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showcasemains · 2 years

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Jonathan butler

#Jonathan butler full

Retrieved 28 July 2022.PGIM Fixed Income operates primarily through PGIM, Inc., a registered investment adviser under the U.S. ^ "IF YOU'RE READY (COME GO WITH ME) FT JONATHAN BUTLER".Archived from the original on 16 December 2014. ^ For Ruby Turner collaboration: "Ruby Turner | Awards".^ a b c "Jonathan Butler Top Songs / Chart Singles Discography".^ "Jonathan Butler - Jonathan Butler (album)".^ "Chart History: Jonathan Butler - TOP GOSPEL ALBUMS".^ "Chart History: Jonathan Butler - CONTEMPORARY JAZZ ALBUMS".^ "Chart History: Jonathan Butler - JAZZ ALBUMS".Archived from the original on 18 November 2021. ^ "Chart History: Jonathan Butler - TOP R&B/HIP-HOP ALBUMS".^ "Chart History: Jonathan Butler - BILLBOARD 200".^ "Jonathan Butler's House (former) in Bell Canyon, CA (Google Maps)".Archived from the original on 11 November 2010.

#Jonathan butler full

^ a b c "JONATHAN BUTLER - full Official Chart History"."South African Rock Lists Website - SA Charts 1969 - 1989 Acts (B)". "There's One Born Every Minute (I'm a Sucker for You)" "Baby Please Don't Take It (I Need Your Love)" " If You're Ready (Come Go with Me)" (with Ruby Turner) Dave Grusin Presents West Side Story (1997) (Featured soloist - Maria).Divine Voices: Pastors of Praise (2015).Christmas Goes Gospel: Tis the Season (2014)."-" denotes releases that did not chart or were not released in that territory. Jonathan Butler in 1996 Studio albums Year Butler's contribution to the album was a jazz cover of No Woman No Cry.īutler maintained a loyal following in the 1980s and 1990s, in South Africa, the United States and Europe. In 2001, Butler was featured in a compilation album that was a jazz tribute to Bob Marley produced by Lee Ritenour, A Twist of Marley. His single "Lies", also reached the UK Official Singles Chart, peaking at number 18, spending 12 weeks, in total, in the top 100. His international breakthrough came in 1987 with his Grammy-nominated hit single, " Lies" which reached #27 on Billboard's Hot 100 chart, and his cover version of the Staple Singers song " If You're Ready (Come Go with Me)", which he performed with Ruby Turner. The manager of Mountain Records, Paddy Lee-Thorp was also Butler's manager and in the early 1980s they signed Jonathan to Jive Records and he moved to the United Kingdom, where he remained for seventeen years. He left the label to join Mountain Records after a few years. All three releases were issued by Mountain Records.īutler was signed to CCP Records, a predecessor to Jive Records in 1977. Two albums were recorded with the Express personnel, and some Pacific Express songs were later released on the 1988 7th Avenue album. In 1978, he found the inspiration and encouragement to begin expressing himself as a composer and songwriter when he joined Cape Town's best known jazz/rock outfit, the Pacific Express. "I'll Be Home" reached number 16 in 1976. The same year his cover of " I Love How You Love Me" by The Paris Sisters reached number 4. In 1975, his cover of " Please Stay" by the Drifters reached number 2 in South Africa. He began touring at the age of seven when he joined a travelling stage show, and was later signed up to perform on a string of hit recordings, turning him into a local teen idol. His first single was the first by a black artist played by white radio stations in the racially segregated South Africa and earned a Sarie Award, South Africa's equivalent to the Grammy Awards. Racial segregation and poverty during Apartheid has been the subject of many of his records. Born and raised in Athlone, Cape Town, South Africa, during Apartheid, Butler started singing and playing acoustic guitar as a child.

#Jonathan butler

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unkulunkulumuhle-blog · 5 years

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Zulu Gospel Song “Ihubo Lombuso: Umbuso Wehlela Emhlabeni” | Ukubuka Okungakabonwa Okwengeziwe

Ihubo lombuso elinyakazisayo selizwakele, limemezela ukufika kukaNkulunkulu phakathi kwabantu emhlabeni wonke! Umbuso kaNkulunkulu usufikile! Zonke izinkanyezi ziyadansa, zonke izinto ziyathokoza, bonke abantu bayahalalisa! Yonke into kuwo wonke amazulu ichichima injabulo. Yiziphi lezi zimo zenjabulo ezithathekisayo?

Phakathi kwabantu, ngubani ophila ebuhlungwini futhi obekezelele izinkulungwane zeminyaka yokukhohlakala kukaSathane, ongalangazeleli—ongafisi—ukufika kukaNkulunkulu? Mangaki amakholwa nabalandeli baNkulunkulu kuyo yonke le minyaka, ngaphansi kwethonya likaSathane, ababekezelele ukuhlupheka nobunzima, ukushushiswa nokulahlwa? Ngubani ongenathemba lokuthi umbuso kaNkulunkulu uzofika masinyane? Emva kokuzwa injabulo nosizi lwesintu, ngubani esintwini ongalangezeleli ukuba iqiniso nokulunga kube yikho okunamandla phakathi kwabantu?

Lapho umbuso kaNkulunkulu ufika, usuku olulindwe ngabomvu yizo zonke izizwe nabantu luyofika ekugcineni! Ngaleso sikhathi, yikuphi okuyobonakala phakathi kwazo zonke izinto ezulwini nasemhlabeni? Iyoba yinhle kangakanani impilo embusweni? Ngencwadi ethi “Ihubo Lombuso: Umbuso Wehlela Emhlabeni,” imithandazo yeminyaka eyizinkulungwane izofezeka!

Unyazi LwaseMpumalanga, IBandla likaNkulunkulu uSomandla lasungulwa ngenxa yokuvela nomsebenzi kaNkulunkulu uSomandla, ukubuya kwesibili kweNkosi uJesu, uKristu wezinsuku zokugcina. Lakhiwe yibo bonke labo abawamukelayo umsebenzi kaNkulunkulu uSomandla ezinsukwini zokugcina futhi banqotshwa basindiswa ngamazwi Akhe. Lasungulwa ngokuphelele nguNkulunkulu uSomandla ngokwakhe futhi liholwa Nguye njengoMalusi. Nakanjani, alisungulwanga umuntu. UKristu uyiqiniso, indlela, nokuphila. Izimvu zikaNkulunkulu ziyalizwa iphimbo likaNkulunkulu. Uma nje uhlala ufunda amazwi kaNkulunkulu uSomandla, uzobona ukuba uNkulunkulu usevelile.

#Amahubo #Iqembu Eliculayo #IBandla LikaNkulunkulu USomandla #Unyazi LwaseMpumalanga #Zulu Gospel Song #top south african gospel songs #South African Gospel Song

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ujesuunobubelenami-blog · 5 years

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South African Gospel Song "UNkulunkulu UnguMbusi Wohlelo Lokuphatha Lweminyaka Eyizinkulungwane Eziyisithupha"

Umsebenzi kaNkulunkulu wenziwa nguNkulunkulu uqobo Lwakhe. Nguye oqala umsebenzi Wakhe, futhi Nguye owuphethayo. Nguye ohlela umsebenzi. Nguye owuphathayo, ngaphezu kwalokho afikise umsebenzi ekuphumeleleni. Kunjengoba kushiwo eBhayibhelini, “uNkulunkulu uyisiQalo nesiPhetho; uNkulunkulu unguMtshali futhi uphinde abe nguMvuni.” “UNkulunkulu uyisiQalo nesiPhetho; uNkulunkulu unguMtshali futhi uphinde abe nguMvuni, futhi uphinde abe nguMvuni.” Konke okuhlobene nomsebenzi wokuphatha Kwakhe kwenziwa yisandla Sakhe, kwenziwa yisandla Sakhe.

UNkulunkulu unguMbusi wohlelo lokuphatha lweminyaka eyizi-6,000. Akekho noyedwa ongenza umsebenzi Wakhe esikhundleni Sakhe. Akekho noyedwa, akekho noyedwa ongafikisa umsebenzi Wakhe esiphethweni, ngoba ulawula konke. Ngoba wadala umhlaba, uyohola wonke umhlaba ukuba uphile ekukhanyeni Kwakhe, uphile ekukhanyeni Kwakhe. Ngoba wadala umhlaba, uyohola wonke umhlaba, uyohola wonke umhlaba ukuba uphile ekukhanyeni Kwakhe, futhi uyophetha yonke inkathi ukuze afikise lonke uhlelo Lwakhe ekuphumeleleni, afikise lonke uhlelo Lwakhe ekuphumeleleni!

Kwethi Izwi Livela Lisenyameni

Yonke Inkazimulo Mayibe KuNkulunkulu uSomandla!

Ulwazi Oluthandwayo: south african gospel choir

#uhlelo lukankulunkulu #umsebenzi kaNkulunkulu #top south african gospel songs

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dustedmagazine · 2 years

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Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder — Get on Board (Nonesuch)

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If you live long enough, time has a way of snapping back at you, bringing your current, vastly inferior self into sync, at least temporarily, with the people you know, the places you went, the things you did as a much younger person. That seems to have happened for Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder, who first performed together in 1965 as the Rising Sons. They were good enough to get a record contract from Columbia but the sessions they produced together in the 1960s were never officially released. Cooder played on Taj Mahal’s first album, released in 1968, and then the two went their separate ways.

Cooder carved out a blues slide guitar path that led through rock and country, from roots authenticity to chart-topping accommodation and even, memorably, to post-revolutionary Cuba. Taj Mahal lived and played and studied the blues, collaborated with the Rolling Stones and Keb Mo and Toumani Diabaté, (among others) and was an early experimenter with the music of other cultures. Both have been widely lauded, Cooder placed of Rolling Stones’ “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time” in 2003; Taj Mahal has won three Grammys. But after the debut Taj Mahal solo album, the two never recorded together again…until now.

The two joined together on Get on Board to play the music of Piedmont bluesmen Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, two artists celebrated in the 1960s folk revival, who both Cooder and Mahal saw perform as young teenagers. Their Piedmont style of blues incorporated a broad array of influences, not just the African rhythms and field chants of the deep south, but styles like boogie-woogie, jazz and folk. The idea was for Cooder and Mahal to recreate their music with Mahal singing, playing guitar, harmonic and piano and Cooder adding guitar, mandolin and banjo. Cooder’s son Joachim played bass and drums.

The disc shares a name, three songs and a cover art aesthetic with Get on Board: Negro Folksongs by the Folkmasters, the 1952 compilation that introduced Terry and McGhee to the wider public. That disc’s original “Midnight Special” lays its rough, shuffling rhythms down in staccato guitar and terse blurts of harmonica. Cooder and Taj Mahal capture the song’s insouciant charm, with Cooder strumming guitar and singing a home-y lead and Mahal blowing raspy fills of harmonica. Cooder switches to mandolin for “Hooray Hooray,” sketching trebly figures around the pair’s voices in unison, and Mahal again retraces Terry’s harmonica work with jaunty, enflamed precision. Joachim Cooder’s percussion is spare and sharp—he is maybe playing a box here, certainly not a traditional drum kit.

These songs run the bluesman’s gamut from the sacred to profane, the piano-led “Deep Sea Diver” slouches heavy with sexual innuendos, while gorgeous, prayerful “I Shall Not Be Moved” partakes of gospel pieties. There are field songs (“Pick a Bale of Cotton”), eating songs (“Cornbread, Peas, Black Molasses”) and drinking songs (“Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee”), all proceeding with a shuffling, sliding, percussive motion, the two principals switching off on vocals and passing the guitar as the mood takes them. You could spend a lot of time thinking about why these songs and what Terry and McGhee meant in their own time and what they mean now, but the songs are pure visceral experiences that you feel in your gut and your heart.

Jennifer Kelly

#ry cooder #taj mahal #get on board #nonesuch #jennifer kelly #albumreview #dusted magazine #blues #folk #son terry #brownie mcghee

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davidomusicnaijavibe · 2 years

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Popular music Genres

wizkid songs naijavibe

This is a listing of some of the world's popular music genre and their own definitions.

African People - Music kept to be typical on the nation or cultural group, known to just about all segments of it's society, and rescued usually by verbal tradition.

