Music

Local Boy

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I’ve been reading about Weather Report bassist Jaco Pastorius recently. I discovered that he went to the high school just up the street from me. The club where he was murdered is now Corner Pocket Billiards in Wilton Manors, a spot I pass frequently when I eat at one of the restaurants in that shopping center.

Corner Pocket Billiards

One (Hu)'man One Vote

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This song by Johnny Clegg is very appropriate for today:

The west is sleeping in a fragile freedom
Forgotten is the price that was paid
Ten thousand years of marching through a veil of tears
To break a few links in these chains
These things come to us by way of much pain
Don’t let us slip back into the dark
On a visible but distant shore — a new image of man
The shape of his own future, now in his own hands — he says:

Chorus:
One ‘man, one vote — step into the future
One ‘man, one vote — in a unitary state
One ‘man, one vote — tell them when you see them
One ‘man, one vote — it’s the only way

In the east a giant is awakening
And in the south we feel the rising tide
The soul inside the spark that gives breath to your life
Can no longer be made to hide
These things come to us by way of much pain
Don’t let us slip back into the dark
On a visible but distant shore — a new image of man
The shape of his own future, now in his own hands — he says:

Chorus:
One ‘man, one vote — step into the future
One ‘man, one vote — in a unitary state
One ‘man, one vote — tell them when you see them
One ‘man, one vote — it’s the only way

Ozomatli

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I’m now a fan of Ozomatli after purchasing a few of their songs in iTunes. The first song I heard from them was “Saturday Night” after Apple used it in an iPod commercial and featured it in iTunes. For the past week I’ve been listening to it on a music mix CD in my car and liking it more each time, so when I got home today I looked for more of their music in iTunes. I ended up buying 10 more songs from several albums. Their sound is very eclectic, mixing latin with rock & rap. A lot of their songs are more latin, some of them mixing Mariachi-style horns with rumba and other dance rhythms.

New audio blog

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I just discovered a great new audio blog, Benn loxo du taccu about West African music. Although the title is in Wolof, which I don’t understand, the content is in English.

WorldBeatPlanet news

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A few days ago I got a very nice email from Jimi Mbaye praising WorldBeatPlanet. He has a new album, which isn’t available in the US, and he now has his own studio and has been producing albums for other artists.

I’ve rearranged the topics at WorldBeatPlanet and eliminated the regional topics, since so much music crosses regional boundaries.

I’ve also been experimenting with a professional Drupal layout for an artist-oriented site. Instead of a news page with user-submitted stories like I now have at WorldBeatPlanet & MacMegasite, it will have artist-related pages. Only registered artists can create pages and each artist can have his own forum.