kip hanrahan: c/d s/d

but maybe my attention span is fcked?

Various, Conjure: Cab Calloway Stands In For the Moon (sort of Hal Wilneresque settings of Ishmael Reed's poetry with a core band feat. Don Pullen, Allen Toussaint, Steve Swallow, etc. and divers guests; uneven but the righteous grouchy lead vocal by Bobby Womack on 'The Author Reflects on His 35th Birthday' just gets better and better as I approach that age myself)

When I am a little drunk and on my own I often listen to "All roads lead to the flesh." Such a great album. Its like a lock-in in a jazz club in a crazy film noir. Carmen Lundy and an accordion. Sexy as hell.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vn89yrXalYk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bmgneDNiRA

I heard Kip talking on an informative panel at George Mason University outside DC last month. It was he, Ned Sublette(author of Cuba and Its Music), and DC dj/mambo historian Jim Byers. Kip's wife teaches at George Mason so they live down here. But he only likes to record in NYC so he goes up there a fair amount.

I was just listening to "This Night Comes Out of Both of Us" for the first time and came to see whether anyone was repping for it! Don't think I noticed the revive last Sunday. Some of the lyrics on Coup de Tete are o_O in an overreaching confessional kind of way but I love the general early 80s avant-skronk-funk sounds.

wish i was more of a fan of this album. i dig the concept.

http://static.letsbuyit.com/filer/images/uk/products/original/138/34/conjure-music-for-the-texts-of-ishmael-reed-13834670.jpeg

kinda crazy to see who he gets to play on his records/label. its always, like, everyone alive.

Yeah, Coup de Tete has Bill Laswell (unsurprisingly - wasn't he doing 500 albums a year in the 80s?), Arto Lindsay, Carla Bley...Teo Macero!...and a bunch of kickass Cuban musicians I don't know about.

wanna here this:

PAUL HAINES / DARN IT!

An anthology of music to poetry by PAUL HAINES returned to their natural acoustical settings by PAUL BLEY, ROBERT WYATT, EVAN PARKER, CARMEN LUNDY, GEORGE CARTWRIGHT, DEREK BAILEY, JOHN TCHIKAI, WAYNE HURVITZ, BOBBY PREVETTE, DAVID HOFSTRA, JOHN OSBORNE, MELVIN GIBBS, DK DYSON, DON PULLEN, JACK BRUCE, LEO NOCENTELLI, ROBBY AMEEN, “SMITTY” SMITH, GREG “IRON MAN” TATE, ANDREW CYRILLE, PETERSCHERER, KIP HANRAHAN, JT LEWIS, YALE EVELEV, BORNEO DRUMS, MICHEL CONTAT, ANDY GONZALEZ, IGNACIO BERROA, DANIEL FRIEBERG, DAVID SANCHEZ, MICHAEL SNOW, STEVE SWALLOW, MARY MARGARET O'HARA, GARY LUCAS, DD JACKSON, PEOPLE FROM NORTHERN BURMA, FERNANDO SAUNDERS, CARLOS WARD, TIM HAINES, AVERY HAINES, TIM WRIGHT
Produced by Kip Hanrahan and Paul Haines

lol at "PEOPLE FROM NORTHERN BURMA"

Piazolla's brilliant late albums Tango: Zero Hour, Rough Dancer and the Cyclical Night, & La Camorra
Deep Rumba, This Night Becomes a Rumba (drums and bass if not drum n bass; v. strange version of 'Sunshine of Your Love')
Various,

― max davenport (axehead), Thursday, November 11, 2004 4:59 AM (6 years ago) Bookmark

Rough Dancer and the Cyclical Night is my favorite Piazolla album. and the production / mood / setting is a big part of it.

yeah, the lyrics can be...purple? something like that. i like when jack bruce sings though. i like his voice. its kind of cool to hear such a mellow weirdness. but really i'm in it for the percussion. when its like 10 dudes going crazy on some mod-afro-latin jam.

yeah, the piazolla stuff is unreal. so beautiful.

and the DNA album from 1981 was on Kip's label. props for that.