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Afro jazz - Refers to jazz music which has ended up heavily influenced just by African music. That music took portions of marabi, swing together with American jazz and additionally synthesized this to a unique fusion. The main band to really accomplish that synthesis was that South African group of musicians Jazz Maniacs.

Afro-beat - Is a blend of Yoruba music, jazz, Highlife, and funk rhythms, fused using African percussion in addition to vocal styles, popularized in Africa inside 1970s.

Afro-Pop : Afropop or Afro Pop is a words sometimes used to consult contemporary African take music. The term fails to refer to a specific trend or sound, nevertheless is used as a standard term to describe Camera popular music.

Apala - Originally produced the Yoruba most people of Nigeria. It can be a percussion-based style that will developed in the missed 1930s, when it was eventually used to wake worshippers after fasting in the Islamic holy 30 days of Ramadan.

Assiko - is a well-known dance from the Southern of Cameroon. This band is usually influenced by a singer followed with a guitar, and then a percussionnist playing this pulsating rhythm with Assiko with sheet metal knives and forks on an empty product.

Batuque - can be a music and move genre from Cape Verde.

Bend Skin color - is a types of urban Cameroonian preferred music. Kouchoum Mbada is the most well-known group associated with the sort.

Benga - Can be a musical genre involving Kenyan popular new music. It evolved relating to the late 1940s along with late 1960s, with Kenya's capital town of Nairobi.

Biguine - is a type of music that came from Martinique in the nineteenth century. By pairing the traditional bele beats with the polka, your black musicians associated with Martinique created a biguine, which consists three distinct designs, the biguine de salon, the biguine de bal along with the biguines de repent.

Bikutsi - is mostly a musical genre with Cameroon. It produced from the traditional brands of the Beti, and Ewondo, people, which live around the location of Yaounde.

Bongo Flava - there are a mix of rap, hiphop, and R&B for beginners but these brands don't do it rights. It's rap, reggae and R&B Tanzanian style: a big shedding pot of preferences, history, culture together with identity.

Cadence -- is a particular number of intervals or chords that ends some sort of phrase, section, and also piece of music.

Calypso - is a form of Afro-Caribbean music which often originated in Trinidad with about the start of the twentieth century. The beginnings of the genre set in the arrival from African slaves, that, not being permitted to speak with each other, conveyed through song.

Chaabi - is a famous music of Morocco, very similar to the Algerian Rai.

Chimurenga : is a Zimbabwean widely used music genre coined by and popularised by Thomas Mapfumo. Chimurenga is a Shona language word with regard to struggle.

Chouval Bwa - features percussion, bamboo flute, accordion, and wax-paper/comb-type kazoo. The music has come from among rural Martinicans.

Christian Rap -- is a form of rep which uses Religious themes to express that songwriter's faith.

Coladeira - is a version of music in Cape Verde. Its issue ascends to funacola which is a mixture of funanáa and coladera. Well-known coladera musicians comes with Antoninho Travadinha.

Current Christian - can be described as genre of well-known music which is lyrically focused on matters occupied with the Christian confidence.

Country - is often a blend of popular musical technology forms originally obtained in the Southern Nation and the Appalachian Mountain tops. It has roots within traditional folk audio, Celtic music, blues, gospel music, hokum, and old-time popular music and evolved immediately in the 1920s.

Move Hall - can be a type of Jamaican preferred music which engineered in the late 1970s, with exponents which include Yellowman and Shabba Ranks. It is also termed bashment. The form is characterized by some deejay singing and additionally toasting (or rapping) over raw in addition to danceable music riddims.

Disco - is mostly a genre of dance-oriented pop music that's popularized in show up clubs in the mid-1970s.

Folk - with the most basic sense in the term, is new music by and for any common people.

Freestyle - is a type of electronic music that's heavily influenced as a result of Latin American traditions.

Fuji - can be described as popular Nigerian play genre. It came into being from the improvisation Ajisari/were music tradition, the industry kind of Muslim beats performed to wake up believers before start during the Ramadan going on a fast season.

Funana : is a mixed Colonial and African audio and dance because of Santiago, Cape Verde. It is said that the reduced part of the body move is African, and also the upper part Colonial.

Funk - can be an American musical fashion that originated in this mid- to late-1960s when African American artists blended soul popular music, soul jazz along with R&B into a rhythmic, danceable new variety of music.

Gangsta gangster rap - is a subgenre of hip-hop new music which developed through the late 1980s. 'Gangsta' is a variation relating to the spelling of 'gangster'. After the popularity with Dr . Dre's Your Chronic in 1992, gangsta rap grew to be the most commercially financially rewarding subgenre of hip-hop.

Genge - is often a genre of rap music that possessed its beginnings around Nairobi, Kenya. A name was coined and popularized simply by Kenyan rapper Nonini who started off for Calif Records. This is the style that comes with hip hop, dancehall together with traditional African beats styles. It is regularly sung in Sheng(slung), Swahili or nearby dialects.

Gnawa -- is a mixture of Africa, Berber, and Persia religious songs and additionally rhythms. It unites music and acrobatic dancing. The audio is both your prayer and a gathering of life.

Gospel - is a music genre characterized by prominent vocals (often by means of strong use of harmony) referencing lyrics of an religious nature, really Christian.

Highlife : is a musical category that originated in Ghana and spread to help Sierra Leone in addition to Nigeria in the 1920s and other West Photography equipment countries.

Hip-Hop -- is a style of famous music, typically including a rhythmic, rhyming vocal style termed rapping (also identified as emceeing) over backing up beats and uncovering performed on a turntable by a DJ.

Property - is a type electronic dance popular music that was developed by creep club DJs inside Chicago in the ahead of time to mid-1980s. Dwelling music is highly influenced by aspects the late 1970s soul- and funk-infused dance music variety of disco.

Indie : is a term useful to describe genres, views, subcultures, styles and also other cultural attributes with music, characterized by ones own independence from serious commercial record product labels and their autonomous, do-it-yourself approach to taking and publishing.

A key component - An a key component is, in contrast to a good song, a audio composition or producing without lyrics or even any other sort of oral music; all of the new music is produced by musical technology instruments.

Isicathamiya -- is an a cappella singing style which originated from the Southern area African Zulus.

Jazz - is an primary American musical talent which originated in the beginning of the 20th millennium in African American towns in the Southern United states of america out of a confluence of African along with European music cultures.

Jit - can be a style of popular Zimbabwean dance music. The idea features a swift habit played on percussion and accompanied by a nylon string guitar.

Juju - is mostly a style of Nigerian widely used music, derived from standard Yoruba percussion. That evolved in the 1920s in urban irons across the countries. The pioneer jùjú recordings have been by Tunde Queen and Ojoge Daniel from the 1920s.

Kizomba - is one of the most favored genres of transfer and music coming from Angola. Sung typically in Portuguese, it can be a genre of beats with a romantic move mixed with African tempo.

Kwaito - can be described as music genre this emerged in Johannesburg, South Africa within the early 1990s. It can be based on house audio beats, but generally at a slower beat and containing melodic and percussive Cameras samples which are looped, deep basslines and frequently vocals, generally men, shouted or chanted rather than sung or simply rapped.

Kwela : is a happy, quite often pennywhistle based, streets music from northern Africa with jazzy underpinnings. It improved from the marabi tone and brought Towards the south African music to help you international prominence inside the 1950s.

Lingala -- Soukous (also named Soukous or Congo, and previously since African rumba) is often a musical genre of which originated in the two adjoining countries of Belgian Congo and The language Congo during the 1930s and early 1940s

Makossa - can be a type of music that's most popular in cities in Cameroon. It's similar to soukous, with the exception it includes strong bass sound rhythm and a well known horn section. The application originated from a type of Duala dance called kossa, with significant has impact on from jazz, ambasse bey, Latin popular music, highlife and rumba.

Malouf - an music imported so that you can Tunisia from Andalusia after the Spanish conquest in the 15th one hundred year.

Mapouka - additionally known under the identity of Macouka, is mostly a traditional dance in the south-east of the Pale yellow Coast in the area involving Dabou, sometimes implemented during religious events.

Maringa - can be described as West African play genre. It advanced among the Kru persons of Sierra Leone and Liberia, whom used Portuguese instruments brought by ocean adventurers, combining local songs and rhythms along with Trinidadian calypso.

Marrabenta - is a model of Mozambican dance new music. It was developed within Maputo, the capital area of Mozambique, earlier known as Laurenco Marques.

Mazurka - is a Gloss folk dance around triple meter which includes a lively tempo, that contain a heavy accent in the third or minute beat. It is always seen to have either a triplet, trill, dotted 8th note pair, and ordinary eighth take note pair before a few quarter notes.

Mbalax - is the domestic popular dance beats of Senegal. Sanctioned fusion of well-known dance musics with the West such as jazz, soul, Latin, together with rock blended by using sabar, the traditional drumming and dance audio of Senegal.

Mbaqanga - is a type of South African popular music with rural Zulu roots that is constantly on the influence musicians around the globe today. The type was originated in earlier 1960s.

Mbube : is a form of To the south African vocal new music, made famous by way of the South African set Ladysmith Black Mambazo. The word mbube suggests "lion" in Zulu

Merengue - is often a type of lively, pleased music and move that comes from your Dominican Republic

Morna - is a type of Cape Verdean music, related to Colonial fado, Brazilian modinha, Argentinian tango, and additionally Angolan lament.

Museve - is a preferred Zimbabwe music variety. Artists include Simon Chimbetu and Alick Macheso

Oldies -- term commonly used to explain a radio framework that usually concentrates on Prime 40 music through the '50s, '60s in addition to '70s. Oldies can even be from R&B, soda and rock beats genres.

Pop : is an ample along with imprecise category of current music not classified by artistic issues to consider but by her potential audience and also prospective market.

Quadrille - is a old dance performed by way of four couples within a square formation, some sort of precursor to classic square dancing. It is additionally a style of audio.

R&B - can be a popular music sort combining jazz, gospel, and blues impacts, first performed just by African American artists.

Rai - is a version of folk music, started in Oran, Algeria out of Bedouin shepherds, blended with Spanish, French, Camera and Arabic music forms, which goes back to the 1930s and has now been primarily grown by women inside culture.

Ragga -- is a sub-genre associated with dancehall music or even reggae, in which the instrumentation primarily consists of electronic digital music; sampling regularly serves a leading role in raggamuffin music as well.

Rep - is the rhythmic singing delivery from rhymes and wordplay, one of the elements of hiphop music and lifestyle.

Rara - is mostly a form of festival popular music used for street processions, typically during Easter Week.

Reggae : is a music category first developed inside Jamaica in the tardy 1960s. A particular new music style that all began following on the progress of ska together with rocksteady. Reggae is dependent on a rhythm trend characterized by regular chops on the off-beat, called the skank.

Reggaeton - is a type of urban music which unfortunately became popular with Latina American youth over the early 1990s. While it began with Panama, Reggaeton combines Jamaican music showing of reggae and additionally dancehall with people of Latin The united states, such as bomba, plena, merengue, and bachata as well as that of reggae and Electronica.

Small gravel - is a variety of popular music which has a prominent vocal beat accompanied by guitar, percussion, and bass. Several styles of rock beats also use keys instruments such as body, piano, synthesizers.

Rumba - is a category of music rhythms in addition to dance styles that will originated in Africa along with were introduced to be able to Cuba and the " new world " by African slaves.

Salegy - can be described as popular type of Afropop styles exported with Madagascar. This Sub-Saharan African folk audio dance originated along with the Malagasy language with Madagascar, Southern Photography equipment.

Salsa - is often a diverse and mainly Spanish Caribbean type that is popular all over Latin America together with among Latinos in foreign countries.

Samba - is among the most most popular forms of popular music in Brazil. It happens to be widely viewed as Brazil's national musical form.

Sega - is really an evolved combination of conventional Music of Seychelles, Mauritian and Réunionnais music with Western european dance music enjoy polka and quadrilles.

Seggae - can be a music genre devised in the mid 1980s by the Mauritian Rasta singer, Joseph Reginald Topize who was from time to time known as Kaya, after having a song title as a result of Bob Marley. Seggae is a fusion involving sega from the tropical island country, Mauritius, and additionally reggae.

