Today, the professor breaks down the genre boundaries of his soul revue once again, grooving to new, sometimes strange works by BaBa ZuLa, The Sonic Dawn, Jenny Don’t And The Spurs, Woog Riots, and Ray LaMontagne.
As the DJ turned down his sliders and the colorful stage lights were turned on, a solitary note emerged, presumably played live. Then another. It sounded off and slightly dissonant. Oriental, unsurprisingly, as the creator of this sequence of notes hailed from Istanbul. A bass was booming along with it, a drum was beaten. The stage, however, was empty – for the time being, at least – and Professor P. began to wonder: is this going to be some weird off-Bosporus production, where you stare at a stage promisingly furnished with microphones and a percussion battery and a wall banner with the name of the band on it, BaBa ZuLa, while BaBa ZuLa themselves chose to play backstage via Bluetooth or something? A friend of mine recently told me about a performance by a completely different group, Augn, who had placed two mannequins on stage during the “concert”, then proceeded to play their new album from tape, complete with pre-recorded savage insults to the audience. Now that was performance punk made in Germany. With concerts by the Turkish band BaBa ZuLa – as you may be aware of if you are in the habit of doing some preliminary research – it can be equally difficult to predict how they will unfold, but they seem to routinely get out of hand, culminating in belly dance battles, endless solo cascades on the long-necked lute, or even improvised readings of Turkish avant-garde literature. But then the audience began to move. BaBa ZuLa was approaching, right through a crowd, that at this point had been moved into a billowing groove by the DJ. At the helm was Osman Murat Ertel, 60 years old, an enfant terrible artist who was temporarily banned from publishing in Turkey, who grew up as a teenager with the sounds of The Doors, Pink Floyd, and Santana, and who today creates psychedelic dance music with dub punchlines, folk fragments, and above all his electrified saz lute. At his side is another gray-haired indigenous urbanite operating the loop machine and percussion, plus a screaming punk Amazon belly dancer, a drummer, and an electric bassist. How they all danced through the crowd, instruments held overhead, driving the crowd and the professor into ecstasy right from the very first song, well, to quote Michael Ende completely out of context, that’s another story and shall be told another time. Here and now, however, we turn our attention to BaBa ZuLa’s new album, which is, well, how can I put this in a PG-rated way? Heck, R-rated, then: absolutely fan-fuckin’-tastic!
*The asterisk stands for extra credit here. Since no attempt to capture the uniqueness of this hitherto unknown to me band’s work with questionable cultural or culinary metaphors can hope to do said band justice, I decided to borrow the “extra credit” from the common school code of ego stroking.
BaBa ZuLa – Istanbul Sokaklari
A loudspeaker voice, perhaps at a train station? The honking of a car, the sounds of people walking by. A keyboard strikes up a dark root chord. Above it floats a delicate string plink-plank, with an oriental flavor. A shrill whistle hisses in between, presumably the signal to stay back from the edge of the platform. Of course, it could all mean something completely different; the professor’s Turkish is a little rusty. But this is how Istanbul’s most internationally renowned band – BaBa ZuLa played a leading role in Fatih Akin’s music documentary Crossing The Bridge – The Sound Of Istanbul 20 years ago – introduces us to Turkish soundscapes on the border between the Occident and the Orient. And then we dive right into BaBa ZuLa’s new work, their tenth, Istanbul Sokaklari. Following the street sound snippet overture, the first song, “Arsiz Saksagan,” starts like the prelude to an Ibiza house music party that has been slightly jerked out of the coordinate system: a booming bass sets the tone, the Turkish long-necked lute saz plays a distinctive melody. The whole thing builds to a veritable Bosporus boom-boom or fantastically droning döner dub*, which makes it clear that this group has worked with dancefloor legend Mad Professor in the past. Then come more sound snippets between bazaar and megapolis rush hour, before an eleven-minute oriental opus picks up speed, “Yok Had Yok Hesabi.” From a restrained three-note melody accompanied by monotonous drum sounds, a purple-colored power phoenix emerges, spreads its wings, and glides through the professor’s shotgun shack. I stomp across the dance floor, eyes closed, swaying in a warm Bosporus breeze, it gets louder, it gets psychedelic, it gets downright charman-crazy right up to the final solo of a free-spirited funk guitar. So, anyone who thought they could form an opinion about Turkish music based solely on the background noise in a falafel stand or on the beats blasting from rolled-down BMW windows: Get lost!
