According to Monica Dillon’s manager Stephanie R. Burns, Jhelisa Anderson, niece of Vicki Anderson and Bobby Byrd, cousin of Carleen Anderson and sister of Pamela ‘PY’ Anderson (not that one, the one that sang with Incognito on 100° And Rising), is currently in New Orleans and doing a tribute to the late Nina Simone.
Since I haven’t found an official website by Jhelisa, I’d be glad if anyone who knows more, adds a comment or uses the forum.

[edit: I’ve just searched it on yahoo and the result was this:

source: infracom-records.de]

This just came in via e-mail, the tour dates of US3 whose latest album Questions also features Alison Crockett.

Oh, and if someone provides me with a ticket for the concert in Hamburg/Germany, I promise to go :-)

Some of you have asked me what I have listened to when this site was in hibernation. Well, I re-discovered some of my “old” records and some songs from artists, who had me their records, has really grown on me and became something like an all-time-favourite. Ok, the list would be very, very long anyway. If you have a large record collection you know what I mean. You go through the piles of records and think ‘oh, that was such a great tune, how come I haven’t heard it for a long while?’ So, if you should come up with a list of your all-time-favourites you’ll end up somewhere in the thousands.
Anyway, here are a few songs I’ve listened to and that now mean a lot to me:

Julie Dexter Walk With Me
Fay Victor: Zootoon
Joanna Pacale: Too Marvelous For Words
Myron: Heaven
Dee Daniels: A Song For My Father
Emma Hutchinson: Altea
Monica Dillon: My Baby
Carmen Lundy: Windmills Of Your Mind
Harvey S.: Momentano/Before
Kipper Jones: Better
Frank McComb: When You Call My Name
Juliet Kelly: Too Late Now
Ledisi: Feeling Orange And Sometimes Blue
Maiuko: Breakdown The Walls (reprise)
Tom & Julie: Like Ours
Fertile Ground: Yellow Daisies

Eventually there was a kind of musical revelation to me: the music of Alice Coltrane.
The odd thing is that the first time I’ve heard a song by Alice Coltrane (A Love Supreme, that appeared on the bonus CD of Red Hot + Cool Stolen Moments) it meant nothing to me then and I was like “mmm that sounds strange, more punishing than rewarding, oh my gosh, the widow wanted to punish her late husband John with this recording and spolied it”. Well, that was in 1994 over ten years ago and I guess you really have to evolve your taste in music before you are able to understand spiritually influenced music like Alice Coltrane has recorded.

Years later I really discovered instrumental jazz through releases by McCoy Tyner, Archie Shepp, John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, and Courtney Pine. And it was McCoy Tyner’s Extensions album that re-introduced me to Alice again. I just fell in love with Message From The Nile and I really liked the harp you can hear on it. Looking at the CD showed me that this was Alice Coltrane playing the harp, an instrument used rather seldom on jazz recordings.
The next step was of course lookin for releases by Alice in the records stores in Hamburg/Germany. From her Impulse years there were only a few available over here. So I’ve purchased three of her albums Journey in Satchidananda, Monastic Trio and Ptah, The El Daoud.

I really liked Ptah then (especially Turiya And Ramakrishna and Blue Nile) - and still do it now. Turiya And Ramakrishna is still the most soulful instrumental jazz song I know. But I guess in the meantime I really understand the title song Ptah, The El Daoud.
The real revelation and a great journey into Alice Coltrane though were the albums Huntington Ashram Monastery, Universal Conscousness, Lord Of Lords and most of all World Galaxy. Yes, the album that features her version of A Love Supreme, the musical icon by John Coltrane, that only few people dare to touch. Will Downing did a clever thing with his debut album by adding vocals to the song and turning it into a soul song.

The addition of strings to songs like Galaxy In Turiya or Galaxy In Satchidananda adds real depth, drama and spirituality to the songs and thus makes World Galaxy one of the best jazz albums of all times for me. I would even dare to say that Alice has outdone John with her version of A Love Supreme. After more then ten years (remember 1994?) I finally love this song with the introductory narration by Swami Satchindananda about love and the organ Alice plays throughout the song.