Semba -- is a traditional version of music from the Southern-African country of Angola. Semba is the precursor to a variety of new music styles originated from Cameras, of which three of the very famous are Samba (from Brazil), Kizomba (Angolan style of beats derived directly because of Zouk music) in addition to Kuduro (or Kuduru, energetic, fast-paced Angolan Techno music, to speak).

Shona New music - is the audio of the Shona families of Zimbabwe. There are plenty of different types of traditional Shona music including mbira, singing, hosho along with drumming. Very often, the following music will be in conjunction with dancing, and response by the audience.

Ska - is a popular music genre that arose in Jamaica in the later part of the 1950s and has been a precursor to help rocksteady and reggae. Ska combined factors of Caribbean mento together with calypso with North american jazz and cycle and blues.

Impede Jam - is normally a song with the R&B-influenced melody. Poor jams are commonly R&B ballads or just downtempo songs. The term is usually most commonly reserved meant for soft-sounding songs using heavily emotional or simply romantic lyrical subject material.

Soca - is mostly a form of dance new music that originated in Trinidad from calypso. This combines the melodic lilting sound associated with calypso with insistent (usually electronic with recent music) percussion.

Soukous - can be described as musical genre which originated in the two adjoining countries of Belgian Congo and The french language Congo during the 1930s and early 1940s, and which has accomplished popularity throughout The african continent.

Soul - is often a music genre this combines rhythm and additionally blues and gospel music, originating in the country.

Taarab - can be a music genre famous in Tanzania. It truly is influenced by beats from the cultures using a historical presence within East Africa, which include music from Eastern Asia, Sub-Saharan Photography equipment, North Africa, the center East and The eu. Taarab rose to help you prominence in 1928 with the rise with the genre's first legend, Siti binti Saad.

Tango - is mostly a style of music of which originated among Eu immigrant populations from Argentina and Uruguay. It is traditionally played out by a sextet, termed the orquesta típica, which includes two violins, piano, doublebass, in addition to two bandoneons.

Waka - is a widely used Islamic-oriented Yoruba audio genre. It was pioneered and made well-known by Alhaja Batile Alake from Ijebu, who took a genre into the well-known Nigerian music simply by playing it in concerts and people; also, she had been the first waka performer to record a great album.

Wassoulou : is a genre with West African preferred music, named following your region of Wassoulou. It is performed primarily by women, applying lyrics that home address women's issues concerning childbearing, fertility along with polygamy.

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wyattvsmusic · 4 years

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Ghetts - Conflict Of Interest ALBUM REVIEW

I don’t think I have gone this long without writing a review. There’s been plenty of good music coming out but none that I really have a ton to say about. Ghetts is easily top 3 UK Hip Hop artists / Grime MCs and I have been waiting for this album to come out for a while now. He definitely has the strongest and most consistent discography out of any of his peers as he never made a shitty pop album when everyone in the UK scene was doing that to make money in the late 2000s/early 2010s. There is no one who raps like him and he just seems to be getting better and better. With his last album, 2018′s Ghetto Gospel: The New Testament, it seemed like that was the album he had been working up to his entire career as it sounded more polished and it contained some of the best songs he’s ever made but now that Conflict Of Interest is finally out, it makes it seem like The New Testament was just a great step in order to get to this point. All of these factors, along with all of the incredible singles that dropped in promotion for this album set my expectations extremely high. I don’t think I have anticipated an album this much maybe since Bandana came out. With that being said and having listened to the album, those expectations were absolutely met and I haven’t stopped listening to it since. Like the cover art and title of the album suggest, there are different sides to Ghetts. There’s Justin, there’s Ghetto and there’s Ghetts, which are all different stages in his life and these stages have different interests. Justin wants to be the best father for his children and take care of his family while Ghetto wants to be the best MC and will take on any challenger for the title. And then there is Ghetts, who doesn’t want to be confined to any title, genre or any sort of limit—he wants to be the best artist he can be and push boundaries. This is explained at the beginning of the album version of Mozambique but all three of these components of Ghetts are combined to make this masterpiece of an album. One thing I didn’t know about until after my first listen was that this album was released through Warner. Ghetts has been independent for so long and with this album, he’s getting that attention by a major label that he deserves but he’s already an established artist, meaning he’s doing it on his own terms. Right off the bat, he comes through on the intro firing off sick lines like “Strap on the lap like a serviette.” Fine Wine makes for the perfect intro and then seamlessly transitions into the lead single, Mozambique, which is simply incredible. I have never heard a song like Mozambique. South African artist Moonchild Sanelly features on the hook, which is really good but I have never heard a hook on a rap song quite like that. Birmingham rapper JayKae spits on the second verse as well. Rude Kid deserves a standing ovation for the production on this song. The first beat is crazy good and I was blown away when he flipped Ghetts’s song Top 3 Selected for the latter part of his first verse. The second beat was the one that really blew me away as the transition made sense but that beat is so mean and Ghetts’s more slowed down flow on it made it stand out even more. The last 15 seconds on the song even made a lasting impression as the squealing G-Funk sound gives the song one final punch. Fire and Brimstone goes so hard and the Dizzee Rascal ad-libs were a nice addition. Hop Out is another banger in the same vein as Fire and Brimstone. The way Ghetts switches in and out of different flows on this song is crazy. IC3 is a long overdue collaboration between Ghetts and Skepta but the fact that it’s finally happening now makes it so much more special. The two legends have clashed before and have been on radio sets together and IC3 is definitely makes for an iconic moment in UK history because of all of the history in the Movement and Boy Better Know era which Ghetts mentions in another song. Skepta utilizing his classic lines from Autopsy and the clip of their radio set with Kano at the end of the song where they spit each other’s lyrics makes the song so much more perfect for their first song together after all these years. Skepta’s flow on the song is straight fire while Ghetts’s is more laid back but he is able to float over the beat and showcase his signature rhyming style. As I mentioned before, there are so many different stages in Ghetts’s life and career and Autiobigraphy does an amazing job of going back into some significant moments. This section of the album is definitely the most personal with songs like Dead to Me and Sonya. There is also 10,000 Tears, which features Ed Sheeran. I didn’t really know what to expect from this song as the last time these two collaborated was before Ed Sheeran became one of the biggest musicians ever. I do love this song a lot. If it was Ghetts by himself, it would be an amazing song and if it was Ed by himself it would also be amazing, which speaks to how good it actually is. Proud Family is a song about loving one’s family unconditionally that really touches the soul. I hope that fans who know a bit about Ghetts’s family through songs like Jess Song were touched by this song as much as I was. One of the best things about this song is the hook, which Ghetts sings himself. I didn’t know that when it was released as a single so I was really impressed that he sounded so good. The album then moves on to a run of songs that go super hard. Skengman sounds like what the theme song would be if Ghetts played James Bond. The beat is so menacing and like I said about IC3, Ghetts floats on the beat like no other and spits one of the best lines on the album which is “I was 19 with a gun twice my age.” He then comes back in on the third verse with a mean verse where he attacks the beat in the way that Ghetto would back in the 2000s. Stormzy comes through with a dope verse as well. He doesn’t normally get to rap like this on his own albums so it was really nice to hear him with Ghetts on their first collab since Bad Boys. This song really does sound like an epic movie scene. The song Squeeze also sounds like an epic movie scene. Speaking of James Bond, Ghetts had a sick line on Dead To Me where he raps “I thought we was bonding to live and let die / For your eyes only you know me I'm Roger Moore” in reference to two Roger Moore James Bond films. No Mercy goes so fucking hard and I really wish that I could see it performed live. The hook is kind of quirky in a really fun way. It’s very playful even though the song’s content is so mean. The song features Pa Salieu, who I believe is the next big thing to make a significant impression on the UK scene if he hasn’t already. I highly recommend listening to his mixtape Send Them To Coventry, which I sort of liked at first but has really grown on me with every listen—now I love it. The song also features Salieu’s close collaborator BackRoad Gee, who never fails to bring the energy plenty of adlibs. I knew Crud was going to be a banger before Ghetts started rapping and I was not wrong at all. He went in on the song and his hook was really fun as well. When Giggs came in on the song, he really made it his own. They rap so differently but the beat works well for both of them. Giggs is very hit or miss for me. Sometimes he can be really bad but when he tries he can do incredible things and this verse was hard. The album’s momentum builds and comes to an end at the climax, which is Little Bo Peep. I have never heard a hip hop song like this ever. Wretch 32′s hook sounded incredible and though it did what it needed to do, I think a verse from him would’ve been amazing. Speaking of amazing, Dave killed it and Hamzaa used this song as her time to shine. Although there are some amazing features and Ghetts is the star of the show, one star of this album is producer TenBillion Dreams, who produced half of the album. His production style is very unique and excelled at making Ghetts’s rapping style really stand out. This album also did a great job at showing how Ghetts’s rapping style has evolved over the years. He’s more mature and his verses are very carefully worded. The crazy rhyme schemes are still there but it sounds much different; it shows his growth as an artist. Speaking of rapping and production, this album is not really a grime album at all, which is something I don’t really care about that much because this album is so good, Ghetts has given us plenty of Grime over the years and he is not just a Grime MC. My one issue with this album is the length and that is it. Conflict Of Interest is an incredible album that shows all the different sides to an artist that has freed himself from any limits that people have tried to put on him. It also shows the evolution of Ghetts and how he’s worked his way up to this moment and that it has finally paid off.

Fav Tracks: Fine Wine, Mozambique, Fire and Brimstone, Hop Out. IC3, Autobiography, Proud Family, Skengman, No Mercy, Crud

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thatbanjobusiness · 4 years

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Bluegrass Basics #1

WHAT IS BLUEGRASS?

I realize that, what with this being a bluegrass blog and all, I should probably start by explaining... this.

If you’ve hung out with me in the last year and a half, then you’ve been subjected (probably against your will, kicking and screaming) to a Haddock Talks About Bluegrass conversation. Within seconds, you may be bombarded to an inescapable wall of sound as I shriek about G runs, five-strings, and dudes wearing hats named weird stuff like Lester, Burkett, Arthel, Dorris, Junebug, Haskel, and Chi Chi. Understandably, to cope and survive, your mind might have blocked out the worst of the memories... leaving you now with the question, “Well, what is bluegrass? And why does Haddock find it so cool?”

At its simplest, bluegrass is a folk-inspired genre of music originating from the Southern United States that utilizes a core group of acoustic string instruments: guitar, banjo, string bass, mandolin, fiddle, and dobro. However, bluegrass is not a direct preservation of old folk music. Its biggest influences are Scots-Irish fiddle tunes, African-American blues, and gospel music, and in that you can hear a lot of "old" sounds. But bluegrass also began within a commercial setting. Most people date it to the mid-1940s—yes, it's that new!—and it not only integrated new compositions and contemporary songs, but it brought about innovative instrumental techniques that most audiences had never heard before. Since its inception, bluegrass has been a music of unique juxtaposition; it's simultaneously homespun and commercial, simple and technically complex, straddling tradition with truly progressive innovation.

Also. Unlike almost every other genre that exist out there ever, bluegrass can be traced back to and centralized around a *SINGLE* human being. Yeah. That’s right. ONE dude essentially started his own motherfucking genre.

Enter: the Father of Bluegrass. Mr. Bill Monroe (1911-1996).

This guy.

1. HOW THIS SHIT GOT STARTED

Bill Monroe’s music at the time was considered hillbilly music. (“Hillbilly” was the name of the genre before we changed it to “country”). He was a radio star starting in the 1930s, and by the late 1930s, Bill and his band had become members of a popular, wide-reaching hillbilly music program, the Grand Ole Opry, whose radio signal stretched across the American South. Bill’s music wove together several influences: in particular, he combined the sound of old Scots-Irish fiddle tunes with the pitch bends, syncopation, and blue notes of African-American blues. For good measure, he chucked in four-part gospel songs, threw his singing into the high tenor stratosphere, and pushed the music forward with an urgent drive.

And the name of his act? Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys.

Hmhm... something sounds familiar here... something to do with “blue” and “grass,” maybe.

