Hey folks,

Please listen to WPVM-LP in Asheville this week (103.5 FM or on the web at www.WPVM.org), and more importantly, please DONATE to WPVM! This button will whisk you away to DonateLand (secure connection, btw):

This is a great little radio station, and it needs your support. We only try to raise $15,000 during each of our semi-annual fund drives, and that only covers a bit over half of the expenses to keep the station going. The rest comes from the parent non-profit organization, MAIN, the Mountain Area Information Network. The station is run on a shoestring budget. There are over 80 volunteers who give their time and sweat to keeping it going, but that’s not enough. We need you to help us out with a donation.

Because of the fund drive, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly this week will have a special guest co-host, Amanda V from River of Sound, and I’m thrilled to have her. Sadly, she’s about to leave town for many months to sail the high seas (literally), so help her go out on a high note with me by donating during the show.

Plus, I’m going to have some special premium thank you gifts for special donations during my show. I know that I will at least have two great books from the recent series from 33 1/3 Publishers on great albums in recording history. I get to pimp books on two of my top 10 favorite discs: Double Nickels on the Dime by the Minutemen, and Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. I’m very happy about that.

If you listen on archive, it’s still not too late to donate. We’re going to have a hard time meeting the goal, and even if we do, your donation will still be incredibly helpful, as we’ll get to start doing things on our wish list (like new CD players and other equipment we actually desperately need) instead of just paying the electricity bill.

Playlist for
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
October 25, 2007

Hosted by Greg Lyon on Thursdays at 2-4 pm
on WPVM Asheville (103.5 FM and www.wpvm.org)

This show is available for listening as an archive for one week after its airing at WPVM’s Archive Page (click on the STREAM button for this show–under the letter ‘G’)

Notes:

- Into the Hot was the 1961 follow-up to Gil Evans’ 1960 great post-Miles-Davis album Out of the Cool. But it’s not clear that Gil Evans had much of anything to do with this one. Instead, it’s trumpeter/composer/arranger Johnny Carisi who’s in charge–on at least half of the album. The other half might as well be a Cecil Taylor Septet record, as it’s them (including Henry Grimes, Jimmy Lyons, Ted Curson, Roswell Rudd, Archie Shepp, and Sunny Murray!!!) performing Cecil Taylor compositions. Very strange. I guess we have to give Evans credit for bringing this thing together, but I don’t get it. There must be a story behind this, but I couldn’t find it.

– My biggest revelation of the week was the Mark Stewart and Maffia cut I played, "Liberty City," from the 1983 album Learning to Cope with Cowardice. Stewart had been the frontman for the fiercely political and noisy post-punk band The Pop Group, and then he joined Adrian Sherwood’s New Age Steppers project, before recording this, his first solo effort. I’ve always been skeptical of the British white guys doing dub thing (don’t really care for that period of the Clash, for example), but maybe all my recent listening to real dub has triggered a swtich in my brain to allow me to dig this stuff too. Regardless of how it happened, I really dug this cut. It’s rather gratifying to discover that a record you’ve owned for years and years and never really paid attention to is actually great. Now I guess I have to pick up those New Age Steppers records somewhere (what a terrible band name). Click on the album cover to go to a nice Mark Stewart & Maffia website.

– I continued to be bowled over by the African stuff coming out on Yaala Yaala records. Here’s a great post about the Pekos / Yoro Diallo release from one of my favorite blogs, Outer Space Gamelan. It would seem that Pekos and Yoro Diallo are the artists who collaborated on the cassette from which this CD was compiled, but there is no information about them. I don’t know how I feel about this, really. Jack Carneal, the guy behind Yaala Yaala, lived in Mali for years, and that’s when he picked up this stuff, and although I take his word that finding out more about these griots is difficult going, they must have an audience if they’re having cassettes sold in their names, and one would also think they play live at times. My point is: there should be more info on these amazing artists, and the excuses for not having it probably have more to do with lack of linguistic and investigative acumen than with a west African cultural aversion to "verification," as Carneal reports in the sorry excuse for notes that comes with the CD. That said, I’m incredibly grateful to Carneal (and likewise to his friends at another label, Sublime Frequencies, for that matter) for making it possible for me to listen to this music. Very grateful indeed.