*Oops, another asterisk? Yes, for reasons. Here’s the explanation: The band describes its genre as “Oriental Dub.” But that doesn’t alliterate.
Label: Glitterbeat
Format: CD, LP, DL 24/48
The Sonic Dawn – Phantom
An icy wind blew biting sleet before it. A thousand cold needles stung the faces of the few stragglers huddled at the edge of the harbor. Taxis raced across the wet cobblestones on their way to who knows where. The professor tried in vain to light his concert cigarette with stiff fingers. Inside the establishment, a run-down institution south of the Arctic Circle, he quickly warmed his hands on a lukewarm bottled beer. Incense sticks were lit on stage, the kind that glow for hours, even days, and would transform any multipurpose hall into the last rest stop before the border to Nirvana. However, the scent that filled our noses, clouded our synapses, and provided the olfactory backdrop to an evening that was intoxicating for all the other senses as well was, in fact, the scent of Denmark. The Sonic Dawn presented their new album Phantom, and the trio from Copenhagen took their audience of barely four handfuls of people into a wonderful world of Nordic psychedelic consciousness. The Professor would like to staple a Post-it note to the kneecaps of every reader of his little Rhythm and Soul Compendium: See The Sonic Dawn live! Until then, since the current tour is unfortunately over, you will have plenty of time to explore their oeuvre, which has grown to five albums. Before I tell you what the new album is like: The first four are terrific, especially the debut Perception, which was self-produced by the three school friends in 2015, and the brilliant follow-up Into The Long Night (with the anthems of the century “Emily Lemon” and “Summer Voyage”). Phantom is now rougher and grungier, rockier and actually even more psychedelic than its predecessors, with an organ player providing additional groove in the studio. Listen here: “21st Century Blues” (the opening track at the concert, a heavily dragging thing, as if you were stumbling through the dunes of Denmark in wet moon boots, melodramatic and powerful sound, where earlier works were dominated by shimmering summer freshness) and “Iron Bird” (a psychedelic time warp back to the sixties, an orgy of sound in the style of Ten Years After, Iron Butterfly, and Led Zeppelin).
Label: Heavy Psych Sounds
Format: CD, LP, DL 24/96
Jenny Don’t And The Spurs – Broken Hearted Blue
Yes, this is how an album can – nay, should – start if it wants to find its way into Prof. P’s Rhythm and Soul Revue: from naught to 180 in two zeptoseconds*. The drums pound, the bass booms, and the guitars grind away at two chords like there’s no tomorrow – the kind of in-your-face that you’d expect from the third encore of a punk concert in a Berlin backyard around 1987 at half past midnight. No, Broken Hearted Blue is definitely not your run-of-the-mill country album. This is a band whose founding duo are not only married to each other, but also previously played together in a punk band that they had also founded together. But singer Jenny Connors and bassist Kelly Halliburton put their punk outlet Don’t on hold a few years ago because the songs they were writing somehow, all on their own, ended up sounding more and more like country, rock ‘n’ roll, and even a little soul. So the hobby side project Jenny Don’t And The Spurs became the main band, with half a dozen records on offer by now. But not all country is created equal. Jenny & Co. are not from Nashville, but from Portland, Oregon, in the rugged lumberjack north of the United States of B-merica. They play in the style of the raw Bakersfield sound once shaped by workers who fled the parched Midwest to the oil rigs off the West Coast. This subgenre is now called outlaw country, or cowpunk, and Jenny Don’t and The Spurs are its masters – quite secretively so, because unfortunately almost unknown. The way the opening song “Flying High” morphs rockabilly, soul, punk, and country swing is on fire! And it’s great art: lead guitarist Christopher March is a master of the acoustic guitar, and I say that as a concert expert who has seen Jenny Don’t and The Spurs live four or five times, even going so far as to driving his pony to a punk center in the middle of nowhere, namely Stuckenborstel, to do so. The band had to find a replacement on drums in 2022 because long-time Don’t and Spurs drummer Sam Henry, a punk legend (The Wipers, Poison Idea), passed away during the tour. Broken Hearted Blue is now the first album with new drummer Buddy Weeks, a young musician who has clearly already warmed up well in the quartet. Recommended tracks: “Pain in My Heart” (classic rockabilly rock ‘n’ roll with honky-tonk infusion and magnificent acoustic guitar and pedal steel) and “Sidewinder” (voodoo bass from hell, Once-Upon-a-Time-in-the-West guitar and driving drums create a wonderful piece of desert soul here).
