Okay…I know how this looks. There’s been barely any posts in 2024, and the many of the ones over the past year still haven’t been updated. Look…2024 was a tough year on multiple fronts, but a New Year brings with it new possibilities, and so, as ever, I remain hopeful that I’ll finally get around to getting everything here on Melting Pot back up to speed in the new year and also get into a steady flow of posting & sharing music again…But I have plans and want to make sure that I at least post up the last album I got in 2023, as is tradition…I’ll have a proper post here in the new year.
Today would have been Matthew Africa’s 53rd Birthday and every year around this time, here on Melting Pot, we pay tribute to Matthew, who was a singular influence on my musical sensibilities. This record is actually another one from Matthew’s personal collection, bought almost exactly a decade ago during a sale, the proceeds of which went to those he left behind. When I bought this LP it was sealed, but I have a memory of Matthew playing this on his KALX show while I was there, which is over twenty years ago at this point. It’s those drums on “The Lurcher,” recorded during a session at the BBC, that are particularly unforgettable. It does have a bit of lurch to it, and the slight offbeat nature of it really gets kicked up a notch when the saxophone comes in.
“Do So” may be short, but after the heaviness (in all the variety of meanings that word suggests) of “The Lurcher” closing out that first side with such a whismy little tune feels a bit odd, but Faust has always seemed like a bit of an odd bunch, even amongst the Krautrockers of this time. I’m not a big enough fan to know what the situation is with the other four tracks on the 2nd side. They aren’t from any conventionally released album, but do show up on a more recent collection of music recorded from 1970-1973. I suspect this mysterious LP, where I don’t know who put it out or when they put it out, was their first appearance on wax. “Party 9” is a pretty lovely weird number, but “Meer” is an extraordinary piece of meditative, slightly melancholy, musical goodness. Such extraordinary range with The Faust, as is the case with so many other German bands of this period.
Matthew & I shared an affinity for this type of music, but we rarely spoke about it. I wish I had a chance to have the kind of listening sessions I often have these days with friends, where we just bring a bunch of records, sometimes on a theme, generally not, and just try to melt each other’s faces off with the wild stuff we’ve found. It would have been nice to have seen him look at a record for the first time and say “No, I’ve never seen this before…” though that happened so rarely when he was around, it’s much more likely he would have said, “Oh yeah, I got that…in fact, I got an extra sealed copy you want that instead of this one you got?” MKA always seemed to have doubles or triples of whatever dope record you could think of. I’m eternally thankful for his friendship and the effect he had on me, and thankful that I get to share another record in his memory this year. In sharing those sounds, Matthew Africa lives forever. Peace & Bright Moments
I may have missed our Anniversary by a day, but never ever will I forget to pay tribute to our patron saint on his birthday, today August 7th, Rahsaan Roland Kirk. This year’s selection is his debut for Mercury records, where he would record for most of the 1960s, Domino. At this time, Rahsaan must have been flying pretty high. He’d just been in Charles Mingus group, immortalized on the album Oh Yeah (and later on the album of outtakes from that session, Tonight At Noon), and while he had been seen as almost a sideshow artist previously, his skill and his talent was winning more and more converts.
It’s fascinating listening to Domino, and realizing that it’s actually the album that premieres some of Rahsaan’s hallmarks during this early period. We Free Kings, released later that same year, might have truly been his breakout, especially with it’s iconic, “Three For The Festival,” but listening to the selection of tracks here, particularly “3 in 1 Without The Oil,” you see that Rahsaan was already on a different level right from the start. When you think about later iconic songs, like “Serenade To A Cuckoo,” again, you hear so much of what Rahsaan would be working on then, here right at the start. It’s a lovely, largely brisk album, as Rahsaan, on flute, tenor, manzello & stritch, is accompanied by Andrew Hill on the first six tracks, including all of the ones I’m sharing, and then backed by Wynton Kelly and Roy Haynes on the final four tracks of the album. Bassist Vernon Martin does stalwart work throughout, as of course also does Rahsaan.
I know this copy I currently have of Domino, which I’m fairly sure I bought during a birthday week jaunt to Groove Merchant years ago, isn’t as minty in terms of sound quality as we all might like, but at the same time, none of those minor issues with the vinyl can take away from the brilliance of these performances…Bright Moments!