Bill’s music underwent changes, different personnel, different instruments. Every musician’s contribution is important and worth noting, but regrettably my post would be too long if I talked about them here. I will, however, mention what’s often considered the last piece of the puzzle. On December 8, 1945, Bill introduced a new musician he had just hired, a twenty-one year old banjo picker whose style of playing was so unexpected to audiences that you could barely hear the music above the amazed cheers and shouts from the live crowd. People who heard it on the radio talked about the banjo picker all week; some blokes debated about whether one person was playing or several, or if it was even a banjo at all. I know peeps today don’t tend to think of banjos as “cool” and all, but he was shredding up the instrument like some banjo Jimi Hendrix, as far as they were concerned. It was so exciting. Bill was already a popular performer; under this ensemble he had between then and 1948, he was launched to even more popularity.

I’m not trying to focus just on the banjo, but my point here is to emphasize how bluegrass did invoke monumentally new ideas.

That 1946-1948 group is what we usually consider the first-ever bluegrass band. They created the initial blueprint by which a unique band style emerged. Now, some standard musical features of the genre got locked in during the 1950s after several seminal Blue Grass Boys bandmates left and formed their own band. But this original group’s sound started A Movement™ that trickled down over the decades. New-budding musicians began imitating Bill’s sound in their bands. And also, Bill’s band had constant turnover, meaning that a ton of people went into the Blue Grass Boys, got influenced by Bill, then left to form their own ensembles, carrying with them the musical ideas they’d learned from Monroe.

(And by “constant turnover,” I mean—no joke—Bill had something like 200 official band members over the course of his career.)

^^^ The “Classic Band” of Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys, c. 1947. From left to right: Bill Monroe (mandolin), Chubby Wise (fiddle), Birch Monroe (bass), Lester Flatt (guitar), and Earl Scruggs (banjo). When talking about the classic band, the bassist usually listed is Cedric Rainwater, but here (and legitimately part of the band at the time) is Bill’s older brother Birch.

In the late 1950s and 1960s, mainstream country music had to find a way to compete with the new and oh-so-frustratingly-popular rock-and-roll. Mainstream country music strayed away from scratchy fiddles and banjers and moved to smooth, pop-inspired, electric guitars and background orchestration. And if you didn’t sound like that, you probably weren’t going to be played on mainstream country radio. But there was a notable cluster of acoustic string band musicians who had been left behind... those people and groups who had branched straight off Bill Monroe. By this point, they were distinct enough that their music began to be regularly referred to as... yeah, you guessed it... bluegrass music.

Having been ignored by radio, bluegrass continued through other means, such as festivals that began in the late 60s and 70s. Many musicians brought their own instruments to jam, and to this day, bluegrass is a genre in which it’s common to both pick tunes with friends and family as a social event and go out to see professional performers.

As new generations have entered bluegrass, new ideas and sounds have funneled into it. However, I feel like the theme of combining tradition with innovation remains. For instance, in the 1960s with the Folk Revival, second generation bluegrass musicians simultaneously inserted more several-centuries-old folk songs into the bluegrass repertoire (ex: Fox on the Run), and brought in contemporary rock and pop elements to their bands’s sounds. And while today you may meet bluegrass purists who want to stick with what they heard in the 40s and 50s, you’ll see just as many if not more musicians continue to innovate and expand the genre.

And expand it they will.

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2. WHAT MAKES BLUEGRASS MUSIC BLUEGRASS?

As I’ve said before, bluegrass is a somewhat progressive amalgamation and reformulation of older music styles combined with contemporary music. Bluegrass might have been based in part on ideas from British Isles fiddle tunes and African-American blues, but it’s certainly not regurgitating how people played in decades past. Familiar, old elements combine with new, creative, and original concepts. You keep a healthy dose of both old and new.

It’s because of bluegrass that the banjo was completely reformulated as an instrument: changed from a comedic prop that was strummed into an intensely-picked solo instrument. Within bluegrass, banjo performance technique has continued to evolve, new ideas and styles building on top of one another. And let’s not forget the other instruments! The first dobro in a bluegrass band went in extremely unique directions compared to what was heard at the time, taking influences from everything down to banjo technique. At the same time, bluegrass has provided the space for styles like the old-time hoedown fiddle in periods of music where fiddle was ignored.

But....... as you’ve probably been wondering this entire post.... what does this genre sound like?

^^^ The typical instrument set-up for a bluegrass band. In the back is a string bass. In front, left to right, is a banjo, mandolin, fiddle, guitar, and dobro. If you’re not familiar with how to distinguish instruments: basses are plucked and low pitch; banjos sound twangy and play short note values; mandolins are a high-pitched instrument with a mellower sound that often employ tremolo (quickly undulating notes by strumming the strings up and down rapidly); fiddle is... I mean, it’s a violin; guitar is a mellower acoustic instrument that blends sonically with everything; and the dobro (maybe you’ve heard it referred to as a “steel guitar” or “Hawaiian guitar”) has a... uhhh... it’s a unique hound dog tone I have difficulties describing but is very distinct to hear.

A typical ensemble consists of mandolin, guitar, banjo, fiddle, string bass, and sometimes dobro. On rarer occasions, you may see other instruments like autoharp or harmonica (drums are usually considered horrible, forbidden things, even though... for the record... some high-profile bluegrass bands have used them). You’ll notice bluegrass is a distinctly acoustic string band sound.

There are also, of course, vocals, and in bluegrass, there is notable emphasis on tight two-, three-, and four-part harmony. However, what’s interesting about bluegrass as versus, say, other strains of country, is that for bluegrass, it’s about the full band and not just the lead singer. It’s as important to pay attention to the technically-driven solos (“breaks”) that the instruments play between sung verses. Many bluegrass pieces are straight out instrumentals, too.

Every instrument has a role or roles it fulfills in a bluegrass band. In the background, instruments may play rhythm or fills. Rhythm keeps the basic beat. Fills are unobtrusive melodic-sounding fragments that hide behind the vocalist(s) singing the main melody. And when there’s no singing, instruments take turns in the spotlight playing breaks. You can hear any instrument play a break. It’s to note that breaks are often improvised or semi-improvised, which is half of the fun and skill of watching the musicians perform. Ergo, even if the song itself may or may not have simple chord structures and lyrics, it’s also technically advanced with an expectation that every musician can perform fast-paced solos they improvise on the fly.

There’s different types of guitar styles I’ve seen in bluegrass. I’m not a guitarist, so I don’t want to elaborate too far and share incorrect information. However, it’s fair to say that guitar can be anything from a backup rhythm chord strummer to a flat-picked, fast-paced, melodic soloist. There is a VERY distinct guitar fill that happens at the end of lines, phrases, or sections called the G run you’ll hear everywhere. Fiddle I’ve also heard a wide variety of styles. On the dobro side, the dobro tends not to be the “Hawaiian” sound you may be familiar with on a steel guitar, but more geared toward quick, technical, bluesy stuff. Bluegrass banjo has several styles, but the most prototypical is the Scruggs style, where the banjo does rapid-fire, ornamented, three-fingered picking in which a melody line is pulled out at the same time you’re also picking background chord notes.

To describe bluegrass vocals, you’ll sometimes hear the phrase “high lonesome” thrown around. I don’t hear anywhere as much high lonesome sound in contemporary bands as I do first generation, but the high lonesome sound is a description of piercing, high-range vocals. Bill Monroe would even take songs that were usually played in the key of G and pitch them higher into A or B, pushing his and the ensemble’s vocals into a higher range. I remember listening to Monroe and thinking to myself, “Even though it’s male vocals, why is it so easy for me to sing to?” Because I’m a fucking mezzosoprano, and there’s times Monroe hits and holds notes that are at the top of my range. Hot damn.

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Rhythmically, bluegrass tends to be a driving genre of music. A term that gets thrown around a bit is “drive.” Even on the slow songs, you may hear the instruments push or strain forward. Beat-wise, bluegrass tends to emphasize both a strong downbeat and hit heavy offbeats in a boom-chick style. That last sentence might not have made sense to non-musicians, so I’ll explain...

When we listen to music, we can clap to it. We can also count along to any song as we clap. Music has an innate structure where, when we count, the sound seems organized in groups of two, three, or four. So, when we count to music, we’ll count repetitively. One song may be groups of two (you’ll count “One two, one two, one two”), groups of three (“One two three, one two three”), or groups of four. Every time you hit the “one,” it sounds bigger. It’s more emphasized. It’s restarting the pattern or unit of counting that’s inherent to the rhythmic structure of music.

Now, you can subdivide those numbers between your claps. That means you’d count “One (and) two (and), one (and) two (and),” where the “ands” tend to feel smaller and less-emphasized. Those “ands” are called offbeats. In bluegrass, you’ll hear both the numbers and the “ands” clearly hit. The string bass will play the one’s and two’s, while perhaps the mandolin and banjo are emphatically hitting the “ands” in the background.

There are subgenres within bluegrass. You may hear people refer to newgrass, progressive bluegrass, jamgrass, punkgrass, etc. Put a word in front of it, add the word “grass,” and it probably exists. Jewgrass exists and it’s awesome. There’s fusions, too. The Native Howl is a band that combines thrash metal and bluegrass. Gangstagrass is a band that combines bluegrass with hip hop. It’s also to note that bluegrass has long since become international, and there are notable communities and bands of bluegrass from everywhere to Japan to the Czech Republic.

3. RECOMMENDATIONS FOR GETTING STARTED?

Ummhmhmhm I honestly need a separate post to begin sharing videos, bands, periods of bluegrass, and more. It’s diverse and I love everything from the music coming out in 2020 to the stuff heard in 1947.

I realize that this post skews more toward first generation bluegrass and the starting bands in Ye Olde Days. Because of that, I’ll say this much: the Big Three bands of the early years were Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys, Flatt & Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys, and the Stanley Brothers and the Clinch Mountain Boys. Bill Monroe’s music is “the original” and is based, at least in his mind, the most on the fiddle tunes he grew up with. Flatt & Scruggs skew somewhat more toward a popular culture sound with smoother vocals and instruments like the dobro that other early bluegrass bands did not use. The Stanley Brothers lean the most to mountain old-time music. Every band is wonderful in their own way and I love listening to all.

I’ll leave this post with what was my gateway song into bluegrass. This was the first song I listened to with the intent of experiencing bluegrass, not expecting to like it, but being pleasantly surprised. I fell in love with the song and... well... as you’ve seen... I’m a year and a half into the genre and still charging strong.

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I look forward to continuing to learn about bluegrass, refine my understanding of it, and share those discoveries with y’all in my future posts.

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emerald-studies · 4 years

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The complex Nina Simone

“Born Eunice Kathleen Waymon in Tryon, North Carolina on February 21st, 1933, Nina’s prodigious talent as a musician was evident early on when she started playing piano by ear at the age of three. Her mother, a Methodist minister, and her father, a handyman and preacher himself, couldn’t ignore young Eunice’s God-given gift of music. Raised in the church on the straight and narrow, her parents taught her right from wrong, to carry herself with dignity, and to work hard. She played piano – but didn’t sing – in her mother’s church, displaying remarkable talent early in her life. Able to play virtually anything by ear, she was soon studying classical music with an Englishwoman named Muriel Mazzanovich, who had moved to the small southern town. It was from these humble roots that Eunice developed a lifelong love of Johann Sebastian Bach, Chopin, Brahms, Beethoven and Schubert.After graduating valedictorian of her high school class, the community raised money for a scholarship for Eunice to study at Julliard in New York City before applying to the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Her family had already moved to the City Of Brotherly Love, but Eunice’s hopes for a career as a pioneering African American classical pianist were dashed when the school denied her admission. To the end, she herself would claim that racism was the reason she did not attend. While her original dream was unfulfilled, Eunice ended up with an incredible worldwide career as Nina Simone – almost by default.

