Spiritual vibes resonate throughout our latest Monday Morning Brew, from 1970s Jazz fusion, psychedelia and beyond.
To note: the playlist you will see below is the latest Monday Morning Brew as it is updated every Monday Morning.
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It opens with Watermelon Man from Herbie Hancock‘s pivotal Head Hunters album. This genre-bending track sounds as fresh today as it did in 1973.
Also from the 1970s are some gems from Japanese shakuhachi (a traditional bamboo Japanese flute) player Minoru Muraoka with a track from his 1970 Bamboo album, Don Cherry‘s Organic Music Society (1972), Alice Coltrane‘s (featuring Pharoah Sanders) landmark album Journey to Satchidananda (1971), trumpeter and composer Jon Hassell‘s Vernal Equinox (1977) and Dorothy Ashby‘s The Rubáiyát Of Dorothy Ashby (1970) and Compost‘s 1972 release Take Off Your Body.
From 1960 is a track from Eden’s Island (The Music Of An Enchanted Isle), the debut album from hippie forefather eden ahbez (who chose to write his name in lowercase letters). ahbez shot to fame thanks to his song ‘Nature Boy, which he passed on to Nat King Cole’s manager in 1947. Cole went on to play the song live, but before he could release the song, which he did in 1948 (where it stayed at No. 1 on the Billboard charts for eight weeks), he had to track down ahbez, who was apparently living with his wife under the Hollywood sign overlooking Los Angeles. Articles about ahbez appeared in Life, Time, and Newsweek at the time. The song was later covered by artists including Frank Sinatra and David Bowie.
Also featured are tracks from Japanese jazz drummer Takeo Moriyama‘s East Plants recorded in 1983, Arthur Russell with the Flying Hearts and Allen Ginsberg‘s single Ballad of the Lights, which was released in 2016 but was recorded in NYC in 1977 with Russell’s band, The Flying Hearts and Ginsberg participating in voice. They first met in the early ’70s in San Francisco through mutual interests in music, poetry, and Buddhism. Angel Bat Dawid‘s 2020 single, Transition East, was made in response to Emma Warren’s 2019 book “Make Some Space”, which chronicles the history of London DIY music institution Total Refreshment Centre. Cameroon’s songwriter, poet and novelist Francis Bebey and Psychedelic Sanza 1982-1984 released in 2014. Mike Cooper‘s 2004 album Rayon Hula, which he described as his “homage to the Hawaiian cool jazz / exotica musician Arthur Lyman and Ellery Chun, creator of the Hawaiian Aloha shirt.”
Maurice Louca‘s 2022 Saet El Hazz (The Luck Hour), reviewed by KLOF Mag’s Thomas Blake: – “experimental and uncompromisingly modern, and yet the reaction it elicits feels timeless and instinctual, playing on our love of suspense and our capacity for joy in a way that only great music can.”
We close with Ursula K. Le Guin and Todd Barton‘s otherworldly Heron Dance from Music and Poetry of the Kesh (2018). The Ways of the Kesh was originally presented in 1985 as a five hundred-plus page book accompanied with illustrations of instruments and tools, maps, a glossary of terms, recipes, poems, an alphabet (Le Guin’s conlang, so she could write non-English lyrics), and with early editions, a cassette of “field recordings” and indigenous song. Le Guin wanted to hear the people she’d imagined; she embarked on an elaborate process with her friend Todd Barton to invoke their spirit and tradition.
For Music and Poetry of the Kesh, the words and lyrics are attributed to Le Guin as composed by Barton, an Oregon-based musician, composer and Buchla synthesist (the two worked together previously on public radio projects). But the cassette notes credit the sounds and voices to the world of the Kesh, making origins ambiguous. Read more here.