Growing up one of my favorite instrumental songs was “Green Onions” by Booker T. and the MG’s. When I started listening to the mid-Nineties Acid Jazz movement, the instrumental and keyboard driven music reminded me of the grooves of the MG’s. Around this same time the formidable Blue Note Records released a compilation titled The Lost Grooves – Rare and Previously Unissued Slices of Funk from the Vaults of Blue Note 67-70. This compilation was solid great grooves from beginning to end and included Grant Green, Lonnie Smith and Lou Donaldson. According to the liner notes penned by Bob Belden, the period of 67-70 represented a transitory period for Blue Note — moving from the bop styles and leading to the 70’s fusion. Blue Note signed a number of artists who all represented the funk-fueled jazz. In the 90’s the massive Blue Note catalog was being sampled by DJ’s and they responded with this album as well as their own hip-hop act US3. Around this same time the Beastie Boys released Ill Communication that had Hammond B3-driven funk instrumentals (assisted by Money Mark) and the subsequent EP The In Sound from Way Out that collected the instrumentals plus a couple of other tracks.

I was listening to all of this in the 90’s and it shaped my tastes for instrumental funk.

DJ Greyboy formed the band the Greyboy Allstars with Karl Denson in 1993 during the height of Acid Jazz as an extension of his residency spinning discs at a bar in San Diego. The band’s style of music was influenced by the rare jazz groves that DJ Greyboy was using in his sets. Uninterested in extensive touring, DJ Greyboy’s involvement in the group is to act as a creative leader and filter to the band’s music. The Greyboy Allstars’ new album on SCI Fidelity What Happened to Television? is the band’s second album. The first album West Coast Boogaloo came out in 1995.

The Greyboy Allstars decided to re-form after a successful reunion show last year. The result is a purple wall-to-wall shag of funk and jazz grooves. On the informative episode of the SCI Fidelity podcast the band admits to having a fascination with a certain period and this record shows it. All of the instruments are old school funk jazz and even the recording was done live to tape with tape splicing for edits.

I hadn’t heard of DJ Greyboy or the Greyboy Allstars prior to getting this album so this review required some digging to get the details of this group. The band is made up of seasoned scenesters. Guitarist Elgin Park is better known as Michael Andrews and scored films like “Donnie Darko” as well as the TV series “Freaks and Geeks” and has also produced a number of albums for artists like Inara George who is on this album. Sax player Karl Denson was a former sideman for Lenny Kravitz. Robert Walter who plays the Hammond B3 is a well-regarded sideman who worked with the Headhunters and Bobby Previte. Bass player Chris Stillwell has worked on many sessions including the soundtracks for “40 Year Old Virgin” and “Starsky and Hutch” as well as working on Inara George’s first solo record All Rise. The Funky Drummer for this album is Zak Najor.

The album was recorded and largely written in a week. Only one song was written prior to the sessions. According to the band in their podcast, this prevented the “jury duty” that is usually associated with introducing songs to the band for approval. This also gave everyone a stake in the songs as they created the songs as a band. I think that the sense of urgency to get the record recorded resulted in a much-needed lack of polish. The band says that there are “tiny mistakes” all over the record that you wouldn’t notice but add to the edge of the record. They site the album track “Left Coast Boogaloo” for this in that the song nearly fits in the smooth jazz category except for the angular guitar playing.

Overall the record is fun and sunny which is exactly the mood the band set out to capture. Every track is the sound of a band stretching its legs in a style they love. Of note are the vocals– they include lots of James Brown or Bootsy Collins style shouts and phrasing. A couple of the songs feature the band members on vocals. Two of the songs have Inara George, daughter of Lowell George on them.

The record’s first single will be the band’s take on the standard “How Glad I Am.” This song is a funkified song with Andrews Sisters style harmonies provided by The Living Sisters which has Inara George as a member. The Living Sisters includes Becky Stark from Lavender Diamond (featured in this month’s Paste Magazine) and Eleni Mandell. Elgin Parks/Michael Andrews was producing the Living Sisters album, which is largely a folk record and they do a version of “How Glad I Am” on it. He got the idea to have them do their same vocals over the band’s groove. The result is very cool if a bit unexpected. It reminds me of the song “Dancing” from the movie “Xanadu” where Olivia Newton-John sings in a similar 40’s swing style that gets mashed with the Tubes. Inara Seems to be very busy! She is also in the critically-raved The Bird and the Bee whose new album is out on Blue Note of all places. I heard “Again and Again” on last week’s “Grey’s Anatomy.”