One fateful day in 1954, looking to supplement her income, Eunice auditioned to sing at the Midtown Bar & Grill on Pacific Avenue in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Word spread about this new singer and pianist who was dipping into the songbooks of Gershwin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and the like, transforming popular tunes of the day into a unique synthesis of jazz, blues, and classical music. Her rich, deep velvet vocal tones, combined with her mastery of the keyboard, soon attracted club goers up and down the East Coast. In order to hide the fact that she was singing in bars, Eunice’s mother would refer to the practice as “working in the fires of hell”, overnight Eunice Waymon became Nina Simone by taking the nickname “Nina” meaning “little one” in Spanish and “Simone” after the actress Simone Signoret.At the age of twenty-four, Nina came to the attention of the record industry. After submitting a demo of songs she had recorded during a performance in New Hope, Pennsylvania, she was signed by Syd Nathan, owner of the Ohio-based King Records (home to James Brown), to his Jazz imprint, Bethlehem Records. The boisterous Nathan had insisted on choosing songs for her debut set, but eventually relented and allowed Nina to delve in the repertoire she had been performing at clubs up and down the eastern seaboard. One of Nina’s stated musical influences was Billie Holiday and her inspired reading of “Porgy” (from “Porgy & Bess”) heralded the arrival of a new talent on the national scene. At the same mammoth 13 hour session in 1957, recorded in New York City, Nina also cut “My Baby Just Cares For Me,” previously recorded by Nate King Cole, Count Basie, and Woody Herman. The song was used by Chanel in a perfume commercial in Europe in the 1980’s and it became a massive hit for Nina, a British chart topper at #5, and thus a staple of her repertoire for the rest of her career.

Nina Simone’s stay with Bethlehem Records was short lived and in 1959, after moving to New York City, she was signed by Joyce Selznik, the eastern talent scout for Colpix Records, a division of Columbia Pictures. Months after the release of her debut LP for the label (1959‘s The Amazing Nina Simone), Nina was performing at her first major New York City venue, the mid-Manhattan-located Town Hall. Sensing that her live performances would capture the essential spontaneity of her artistry, Colpix opted to record her September 12, 1959 show. “You Can Have Him,” a glorious torch song previously cut by Peggy Lee and Ella Fitzgerald, was one of the highlights of the evening. The song opened with a dazzling keyboard arpeggio that would become her signature for decades. So momentous was the Town Hall performance that it inspired some of the same musicians, featuring the vocals of Nina’s only daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, to do a tribute to a sold out audience over forty five years later.As Nina’s reputation as an engaging live performer grew, it wasn’t long before she was asked to perform at the prestigious Newport Jazz Festival. Accompanied on the June 30th, 1960 show by Al Schackman, a guitarist who would go on to become Nina’s longest-running musical colleague, bassist Chris White, and drummer Bobby Hamilton, the dynamic show was recorded by the Colpix. The subsequent release in 1961 of the old blues tune “Trouble In Mind” as a single gave Nina her third charted record.Her stay with Colpix resulted in some wonderful albums – nine in all – included Nina’s version of Bessie Smith’s blues classic “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out.” Issued as a single in 1960, it became Nina’s second charted Pop and R&B hit and one of two Colpix tracks to achieve such a feat during her five year stint with the label. Other stand out tracks from that era were the soulful song “Cotton Eyed Joe,” the torch tune “The Other Women,” and the Norwegian folk rendition of “Black Is The Color Of My True Love’s Hair” – all beautiful examples of Nina Simone at her storytelling best, painting a vivid picture with her skill as a lyrical interpreter. During this time with the label, Nina recorded one civil rights song, Oscar Brown Jr.’s “Brown Baby,” which was included on her fifth album for the label, At The Village Gate.“Critics started to talk about what sort of music I was playing,” writes Nina in her 1991 autobiography I Put A Spell On You, “and tried to find a neat slot to file it away in. It was difficult for them because I was playing popular songs in a classical style with a classical piano technique influenced by cocktail jazz. On top of that I included spirituals and children’s song in my performances, and those sorts of songs were automatically identified with the folk movement. So, saying what sort of music I played gave the critics problems because there was something from everything in there, but it also meant I was appreciated across the board – by jazz, folk, pop and blues fans as well as admirers of classical music.” Clearly Nina Simone was not an artist who could be easily classified.

Nina’s Colpix recordings cemented her appeal to a nightclub based U.S. audience. Once she moved to Phillips, a division of Dutch-owned Mercury Records, she was ready to expand her following globally. Her first LP for the label, 1964’s In Concert, signaled Nina’s undaunted stand for freedom and justice for all, stamping her irrevocably as a pioneer and inspirational leader in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. Her own original “Mississippi Goddam” was banned throughout the South but such a response made no difference in Nina’s unyielding commitment to liberty; subsequent groundbreaking recordings for Philips like “Four Women” (recorded September 1965) and “Strange Fruit” continued to keep Nina in the forefront of the few performers willing to use music as a vehicle for social commentary and change. Such risks were seldom taken by artists during that time of such dramatic civil upheaval.For years, Nina felt there was much about the way that she made her living that was less than appealing. One gets a sense of that in the following passage from I Put A Spell on You where she explains her initial reluctance to perform material that was tied to the Civil Rights Movement.“Nightclubs were dirty, making records was dirty, popular music was dirty and to mix all that with politics seemed senseless and demeaning. And until songs like ‘Mississippi Goddam’ just burst out of me, I had musical problems as well. How can you take the memory of a man like [Civil Rights activist] Medgar Evers and reduce all that he was to three and a half minutes and a simple tune? That was the musical side of it I shied away from; I didn’t like ‘protest music’ because a lot of it was so simple and unimaginative it stripped the dignity away from the people it was trying to celebrate. But the Alabama church bombing and the murder of Medgar Evers stopped that argument and with ‘Mississippi Goddam,’ I realized there was no turning back.”

Nina was deeply affected by these two events. In 1962, she had befriended noted playwright Lorraine Hansberry and spoke often with her about the Civil Rights Movement. While she was moved by her conversations with Hansberry, it took the killing of Medgar Evers and the four girls in Birmingham to act as catalysts for a transformation of Nina’s career.There were many sides to Nina Simone. Among her most amazing recordings were the original and so-soulful version “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood” and “I Put A Spell On You” (which had reached to #23 in the U.S. charts), eerily moody, unrestrained, drama to the max; “Ne Me Quitte Pas” tender, poignant, filled with melancholy; and with gospel-like fervor, the hypnotic voodoo of “See-Line Woman.” In her own unrivaled way, Nina also loved to venture into the more earthy side of life. After she signed with RCA Records in 1967 (a deal her then husband/manager Andy Stroud had negotiated), her very first recordings for the label included the saucy “Do I Move You?” and the undeniably sexual “I Want A Little Sugar In My Bowl” which were from the concept album entitled Nina Sings The Blues. Backed by a stellar cast of New York CIty session musicians, the album was far and away Nina’s most down-home recording session. By this time, Nina had become central to a circle of African American playwrights, poets, and writers all centered in Harlem along with the previously mentioned Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin and Langston Hughes. The outcome from one of the relationships became a highlight of the LP with the song “Backlash Blues,” a song that’s lyrics originated from the last poem Langston Hughes submitted for publication prior to his death in May, 1967 and gave to Nina.Nina’s seven years with RCA produced some remarkable recordings, ranging from two songs featured in the Broadway musical “Hair” (combined into a medley, “Ain’t Got No – I Got Life,” a #2 British hit in 1968) to a Simone-ified version of George Harrison’s “Here Comes The Sun,” which remained in Nina’s repertoire all the way through to her final performance in 2002. Along the way at RCA, songs penned by Bob Dylan (“Just Like A Woman”), the brothers Gibb (“To Love Somebody”), and Tina Turner (“Funkier Than A Mosquito’s Tweeter”) took pride of place alongside Nina’s own anthem of empowerment, the classic “To Be Young, Gifted, & Black,” a song written in memory of Nina’s good friend Lorraine Hansberry. The title of the song coming from a play Hansberry had been working on just prior to her death.After Nina left RCA, she spent a good deal of the 1970’s and early 1980’s living in Liberia, Barbados, England, Belgium, France, Switzerland and The Netherlands. In 1978, for the first time since she left RCA, Nina was convinced by U.S. jazz veteran Creed Taylor to make an album for his CTI label. This would be her first new studio album in six years and she recorded it in Belgium with strings and background vocals cut in New York City. With the kind of “clean” sound that was a hallmark of CTI recordings, the Nina Simone album that emerged was simply brilliant. Nina herself would later claimed that she ”hated” the record but many fans strongly disagreed. With an eighteen piece string section conducted by David Mathews (known for his arrangements on James Brown’s records), the results were spectacular. The title track, Randy Newman’s evocative “Baltimore,” was an inspired Nina Simone choice. It had a beautifully constructed reggae-like beat and used some of the finest musicians producer Creed Taylor could find including Nina’s guitarist and music director, Al Schackman.

Aside from 1982’s Fodder On My Wings that Nina recorded for Carrere Records, two albums she made of the independent VPI label in Hollywood (Nina’s Back and Live And Kickin’) in 1985, and a 1987 Live At Vine Street set recorded for Verve, Nina Simone did not make another full length album until Elektra A&R executive Michael Alago persuaded her to record again. After much wining and dining, Nina finally signed on the dotted line. Elektra tapped producer Andre Fischer, noted conductor Jeremy Lubbock, and a trio of respected musicians to provide the suitable environment for this highly personal reading of “A Single Woman,” which became the centerpiece and title track for Nina Simone’s final full length album.With two marriages behind her in 1993 she settled in Carry-le-Rout, near Aix-en-Provence in Southern France. She would continue to tour through the 1990’s and became very much ‘the single woman’ she sang about on her last label recording. She rarely traveled without an entourage, but if you were fortunate enough to get to know the woman behind the music you could glimpse the solitary soul that understood the pain of being misunderstood. It was one of Nina’s many abilities to comprehend the bittersweet qualities of life and then parlay them into a song that made her such an enduring and fascinating person.

In her autobiography, Nina Simone writes that her function as an artist is “…to make people feel on a deep level. It’s difficult to describe because it’s not something you can analyze; to get near what it’s about you have to play it. And when you’ve caught it, when you’ve got the audience hooked, you always know because it’s like electricity hanging in the air.” It was that very electricity that made her such an important artist to so many and it will be that electricity that continues to turn on new people all over the world for years to come.Nina Simone died in her sleep at her home in Carry-le-Rout, Bouches-du-Rhone on April 21, 2003. Her funeral service was attended by Miriam Makeba, Patti Labelle, poet Sonia Sanchez, actor Ossie Davis and hundreds of others. Elton John sent a floral tribute with the message, “You were the greatest and I love you”.” (source)

Watch “What Happened Miss Simone?”

#blm #blacklivesmatter #nina simone #black musicians #black artists #black royalty

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kemetic-dreams · 5 years

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Christianity in Africa Jesus in the Morning, Voodoo in the Evening

The old natural religions continue to thrive in Africa. While Christianity and Islam vie for supremacy in many countries, they have failed to banish the rain gods and spirits south of the Sahara. Frequently the pagan rites have fused with a faith in Jesus Christ.

Six men in flowing white robes stride across the square in Maryal Bai. One village elder, his features gnarled, is wearing a leopard-skin hat. Akoon Duong is a priest, as are his five companions. To demonstrate his spiritual power the old man brandishes an elaborately carved spear, as do the other "spear masters" - the high priests of pagan nature worship. Akoon Duong has inherited these trappings of power from his grandfather, who in turn had received them from his own grandfather.

The men thrust their spears into the muddy ground and dance. One of them pounds out the beat on a bush drum. Scrawny arms flail upward, quivering in ecstasy. They render their songs in high, reedy voices. If there were a drought, they would have had to invoke Deng, the rain god. But this is the wet season; malaria can strike at any time, so they pray for deliverance from disease.

Maryal Bai is in southern Sudan, 15 miles from the no-go area between the Islamic government's militias and the guerrillas of the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA). The village was the demarcation line for the recently ended North-South war and the escalating conflict in Darfur.

Just a few miles to the north, Sharia law - with its punishments extending from whipping to dismemberment - prevails. The South is mainly inhabited by Christians. For decades the region has been ravaged by fighting. Usually over matters of faith.

Camped along the majestic Gazelle River are thousands of refugees, the sableskinned, long-legged people of the Dinka tribe. Once they had fled to Darfur from the war in the South; now they are returning to the lands of their ancestors.

