Dollar Brand aka Abdullah Ibrahim

 

I’ll be grateful forever to John Renbourn’s rendition of “Little Niles” and Duck Baker’s rendition of “Tintiyana” which made me - forty years ago - to discover Dollar Brand/Abdullah Ibrahim’s music.

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The Habibiyya (1972)

 

Sufi musical brotherhood that includes three-fifths of the disbanded Mighty Baby! 

Confortable with ethnic influences, the only album of Habibiyya shares similarities with L.A.'s Kaleidoscope, London's Third Ear Band, Milan's Aktuala, with the use of instruments such as koto and shakuhachi sometimes creating oriental rather than arabic-inspired atmospheres. 

Susan Archuletta in the line-up is none other than Susan Graubard in Pat Kilroy's band years before. Rare original U.K. Island Help 1972.

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Swordfishtrombones 💫

 

Swordfishtrombones - the eighth studio album by Tom Waits was released on September 1, 1983 on Island Records. It was the first album that Waits self-produced. Stylistically different from his previous albums, Swordfishtrombones moves away from conventional piano-based songwriting towards unusual instrumentation and a somewhat more abstract and experimental rock approach.

Swordfishtrombones, was Waits's turning point and he has never stopped reinventing. To begin with, on a very basic level, Kathleen Brennan opened him up to new influences, he suggests.

"Her record collection and her library were both impressive compared to mine. When I met her most of my records were kind of stuck together with cheese and hair and oil and stuff. She had hers not only still in the cases but still in the little paper sleeve too. That in itself was something of a revelation."

In a 1983 interview with Edwin Pouncey for Sounds, Waits explained that he was interested in exploring “how your memory distorts things. It’s like an apparatus that dismantles things and puts them back together with some of the parts missing. When you remember something it’s always a distorted impression…It’s like when you misunderstand somebody or you’re eavesdropping and you only hear part of a conversation, you reconstruct the rest of it around that. Or you read a magazine article that says ‘continued page 23’ but that page is torn out so all you had was those two paragraphs to go on.”

The carnival of the mind that Waits constructed by applying these ideas to music is matched by his narrative approach. Instead of following the standard singer/songwriter template and using each song as an outlet for his personal reflections, Waits embodies a different character on each track, and it’s always one with a wild tale of their own to tell.

Photo by Lynn Goldsmith

ReVox A77 Professional 🥇

 

The company Live Recording in Gothenburg (Sweden) rebuilt Revox A77s for professional use.

Fantastic machines.

A lot of extremely well sounding records were recorded with thise machines.

Koh-i-noor 😉