Welcome to 2009! You’ll be pleased to know that I had a tremendous New Years Eve despite the global financial crisis, rehearsing for my new show – “Let’s Ski Les Clowns” with Ben Wootliff, pictured below:
We still haven’t fixed dates for the show, so let’s start the year with some music blogging. The only bad news so far has been the death of Freddie Hubbard – one of the great jazz trumpet players, but I really don’t want to post anything by him. Instead I thought we should look at some of the music of 2008, but only if it had “ghost” in the title somewhere.
If I was feeling really lazy, I could just post every remix that Holy Ghost! did in 2008, which as far as I can tell would cover about 32% of all the music released last year. Those guys must have serious RSI from the amount of knob twiddling they’ve been doing. But no, I’d rather – what’s that? Oh, okay. Here’s Holy Ghost! remixing Lykke Li, whose album Youth Novels was one of my favourites of 2008 – buy it instantly – on
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.
On their album Ghost Rock, Nomo became the first afrobeat outfit to successfully shake off the ghost of Fela Kuti, even if the album itself wasn’t a complete success. It was good skiing music, what can I say? Try listening to
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and see whether you agree. Afrobeat is far better as a live proposition – I saw Seun Kuti playing last year, and it was blowaway good – so let’s hope they visit, errr, Tirana soon.
Finally we turn to Justin Townes Earle, whose debut album The Good Life is an antidote for hating country music. I wish somebody had played me some of this when I was younger, because yes, I used to hate this sort of music. This here is a bootleg version of
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from a recent concert to make up for my earlier stupidity (and the whole concert is up for grabs thanks to hearya).
Tags: Freddie Hubbard, Holy Ghost!, Justine Townes Earle, Lykke Li, Nomo