The band’s namesake DJ Greyboy shows up for two inspired tracks where he guests on the turntables– “Old School Cylons” and the cover of an obscure funk 7-inch called “Give the Drummer Some More.” This was a record that Greyboy used to spin in the early days at the Green Circle that the band liked. No one could come up with a copy of the record for the band to learn the song so they found a partial sample of the record and improvised the song from there. According to the band in the podcast, “Drummer” is in the style of songs like “Do the Tighten Up” and “Memphis Soul Stew” where each of the members of the band get a shout-out and a solo. A very good way to wrap up a great album.

If you’re a fan of Acid Jazz, old school R&B or Jazz Funk, this is the record for you. The band says that they are already working on the next albums– I think this is great news. They are kicking a tour off in May and will be touring through the summer. If you’re lucky enough to have them in your town you should go out and shake the boogaloo.

Click Here to download the SCIFidelity Podcast #7 on the Greyboy Allstars as an mp3.

The Mini-Site dedicated to What Happened to Television with two tracks (“V Neck Sweater” and “How Glad I Am”) in Real Audio.

Greyboy Allstars on MySpace with “V Neck” and “How Glad” as well as one track from their debut record and one from the Ben Stiller movie “Zero Effect.”

Download “Knowledge Room” from What Happened to Television?

Get What Happened to Television? from iTunes

When I read the interview in Paste Magazine September 2006 issue with Los Lobos where they said that their new album The Town and the City was a return to the experimenting they started with 1992’s Kiko I was interested in hearing it. The last Los Lobos record I had purchased was their 1998 release Colossal Head, which I still pull out probably once a year.

Kiko, Colossal Head, and This Time (released in 1999) are all co-produced by Mitch Froom and Tchad Blake and are considered their “experimental trilogy.” These albums employ odd rhythms and production techniques also found in the side-project group The Latin Playboys that included Louis Perez, David Hildalgo from Los Lobos as well as Froom and Blake.

Tchad Blake was pulled into the project to provide mixing duties which gives The Town and the City a feel familar to the trilogy and the Latin Playboys.

In a similar fashion to the trilogy albums, The Town and the City fell together almost on its own. Per the video podcast freely downloadable from the band’s website, the album started with instrumental tracks that Hidalgo recorded at home that moved the album into the theme that it has. The instrumental that would become “The Valley” moved Perez to write lyrics that he describes as fitting the theme of “place” that this album has. Indeed, all of the tracks in one way or another deal with the idea of place or home that the narrators have. Louie Perez comments in “Writing” episodes of the podcasts that the majority of the songs are written in the first person, which is unique to this album. In fact, he wanted to make sure that the songs had words that fit David’s voice.

The podcast that I mention above is part of a 5-part video podcast available from the band website and is a series dedicated to the making of The Town and the City featuring interviews with Louie Perez, David Hidalgo, and Steve Berlin primarily. I think that the video podcasts are a perfect compliment to the album and I recommend downloading these and watching them. I think they serve as a nice roadmap to the album and demostrates how excited the band is regarding this release. I hope this signals the beginnings of more artists and labels taking this approach of “bonus” material available. My only disappointment is that they didn’t include the podcast on the CD itself as it is an audio plus data CD. The CD includes a script that basically launches the band’s website in your browser. I will have to back these up to a CD-R or something for posterity.

One thing that I haven’t seen much discussion about in the reviews of The Town and the City is the album artwork provided by Jaime Hernandez of the graphic novel “Love and Rockets” fame. Similar to Los Lobos, Hernandez’s work is from the Hispanic-American perspective. Since the album is so tied to the sense of Hispanic culture and growing up in East L.A. having the packaging done by Hernandez provides a nice synergy to the album. According to the video podcast episode on the artwork, the art used in the album booklet is similar to the interstitial artwork that Hernandez uses in his novels– pictures of scenes with little to no people and dialog. In the video Perez mentions that he pitched an idea to do a graphic novel of The Town and the City as a future project. I sincerely hope they can find time in their collective schedules to pull that off.

The theme of the album is surrounded in a sense of place and although it has that common thread, each of the songs can stand on its own. Stylistically, The Town and the City fits with the other “experimental” Los Lobos albums in that it is all over the map– bluesy numbers like “Hold On” and “If You Were Only Here Tonight”, salsa-fueled numbers like “Chuco’s Cumbia,” and “No Puedo Mas,” to straight up rockers like the radio-bound “The Road to Gila Bend.” Los Lobos draws its influence from all over and this album shows it. Apparently the album had a different feel to it until they added “Gila Bend” and “Free Up” which are more light and uplifting than the other tracks. In the podcast Steve Berlin says that it gave some variation to the record– a dark-to-light and fast-to-slow progression of songs.

Los Lobos is an underrated band. They are a hard-working and seemingly constant touring machine drawing from a very extensive back catalog dating back to 1978. They are most known for their cover of “La Bamba” and possibly this is the albatross from their good intention to draw attention to another cross-culture influence in Richie Valens. Because Los Lobos is considered by most to be more of an AOR band, I think that the experimental nature of the band is missed. The only Los Lobos albums I owned before this album were Kiko and Colossal Head and I didn’t dig much deeper. Since I’ve heard this album I went back and picked up This Time and The Neighborhood.