*That’s right, friends, you are seeing stars. But the professor doesn’t want to send you out into the cold world without doing a little something for the educational level of the readership: A zeptosecond is one trillionth of a billionth of a second. Or, in other words for the humanities scholars among you: pretty darn brief.
Label: Fluff and Gravy Records
Format: CD, LP, DL 24/48
Woog Riots – Collectors Of Pop
From another context, I know that a lot of energy is expended in Darmstadt to accelerate tiny particles. They are accelerated to almost the speed of light, and in the process, new discoveries are sometimes made, such as a chemical element from the transactinide group in the 7th period of the d-block, which, credit where credit is due, is now called darmstadtium. Other than that, I only know that Darmstadt also tends to revive old parts and calls the project “SV Darmstadt 98,” a home for second- and third-hand soccer players with a last bit of battery power left in their hearts. And then there’s Woog Riots. A rather idiosyncratic Darmstadt duo, Silvana Battisti and Marc Herbert, who have now released their seventh album on their own label. As with the first six, however, this went down so far under the radar of any mainstream-oriented public that it’s no surprise that even a free spirit like the professor, who is weaned off mass taste, has heard of darmstadtium, but not of Darmstadt’s pop avant-garde. Well, those days are now over. The band itself describes its work as “songs as colorful as a Wes Anderson film, with lyrics that hit like Muhammed Ali’s quotes, and melodies as soft as a kiss from Princess Di.” Well, again: I have to lift the Woog Riots out of this self-made pigeonhole and proclaim that the music of Ms. Battisti and Mr. Herbert is beautiful even without dubious analogies. The sounds of keyboard, guitar, laptop database, a fretsaw, and two instruments I don’t know tumble over each other so skillfully that, strangely enough, the result is fine music. For example, I am still amazed at myself that I didn’t immediately put a song called “Bob Dylan,” that begins with a plastic keyboard fart no less, on my blacklist of music never to be heard again. On the contrary. And “Riverboot To Amsterdam” is actually a hit in the guise of an only seemingly insignificant little song, with a good melody, a catchy chorus, and, incidentally, a violin recorded in northern Finland, to whom that information may concern. Oh, and the two instruments I don’t know are called stylophone and otamatone, which, according to Google, are a keyboard precursor from the 1960s and a Japanese synthesizer saxophone for children, respectively. Well, keep on rockin’, Boweltown.
Label: From Lo-Fi to Disco!/Broken Silence
Format: CD, LP, DL 24/44
Ray LaMontagne – Long Way Home
He is a child of the East Coast. Born in New Hampshire, raised in Maine, in the small town of Lewiston. Escaping the trailer park where he lived with his mother and five siblings was his life’s goal. But it’s difficult when you belong to a demographic that the better-off condescendingly refer to as “white trash.” Eventually, Ray LaMontagne found a job at the local shoe factory. The alarm clock would ring at four o’clock, every morning, for years. Until a song broke the mold and a small but wonderful miracle took its course. Ray LaMontagne, up until then a hobby guitarist who performed exclusively in his kitchen at home, heard Stephen Stills’ “Treetop Flyer” that morning some 20 years ago, was intoxicated by the improvisational guitar playing, and decided: I’m going to be a guitarist. This was followed by a few gigs in the bars of Lewiston, a self-produced demo tape, and a surprisingly quick breakthrough thanks to a far-sighted producer. Ethan Jones, known for his work with Kings of Leon, produced the debut album Trouble, which sold 250,000 copies right off the bat, thanks in part to the shy musician’s great performances on the talk shows of David Letterman and Conan O’Brian (still available today on You-know-what-tube). Now the man who names Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Crosby, Stills, and Nash as his role models has already recorded his tenth album, which he also produced himself, after Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys, for example, recently steered Ray LaMontagne’s work more in the direction of sixties beat and psychedelic blues. And now the professor says: This self-made album, Long Way Home, is great. A gently swinging folk rock work with sparse instrumentation, catchy arrangements, and a lot of feeling. LaMontagne’s mildly warm tenor is one of the great voices of our time, but unfortunately, hardly anybody knows that. Although, you know now. So do yourself a favor and open your ears to a very beautiful album. Peace.
Label: Liula Records/Thirty Tigers
Format: CD, LP, DL 24/48