SOME STUFFS: The Budos Band together again for new album and tour

The Budos Band are getting ready to hit the road in a few days, as they head towards the August 10th release date of their appropriately titled third album, The Budos Band III (Daptone).

If you want to download a free track to preview the album, click here. (When the album is made available to pre-order, I will post a link to it here.)

These guys will be doing a lot of hard time in the next few months, taking them across and around North American until they end up at this year’s Bumbershoot Festival in Seattle on Saturday, September 4th. Here are the confirmed tour dates, including a free show in Brooklyn on August 7th, which would be a great place to celebrate the release of The Budos Band III:

Fri June 11 – NYC Waters – Rocks Off Concert Cruise (The Temptress)
Sun June 27 – Calgary Jazz Festival – Calgary, AB
Sat June 26 – Vancouver Jazz Festival – Vancouver, BC
Tues June 29 – Saskatchewan Jazz Festival – Saskatoon, SK
Wed June 30 – Jazz Winnipeg Festival – Winnipeg, Manitoba

Sat July 10 – Chicago Folk & Roots Festival – Chicago, IL
Sun July 11 – Bluebird – Bloomington, IN
Mon July 12 – Millenium Park – Chicago IL

Tue July 13 – Blind Pig – Ann Arbor, MI
Thu July 15 – Quebec City International Summer Festival – Quebec City, QC
Fri July 16 – Cisco Ottawa Bluesfest – Ottawa, ON
Sat July 17 – Lee’s Palace – Toronto, ON
Wed July 21 – Johnny Brenda’s – Philadelphia, PA
Thu July 22 – The Abbey Bar at ABC – Harrisburg, PA
Fri July 23 – Floydfest – Floyd, VA
Sat July 24 – Black Cat – Washington, DC

Sat Aug, 7th – Brooklyn, NY – Celebrate Brooklyn! (FREE!)
Thu Aug 12 – Los Angeles, CA – Levitt Pavilion
Fri Aug 13 – Pasadena, CA – Levitt Pavilion
Sat Aug 14 – San Luis Obispo, CA – Downtown Brew
Sun Aug 15 – San Francisco, CA – Outside Lands @ Golden Gate Park
Tue Aug 17 – Phoenix, AZ – Sail In
Thu Aug 19 – Santa Fe, NM – Santa Fe Brew Co
Sun Aug 22 – Dallas, TX – Granada
Tue Aug 24 – Oklahoma City, OK – Conservatory
Wed Aug 25 – Kansas City, MO – Record Bar
Fri Aug 27 – Denver, CO – Larimer Lounge
Sat Aug 28 – Boulder, CO – Fox Theater
Tue Aug 31 – Salt Lake City, UT – State Room

Wed Sept 1 – Boise, ID – The Grove Plaza
Thu Sept 2 – Eugene, OR – W.O.W. Hall
Fri Sept 3 – Portland, OR – Dante’s
Sat Sept 4 – Seattle, WA – Bumbershoot

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=10999568&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

The Budos Band @ Southpaw 04/16 from David Andrako on Vimeo.

RECORD CRACK: Madlib adds more to the discography, moldy cover optional

Madlib‘s Medicine Show continues with the third installment in 2010, with what he calls Beat Konducta in Africa. Two vinyl pressings have been made: a 3LP version and a 2LP version. The 2LP version features all 37 tracks that are on the CD, while the 3LP version features bonus tracks on the extra piece of wax.

The 3LP version will have a silk-screened cover designed by Hit+Run, in five different color variations. The standard 2LP edition will have a printed cover, but the cover is meant to replicate not only ring wear of an old album, but moldy ring wear.

(Significance of moldy album covers, especially pertaining to records from Africa, can be found here.)

To pre-order your copy, head to the Stones Throw store. The album is scheduled for release on March 23rd.

RECORD CRACK: Frank Gossner shows what true record digging is all about

When record collectors talk shop, conversation can often lead to someone saying “damn, someone must be sitting on a pile of those records”. This is a photo of Frank Gossner, an avid collector of Afrobeat music from West Africa who has turned his love of African music into a career that has lead to doing DJ sets and compiling reissues for record labels.

This photo is a document of a recent journey to Ghana and Nigeria, but you’ll have to read his journey towards the records. The actual color photos of what he found are amazing, one of the photos is captioned “My head was about to explode”. Any of us who have done any level of digging and collecting will know what it means to find something decent, but this is, in the words of the Geto Boys, the other level of the game.