Time has stood still

The clash of civilizations and religions, the focus of so much debate in Europe and America, can be witnessed firsthand here in Africa. And today Maryal Bai is one of its many fronts. Islamic Fundamentalism is advancing from the west, penetrating all the way to the continent's eastern reaches. In some regions it collides head-on with an equally aggressive brand of Christianity. The clashes are becoming increasingly bitter because the desert is expanding, bringing more poverty in its wake. According to Georg Brunold, a Swiss expert on African affairs, a front line is crystallizing here that will spark "decades of war." Yet, as hard as the two great monotheistic faiths have struggled for supremacy, they have failed to wrest power from priests like Akoon Duong. With its nature deities, the old African mythology is often the only stabilizing force in a world full of suffering, displacement and death, where everything is in constant flux but rarely changes for the better, where - in many respects - time has stood still. This is a world populated by nymphs and sirens, by elfin spirits, sun and moon gods, and by animal deities such as cows, stags, lambs and calves. At the end of the 19th century, the British ethnologist Edward Burnett Tylor coined the term animism (the Latin word anima means soul or breath) to describe this pantheon, correctly assuming that plants, animals and objects also have souls in the minds of these "primitive peoples."

Cult of the dead

Despite the best efforts of Christian and Islamic missionaries, some 40 percent of the people in Burkina Faso, western Africa, are still considered animist. In East African Ethiopia, a largely Christian domain, the figure is still thought to be 10 percent. Yet these numbers remain pure conjecture. In truth, religious distinctions have long blurred, indeed evaporated, in Africa. Someone who attends church in the morning and the mosque at midday might easily invite a voodoo priest over in the evening to read the kola nuts.

DER SPIEGEL

Sub-Saharan Africa.

Practically everywhere the cult of the dead intermingles with Christianity, according to religious scholar Fritz Stenger from the Catholic University of East Africa in Nairobi. "There is scarcely any distinction between the secular and religious spheres; faith is omnipresent," says Stenger.

Should a child succumb to malaria, the relatives - according to Stenger - would partly blame the lack of effective medicine. However, the belief that its death was willed by God would carry greater weight. It is therefore no surprise that doctors attending to the sick often arrive with the preacher, medicine man and local sorcerer. Stenger, who has spent more than three decades in Africa, has observed this coexistence of divergent faiths throughout the so-called "Dark Continent."

In Kenya, for example, the modern minded Kikuyu, flashing cell phones and Ray-Bans, happily journey to Mount Kenya and pray to Ngai, the supreme God of the animists - despite often being members of one of the numerous Christian sects, such as the Pentecostals or the gospel churches. In this way, Stenger adds, Christianity and the pagan belief in nature deities and demons mutually impact one another. The existence of a god of creation in nearly all pre-Christian African religions encourages this process.

This cross-fertilization is not as strange as it may sound, even to Christians in the West. Something quite similar occurred there centuries ago, "when pagan Germanic customs mingled with Christian rites," says Stenger. "Even Christmas - that most traditional of Christian celebrations - has ancient Germanic roots."

In Benin City, Nigeria's "human trafficking hub," where the women from the region's slums begin their journeys to Europe's red-light districts, the path to the gods of nature runs through a backyard reeking of urine. The voodoo priest Chief John Odeh receives his flock in a white gown. His upholstered throne is trimmed with red satin. Beside him hang drums made of cowhide and the sword-like insignia of his position, known as Eben and Ada.

"Christianity has destroyed our culture. The people have lost faith in our ancient gods and values," the animist priest laments. Ape skulls, amulets and shells are laid out on the concrete floor of the adjacent garage. Figures of Ogun, the god of iron, Orunmila, the god of wisdom, and Olokun, the god of waters, adorn this unusual shrine. Osalobua, the supreme God, punishes theft swiftly and without mercy, says Odeh. And the dead hear every lie told by the living. "The pastors go to church in the morning and preach Christianity," says the voodoo priest. "And in the evening they come to me and speak with their forefathers."

A woman carrying a bowl of blood in Ouidah, Benin following an animal sacrifice.

Does He approve?

Odeh shrugs his shoulders. "Christianity cannot compete with our ancestors. Your God is impotent against Shango, the god of thunder and lightning. That's why the Christian pastors in Nigeria all die so young." The voodoo priest is holding some kola nuts in his hand. He scatters them on the dusty floor and prophesies the future. His predictions are as accurate as horoscopes in the yellow press.

Odeh celebrates his masses in Otofure, a village some 20 minutes from Benin City. This, inside the tropical jungle, is the realm of Owa Oba Asoon, a weathered wooden figurine with a greenish sheen that embodies the King of the Night. The priest blows into his cow horn, the altar boys beat their drums. The ground is littered with animal skulls, fetishes - and empty liquor bottles.

As the voodoo mass begins, Odeh flourishes a chicken over his head, mumbles unintelligible incantations and pours liquor over the skulls. Then he takes a knife and cuts the bird's throat. Blood fountains in every direction, splattering onto the wooden fetishes - crudely carved figures with huge penises. More liquor is dispensed, another invocation mumbled, bringing the juju ceremony to its conclusion. Tribute has been paid and the King of the Night appeased.

Satisfied, Odeh pockets the $100 this service nets and hustles to his car. The faithful are waiting in the city. Nervously he glances at his watch, which is made of gold. His car too suggests an affluent lifestyle. "Oh well," he says disingenuously, "that's how things are nowadays. Nothing's free in life except death."

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blackkudos · 4 years

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Darius Rucker

Darius Carlos Rucker (born May 13, 1966) is an American singer and songwriter. He first gained fame as the lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist of rock band Hootie & the Blowfish, which he founded in 1986 at the University of South Carolina along with Mark Bryan, Jim "Soni" Sonefeld, and Dean Felber. The band released five studio albums with him as a member and charted six top 40 hits on the Billboard Hot 100. Rucker co-wrote most of the songs with the other members.

He released a solo R&B album, Back to Then in 2002 on Hidden Beach Recordings but no singles from it charted. Six years later, Rucker signed to Capitol Nashville as a country music singer, releasing the album, Learn to Live that year. Its first single, "Don't Think I Don't Think About It", made him the first black artist to reach number one on the Hot Country Songs charts since Charley Pride in 1983. (Ray Charles hit number one in March 1985 in a duet with Willie Nelson with "Seven Spanish Angels".) It was followed by two more number one singles, "It Won't Be Like This for Long" and "Alright" and the number three hit "History in the Making". In 2009, he became the first black American to win the New Artist Award from the Country Music Association, and the second black person to win any award from the association. A second album, Charleston, SC 1966, was released on October 12, 2010. The album includes the number one singles, "Come Back Song" and "This".

Early life

Rucker was born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina, where his family history goes back generations. He lives in Charleston with his wife and three children. His single mother, Carolyn, a nurse at Medical University of South Carolina, raised him with his three sisters and two brothers. According to Rucker, his father was never around, and Rucker saw him only before church on Sundays. His father was in a gospel band called The Traveling Echoes. Rucker has said that he had a typical Southern African-American upbringing. His family attended church every Sunday and was economically poor, and at one point, his mother, her two sisters, his grandmother and 14 children were all living in a three-bedroom house. But he says that he looks back on his childhood with very fond memories. His sister, L'Corine, recalled that singing was always his dream.

Hootie & the Blowfish

Darius Rucker has been the lead singer of Hootie & the Blowfish since its formation in 1986. He met fellow band members Mark Bryan, Jim "Soni" Sonefeld, and Dean Felber while attending the University of South Carolina. Bryan first heard Rucker singing in the shower, and the two became a duo, playing R.E.M. covers at a local venue. They later recruited Felber and finally Sonefeld joined in 1989. As a member of Hootie & the Blowfish, Rucker has recorded six studio albums: Cracked Rear View – 1994, Fairweather Johnson – 1996, Musical Chairs – 1998, Scattered, Smothered & Covered – 2000, Hootie & the Blowfish and Looking for Lucky – 2005, also charting within the top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100 six times. All six albums feature songs that Rucker, Bryan and Felber wrote. As the frontman, Rucker began to be called simply "Hootie" by fans, though the band title combines the nicknames of his college friends. Before his rise to fame, he lived in the basement of the Sigma Phi Epsilon house at the University of South Carolina, attempting to launch his career through the college bar scene.

Rucker's signature contribution to the band is his baritone voice, which Rolling Stone has called "ingratiating," TIME has called "low, gruff, [and] charismatic," and Entertainment Weekly has characterized as a "barrelhouse growl." Rucker said they "flipped" the formula of the all black band with a white frontman, like Frank Sinatra performing with Count Basie. Musically, he has sometimes been criticized or spoofed for not being "black enough". Saturday Night Live ran a sketch of Tim Meadows playing Rucker leading beer-drinking, white fraternity members in a counter-march to Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March. He also received death threats for singing the Hootie song "Drowning," a protest song against the flying of the Confederate flag above the South Carolina statehouse.

Shortly after gaining a measure of fame, Felber and Rucker (who consider themselves best friends) moved into an apartment in Columbia, South Carolina. With Rucker's recognition as the frontman of a successful band came increased opportunities. In October 1995, he was asked to sing the national anthem at the World Series. Frank Sinatra invited him to sing at his 80th birthday party; he sang "The Lady Is a Tramp." That same week, he made a voice cameo in an episode of the sitcom Friends. He also joined Nanci Griffith on the song "Gulf Coast Highway" for her 1997 album Blue Roses from the Moons, and sang backing vocals on Radney Foster's 1999 album See What You Want to See. He encouraged Atlantic Records to agree to a deal with Edwin McCain and made a guest appearance on McCain's debut album, Honor Among Thieves.

In regard to the future of Hootie & the Blowfish, Rucker was quoted by CBS news as stating in late 2011, "I don't think we'll ever break up totally. We're Hootie & the Blowfish. ... We'll make another record and do another tour someday. I don't know when, but it will happen. There's one more in us." After a ten-year hiatus, Rucker and the band announced that they will be touring with Barenaked Ladies in 2019 while releasing a new album the same year.

Their sixth studio album Imperfect Circle was released on November 1, 2019.

Solo career

In 2001, he made his solo R&B debut album, The Return of Mongo Slade, for Atlantic Records. Because of contractual changes, it was never released by the label. Hidden Beach Recordings, an independent label, acquired the masters from Atlantic and released the album as Back to Then in July 2002. The album included work from the production team of Jill Scott, and she made an appearance on the track "Hold On." The single "This Is My World" was featured in the 2001 comedy film Shallow Hal. In regards to the album, "That was just a minute in my life," he later told The Arizona Republic about the record. "I was listening to a lot of Notorious B.I.G. and Lauryn Hill at that time, and I wanted to make a neo soul record." He also said in the article that he doesn't anticipate recording an R&B-styled disc again. "Country music is my day job now. I'll probably do this till it's all over, but that album was a lot of fun."

Rucker appeared on a pop-star edition of the quiz show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? in July 2001. He also portrayed a singing cowboy in a television commercial for the fast-food company Burger King, promoting its TenderCrisp Bacon Cheddar Ranch sandwich in 2005. In the commercial, he sang a jingle set to the tune of "Big Rock Candy Mountain." In 2006 Rucker lent his voice to the track "God's Reasons" written by Dean Dinning and Joel A. Miller for the film The Still Life.

Country music2008–2009: Learn to Live

In early 2008, Rucker signed to Capitol Records Nashville as the beginning of a career in country music. His first solo single, "Don't Think I Don't Think About It" (which he co-wrote with Clay Mills) debuted at No. 51 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs charts for the week of May 3, 2008. It is the first single from his second album, Learn to Live. For this album, Rucker worked with Frank Rogers, a record producer who has also produced for Brad Paisley and Trace Adkins. Rucker also made his Grand Ole Opry debut in July 2008. The single reached number one in September, making Rucker the first solo, African-American artist to chart a number one country hit since Charley Pride's "Night Games" in 1983.

Learn to Live was certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) on February 6, 2009, and received a platinum certification on August 7, 2009. The album's second single, "It Won't Be Like This for Long", spent three weeks at the top of the country chart in mid-2009. Its follow-up, "Alright", became Rucker's third straight No. 1 hit, making him the first singer to have his first three country singles reach No. 1 since Wynonna in 1992. The album's fourth single, "History in the Making" was released in September and peaked at No. 3. The singles also crossed over to the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at 35, 36, 30 and 61.

