A Commonplace Book

Although my ears usually split their time 50/50 between extremely awesome chamber pop and equally terrible deep progressive Balearic house, I do occasionally like to explore the (for me) uncharted territories of “everything else.” Fortunately I have as my guide two music snobs, each in his own right an embarrassingly knowledgeable Virgil in the Hell of the recording industry.

Although Julian Himes always makes for a good source on the Next Big Thing, Buzzy Cohen has the edge when it comes to choice cuts from the past. Suggestions from the former have been available online at the Amie Street blog for some time, but now the latter is taking his show on the road at East Village Radio. I don’t know whether it’s going to be a regular show yet, but the tracklist and link for the inaugural broadcast with co-DJ Jarrett Mason is up here.

Mostly drawing from the catalog and recent acquisitions of EMI Music Publishing, the show covers a pretty wide variety of genres, but sticks close to soul and Motown. Three tracks to keep an eye on:

• Inez Fox - Hurt By Love
• Sam Sparro - Black & Gold
• Eggstone - Marabous

There’s also a direct link to the streaming audio here.

As some of you may know I have a new band with ROSTAM, CHRIS and CHRIS called VAMPIRE WEEKEND (yes it has the same name as the forthcoming film). We played our second ever show last Saturday at the Columbia RELAY 4 LIFE. It was a very positive experience.

I am so in love with modern technology. It’s amazing to look back and follow the footprints that a band has left across the internet from its inception, as pasted above from lead singer Ezra’s old blog here, then through one of its earliest performances, as recorded below, and on to the charts at iTunes and Amazon.

I’m sure there are many other bands besides Vampire Weekend for which you can follow a trail of bread crumbs across the internet as it has developed, but I think this is probably the only one which took its name from something this awesome:

There aren’t many times when I can claim to be ahead of the curve on new music. I don’t think I started listening to New York dance-rock until years after it broke. I just started listening to LCD Soundsystem some 6 months after Sound of Silver came out. And even my fondness for Daft Punk, dating back to 8th or 9th grade, is going to have to be counted a fluke unless people start rediscovering the genius of Rabbit In The Moon and Future Sound of London too.

With this in mind, I was amazed to learn in the past year that Andrew Bird is a widely respected independent musician, since he was the first artist I ever saw in concert. I was 14.

I suppose it might be less impressively hip that I was there to see Squirrel Nut Zippers (this was at the height of the Gap-inspired commercial swing revival) and that I was there with my mother (I was 14). But I was impressed enough with his performance as an opener for the opener that I walked away from The Electric Factory with a copy of Thrills.

Since then the Squirrel Nut Zippers have dissolved and faded into obscurity while Bird has ascended as a respected musician in his own right. Unfortunately, Armchair Apocrypha didn’t rate nearly as high as I expected it to on the end-of-year lists I have read. Even so I am excited to have rediscovered him after so many years, and I look forward to catching him in concert the next time he comes through New York. I’ll probably even go with my mother just for old times’ sake.