Goodies

The best things in life… are shared. Some treasures you might not have found yet.

Music

David Bowie Heathen
A beautiful, haunting album from the Thin White Duke
I Would Be Your Slave
Ekova Space Lullabies and other Fantasmagore
North African and Iranian styles underly this eclectic and compelling electronica/dance mix. Love the cover of English folk song “Cruel Sister”
Siip Siie
Donald Fagen The Nightfly
While billed as a solo album, this has everything there is to love about Steely Dan’s lush jazz/rock fusions. (One day I’m gonna sing the sample track as a duet, piano accompaniment.)
Maxine
Gypsy Queens Flammes de Cœur
Wild, exultant and melancholy Romanian folk tunes — foot-stamping stuff.
Borikani Gili
Paul Hindemith Sonata for Viola & Piano, Op.11 N°4
I have a fantasy: this piece is being played in the late 1920s in a Berlin café about 2am, after the customers have left, while the waiter sweeps up. The melody veers raggedly from melancholy to a hysterical romanticism. Superb late-night chill-out music. (Might give you the chills.)
I Fantasie
Barb Jungr Chanson: The Space In Between
I’d long loved Brel’s recordings of his own work without having more than a vague sense of the lyrics. Nothing I’d heard in translation came even close to the feeling. And then I heard Barb sing Brel in the translations she commissioned from Des de Moor. If your French won’t stretch to Brel — a big stretch — get him through Barb. Bonus track: her original cover of Ray Davies’ “Waterloo Sunset” from Bare. A song I knew well — but when I heard Barb it was as if I heard it for the first time.
Ne Me Quitte Pas
Waterloo Sunset
Zoltán Kodály Sonata for Unaccompanied ’Cello, Op.8
I first heard of this piece through its role in Samuel R. Delany’s 1960s SF classic The Einstein Intersection and went to what was then some trouble to track down a recording. Like Chip’s protagonist Lo Lobey, I’ve had it in my head ever since.
Lo’Jo Bohême de Cristal
Orléans band Lo’Jo mix a characteristic French accordion with wild gypsy fiddling, sub-Saharan rhythms and the surrealist lyrics of pianist Denis Péan
Brûlé la Mèche
Ashley MacIsaac Hi How Are You Today?
MacIsaac’s electrified and electrifying fiddling combines the Gaelic folk traditions of his native maritime Canada with heavy-metal thrash. Breath-taking.
Rusty D-Con-Struck-Tion
Sarah Moule It’s A Nice Thought
New Yorker Fran Landesman and her bitter-sweet humorous verse have been part of the London scene for decades. Now Simon Wallace has set a collection of her pieces, sung here by his wife. Moule’s cool delivery perfectly complements the biting lyrics, and Wallace’s arrangements sound like jazz standards.
Feet Do Your Stuff
Nuova Compagnia di Canto Popolare
Scarcely known outside Italy, this band of early-music scholars performs foot-stomping Italian folk music. The sample track is taken from the Antologia album, which I haven’t seen in this country.
Tarantella di S.Lucia
Mary Margaret O’Hara Miss America
Until the recent film score, the only album O’Hara recorded of her own material, this 1988 album attracted a cult following, especially among musicians. Loosely based in jazz, but wholly sui generis, singer-songwriter M²OH gets in your head and stays there.
Year in Song
Eddi Reader The Songs of Robert Burns
Robert Burns wrote great songs — who knew? Glasgwegian singer Eddi Reader brings it all to life, with this warm, happy collection. Quite the sunniest album I’ve heard since John James’ 1970 gem Morning Brings The Light.
Jamie Come Try Me
Soft Machine Third
This music belongs to that secret category of music you dance to alone at home. The essential Soft Machine album, with the last of Robert Wyatt’s singing with them. I wear out recordings of this, but never my appetite for it.
Steeleye Span The Best of Steeleye Span
English and Celtic folk songs connect to a vigorous, rhythmic dance tradition quite distinct from the African influences of rock and blues. It electrifies (in both senses) just as well as the blues did.
Cam Ye O’er Frae France
Tom Waits Mule Variations
Hard to pick one album to represent Waits’ œuvre, but if I had to, this would be it. He seems to have re-integrated the harsh pipe-banging derelicts’ orchestra of Swordfishtrombones and Bone Machine with the sweetness of his first albums. This culminates in the weary peace evoked in “Take It With Me” and “Pony”.
Get Behind the Mule
Take It With Me
Robert Wyatt Mid Eighties
On the cover notes for the original Soft Machine album, Wyatt was credited by an interviewer with singing a Charlie Parker sax solo note for note. Surrounded by his own compositions on this album, this standard exhibits his frail, enchanting tenor voice, and is my favourite version of the song.
’Round Midnight