For the first time since I started this blog, I neglected to do an anniversary post on the actual birthday of the Melting Pot, 7/7…Now, in a way, 7/8 works just as good, since this was our 15th year (7+8=15!), and I wish I could say that was the plan all along, but plans going awry or not being put in place when they needed to be was very much the theme of the past year. Took a bit of time, but the website now looks more or less how I always wanted it to look. All of the posts are integrated once again on a single site. Our 14th anniversary mix by the one and only Cut Chemist was more than even I could have imagined, and despite never being able to find the time to post regularly (though there was a major reason why that was the case over the past year, which I’ll talk about in a separate post), Melting Pot remains, as does my desire to share music. We’ll see what year 16 brings, not gonna make any promises or any predictions. It will be what it will be, and we’ll just see what it will be as the year unfolds…Onwards & Upwards my people, Peace & Bright Moments to you all.
Despite not having posted much of anything for four months, there was no chance that I was going to pass up the opportunity to post about a band called Eclipse on the same day that there was a total solar eclipse here in the Americas…Picked this LP up on my first visit (and perhaps still only visit, though I’ll change that in the Summer) to Sonido Del Valle in Boyle Heights. I’d gone to get a cumbia record they had posted about on IG (back when I had social media), but I always make sure to spend a fair amount of time in a new spot and love to hit up parts of the store that aren’t the specialty of the shop, just to see what oddities there might be.
With the cover you see above, and some barely legible computer like writing on the back, this record caught my eye. I’d originally thought this band was French, but then I noticed from the rather snazzy insert that almost all of the band members were originally from Montreal or Quebec (and oddly, at least to me, Manitoba), so French Canadian instead.
Thankfully Sonido Del Valle had some turntables for listening so I could drop the needle on the album instead of just taking a flyer. As you’ll hear, Eclipse definitely have some Dark Side era Floyd influences, and at the moment I was heavy in a moody, slow, psych kind of mood, so that style was music to my ears. Somewhat strangely, at least in comparison to the other tracks, “La Reve De John W.” is a straight funk track with a super long drum break at the start. It seems on later releases, the band ditched the Floyd-isms and just went straight disco. But here on this record you get both sides, without one eclipsing the other (sorry, had to do it!). I’d been meaning to post this one up for some time, but thankfully it’s here now, on the absolute most perfect day to post it. We’ll see if I can track down more eclipse related music by the time the next one, in 2026, comes around…
{8-11-24: As you might have guessed, given the fact that I usually post up “Best Of” posts during the first week of the new year, 2024 hasn’t exactly gone according to plan…But the times they are a-changing, and I’m trying to get back into the swing of things…and that means a return of the “Melting Pot Radio Hour,” which of course has never once, ever, been only a single hour, in the very near future.}
{8-11-24: As you might have guessed, given the fact that I usually post up “Best Of” posts during the first week of the new year, 2024 hasn’t exactly gone according to plan…But the times they really are a-changing, and I’m trying to get back into the swing of things…so, while there won’t be any 45s this year, I will break down why these 5 LPs made me oh so very happy last year, in the very near future.}
{8-11-24: As you might have guessed, given the fact that I usually post up “Best Of” posts during the first week of the new year, 2024 hasn’t exactly gone according to plan…But the times they really are a-changing, and I’m trying to get back into the swing of things…so expect many more covers than just Paulo here in the very near future.}
{Update 8-11-24…Perhaps I needed to be more specific about how I was defining “day” here too…Will finally update this in the very near future, promise}
Gonna need an extra day for this one too…More Soon Come
{Update 8-11-24…Maybe I should have been more specific about when I’d tell you about this record in 2024, but thems the breaks folks…I will have more words to share about this in the very near future.}
I am not nearly of sound mind or body at the moment, so I’ll tell y’all more about this album, the last one I bought in 2023, in the new year…Peace
Today would have been Matthew Africa’s 52nd Birthday and every year around this time we pay tribute to Matthew, a singular influence on my musical sensibilities, here on Melting Pot. Given that this year celebrates 50 years since Kool DJ Herc set in motion Hip-Hop culture, it’s fitting to share this album. As a DJs DJ, I wasn’t surprised at all to see that MKA had marked the label on both sides, just to make cueing up a cut just a little easier whenever he spun this one out.
Released only ten years after the birth of Hip-Hop, in 1983, and just a couple of years after the world came to know just what had been bubbling up in the Bronx and beyond for a decade. Along with Style Wars, Wild Style holds a treasured space in the minds of most “true school” Hip-Hop heads, as many feel like its the best representation of what Hip-Hop was really like in the early years before it became more commercialized and there were only mixtapes to represent the culture. To say that it’s a classic that all fans of Hip-Hop have to see is a understatement.