In 2006 Kip was living in Reston, VA near George mason U where his wife teaches. I interviewed him then. He used to travel up to NYC to do all his recording though.

http://jazztimes.com/articles/16573-kip-hanrahan-american-claveist

Now in 2016, I think he still is traveling up to NYC from Reston Virginia, and is trying to raise 8 grand to put out a new album

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/new-american-clave-record-funds-for-the-end-run#/

i hate to say it but i've come to the conclusion that the stuff not by him on his label is worth hearing/owning and his own records....not so much. ambitious and weird for sure but i've owned more than a few and i never played them and eventually got rid of them.

Some were too weird for me, but not in a way that I liked . He seems to be still working with mostly the same folks:

This record will be under my name and will hopefully include many of the musicians I’ve been closely working with over the last stretch of years, such as: Steve Swallow [CONFIRMED], Brandon Ross, Fernando Saunders, Robby Ameen [CONFIRMED], Horacio “El Negro" Hernandez [CONFIRMED], Charles Neville [CONFIRMED], Alfredo Triff, Xiomara Laugart, Roberto Poveda, Yunior Terry, Yosvanni Terry and a host of others, as well as asking some friends and collaborators we’ve worked with in the past like Ruben Blades, Carmen Lundy, Giovanni Hidalgo and a few others, AND a few new faces (voices? hands?) who’s passion I’ve heard bursting through their music in ways that it seems that our project might be the perfect way to take their music even further into the emotional and musical complexity and honesty just waiting…

you can get steve swallow to play on your record if you pay him.

"Some were too weird for me, but not in a way that I liked ."

same here. its like listening to someone else's dream. the music he made was obviously very personal and meaningful to him, but i never felt like following along.

Haven't heard his own, or a whole lot on his label, but do very much enjoy Conjure, especially the first, well-described by xgau:
Conjure [American Clavé, 1984]
Ishmael Reed or no Ishmael Reed, to hear Taj Mahal, David Murray, and Allen Toussaint playing not alongside but with one another is really something. Thank Murray for his virtuosic atavism on the smartly paced blues side, and Mahal for his progressive heart on the more desultory jazz side. Thank Steve Swallow and Billy Hart for their humble shuffles. And then hail Ishmael Reed, whose pan-Afro-American modernism was the occasion of these miracles. Nothing like an oral tradition to make written words sing. A-
Bad Mouth [American Clavé, 2006]
The return of polycultural prophet Kip Hanrahan, starring Ishmael Reed and some funky jazzmen ("In War Such Things Happen," "Bad Mouth"). **
* ditto Conjure 2: Cab Calloway Stands In For The Moon, as noted by max davenport up-thread. Always thought the debut's sinuous ballad "The Wardrobe Master of Paradise" might be about Sun Ra.
Tango: Zero Hour is prob the one that puts this label in music history; and yeah xpostRough Dancer... is scrumptious too.

I'm a big Conjure fan. The two-disc American Clave sampler-best of I found enjoyable, and I like Tango: Zero Hour. Had Darn It! at one time but kinda gave up on getting into it.

ran across a copy of Desire Develops and Edge today at a record store and picked it up on a whim. Vertical's Currency was the album I used to have, and I still don't remember anything about it; the title of this one is more familiar for some reason, I guess maybe because there's basically a Golden Palomino's track on it. Gave one side a listen and it was really great, will listen to the rest when I get a chance.

I loved that album so much at one time, haven't heard in a while. great find.

also search Coup de Tete which has a cool Carla Bley feature.

one of those albums that defined what NYC was like before my time in my imagination when i was growing up.

yeah finished it up this evening, it is good. what strikes me most of all is the quality of the recording, which is extremely clear. he's clearly a great producer and I know he ran the label himself; presumably he also had a studio at the time? I'm a little struck by how expensive it all feels, for something that in the end seems to have had little critical or popular impact. It straddles a weird place between the No Wave scene and more serious jazzbo stuff + world music. I guess Laswell is a point of comparison but he had a much more prolific and pronounced career.

i love that record, always recommending it to people. His later stuff gets a little shape of my heart but agree that DDAE totally encapsulates an imaginary (and long gone) NYC for me.

he is like the DJ Khalid of downtown music