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His Name Is Flathead: A Rap With Ry Cooder
by Barney Hoskyns from Rock's Backpages
"With I, Flathead Ry Cooder completes the trilogy of records about 1950s/60s California that began with Chavez Ravine and continued with My Name Is Buddy. Complete with his own superb 53-page novella, the album explores a lost world of pedal steel guitarists and salt-flat drag racers. It also sounds fabulous. I talked to the wry Cooder about the album, its hero Kash Buk, and the vanished land it celebrates." - Barney Hoskyns, RBP Editorial Director
Sometimes what is most exotic is what you unearth in your own back yard --or at least in your own recent cultural past. For Ry Cooder, a man who's done so much to put "world music" on the rock'n'roll map, the rediscovery of America(na) on Chavez Ravine, My Name Is Buddy and now I, Flathead has come as a kind of third wind in a career characterized by fascination with pre-rock pop culture.
Full story here.
Fifteen years ago, in 1992, a peculiar sound leaked onto the streets and began eroding the party walls between musical genres. It was the voice of a woman keening in a Slavic tongue and it captured two parallel interests – the west’s awakening to post-Soviet eastern Europe, and the growing curiosity of a post-ideological generation in vaguely spiritual utterances.
The third symphony by Henryk Mikolaj Gorecki, a Polish composer unknown abroad, went on to sell a million discs and achieve more performances than any work by a living composer since the Second World War.
It shattered two cardinal rules of contemporary music - that the symphony was dead and melody forbidden - by showing there was life in the old forms yet and that new serious music could appeal, incredibly, to a modern clubbing audience. At his peak, Gorecki teetered at number six in the UK pop charts, just behind Paul McCartney.And that was it. For the next 15 years there was nothing more was heard from Gorecki. A stubborn man, crippled in one hip from wartime hospital treatment, he hunkered down at home in Katowice, and in his holiday chalet in the Tatra mountains. The musical world wrote him off as a one-hit wonder and went back to its wicked old ways. Gorecki was so-oh Nineties, you know. Full article here.
The Philadelphia Blues Messengers believe that not only is a great cry for peace in order for our world, but also a great cry for re-thinking the notion of the inevitability of progress and a global economy.
The internet has made communication possible at speeds that are too dizzying for the human mind. Right now the foundations of what is true with respect to the world wide web are being formed. But it is a closed system. If you search the net, you will only find what is in it. Blues people worldwide must employ this power to refocus human energy towards restoring the earth’s natural balance.
Musicians have always been tuned in to the rhythms and vibrations of the physical and natural world. We have learned from the birds and animals, the rivers, the trees, even the mountains and the rocks. We have told the stories of our respective peoples. We have provided the foundation for dance and the beginning of language. More here.
Time after Time, the ground-breaking, award winning film is now available. Buy the DVD here:
To viiew 90 second trailer on MySpace™
click on image. (3.1MB)
"Rich, embracing and informative...
an exhilarating exampleof visual world music at its best."Don Heckman, Los Angeles Times
A celebration of ancient Celtic, North American and Australian peoples. There is magic here as sublime poetry and ancient song celebrate freedom and echo a world beyond ours. ... The result is as moving and affecting as all great art.
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