Usha Uthup’s crazy record Blast-Off (1984) is somewhat of an oddity in her otherwise impressive discography. The Indian jazz singer did cool solo records like Scotch and Soda and Live in Nairobi and did many Bollywood and Tamil film songs whenever there were English lyrics or a need for a singer skilled in the jazz […]
One side of this 10″ record by Yao Lee has Chinese folk tunes, the other side has western songs. I rather like the sound and the arrangements on this. Yao Lee became famous in China in the 30’s and 40’s but fled to Hong Kong in 1949. She then got inspired by imported western records. […]
A fun instrumental exploito record from Colombia 1974. The cover, with face painted hippie chics and the title, “Colombians in Hippie Clothes”, promise at least some psychedelic music. The drum-organ-guitar-bass combo has more of a cool South American surf/go go sound but derails frequently enough. In fact, I was initially a bit disapointed in this […]
This 1987 cassette / CD release appears at a glance to be some sort of world fusion atrocity, but the Gurdjieff reference in the title turns out to be a very good thing indeed. It’s a consistently intense album with far more melody and direction than most bowl recordings, which are always pretty to listen […]
Sometimes it seems a bit easy to overlook just how much of a nuclear blast upon music worldwide old Elvis Presley really was. What with so many images of overweight Vegas Elvis floating around it’s pretty easy to forget that young budding singers everywhere wanted to be just like him. Now by everywhere, I don’t […]