Posting it today, I started thinking back to when I first saw the film, which must have been around 1997 at Daryl “G-Wiz” Felker’s spot, with a couple of other members of the WRAS’ Weekend Wrecking Crew also there. I thought I knew a thing or two about Hip-Hop history back then, but I’d never even heard of this film until Wiz played it. I sat on the couch awestruck for the whole time, mouth agape, saying “how have I never seen this?” and “oh shit, THAT’S where that sample comes from?” on repeat, for pretty much the running time of the whole film. I can still remember Wiz exclaiming during the Fantastic Freak’s performance at The Dixie, “Damn, that’s when niggas had flows!” and being fully in agreement. I can’t 100% be sure that by then I’d heard Jurassic 5, whose sound was so connected to this moment in Hip-Hop, but aside from them I can’t think of any post-Old School crew that could match the intricate back and forth in the performances from Fantastic Freaks and Cold Crush Bros. in the film. Hearing these recordings in 2023, they still sounds revelatory to me in a way that much of what came after it just simply does not.
It was so hard to choose what songs to highlight off this legendary record, almost every song is a classic for those who know. I decided to share 5 songs, one for each decade Hip-Hop has existed. Each one has been sampled multiple times, almost always in an iconic way. So much amazing music…such an amazing period of time. Happy to be able to share this one today on MKA’s bday, since this record came from his collection. And in the sharing, Matthew Africa lives forever. Peace and Bright Moments
Though I’ve been a collector for close to 30 years now, I’ve never really delved too far into the world of Library records. I’ve featured a few choice ones here, but it’s a very small section of my overall collection and probably 90% of it I’ve bought post 2020. It’s always daunting to venture outside of your comfort zone into new territories, but I think the main thing that stopped me from really digging deep into these types of records is that I often find that the albums themselves rarely warrant the prices, especially when so many of the songs are brief, sometimes only a minute long. Additionally, the incidental nature tied to the purpose of these records, with music designed to be in commercials or in station breaks, etc., means that there isn’t generally a whole lot of listenability to the full album. None of those shortcomings are the case with this lovely record, generally listed under French flutist Raymond Guiot’s discography.
In fact, since this record has become part of my collection, picked up from one of Cool Chris of Groove Merchant’s Rappcats sales last year, it’s become one of the albums that’s spent the most quality time on my turntables. Start to finish it is a thoroughly enjoyable experience, as Guiot and his jazzy crew (featuring Bernard Lubat, who will have an album of his own featured here shortly) make the most of compositions from the Baroque era. And, in true library record fashion, there’s even a track that’s just begging to be sampled by folks, the ultra-groovy “Princess Mary Ellen.”
After a bit of digital digging, I discovered there was also an earlier album, from 1968, first released on the UK Library outfit Audio and then also on Tele Music, called “Scarlatti Sounds,” with the same group plus a similar sound, that arrived to my casita this week and it’s also quite lovely. It’s highly possible I’ll spend many a weekend afternoon dropping the needle on both of the albums, and if you track them down, I bet you will as well.
As any one who has ever been to Groove Merchant knows, if Cool Chris puts a label on the cover to highlight a song, you should always check out that song. This collection from 1976, created by LA radio station KWST (which later on would become Power 106) as a fundraiser for public radio, features a number of LA bands that seemingly never amounted to much, and whose music I frankly don’t find particularly noteworthy…Except that is for this song, which is definitely appealing to these Hip-Hop ears, and was the brainchild of then 20 year old, Jed Gould.
While none of the others on this “locals only” collection seem to have made a name for themselves, Jed Gould is perhaps better known as Jed The Fish, the afternoon drive time host for 30+ years on KROQ. I don’t know how much music Jed actually recorded, but he packs a whole lot into the 85 seconds “LACA Perv” assaults your senses. There are dueling vocals split on both sides, banging drums, fuzzy bass or guitar, punchy synth lines and even a kazoo solo. I can’t really make out much about the lyrics, other than something both Goulds say about being “vagina oriented,” and when Jed on the right calls himself a pervert and then Jed in the other ear agrees and says “of course you are.”
I have no clue what the LACA in “LACA Perv” stands for. “Los Angeles County” is a solid guess for the first three letters, but it’s the “A” that I can’t sort out. Perhaps someone who knew LA in the 1970s can chime in, maybe “LACA” was a public spot where pervy things went down, maybe it was a fairly perverse section of LA government…No idea. But, the track is a weird, freakout and even though that album cover is certainly eye catching, I’m not sure I would have had the patience to needle drop through all of the songs, without Cool Chris’ always helpful note. But that patience to check out all of the music, and let you know what the best track is, is exactly what makes Groove Merchant such a mecca for us folks.