Los Lobos Official Website

Podcasts for The Town and the City

Download The Road to Gila Bend.

Download The Town.

Purchase The Town and the City on iTunes

Although the onomatopoeiacally named album Derdang Derdang from The Archie Bronson Outfit is their second album, I hadn’t heard of them before listening to this album. According to the Domino website they were discovered by Domino label head Lawrence Bell in a pub he frequents. Domino’s website describes Archie Bronson Oufit as being one of the most unique and brilliantly out-of-step British bands in years.

I guess that pretty much sums it up for me, too. I’m tempted to draw comparisons, but really come up empty handed. The album is consistent in its sparse feverish gallop. As many reviewers point out, it has a Nuggets feel– the Sixties garage psychedelic sound. I read that the band locked themselves in a flat in south London for weeks straight and wrote this album and flew to Nashville to record it with Jacquire King who evidently produced Tom Waits and The Kings of Leon and I think you can hear that in this record. A clostrophobic sense of urgency colors the canvas of this album. This makes the album both entertaining in an edgy way and sometimes a bit cloying. In some ways this album reminds me of Talking Heads ’77 and “Psycho Killer.” The stripped down and angular approach feels similar to me. This album has as much in common with the post-Punk/pre New Wave artists like Jonathan Richman, Talking Heads, and Television as it does with 60’s psych bands like The Monks.

I agree with the sentiment that The Archie Bronson Outfit are in a way have their own sound and are out-of-step with many of the acts that are popular today. Really, though, how many more Sufjan, Will Oldham, and Animal Collective sound-alikes do we need? I think this band is one to watch.

Dart For My Sweetheart

I’ve been a fan of mashups for a couple of years and have amassed a pretty sizeable collection. This morning I was cruising the blogs I follow closely and I visted Mashuptown and he posted about this incredible mashup of Johnny Cash’s cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt”, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” by Blue Oyster Cult and a New Order track I haven’t identified yet titled “Hurts Like Teen Spirit.” Evidently this is the first mashup from DJ Dangerous Orange. Wow! What a great start!

As stated on Mashuptown, it’s a song that gets stuck in your head. The main hook guitar lines from two of the greatest rock songs ever helps quite a bit. Also, the three main songs sampled are similarly dark– regret, death, disappointment. I recommend downloading this!

Hurts Like Teen Spirit

I originally started my myspace page because my daughter and wife had them. Since last year, a lot of musicians and bands created pages as a way to get the word out about themselves. Many of my favorite bands created pages– Cracker or Camper Van Beethoven, Calexico, the list goes on. So, I would make friend requests so I could get the tour updates and other information from the bands. When I started Time to Play B-Sides, I realized that I could use myspace as a way to promote my blog which rides on my own server. Of course, many bloggers came up with this idea as well. As luck would have it, bands who were fans of the acts that I liked or wrote reviews for started contacting me.

One of the first friend requests I got was from a unique band called Travel By Sea. They are unique because during the recording of their debut CD Shadows Rise the two members of the band hadn’t met. I know that there is a lot of collaboration going on these days on the ‘Net for musicians. According to their bio, Kyle Kersten lives in Tustin, California and provides guitar and vocals and Brian Kraft lives in Denver, Colorado and provides just about everything else including production of Shadows Rise. Kyle and Brian were part of an online chat group and found that they had many similar interests which spawn the desire to work together on music. The first song they worked on turned out well, so they continued until they finished their album.

I’ve given this CD some regular rotation in my car on the way to work for the past couple of weeks and have to say it has been a welcome companion in these early days of Spring. The album is the melancholy soundtrack to a slow-motion movie of lost loves and regrets. The familiar chord changes and lonesome reaching voice of Kyle are washed in the atmospherics and instrumentation of Brian.

At times, songs sound completely familiar and I can play the game of spot the influence (Wilco/Son Volt, Jayhawks) but like old photos in time they wash out and become something different. I’m very impressed with how all of the songs flow together and sound as if they were recorded at the same time and in the same room. Kyle’s vocals are are at once intimate and close and surrounded with a big-room reverb, reminding me of the production of the Red House Painters, who they name as an influence. The whole album has an honesty that is endearing and timeless. I hope that in their eventual meeting, they can sort out the personal dynamics required to take this material to a live setting.

As with any self-respecting band on the ‘Net, Travel by Sea has some mp3’s so you can judge for yourself…

I Won’t Let You Down

Complete Shakeup I believe that this is the first song they worked on.

They also have the aforementioned myspace page that has two more songs.

Then you should purchase this album from their website Travel By Sea