Category: Interviews

This Sunday, we’re doing our last ever party at Industry City. Each week of this outdoor Mister Sunday season, Eamon and Justin (and on two occasions, their guests, Duane Harriott and JD Twitch) opened proceedings with an entire album. We’ve made a playlist of all the albums we could find on Spotify (only six of them weren’t there – good job Spotify!), including the album that Justin’s playing this Sunday to open the last dance at Industry City, Jaga Jazzist’s What We Must.

Here’s the playlist:

And here’s the full list of albums, along with the date the guys played them:

May 24 // RL Burnside, First Recordings
May 31 // Ernest Ranglin, Jamaica Jazz
June 7 // Salvatore, Tempo
June 14 // Meta Meta, Metal Metal
June 21 // Mr. Shortstuff and big Joe Williams, Introducing Mr. Shortstuff
June 28 // Four Tet, Morning/Evening
July 5 // Daedelus, Invention
July 12 // Terry Callier, Speak Your Peace
July 19 // Spoon, Kill The Moonlight
July 26 // Milton Wright, Friends and Buddies
August 2 // Outkast, ATLiens
August 9 // Reg King, Reg King
August 16 // Spiritualized, Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space
August 23 // Spiritualized, Pure Phase
August 30 // The History of Jazz, Volume 3: Then Came Swing
September // Moritz Von Oswald Trio, Fetch
September // Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Shahen-Shah
September 20 // Upsetters, Super Ape
September 27 // Battle Trance, Palace of Wind
October 4 // Joseph Spence, Good Morning Mr. Walker
October 11 // Rhys Chatham, An Angel Moves Too Fast To See
October 18 // Jaga Jazzist, What We Must

This week Eamon will be opening the Mister by playing Rhys Chatham’s ‘An Angel Moves Too Fast To See,’ in full, right as we open the doors at 3pm. This classic record captures Chatham’s dual influences and love of rock and classical minimalism, in a record that was pivotal to the pre-Giuliani downtown art and music scene. Come early to be mesmerized!

Every week of this outdoor Mister Sunday season, the party begins with the airing of an entire album. This week Justin Carter selects. He’s chosen Shahen-Shah by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. This is what he has to say about it.

Last Friday I went to the Shinnecock Nation’s Pow Wow in Southampton, NY. There were representatives of tribes from all over North America dancing in absolutely beautiful traditional clothes, and accompanying them were a couple of groups of singers and drummers. The music was an entrancing polyrhythmic, polyphonic combination of singers and drummers. I’ve been dreaming about it since and trying to find recordings.

I haven’t yet found anything, but I’ve pulled out this album by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the master of Qawwali, a devotional Sufi music that’s most often heard in Muslim areas of Pakistan and India. One day, when I go back to school to get my doctorate in musicology, I’ll figure out the cultural and migrational connections between the Native American music I heard Friday and Qawwali, but for now, all I can say is that both are evocative and trance inducing, and both are stunningly beautiful. I can’t wait to play Nusrat for you on Sunday…

Every week of this outdoor Mister Sunday season, the party begins with the airing of an entire album. This week Justin Carter, who’s playing solo, selects. He’s chosen The History of Jazz Vol. 3: Then Came Swing. This is what he has to say about it.

I’ve chosen this week’s album for couple reasons. One is that I love old jazz and blues, and this set from 1945 is full of great names like Coleman Hawkins,  T-Bone Walker, Benny Carter and Nat Cole. But the other is because of the format and a question that it answers. Before I collected 78s, I always used to wonder, “Why do we call LPs albums?” Well, as I was digging through old collections, I started to find bound books full of records – they looked a lot like photo albums, actually, but inside, the pages would be sleeves holding 78s. Until the vinyl LP was widely introduced in 1948, the dominant technology was a shellac record cut at 78rpm. While the LP could hold twenty minutes of audio on a side, the 78 could only hold five minutes (most just held three-and-a-half), so if you wanted to hear a collection of songs, you’d have to buy a book of records – literally an album. The term stuck, and even though LP (short for long player) was the official term for the format that replaced the book of 78s, “album” stuck.

Beyond the trivial reasons for bringing out The History of Jazz, there’s a special bonus: I’ll have my player, so I can bring down some gems from the rest of my 78 collection, which I’ll try to squeeze in through the rest of the day. I’m looking forward to playing them for you on the big system!