Billboard magazine said that "there's a sense of purpose that makes Rucker feel like a member of the country family, rather than calculating interloper." Rucker made visits to various country stations around the United States, explaining that he was aware that he was the "new kid on the block." Mike Culotta, the program director of Tampa, Florida, radio station WQYK-FM expected that Rucker would be "somebody who would have entitlement," but instead said that "Darius engaged everybody." When Rucker found that "Don't Think I Don't Think About It" went to number one, he cried. On November 11, 2009, Rucker won the Country Music Association New Artist of the Year award (formerly known as the Horizon Award), making him the first African American to do so since the award was introduced in 1981. Only one other African American has won at the CMAs: Charley Pride, who won entertainer of the year in 1971 and male vocalist in 1971 and 1972.

2010–2011: Charleston, SC 1966

Rucker released his second country album, Charleston, SC 1966, on October 12, 2010. The title is inspired by Radney Foster's solo debut album, Del Rio, TX 1959. Its first single was "Come Back Song," which Rucker wrote with Chris Stapleton and Casey Beathard. It was his fourth country number one as well as a NO. 37 hit on the Hot 100. The album's second single was "This", which was released to radio in November 2010 and also reached No. 1 in the country chart. Rucker wrote it with Rogers and Kara DioGuardi. "I Got Nothin'" was the album's third single, peaking at No. 18. Also included on the album is a duet with Brad Paisley titled "I Don't Care". Charleston, SC 1966 received a gold certification.

2012–2014: True Believers

On May 20, 2011, Rucker delivered the commencement address to the graduating class of the Medical University of South Carolina.

On December 14, 2011, CBSnews.com reported that Rucker was working on a third country album with recording set to begin January 2012 followed by the release of the album early in the year. The album's lead-off single, "True Believers," made its chart debut in September. On October 12, 2012, Rucker told Broadway's Electric Barnyard that his album would also be titled True Believers. "True Believers" peaked at No. 18. Its second single is a cover of Bob Dylan and Ketch Secor's "Wagon Wheel" (previously made famous by Old Crow Medicine Show), featuring backing vocals from Lady Antebellum. "Wagon Wheel" reached No. 1 on the Country Airplay chart in May 2013. True Believers was released on May 21, 2013. The album's third single, "Radio", was released to country radio on July 22, 2013. The album's fourth single, "Miss You", was released to country radio on February 3, 2014.

On October 2, 2012, Rucker was invited to join the Grand Ole Opry. Halfway through his set at the Opry that night he answered questions from the audience which included a question from Brad Paisley. Paisley said: "I have two questions. One, are you still the worst poker player in the world? And two, would you like to become the newest member of the Grand Ole Opry?" Rucker accepted, and it became official on October 16.

Rucker was a featured performer at the C2C: Country to Country festival in London on March 17, 2013, which was headlined by Carrie Underwood.

On News Year's Day 2013. he sang the national anthem at the Outback Bowl in Tampa, Florida.

On May 11, 2013, Rucker was the speaker at the commencement ceremony for the University of South Carolina in Columbia. Before his speech, he received an honorary doctorate of music.

Rucker also sang the national anthem at the NBA finals on June 16, 2013.

On December 6, 2013, it was announced that Rucker's version of "Wagon Wheel" had earned him a nomination for Best Country Solo Performance for the 56th Annual Grammy Awards. At the awards ceremony on January 26, 2014, Rucker won, becoming only the third African American recording act (the first being Charley Pride, the second being The Pointer Sisters) to win a vocal performance Grammy Award in a country music category.

2014–2015: Southern Style and Home for the Holidays

On August 25, 2014, Rucker released a new single titled "Homegrown Honey" to country radio and to digital retailers. It served as the lead single to his fourth country studio album, Southern Style, released on March 31, 2015. It reached No. 2 on the Country Airplay chart in April 2015. The album's second single, the title track, released to country radio on May 4, 2015.

On September 15, 2014, it was announced that Rucker had completed his first Christmas album and that it would be released on October 27, 2014. Included is a collaboration with Sheryl Crow on "Baby, It's Cold Outside".May 30, 2015 Rucker headlined Philadelphia's famous XTU 31st Anniversary Show at the Susquehanna Bank Center. Christopher Bousquet named President of the Hootie fan club

Rucker makes an appearance on Sister Hazel's new album, Lighter in the Dark.

2016–present: When Was the Last Time

On January 6, 2016, Rucker announced that he was working on his fifth country album. The album's lead single, "If I Told You" was released to country radio on July 5, 2016. It reached number one in the Country Airplay chart nearly a year later, and peaked at number four on the Hot Country Chart. Rucker also returned to the C2C: Country to Country festival in the UK in March 2017, where he was second on the bill to Reba McEntire.

On May 29, 2016, Rucker performed the national anthem prior to the 100th running of the Indianapolis 500. Rucker also performed the national anthem for a game between the Buffalo Bills and the New York Jets on September 15. Rucker agreed to perform the song at the behest of personal friend and former Bills player Bruce Smith, whose jersey was being retired that night. He sang the national anthem again ahead of the Saints-Dolphins game held at London's Wembley Stadium in October 2017, as part of the NFL International Series.

Rucker was selected as one of 30 artists to perform on "Forever Country", a mash-up track of "Take Me Home, Country Roads", "On the Road Again" and "I Will Always Love You", which celebrates 50 years of the CMA Awards. On July 24, 2017, Rucker released the second single from his upcoming album, titled "For the First Time." On July 26, 2017, he shared details of his fifth country album, titled When Was the Last Time and it was released on October 20, 2017.

Rucker appeared as a mentor on seventeenth season of The Voice for Team Blake.

Personal life

Rucker is an ardent South Carolina Gamecocks fan as well as a Miami Dolphins and Cincinnati Reds fan. He also likes the film Stir Crazy, which he has seen more than 100 times.To show his loyalty to his University, he gave a free concert which was held at the Colonial Life Arena after the football team was able to win 6 games following a pair of losing seasons after joining the Southeastern Conference.

Rucker's mother died in November 1992 of a heart attack. His grief inspired two Hootie & the Blowfish songs: "I'm Goin' Home" and "Not Even the Trees." On April 21, 1995, his girlfriend (Elizabeth Ann Phillips) gave birth to Rucker's first child, Carolyn Pearl Phillips. His second daughter, Daniella Rose, was born to his wife, Beth, on May 16, 2001. They had a son, Jack, in 2005. The Hootie song "Where Were You" is about Rucker's strained relationship with his father, and was released only in Europe, where Rucker thought that his father would be unlikely to hear it. His country single "Alright" was inspired by his marriage.

Rucker is a friend of the golfer Tiger Woods, whom he met in a bar when Woods was 18. Rucker sang at the golfer's wedding with Hootie & the Blowfish and at his father's funeral. His interest in golf goes well beyond his relationship with Woods; he was a VIP guest of Team USA at the 2016 Ryder Cup, and he attended Arnold Palmer's funeral shortly before the Cup.

On November 7, 2016, Rucker told ESPN that he had become a partner in MGC Sports, a sports agency that currently represents golfers (among them Steve Stricker and Kenny Perry), football players, and coaches. He added that he was planning to reduce his performance commitments from 100 dates per year to about 30, and that he thought that his experience in the entertainment business would be an asset to potential clients. Rucker will be able to work without restrictions for golfers, but because he is not registered with the NFL players' union, he initially will only be able to meet with NFL players under very limited circumstances.

For the Undercover Boss series episode "Celebrity Undercover Boss: Darius Rucker" which premiered May 12, 2017, Rucker disguised himself as a 62 year old music teacher, ran an open mic night and worked as a roadie.

Philanthropy and impact

Rucker has regularly worked with charities that support sick and underprivileged children, via benefit concerts, volunteering, the PGA The First Tee Program, and the Hootie & The Blowfish Foundation which has raised nearly $4.5 million to provide funding to public education systems throughout South Carolina.

He serves as a board member of the MUSC Children's Hospital in Charleston, SC. where his mother worked for over 30 years from the time Rucker was a child, and has helped fundraise millions of dollars to help build a new hospital.

He also made a commitment to support St. Jude Children's Research Hospital after touring the facility in 2008. Since then, Rucker has spearheaded an annual event focused on amazing music, memorable collaborations and heartfelt stories resulting in over $1.6M raised for St. Jude's to date.

#05/13

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unkulunkulumuhle-blog · 5 years

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Gospel Choir “Ihubo Lombuso: Umbuso Wehlela Emhlabeni”Ukubuka Kungakabonwa: Ukungenisa Nge-Tap Dance

Gospel Choir “Ihubo Lombuso: Umbuso Wehlela Emhlabeni”Ukubuka Kungakabonwa: Ukungenisa Nge-Tap Dance Umbukiso omangazayo we-tap dance wokwamukela umbuso! Inkathi entsha egujwa yibo bonke isifikile ekugcineni! Umculo wekhwaya enkulu yamaKristu, “Ihubo Lombuso: Umbuso Wehlela Emhlabeni,” uyeza masinyane! Unyazi LwaseMpumalanga, IBandla likaNkulunkulu uSomandla lasungulwa ngenxa yokuvela nomsebenzi kaNkulunkulu uSomandla, ukubuya kwesibili kweNkosi uJesu, uKristu wezinsuku zokugcina. Lakhiwe yibo bonke labo abawamukelayo umsebenzi kaNkulunkulu uSomandla ezinsukwini zokugcina futhi banqotshwa basindiswa ngamazwi Akhe. Lasungulwa ngokuphelele nguNkulunkulu uSomandla ngokwakhe futhi liholwa Nguye njengoMalusi. Nakanjani, alisungulwanga umuntu. UKristu uyiqiniso, indlela, nokuphila.

Funda Okwengeziwe：top south african gospel songs

#Izwi likaNkulunkulu #zulu gospel song #South African Gospel Song #top south african gospel songs #South African Christian Music

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voodoochili · 5 years

Text

My Favorite Albums of 2019

As we bid adieu to a decade and a year that many of us would like to forget, let’s take the time to run through some albums that deserve to stay in our rotations at least until the onset of the imminent apocalypse. It’s a cliche, and we say it every year, but as bad as 2019 might have been in the real world, it was an excellent year for music. I listened to at least 300 albums this year and found at least 150 that I liked! Here’s the stuff that made me think, made me happy, and made me drop my jaw last year.

Some themes I found in my listening--I really like rap music from L.A. and Detroit; A few artists who I admired more than loved in the past came out with albums that I completely adored; the nebulous genre often called “afrobeats” or “afropop” has the highest hit percentage of any international scene since dub/reggae in the 1970s (the African Heat playlist on Spotify might be my actual album of the year); a lot of my favorite albums this year came from people who are clearly the product of music schools; my top four contains two excellent bedroom pop albums, and two excellent treatises on race relations in the USA.

I made a Spotify playlist with highlights from my albums list: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6S9kSm5xG3U1vPxhVyBpQc?si=0PHLV0-XQOyNY3XAVRzzAA

And in case you missed it, here’s my list of the year’s best songs: https://voodoochili.tumblr.com/post/189890284724/my-favorite-songs-of-2019

THE BEST:

10. glass beach - the first glass beach album - the first glass beach album combines chiptune synths, frayed emo vocals, jazz piano, and suite-like song structure into an exhilaratingly chaotic mishmash. Mix it with a strong dose of theater-kid earnestness and the result is the most ambitious debut album of the year and possibly of the decade, providing a peek into an alternate dimension where Los Campesinos! wrote the La La Land soundtrack. It sounds like it shouldn’t work, and it wouldn’t if glass beach didn’t buttress their boundless invention with well-crafted songs, like “classic j dies and goes to hell part 1,” the suitably bonkers intro, the prog-pop opus “bedroom community,” and “cold weather,” which shifts from ska-punk to math rock and back in 2 minutes and 20 seconds.

