Autorickshaw, Gotan Project, Dave Brubeck, and Baroque Recorder: Playlist for The Open Window for October 26, 2009

The Open Window airs Mondays at 6:30 am and Thursdays at 10 am at www.cjly.net (Kootenay Cooperative Radio)

Listen to a podcast of this show here

Autorickshaw: Ragam and Saraswati from Four Higher (Tala-Wallah)

Vocalist Suba Sankaran leads this Toronto group that plays a mix of Indian classical, jazz, and funk. Always a big fan of Indian music and its cross-over with Western music, I find the funky electric bass lines really interesting here, and I like Suba Sankaran's vocals. In December Autorickshaw will perform a concert in Toronto to mark the 25th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, the worst industrial disaster in history. The concert is a benefit for the Sambhavna Clinic which treats the thousands of people still affected.

Gotan Project: Gotan Project Meets Chet Baker from Inspiracion-Espiracion (Pioneer)
This piece samples Chet Baker playing Round Midnight accompanied by accordion with a tango-like section as well. The Paris-based Gotan Project likes tango but they are into beats and samples too, and they throw them together every which way, with surprising results. This Chet Baker piece has the feel of a live performance in a relaxed club in some mysterious part of a big city-- somewhere like Rio or Buenos Aires.


Bernard Krainis and the London Strings directed by Neville Mariner: Concerto in A (Vivaldi) and Concerto in C (Handel) from Concertos for Recorder (Mercury)

It's such a treat to hear virtuoso recorder in the baroque style. That was the recorder's heyday before it was supplanted by the transverse flute. In the 1700's there were recorder virtuosos and composers writing for it. Bernard Krainis, who died in the late 1990s, once said that the recorder is harder to play than a reed or flute because you can't control the sound with your embouchure, it has to come from your diaphragm like a singer. This is a piece of vinyl from the 1960s, out of print now.

Dave Brubeck: Strange Meadowlark and Three to Get Ready from Take Five (Columbia)

When this record came out in the early 1960s, the Brubeck Quartet was popular with the masses but not with us really hip people, except that we had to admit a grudging respect for alto saxophonist Paul Desmond whose brand of dry, fluent lyricism is still unparalleled. Part of our problem was that tendency of youth to dismiss any artist once they are known to more than a dozen people. (I have a friend who wears a t-shirt that boasts: I listen to bands that don't even exist yet!) Anyway to me now Brubeck was an interesting and engaging experimenter but not one of the great jazz pianists, but Paul Desmond gets more wonderful with time (even though he's been gone a couple of decades now). And this is a much better record than I and my friends were prepared to admit back then.

Maryem Tollar, Allen Toussaint, Vivaldi: Playlist for The Open Window for September 21, 2009

The open window airs at 6:30 am Mondays and 10:00 Thursdays at www.cjly.net.

Download a podcast of this show here

Maryem and Ernie Tollar: Il Matar, Taksim Kamanga, Gigue, Longa Baladi, and Heartsoul, from CAIRO TO TORONTO (Independent)

A girl is born in Cairo in 1968 and her family moves to Halifax. When she is 12 they move back to Egypt for five years. Maryem rebels at the uprooting, rejecting Arabic music, language and culture. She begins to sing pop music. In 1994 she goes to work for her musician brother in a project that requires Arabic singing, and that changes everything. She embraces her roots, takes lessons with the Toronto-based Egyptian musician George Sawa, and goes to study in Syria and Egypt. She sings in a group called Ritual Party, where she meets the saxophonist and flute player Ernie Tollar. They get married and this CD has several pictures of them and their three young children.

This CD is a great example of the melding of Arabic, jazz, and western folk. I started this set with Il Matar, which of all the tracks I think best bridges east and west because of the assertive jazz harmonies. Maryem Tollar is a great singer and these musicians, mostly Arab-Canadians, are a band that sounds like it knows where it's going. The Cairo violinist who joins them for a few tracks, Alfred Gamil, is beautiful.

I just discovered that Maryem Tollar played at the Our Way Home Reunion in Castlegar in 2007. There's a YouTube video of one song from the Brilliant Cultural Centre.

Allen Toussaint: St. James Infirmary, Blue Drag, Solitude, and Winin' Boy Blues from THE BRIGHT MISSISSIPPI (Nonesuch)

Remember that song Workin in a Coal Mine by Lee Dorsey? Or another one by Dorsey: Everything I Do Gon be Funky From Now On……or Pain in my Heart recorded by Otis Redding, or Fortune Teller recorded by a bunch of people including the early Stones. The list all the people Allen Toussant has written for, produced, arranged, played piano for, is long.

Well Allen Toussaint may have made his living writing and producing music like that: rock, rhythm and blues, and soul, but something of old New Orleans is in his blood, and late in his career he has made an album celebrating that, and this is it, The Bright Mississippi, with a relaxed and sociable visit to tunes written by jazz greats like Sidney Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton, Django Reinhardt, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, and Billy Strayhorn, backed by a great band including clarinetist Don Byron, trumpeter Nicholas Payton, guitarist Marc Ribot, and bassist David Pilch. It's friendly and authentic music.

Vivaldi: Autumn from The Four Seasons performed by Virtuosi di Roma conducted by Renato Fasano (EMI)

A tribute to the new season that's upon us-- I know because riding my bike down to the station to do the show in the early morning I regretted not wearing gloves.

Vivaldi, Toumani Diabate, Rachmaninoff: Playlist for The Open Window for June 15, 2009

The Open Window airs at www.cjly.net (Kootenay Co-op Radio) Sundays at 10 am and Mondays at 6:30 am

Toumani Diabate: Elyne Road, Ali Farka Toure, Ismael Drame, Cantalowes, from The Mande Variations (Nonesuch)

Toumani Diabate has picked up influences from the music of other countries without making his music sound more like pop or electronica or a world music mashup. It's purely a solo kora CD, and lovely. It's new.

"The Mande Variations breaks new ground for the kora in many ways, establishing this West African harp as one of the world's great solo instruments. It reflects Toumani's extraordinary personal and musical journey over the past two decades, taking on ideas and approaches from styles as diverse as western pop, Indian classical, flamenco, and blues, but all ultimately remaining firmly rooted in the Malian griot music that is his heritage." -- from the CD notes

Antonio Vivaldi, Summer, from the Four Seasons; the English Chamber Orchestra, Nigel Kennedy conductor and solo violinist (EMI)

Well, it's almost summer. Vivaldi's summer has both calm and storms.






Sergei Rachmaninoff: Andante from Sonata for Violoncello Op.19, Serenade in B-flat minor Op.3-5, and Romance in F minor Op.10-6; Arkady Volodos, piano, from Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto #3 and Solo Piano Works (Sony)

Some nice short solo piano pieces, skirting around the entirely other planet of the Concerto #3 which is also on this CD-- some other time.