I’ve never been into classical music, but I must admit I like Alice versions of Igor Stravinsky’s The Firebird. In the liner notes to her Lord Of Lords album there’s an oblique explanation by Alice about The Firebird:

“On March 20, 1972, I was blessed with the good fortune of receiving a visitation from the great master composer, Mr. Igor Stravinsky, whom I had never met before in life. After a warm and intimate discussion on the subject of music, he said: “I wanted you to receive my vote.” I did not fully understand his meaning. He then presented me with a small glass vial containing a clear, colorless liquid. He was seated in a comfortable armchair; he held me close and said, “Daughter, this vial was for your grandmother, but instead, I kept it in reserve for you.” He then asked if I would like elixir, I said yes. As he walked away for it, I began to drink from the vial. To my surprise, it was difficult to swallow. When it was finished, Mr. Stravinsky returned. Since that time, I have kept the album photograph from Mr. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in my room. As opposed to this photograph, he had the appearance of an elderly man, but none of the weariness or age lines shown on this face.
Since that time, it has been incumbent on me to proceed forthrightly into the great master Stravinsky’s works. Divine instruction has been given to me throughout the entire arranging of this music, even down to the smallest detail. Ohnedaruth, when he was John Coltrane, seven years ago, introduced to me the music of, as he termed it, “a Universal musician and composer,” Mr. Igor Stravinsky.”

If you have the time and want to experience great spiritually moving music, that even moves an atheist like me, I recommend that you start with these albums:

Ptah, The El Daoud
World Galaxy
Huntington Ashram Monastery
Lord Of Lords
Universal Consciousness

And to close this excursion into the music of Alice Coltrane, here’s a quote a friend of mine once said when I played him some of Alice’s songs “Who needs drugs when you can appreciate this music”

[more infos about Alice on the internet: jazzsupreme.com, silent-watcher.net, theglobalist.com, allmusic.com]

The Jazzcat has a fine review of a live performance of Carmen Lundy, from which the picture above is, er, borrowed :-)
There also a short video clip from Carmen’s performance of All Day, All Night (from her This Is Carmen Lundy album) at the Vic in Santa Monica. And if you’re living in London/UK consider yourself very lucky, since Carmen will be at Ronnie Scott’s for several days (June 6-13th, 2005)

et voilà…here’s the forum for jazz-not-jazz.de. And again the design is reduced to the essential parts, just like the blog or the old site :-)
You can reach it via forum.jazz-not-jazz.de and of course there’s a link on the left in the menue here. Right now it looks a little empty, so don’t hesitate to register and fill the forum with threads to discuss your favourite music and tell all your friends and their friends about it.
I’ve tested everything and hopefully it will all work fine. If you’re having problems to register or to post in the forum, please let me know.

Joey Negro In The House is available these days from Defected Records. With three CDs this is somewhere inbetween value for money and music overkill. There are two mixed CDs offering 33 songs between disco, deep house/garage and funk with Notenshun Feat. Sandy Mill, The Two Tons, Blaze Presents Underground Dance Artists For Life feat. Barbara Tucker, Sydenham & Ferrer, Kings Of Tomorrow, Imagination, Fred West & The J.B.’s, or Martin Solveig to name but a few. The third CD includes bonus material (like a discography, biography, interview) and some special re-edits by Joey Negro. If you ever wanted to have a Joey Negro version of Roxy Music’s Angel Eyes, you’ll need this record. Other re-edits include the Kings Of Tomorrow’s Finally, Don Carlos’ Alone and The O’Jays’ Put Your Hands Together. By the way, the original version of the O’Jays song appears on their Ship Ahoi album that is a must-have for any soulboy with its dramatic title song and the famous For The Love Of Money.
So all in all Joey Negro did a good job with the songs he selected and mixed…as if we had expected something else :-)

Why not let Joey Negro explain his motivation behind this compilation?

Here’s an interview Toni Tambourine (Defected Records) did with him.

Q: How did your career start?

Joey Negro: I’ve been DJ’ing since the late 80’s but what really started me off was making music. I’d always been a big music fan. I managed to get a job in a record shop in London in 1986. I moved from Clacton on Sea in Essex down to London and got a job in just around the time house music was really kicking in. It was the time when tracks like Jack Your Body and Fingers Inc had come in but hip-hop and rare groove was really strong too. It was a really exiting time to be in London and I met a lot of people like Jonathan Moore (Coldcut) and Trevor Nelson, who was working on one of the vans that sold us records, it really seemed like there was a new school of people coming through. I stayed in the record shop for about 9 months before getting a job with a record distributor (Rough Trade), which taught me a lot about the business. I then started my own label called Republic, we put out a lot of early New York garage - things like Blaze and The Turntable Orchestra. At the same time I started making my own music, something I’d always wanted to do. My first release was a track I’d done with a friend called MDM - Get Busy on Republic. I started Z records in 1992 which was set-up to release my own records or stuff that I really liked. Out of our 75 releases, I’d say around 65 are me or tracks that I’ve remixed. Things like Must Be the Music, Can’t Get High Without You, Saturday.
>>>continue