9. Jenny Lewis - On The Line - Long one of indie’s pre-eminent songsmiths, Jenny Lewis’s On The Line is her most personal album yet, digging deep into her childhood trauma and emerging out the other side with pearls of cheeky wisdom. Jenny’s lived more lives than most, enduring an entire career as an in-demand child star before ever even picking up a guitar; when she reached her teenage years, she learned most of her earnings fed directly into her mother’s heroin habit. Some songs like “Wasted Youth” and “Little White Dove” confront it directly (“Wasted Youth” takes the form of a conversaqtion between Lewis and her sister about their late mother), while other songs like “On The Line” and “Rabbit Hole” are testaments to the strength Lewis gained after fending for herself for so long. Appropriately for an album so focused on the past, Lewis enlists the help of rock legends like Ringo Starr, Don Was, and Benmont Tench, whose organ lends a lush poignancy throughout the album, and transforms opener “Heads Gonna Roll” from a pretty ballad to a genuine tearjerker.

8. Burna Boy - African Giant - West African music continued its quest for global hegemony in 2019, flooding the airwaves with passionate, uptempo party music. Though it was a massive year for artists like Mr Eazi, Zlatan, and do-everything superstar Wizkid, the year belonged to Burna Boy of Nigeria, his sonorous deep voice lending authority to each extravagant boast. Following up last year’s promising Outside, African Giant unleashes Burna’s full potential, drawing a through-line between Africa’s past and present--his use of multilingual lyrics, outspoken politics, and supernatural sense of rhythm updates the famous formula of Afrobeat founding father Fela Kuti for the new era. Aided by frequent collaborator and unheralded genius Kel-P, whose lush and genre-bending beats perfectly complement Burna’s melodic strengths, African Giant was 2019’s most reliable mood booster, presenting standout singles like the irresistible “Anybody,” the ambitious and easygoing “Dangote,” and the romantic club anthem “Secret,” before taking time to explain the history of colonialism in Nigeria on “Another Story.”

7. The Comet Is Coming - Trust In The Lifeforce of the Deep Mystery/The Afterlife - With a long list of collaborators and an even longer list of influences, London-born saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings’ musical ambitions can’t be confined to a single form or style. While his work with Sons of Kemet emphasizes percussion-heavy Caribbean influences and radical spoken word poetry, Hutchings aims squarely for the stratosphere with his The Comet Is Coming project, which continued its progressive jazz odyssey with two worthy albums in 2019. Elevated by the interplay between Hutchings (calling himself King Shabaka), synth wizard Danalogue, and drummer Betamax, Trust In The Lifeforce of Deep Mystery is a mesmerizing cycle of songs. Boasting titles like “The Universe Wakes Up” and “Super Zodiac,” each song searches for (and finds) a trance-like groove, transporting listeners to the far-flung locales of the song titles before reaching an emotional conclusion. A more contemplative, but still ceaselessly propulsive follow-up, The Afterlife is music for the “stargate” sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey, providing a more optimistic counterpoint to Trust while refining the trio’s unique group dynamic. Together, the two works make an immensely satisfying head trip, offering a thrilling soundtrack for the end of the universe and whatever comes next.

6. Moodymann - Sinner - “I don’t even know what you need, but I’ll provide,” grunts Moodymann on Sinner’s simmering opener “I’ll Provide,” “Cause I got something for all your dirty nasty needs.” Possibly the most singular and beloved figure in a Detroit electronic scene overflowing with singular and beloved figures, Moodymann is known for sublimely tasteful DJ sets and sprawling solo works that fuse house music with elements of R&B, gospel, blues, and funk. By his standards, Sinner is slight, spanning only 7 tracks and 44 minutes, but it benefits from a tight focus, showcasing Moodymann’s effortless creativity. Throughout the project, the artist born Kenny Dixon approaches familiar elements from odd angles: jazzy changes and burbling Fender Rhodes invade an intoxicating two-chord vamp on “Downtown”; fellow Detroiter Amp Fiddler adds soulful auto-tune to the blissful “Got Me Coming Back Right Now.” He even manages to find a fresh way to incorporate Camille Yarbrough’s “Take Yo’ Praise,” most famously sampled by Fatboy Slim, into one of the album’s hardest-charging tracks.

5. Polo G - Die A Legend - Way back in 2011, long before he became rap’s first Pulitzer Prize winner, Kendrick Lamar took a moment to explain his ethos on the outro to his breakthrough Section.80 tape: “I'm not on the outside looking in/I'm not on the inside looking out/I'm in the dead fucking center, looking around.” It was a bold statement, but one that Kendrick’s managed to live up to, and finally we’ve found another artist with the ability to achieve all-seeing perspective on record: Chicago 20-year-old Polo G.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been blown away by a new rapper like I was by Polo G in 2019. He possesses a rare combination of melodic mastery and writerly observation, painting a vivid (if bleak) picture of his life on the South Side. His debut project Die A Legend is packed with unflinching observations about the reality of his situation, he touches on his former pill addiction on “Battle Cry” and he reminisces about talking to his younger sister through a prison phone on “Through Da Storm.” As dark as the subject matter can get, Polo never crumbles under the pressures of poverty or fame, staying afloat with crisp melodies that mix the emotional honesty of Lil Durk with the radio-ready slickness of Wiz Khalifa. He’s already mastered the art of the rap ballad, and I can’t wait to see what’s next.

4. Helado Negro - This Is How You Smile - This Is How You Smile overflows with warmth, inspiring a feeling I don’t often get from music. Listening to it feels like a long-awaited return to a physical place of comfort--a childhood bedroom, perhaps, or a reading nook in a favorite library. Our tour guide is Roberto Carlos Lange, an expert sound designer whose plainspoken, pleasantly nasal voice might be the friendliest sound in music today. The album is comforting, yet unpredictable, with songs that range from synth folk to bedroom pop to ambient field recordings, and feature lyrics that vacillate between English and Spanish. Highlights include the bouncy “Seen My Aura,” calling to mind a collaboration between The Brothers Johnson and Ariel Pink, the sweeping and mesmerizing “Running,” combining trap drums and Budd/Eno piano, and my favorite, the devastating acoustic ballad “Todo lo que me falta.”

3. Jamila Woods - LEGACY, LEGACY! - Jamila Woods has a gift for expressing complex intellectual and musical ideas in deceptively simple ways. Her melodies are like nursery rhymes, her lyrics are cutting and conversational, and with LEGACY, LEGACY! she delivers a fiery blend of artistry and activism that rivals peak Gil Scott-Heron. These songs are bold and truthful, tackling heavy subject matter with a delicate touch, commenting on cultural appropriation on “MUDDY” (“They can study my fingers/They can mirror my pose/They can talk your good ear off/On what they think they know”), sexual assault in “SONIA” (“I remember saying no to things that happened anyway/ things that happened/I remember feeling low the mirror took my face away”), and the value of protest on “OCTAVIA” (“It used to be the worst crime to write a line/Our great great greats risked their lives, learned letters fireside/Like a seat on a bus, like heel in a march/Like we holdin' a torch, it's our inheritance”). With songs named after her artistic heroes (a convention that has become a bit trendy, as Rapsody and Sons of Kemet have pulled similar tricks for their recent projects), LEGACY! LEGACY! Is Woods’ audacious attempt to establish herself as an heir to that formidable tradition--one that succeeds without reservation.

2. Raphael Saadiq - Jimmy Lee - A force of nature with one of the most underrated back catalogs in the game (he made hits with Toni, Tony, Tone in the 80s, was a major force behind Neosoul in the 90s and 00s, and produced Solange’s A Seat At The Table in 2015), Raphael Saadiq’s latest is his most powerful effort yet, inspired by the tragic tale of his older brother Jimmy Lee, a heroin addict who died of HIV. Jimmy Lee tries to find the universal through the personal, taking a deep look into how drug addiction can tear a family apart. Throughout the project, Saadiq approaches his brother’s illness with radical empathy, singing from his perspective on the dangerously alluring “Something Keeps Calling,” and the zonked out “I’m Feeling Love.” He uses his personal tragedy as a springboard to talk about larger issues on the twinkling, self-explanatory “This World Is Drunk,” and the seething spiritual “Rikers Island.” The album veers from style to style, connected with a sound effect that mimics a channel changing on an analog TV, encompassing Prince-like grooves, languid quiet storm, simmering funk in the late Sly Stone mold, and taking detours into hip-hop and traditional gospel. Connecting it all is Saadiq’s raw passion, echoing the pain of everyone who’s lost someone to substance abuse, and singing as if his tenor is the only weapon powerful enough to end the epidemic.

1. Yves Jarvis - The Same But By Different Means - There’s a song on The Same But By Different Means called “Constant Change,” in which Jean-Sebastian Audet layers his voice into a cacophonous symphony and repeats the title phrase for 30 seconds til he reaches an abrupt crescendo. In his first project under the name Yves Jarvis (the 22-year Montreal native used to record under the name Un Blonde), “Constant Change” is his animating philosophy, guiding each second of the most surprising masterpiece of the year. A thrilling and unpredictable effort, The Same But By Different Means overflows with sonic and melodic ideas, shifting and beguiling with unexpected shifts and sounds. The album gets its power from this fluidity--sounds burst into the mix and fade away without notice; songs mutate from one genre to another (traces of freak-folk, tropicalía, funk, and a lot more) within the span of 2 or 3 minutes. It’s a hazy, dream-like collage, at times evoking the likes of Nick Drake, Joni Mitchell, and Nicolas Jaar; the least expected sound-a-like occurs on “That Don’t Make It So,” which could easily be mistaken for an outtake from D’Angelo’s Voodoo. No hour of music in 2019 was more calming, yet more invigorating than this one--an eclectic and restless monument to Audet’s creativity and an addicting, absorbing soundscape. I listened to hundreds of albums this year, but none of them hit me quite like this one.

THE REST:

11. Cate Le Bon - Reward 12. Big Thief - U.F.O.F./Two Hands 13. Vampire Weekend - Father Of The Bride 14. Jay Som - Anak Ko 15. Raveena - Lucid 16. American Football - American Football 17. Purple Mountains - Purple Mountains 18. Kelsey Lu - Blood 19. Pivot Gang - You Can’t Sit With Us 20. Gunna - Drip Or Drown 2 21. Great Grandpa - Four Of Arrows 22. G.S. Schray - First Appearance 23. Bandgang Lonnie Bands - KOD 24. Marika Hackman - Any Human Friend 25. Mavi - Let The Sun In 26. Spellling - Mazy Fly 27. SAULT - 5 / 7 28. Juan Wauters - La Onda De Juan Pablo 29. 75 Dollar Bill - I Was Real 30. Maxo Kream - Brandon Banks 31. Brittany Howard - Jaime 32. J Balvin & Bad Bunny - Oasis 33. Rio Da Yung OG - 2 Faced 34. Desperate Journalist - In Search Of The Miraculous 35. Angel Olsen - All Mirrors 36. 03 Greedo - Netflix & Deal/Still Summer In The Projects 37. Doja Cat - Hot Pink 38. Lambchop - This (Is What I Wanted To Tell You) 39. Sada Baby - Bartier Bounty 40. Rucci - Tako’s Son 41. Floating Points - Crush 42. Bat For Lashes - Lost Girls 43. Young Thug - So Much Fun 44. Samthing Soweto - Isphithiphithi 45. Kim Gordon - No Home Record 46. Sandro Perri - Soft Landing 47. Anthony Naples - Fog FM 48. Quelle Chris - Guns 49. Sleater-Kinney - The Center Won’t Hold 50. Tyler, The Creator - IGOR

Honorable Mentions:

Billy Woods & Kenny Segal - Hiding Places Caroline Shaw & The Attaca Quartet - Orange Leo Svirsky - River Without Banks Martha - Love Keeps Kicking Nilüfer Yanya - Miss Universe Drego & Beno - Sorry For The Get Off The Japanese House - Good At Falling Tree & Vic Spencer - Nothing IS Something Spielbergs - This Is Not The End Fireboy DML - Laughter, Tears & Goosebumps Dee Watkins - Problem Child Daniel Norgren - Wooh Dang

TOO MANY MORE TO NAME--could’ve listed up to 80

#Burna Boy #polo g #yves jarvis #glass beach #raphael saadiq #jamila woods #helado negro #moodymann #jenny lewis #the comet is coming #shabaka hutchings

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