Rock El Casbah

Rachid Taha is becoming one of my favorite performers. I just got his new album, Tekitoi (Who Are You?), which has an awesome cover of “Rock the Casbah”. Rachid’s music combines Algerian Rai with electronic, club, & techno beats in one of the best world fusion mixes.

New Projects

I now have Jimi Mbaye‘s Studio Dogo site set up at DreamHost. We weren’t able to regain control of studio-dogo.com, so we now have studiodogo.com.

We’ve exchanged several emails the last few days and Jimi is interested in working on other projects.

I’m also planning to relaunch ShareYourMusic.com as a completely new professional site, as I had originally planned to do. The old GarageBand site didn’t work out well because a lot of inappropriate non-garageband stuff was being uploaded. For that reason, I finally shut it down. The new site will allow artists to maintain their own info pages and sell their music.

Studio Dogo

I’m now hosting Jimi Mbaye’s Studio Dogo site at DreamHost. Unfortuantely the previous domain owner let it lapse and the registrar won’t let me transfer the domain, so it’s now a subdomain of dreamhosters.com until I can get it straightened out.

R.I.P. Jimmy Smith

I just found out that Jazz great Jimmy Smith has died. I’ve always been a huge fan. When I was a teenager, I played piano, organ and keyboards, and Jimmy was my inspiration. I always tried to imitate his sound.

A nice iTunes surprise

I decided to try Linux on my iPod. It was sort of fun, but I found that it will only play MP3s, while most of my music is AAC. Even though it doesn’t mess up anything on the iPod and you can still run the standard OS, I completely restored my iPod to make sure it’s really clean.

When I restored my iPod in iTunes, I found that I was offered 13 free songs in iTunes Music Store.