Olatunji Olugbenga Omotayo Olanrewaju Adetokunbo Abdul Majeed Onabule, better known as Onabule did it again and that is, surpassing himself. Just like it’s predecessor Ambitions For Deeper Breadth In Emergency, Brake Silence is another great soul album that has everything we love about Ola’s music, original, self-written songs, a warm, organic musical background, meaningful lyrics and of course Ola’s great voice.
The opener Soul Town is a great piece of midtempo soul that finds Ola lamenting over the fact that the dreams and hopes we had in the past are unfulfilled today (”Somebody tell me what happened to all those dreams of peace/ And understanding and harmony and brotherhood and love/ Being together for ever and ever/ Don’t it seem like Soul Town, Soul Town is gone“).
Heart Of Lead is story telling soul about an former lover, who wants to re-activate the bonds of love but to Ola this just doesn’t make sense.
A priceless, excellent ballad comes with Love Affair, thanks to spare instrumentation this is the perfect vehicle to show Ola’s vocal capability. Of equal class is the album’s closing ballad Forgiven. I think it would be very interesting and musical satisfying to hear Ola with a classical jazz trio (piano, bass, drums).
Funky midtempo songs like Savoir Faire or Need To Know round things nicely while Going Away might surprise you with its rock-influenced guitars. But after all this is all pure Ola and the music he wants to make or like he said in an interview with Echoes “But I won’t be doing this with a major label. Those days have gone. I’ve seen people who have built something special the independent route and then fell for the big cash offer, and all their uniqueness goes. I won’t trade that.”
To sum it up this is the perfect album for those who are into pure, unaltered soul music that comes from the very heart of a man. Ola gives us the very essence of soul.

For more infos visit ola-onabule.co.uk.
[edit: In Emergency, Break Silence will be released in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Holland and Luxemburg on April 18th 2005 ZYX Music. (I hope you will have more luck opening the zyx site, neither my Firefox, nor my Opera could load this site…it just keeps loading and loading without showing anything. And if you disable JavaScript you get a site telling you that you should acctivate it :-/ ]
[second edit: you can also read an interwiew with Ola here.]

I’ve just updated my custom 404 error page…if you mistype an url, you’ll see what I mean, otherwise you can also visit jazz-not-jazz.de/this_page_does_not_exist_you_fool :-)

Happy birthday, Irma Thomas…you can find more dates of brithdays on soulexpressradio.com…and here you’ll find more infos about Irma.

Nobody tells me a thing out there…lol…but it looks like I’ve missed Siji’s album God-Given from last year…judging from the tracklisting and the logo of Ivy Records this must be the man behind Shiji’s My Lover’s Embrace…oh how I loved that song in 1997!

arghh…I really must read the stuff before I click save/publish here…just edited the edit of the last post three times.

I’m currently testing a forum for this site using phpbb…and everything works quite nicely after I’ve spend most of the evening/night with it…the only thing that doesn’t want to change is the underlining of the user names…and I don’t have a clue what causes this anyway since I have set all text-decoration: underline in the css-file to text-decoration: none. Unfortunately I really don’t know much about php so all the files and templates used are a small mystery to me…though it helps that I really know how to work with HTML and CSS. Anyone who has an idea what I may have overlooked, please post a comment.

[edit: thanks to Mike Lothar, whose conundrum skin I’ve used and modified for the forum the link problem is now solved…so I’m just doing a little more testing of the forum’s features now]

  

You like the music of Lionel Hampton, Count Basie, Faye Adams, Sarah Vaughan, Martha Davis, Nat ‘King’ Cole, Cab Calloway, and Ruth Brown? You like to see a movie that features all these artists and more? You have a broadband connection to the internet? You don’t wanna pay a dime for it? “Impossible” I hear you say. Nope, just visit archive.org and download the Rhythm and Blues Revue from 1955. The stand-up comedy between the performances is a little bit dated but it’s still a fine movie if you like one of the above mentioned artists.
And you will find even more interesting movies on offer like Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe or Reefer Madness. Just browse the Feature Films page of the internet archive.

gokudo.co.jp is a great site that brings us virtually every cover of old Blue Note releases like McCoy Tyner’s Cosmos, a record that still hasn’t seen a CD re-issue yet. Some of the songs are available on the Asante CD release but songs like Planet X, Shaken But Not Forsaken, Cosmos, Song For My Lady, or Vibration Blues are lost somewhere in obscursville.
If anybody owns a copy of Cosmos and reads this, please leave a comment or contact me via e-mail.