Back Up & Push 11/19/2008

To view the playlist for last Wednesday's radio show click here.

Country blues, jazz meets hip hop, 1970s Algeria, 1909 wax cylinders, plenty of rock, & Ms. Loretta.

!

Wax cylinder recordings

A new CD we're playing at W X D U starting this week is Polk Miller & His Old South Quartette (Tompkins Square Records). Mr. Miller was born in 1844 in Virginia, and learned music by hanging around slave quarters on a plantation. He was a racial integrationist well ahead of the times, as he made music publicly for years with a quartet of black men. Half of songs on the CD were recorded in 1909, a few years before Miller died. This was before the time of 78rpm records, even... music in 1909 was recorded onto wax cylinders!

Listening to Polk & the Quartette led me to do some reading about wax cylinder recordings. I found a most amazing website dedicated to preserving, in digital form, recordings originally made on those old cylinders. Big shout out to UC Santa Barbara for this great resource! There about songs, vaudeville sketches, and spoken word pieces. The huge archive, containing about 6,000 recordings, is well-indexed and searchable by instrument, country of origin, year, artist name, etc. Most recordings can be streamed online or downloaded. You owe it to your self to check out this incredible musical history! Several of the Polk Miller cylinders are there.

W X D U!

Since 2000 I've been on the air weekly at W X D U, 88.7fm, Durham NC. I play wide variety of music. The blog is as good a place as any to post my playlists, eh?

Look for collages like this one, featuring some of what I played on the most recent show. Click here for the Nov. 12, 2008 playlist, complete w/ comments.

Tune in sometime! Wednesdays, 10am - noon, eastern time. 88.7 on the dial or online at wxdu.org (works on iTunes; other options available of course).

R.I.P. to two ladies who sang their hearts out (and wore hats well).

Miriam Makeba (left), a giant figure in South Africa music, died November 9th after having a heart attack on stage. She was 76.

Yma Sumac (right), famed Peruvian singer, died November 1st at age 86.  She had colon cancer.

Check out Miriam singing, after the most amazing band intro ever:

And here's a super Yma montage to view while you dig her vocal range: