantown Bounce IV!

This year’s spin-a-thon will take place at Club Choices, 379 Somerville Ave, Somerville MA and is 21+

The event will feature special guest performances by DJ Act One’s breakdance crew The Krazy 88’s; Boston Music Award winner Lisa Bello; and a Run-DMC Tribute with DJ Cruz featuring Big Scythe and Visionary Da 3rd. Other DJs on deck for this occasion: DJ Black, DJ Daz-One, DJ Def Stef, DJ Dex, DJ Dru Nyce, EJ Spin, DJ Greg G, DJ Inkognito, DJ Jon Jack, Killer DJ, DJ Knucks, DJ Lil Nes, DJ Nestle Quick, DJ Val Beatz, and DJ Vixxx. Chip Greenidge will host.

The first forty-five patrons will receive a free gift from Peace Boston.

The Day of the DJ Meet & Greet at 7PM (for DJs only)

Guests are encouraged to dress for the occasion to win the Best of the 80’s Dress Contest and to participate in the 80’s dance competition.

Doors open for the public at 7:45. Show starts at 8:01 PM.

Admission is just $10. Guests may also purchase a copy of Peace Boston’s youth and anti-violence programming benefit CD PEACE IN THE STREETS for an additional $10.

Presented by The Knights of the Turntables and Peace Boston

For more information contact:
peaceboston@gmail.com

Rob Chalfen came by recently to listen through some more of the Lexington 78 haul. Along with the Brian Rust book, he brought some recently discovered pictures of his original Wax Vallhala – Cuz Faulkner’s Books Bibles and Records on Columbus Ave in Boston, MA. (Close inspection of the picture of the facade makes me think it was 979 Columbus).

As any reader of this blog knows, Rob is both a good friend and a walking encyclopedia of early music of the African diaspora. By the age of 12 he had absorbed his family’s pretty extensive 78 collection and was taking trips from the family home in Newton down to the South End to dig for old jazz and blues records in the prodigious piles at Cuz Faulkner’s.

I was particularly struck by the confluence of pictures and dates here. All these shots are from a trip Rob made in March, 1965 with his dad (who brought the family camera). He was 12 1/2 and already knew more about early jazz than most of us will absorb in a lifetime. Rob pointed out the MLK calendar above the desk and noted that it was jut one month before he was to arrive in Boston to lead a march of 50,000 on Boston Common.

Sitting here this MLK day 2010, with with images of Hati and Cuz Faulkner’s crossing paths on the internet, it feels like the world is simultaneously imploding on itself and launching new technoutopic wonders distractions by the moment. I stare into these old photos longing for a simpler place and time. Of course, that moment was no less horror filled (Kennedy was killed in ‘63 and the cascades of calamities in ‘68 were a mere three years hence). But somehow, the notion of a white pre-teen record geek from Newton taking the trolley down to sift through Cuz Faulkner’s 78s in search of the origins of jazz provides some strange solace. I guess it just makes me long for a dusty room full of records, the optimism of youth and the sense that the future was yet to be written. For whatever reason, sitting here at the end of history, this little window into a not so distant past feels comforting. Like its not so far away after all.

Anyway, I have been so fascinated with these shots and struck by the timing that I e-mailed Chalfen asking for more detail. Who told you about this place? How did you wind up with a Nat Hentoff curated record collection as a 12 year old? What do you remember about Cuz Faulkner and his place. Here’s his reply.

[Snip]

Lessee…. I think Henry Schwartz, the great Boston Expressionist painter & pal of my dad’s hepped me to it. He was a classical 78 collector & prob discovered it trawling around for Columbia Vivatonals…My dad dropped me off / picked me up on the occasion when he took these shots, but often I would just schlepp in there from Newton Corner on the trolley, hauling my portable phonograph…The owner had a helper who lived nearby on an upper floor, who’s name I think was Milton or Mr Milton, a thin, hangdog older black man – i would yell up at his window & I even tossed gravel up to his window to wake him up, no doorbell…after a spell he would slowly make his way down & open the place up for me…I could easily spend 5 hours in there without any consciousness of time whatever…Next door was a black barbershop – I wandered in there once on a break from my record trance, looking for small talk, and all conversation ground to a halt upon the the intrusion of the white boy. I only met Cuz on a few occasions…I recall him in a 3 piece suit, cigar, of somewhat florid speech, a neighborhood pontificator; or that could just be an artifact of my reconstruction. He always had a few friends hanging out in the front of the shop, shooting the shit; what they made of me I can’t imagine. On the date shown in the photos he regaled my father about how unusual I was, most kids today have no appreciation etc etc, while I clutched the bag of that day’s gleanings, one of my best hauls ever. When I got it home I found I had taken the wrong bag, or it had been switched on me, I never found out which. I got a bunch of Nat King Cole records of no interest to me whatever. Calls back to the place discovered nothing, or so they said. Evidently it had been sold to someone else. I was devastated. I can still remember some of the records I lost. Curiously, Nat King Cole died almost immediately therafter.

