So let’s ring in the new year! It’s not every day you get to start the new year and decade off with a simple blog post, but here it is.
If there is a theme these next several days it will be something of the best of the 2010s, as we saw them. I was quite pleased with the quality of recording artists – especially indie artists – over the past decade. Sharon Van Etten is one. This track, Comeback Kid, is from her most recent album. She’s also currently on tour. Her style is definitely her own. She’s a singer-songwriter who has always added some electronic elements to her songs. This past year, she really decided to emphasize the electronic. In some ways it makes her songs reminiscent of the mid-1980s. In unplugged settings, her new songs hold up very nicely.
A bar tender is available, and we have plenty of music to select from. Happy New Year.
Cheers!
My fascination with electronic music in all its forms goes back many decades. What has morphed from the Rave scene of the end of the 1980s/start of the 1990s has been something to behold. Here’s a set just for fun: The DJ is Amelie Lens. Cheers!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJkuTx1DQzg
Gil Scott-Heron delivered his final album in 2010. This was the lead-off video for that album.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OET8SVAGELA
So, Combover seems to be trying to start a war with Iran. That should go well.
I can now say that I have seen the latest Star Wars film. Somehow it felt like two films trying to be one. I don’t know. Dialog and pacing just seemed very off somehow.
Carly Rae Jepsen sometimes gets overlooked. I forget whether it was Nalbar or Centerfielddj who pointed it out, but she loves to avoid 4-on-the-floor beats, and plays around with time signatures. This track is a 12/8 time signature, which has worked will in other great pop tracks (remember Everybody Wants to Rule The World by Tears for Fears?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeccAtqd5K8
Old-timers like Jah Wobble kept recording. At this point, he seems to be taking in all of the influences he’s ever been exposed to and synthesizing them into some wonderful jazz-inflected alt rock. This track would fit in with a lot of what was going on in the soul-jazz scene around 1975.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJ2L0eJ1xJM
Some of what I found last decade was pure chance. I think this one might have shown up in my Twitter feed or something a few years ago, and I was captivated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cmWi0vn5Y4
Here’s Joss Stone singing along with Gasper:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4u7RUlcx0E
For jazz heads – I know there used to be a few of you (this blog’s predecessor had Friday Night Jazz Jams when I first signed on in 2005!) – we lost some greats, like David S. Ware. Others who had been active in the jazz avant-garde as it saw a minor revival in the 1990s continued to create. Matthew Shipp is still in fine form:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3P21ivgmJQ
More jazz head stuff from this decade – Kamasi Washington, who had been jamming around LA for quite a while and just sort of burst onto the national scene, seemingly out of nowhere:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDXNzucphEw
Well actually last decade. I am still adjusting.
Bassist Esperanza Spalding became a big deal this past decade:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBZa7-2bG2I