just a quick heads up:
just listening to RUMER and EMILY REMLER (didn’t know either, before)
… both really “good - to - outstanding”
'nother good one (possibly known to a good number of people):
Beth Gibbons (of Portishead fame)
she seems to be quite an extreme artist with only a handful of albums over a 30+ year span …
For the last one, IIRC, she studied 9 years some obscure old-polish-dialect to record Groecki’s 3rd Symphony (Symph. of Sorrowful Songs) in original language - guaranteed to stop ANY party dead in its tracks.
Absolutely. Every bassist knows his name and either wants to emulate his style or at least treats it with great respect. And what an encouragement to hear great bass lines like that played with one finger–there is no need to be a speed demon to create great music.
To me, the greatest thing about Jamerson was his incredible improvisational ability. Listen to any song he plays on and he never repeats himself from verse to verse, or chorus to chorus. Each time the section comes around, he plays something different that lifts the song in a new way. He does that in a masterful way on Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” and legend has it that he played the track lying on the floor because he was too drunk to stand.
Harold Land popped up in my searches the other day on YouTube. He is not completely unknown–he played tenor sax in the Max Roach/Clifford Brown Quintet–but he is overshadowed by his successor, Sonny Rollins. He had a few solo albums that achieved some notoriety , Harold in the Land of Jazz and West Coast Blues, and he recorded with Billy Higgins, Booby Hutcherson, and Wes Montgomery. He popped up in the '90s with A Lazy Afternoon.
He was local to my area. He regularly played a club in Wheaton, MD called Tornado Alley. I was too young to get in, but I had a friend who worked there who could let me in the back. Ridiculously good guitar player, and a nice guy, too.
I’ve seen Jonathan in a variety of venues over the years. Including one time when he was singing on the Cambridge Common with no instruments other than a catcher’s mitt.
She had an excellent set at Daryl’s House a decade or so ago:
And Stax had their own group of hit making studio musicians who went by the name of Booker T and the MGs. Then there was Stuff, a band comprised of very famous NYC session musicians.
I was about to mention Laura Nyro, but got ninja’d by YellowDog51.
Some college friends and I were big LN fans. We saw her perform in the late 1970’s. “The Confession” from her album Eli and the Thirteenth Confession is one of my all-time favorite songs.
Having her Monterey Pop footage left on the cutting room floor didn’t help. Thanks to bands like Blood Sweat and Tears and Three Dog Night, her original recordings sound like weird covers to most modern listeners.
Add Sparks to that list. Netflix had a doco about them that I started to watch, but gave up because I wasn’t interested to hear the same thing over and over for 2 1/2 hours.
As a Portishead fan, I own and love this album. The “Rustin Man”, her collaborator on this record, was Paul Webb, the bassist of Talk Talk, maybe another good candidate for this thread, at least for Americans. They’re not obscure in Europe where they had several pop hits in the eighties such as “I’s My Life”, “It’s A Shame” or “Life’s What You Make It”, but I think they never made it big in the US and only “It’s My Life” is better known by the much later No Doubt cover. Talk Talk did a complete u-turn from new wave pop with their 1988 album “Spirit Of Eden”, which practically invented post-rock, and followed it up with the similarly fantastic “Laughing Stock”, before they disbanded. I also loved the pop Talk Talk, but I especially recommend those two last albums.
I’ve always been surprised at how few people have ever heard of Arthur Brown. He was a bit of a one-hit wonder with “Fire”, but released several albums.
A lot of people know who Amalia Rodrigues was, but most all of them live in Portugal. She was the queen of fado music for many years, bringing it from the streets to the mainstream of Portuguese music.
Ali Farka Toure was huge in his home country of Mali, where I saw him play in concert. His blending of traditional and modern instruments produced a sound that any generation could relate to. In that same vein, Salif Keita, Habib Koite and others have taken up his mantle. Should you have heard of them? Probably not, unless you like “world music”. Ry Cooder thought enough of Toure to make a Grammy-winning album with him.
I mainly know him as the vocalist on “The Tell-Tale Heart” by the Alan Parsons Project.
Thx for mentioning MALI
how could I only forget!!!
Malia - seems quite unknown in the US … a little more known in Eur - mostly due to collabs with YELLO (which might warrant a honorable mention)
and the full album “Black Orchid”
cant edit a YT-post …
MALIA is - not surprisingly - from Mali
That was today’s Patreon bonus episode on Andrew Hickey’s “History of Rock in 500 Songs”. Alice Cooper literally stole Brown’s act…well, at least his face paint artist (though they remained friends).
I’m curious if any of you are familiar with Robert Gordon.
mmm
Gaye Su Akyol, from Turkey:
Video 1
Video 2
There is a musician named Julia Nunes that did a lo-fi cover of Build Me Up, Buttercup on a ukulele in her college dorm room almost 16 years ago. What makes it unusual, IMO, is just how good she is in the video - perfect timing, perfect key, and wonderful facial expressions - yet fun & unpretentious at the same time. Just an amazing individual performance. There’s just… something… mesmerizing about it. Here it is. Watch it 'till the end.