My mom was a typical hit parade/big band swing fan bobbysoxer of the late ’30s…she got the discarded records from the jukebox at her dad’s resort in Gloucester when the were changed over by the distributor, at least once a summer, mostly white big band stuff, Goodman, Miller, Dorsey. (Though I think her copy of “South” by Benny Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra (1928) came from it too). Her girlfriend dated Nat Hentoff when they lived in Dorchester, c ‘39/’40, while he was at Boston Latin, see Hentoff’s excellent “Boston Boy – a memoir”, Knopf 1986. Hentoff was already doing radio in Boston at WMEX and wrote jazz reviews while at Northeastern. He was the jazz guru of their set, leading forays to the Savoy Ballroom and other live jazz venues, making sure they were steered away from Commercial Crap and towards the Real Thing. He would lead expeditions to Boston Music Company, Kreys and other downtown record outlets and recommend what was hep amongst the new releases, mostly the 4-record sets then being reissued of classic ’20s jazz for fans of ‘real’ (small combo) jazz, jazz record collectors and other unfortunates: King Oliver, Armstrong Hot 5, Bessie Smith, Frank Teschemacher, Ellington’s Cotton Club band, no Bix for some reason. Sets of early New Orleans Revival stuff like Bunk Johnson. Also misc stuff like pre-war Chicago blues (Big Maceo, Art Hodes), and then-current 52nd St small combo jazz (Cozy Cole, Jerry Jerome & his Cats & Jammers, Chu Berry/Roy Eldridge, Big Joe Turner, Basie, Ellington, Billie Holliday, Eddie Condon, Teddy Wilson, Art Tatum, Muggsy Spanier, Boogie Woogie (Albert Ammons, Pete Johnson, Meade Lux Lewis), Capitol’s 1943 New American Jazz set, Coleman Hawkins. This constituted the bulk of her collection, prob @ 200 records, which I discovered in waves at various points growing up. So to a great extent my formative musical consciousness was curated by Nat Hentoff. Plus my dad’s classical piano playing & records. Plus the jukebox.

My folks would stack them up on the changer when I was bored on rainy days, age about 4, and I would watch them spin with hypnotic fascination. ( I could go on in this mode but that’s prob another essay, this is only part of the tale of my wax obsessions)

[Snip]

Peace on this MLK day 2010 and thanks to all the people trying to bridge the false divisions among us. Keep the dream alive.

pace

I took a week or so off since the Beantown Beats and Rhymes fest, but here are the links for the last day finally.

Part A 3-4pm
Part B 4-5pm

Its all up at WZBC for a bit longer, but grab it while you can. Thanks to Chris Faraone for comin’ by on the third day and bringing some of the latest local heat and classics from the last decade. I gotta confess, I spent much more time digging into the early years and left a lot of the more recent stuff to future efforts.

I also have to thank Brick Casey again for coming down on the second day. As we were getting packed up I was snapping shots of the tectonic layers of local music history captured on the densely stickered, tagged and postered walls of WZBC. Among the Bentmen stickers and band posters from the 90s, there was the original Street Poets poster tacked up on a wood paneled wall next to an old milk crate. Apparently, Casey has been subliminally promoting down at ‘ZBC since the mid 1990s. Who knew? And who put that poster up?

Thanks again to Scott for having us down and to Brian for manning the decks!

Peace to the Bean in 2010.

pace

Thanks to Brick Casey (aka Polecat) who braved the snow storm yesterday to come down to WZBC and talk to us about the 1990’s scene in the Bean. Casey came up in the 4 Corners neighborhood of Dorchester and released a couple of early 1990’s underground gems under the name Polecat. Out Ta Flip is one of my personal faves. The Ruffa Mix features the gravelly Buju-style vocals of Dorchester’s own Ruffa and hints at the deep roots of the ragamuffin hip-hop sound in the Bean. More on that today as we round out the last of the 1990s and head into the Oughts and beyond. Happy 2010.

Here’s the audio from yesterday (Part A Part B).

P.S. Although it wasn’t snowing in the studio, I was sure dressed for it. Maybe I need to get a new hat too.