The Monday Morning Brew #91

Ft. Jim Ghedi, Iona Zajac, Sam Grassie, Silver Apples, CAN, The Smoke, Stealing Sheep, LUMP, Michael Head, Charlie Parr and more.

Credit: Fortepan / Barbjerik Ferenc

Welcome to another Monday Morning Brew Playlist. It’s an eclectic one which sweeps across genre and time. The listen links are further down this page.

While it includes new releases from Jim Ghedi, Iona Zajac and Sam Grassie, most of the music is from the past…fun in places and quirky and weird in others…including Silver Apples, CAN, The Smoke, Stealing Sheep, LUMP, Michael Head, Charlie Parr and more.

And for something not in this week’s playlist:

In 2021, Verve put out a compilation titled “I’ll Be Your Mirror: A Tribute To The Velvet Underground & Nico”. It included tributes from Kurt Vile & The Violators, Sharon Van Etten, Iggy Pop & Matt Sweeney, Michael Stipe, Matt Berninger of The National, Courtney Barnett, King Princess, Fontaines D.C. and more.

The original album The Velvet Underground & Nico was released on Verve in March 1967 and recorded the previous year during Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable tour. The cover album was kept in the same running order as the original, and the pleasure of covering the notable Venus In Furs was given to Andrew Bird and Lucius (Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig). The song’s title was inspired by a novella of the same name published in 1870 by Austrian author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, drawing on themes of female dominance and sadomasochism.

Also, a while back, I interviewed Dan Torigoe of Dolceola Records. Dan is from Japan and often travels halfway around the world to record American traditional music using the same vintage analog equipment used by Alan Lomax - an Ampex 601, which is a portable, analogue, reel-to-reel made between the 1950s-60s and a beautiful vintage ribbon microphone – the RCA-77DX, which has been described as one of the most iconic microphones ever to grace this earth.

Here’s a recent recording he shared featuring Sharde Thomas performing Sittin’ On Top of the World:

Extract from my interview with Dan:

I was born and raised in Iwakuni, Japan. My parents ran record stores and a Jazz club there, and when I was a kid, I saw a lot of Jazz legends at the club, such as Billy Higgins, Nat Adderley, Claude Williamson, Steve Kuhn and Cyrus Chestnut. When I was 13, my mom gave me a Muddy Waters CD saying, “Just listen to this, not Green Day”, which completely blew my mind. I started digging into the world of Blues, from Lightnin’ Hopkins to Charley Patton and Tommy Johnson. After that, I got Smithsonian Folkways’ “Anthology of American Folk Music”, and I explored further, taking in Gospel, Old Time, Cajun and Conjunto music.

…Our mission is to record community-based music, so it's important that we don't hinder them and instead capture these recordings as ordinary moments taking place in the community, as they would normally happen. It's a great pleasure when it goes well.

Gee’s Bend Quilters, Boykin, Alabama (2015)

Read the full interview here.

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