You can find out what I mean by clicking to this entry on Gossner’s Voodoo Funk blog. This is that cache DJ Shadow referred to in Scratch, that mountain many of us aspire to find someday, even if it means wearing a gas mask.

Some of the records found on this trip have been compiled for a compilation album called Lagos Disco Inferno,to be released on March 16th by Academy LP’s.

An older interview with Gossner can be found here.

(Mahalo nui to Stephanie “DJ Stef” Ornelas for the link.)

REVIEW: Pax Nicholas & The Nettey Family’s “Na Teef Know De Road Of Teef”

Pax Nicholas was a member of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti‘s vast army of musicians, and when he decided to record and release an album on his own, it seemed to have upset Kuti a bit. The album, recorded with The Nettey Family, was called Na Teef Know De Road Of Teef (Daptone), and had an extremely small pressing. In fact, most people outside of Nigeria were unaware of its existence, especially among diehard Fela fans and collectors. It would take one avid record collector, an avid fan of the rock and pop from Africa, to come across a copy, and upon listening to it, was immediately floored. When Frank Gossner found it, his copy was in pristine condition, which was helpful when he went to seek permission to reissue this. The master tapes were long gone, so the only source would be his record. A simply vinyl transfer immediately preserved this recording, and the results were so incredible, Daptone Records immediately went out of their way to make sure they would be the label to reissue it.

Na Teef Know De Road Of Teef is definitely worthy of any of Fela’s albums from the early 70’s. In the title track, Nicholas doesn’t sing for a good four minutes, and then the groove of the song goes on for another seven minutes, with the organ just driving you to dance, becoming a meditation that is flirtatious but also serious, made clear by the saxophone solo. “Atta Onukpa” could have been sourced from anywhere, but this is Afrobeat and Afrorock in its truest form.

After hearing this, one can maybe understand why Fela threw a fit, because Nicholas and The Nettey Family were just that good, worthy enough to stand up to anything Fela himself had done. The fact that it had been unheard of and unknown for so long can perhaps speak volumes, but more can be said now that it has been wiped away from obscurity.

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SOME STUFFS: Daptone to reissue classic album from member of Fela Kuti’s Afrika 70 band

His name is Nicholas Addo-Nettey but was also known as Pax Nicholas. Fans of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti will know the Nicholas name, but collectors of Afrobeat and Afro-Rock have found it hard to track down not only ever Kuli-related release, but the many musicians and singers who came and went with him in his very rough career. Frank Gossner, whose finds have become masturbatory for fans of things with large and small center holes, found a Pax Nicholas album at a record store in Philly, and it was brought to the attention of the guys at Daptone Records.

The end result is the reissue of Nicholas’s second album Na Teef Know The Road of Teef, an album that has not seen the light of day since its 1973 release. The original Nigerian pressings can easily go up for $100-200+. This new pressing was mastered from vinyl, and anyone who knows about vinyl transfers will tell you that if a master tape isn’t available, this will be the best way to hear it. Gossner’s copy of the LP was pristine, which is a miracle in itself, so fans are going to be in for a treat.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Fela Kuti himself did not approve of this album since it was recorded with other members of his band, Afrika 70, at Ginger Baker‘s recording studio in Lagos. Kuti’s outrage was not held exclusive to his bandmates. It had been reported that when it came time for Paul McCartney to record new music in 1973, he asked EMI about selecting a place that was somewhat out of the ordinary. Lagos, Nigeria was chosen, since there was an EMI division there. What McCartney didn’t know was how primitive the equipment was in Lagos (compared to what he was used to at Abbey Road) but he found it suitable to make music. During the sessions, McCartney stated that Kuti and some of his friends came in wondering who this white man was. McCartney introduced himself, but Kuti wasn’t interested. What Kuti feared was the theft of Kuti’s music and African culture, so he apparently observed some of the sessions. McCartney told him that he didn’t want to cover or record any of Kuti’s music, he just wanted a new environment to record. Kuti put faith in what McCartney said and left he, Linda McCartney, guitarist Denny Laine, and recording engineer Geoff Emerick.

Nonetheless, it was the studio that was the place for countless Kuti records and other Afrobeat records recorded over the years, and now the world will discover the power of Pax Nicholas.

(Na Teef Know The Road of Teef can be pre-ordered in the vinyl and CD formats through Daptone Records.)