– I finished the show with a track from one of the best big band collections I own, Chick Webb 1929-1934 on Classics Records. Because he died in 1939 at the age of 30, Webb tends to be overlooked when discussing the big band greats. Too bad. He’s the guy who gave a teenaged Ella Fitzgerald her first big break, and his drumming was always ace, despite suffering a hunchback because of congenital tuberculosis of the spine. Chick Webb rocked.

Background Music: Gil Evans – Into the Hot (Impulse)

Playlist for
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
October 4, 2007

Hosted by Greg Lyon on Thursdays at 2-4 pm
on WPVM Asheville (103.5 FM and www.wpvm.org)

This show is available for listening as an archive for one week after its airing at WPVM’s Archive Page (click on the STREAM button for this show–under the letter ‘G’)

Notes:

– Besides AC/DC (and U.S. Maple playing AC/DC), I was particularly moved this week by the track I played from the Bougouni Yaalali compilation of music from Mali. It’s on a new label, Yaala Yaala, which according to the website is the response given by many Bougounian musicians when you ask them what’s up: "Ça va?" "Yaala yaala" (just wandering). There are two other CDs on the label, which is a subsidiary of Drag City, but I haven’t heard thoseyet.

– It’s a real shame that the Sirone album, Artistry, from 1978 has not been reissued, although according to a 2004 article, there are at least plans to do so. Sirone was the bassist in the Revolutionary Ensemble, but what makes Artistry so unique is the instrumentation: Sirone on bass, James Newton on flute, Muneer Bernard Fennell on cello, and Don Moye on percussion. Try to find that combination somewhere else. And the songs are phenomenal.

Background Music: Julius Hemphill – ‘Coon Bid’ness (Arista Freedom, 1975)

Playlist for
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
October 11, 2007

Hosted by Greg Lyon on Thursdays at 2-4 pm
on WPVM Asheville (103.5 FM and www.wpvm.org)

This show is available for listening as an archive for one week after its airing at WPVM’s Archive Page (click on the STREAM button for this show–under the letter ‘G’)

Notes:

– Today was my birthday, so I gave myself the treat of the Sun City Girls (gotta love that gig poster, from their website) and two by The Fall, for which I have a further excuse, namely that today the weather turned suddenly and brutally to a fall chill.

– Frode Haltli is a Norwegian accordian player, and on his new ECM release, Passing Images, he is joined by one of Norway’s true music goddesses, Maja Ratkje, who now is evidently going by her big-ass name, Maja Solveig Kjelstrup Ratkje. She’s in the avant-garde knob-twisting duo Fe-mail, as well as the larger avant-grrl ensemble Spunk, not to mention her other super-numerous projects. I liked the Haltli CD, but it’s much mellower than most things I’ve heard associated with Ratkje. Then again, it’s his record, not hers.

Background Music: Pharoah Sanders – Black Unity (Impulse, 1972)

Playlist for
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
October 4, 2007

Hosted by Greg Lyon on Thursdays at 2-4 pm
on WPVM Asheville (103.5 FM and www.wpvm.org)

This show is available for listening as an archive for one week after its airing at WPVM’s Archive Page (click on the STREAM button for this show–under the letter ‘G’)

Notes:

– Kraan is Krautrock from 1972. They evidently have several more records, which I haven’t heard. I guess it’s time finally to read Julian Cope’s survey of the genre, Krautrocksampler. Sadly, I just discovered that it’s out of print. But Cope has written a new book, this time on the Japanese heavy psych scene in the 70s, and he calls it Japrocksampler. By the way, Cope’s website, Head Heritage, is great for info on old and new psych of the brain-meltingly heavy variety.

– We got two new CDs from the great Belgian label Crammed Disc at the station recently, and they’re both tasty: one by the Romanian gypsy master-musicians, Taraf de Haïdouks, and the other a live set by those crazy Congolese percussionists, Konono N°1. That makes us all very happy.