#I found out Tom could sing recently and I can't get the fact that it's what I picture Melvin sounding like | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

randomvarious · 10 months

Text

Today's compilation:

The Wild Bunch 1995 Reggae / Roots Reggae / Rocksteady / Dub

First off, let me just say that I am in total awe of this crop of reggae instrumentals from the 60s and 70s here. So much music since has come with so much more fuss and technological advancements, and yet an unscalable pile of the stuff that came out after this doesn't seem to come close to how good a bunch of these simple tunes still are. In a broad sense, all these songs' formulas are pretty simple, but they really still just manage to click so damn well 😌.

From this comp's liner notes:

During the past eight years, Trojan have pioneered the 'Revival' Reggae scene. Our re-issue programme has preserved some of the best vocals ever recorded in Jamaica, but with the emphasis being placed on some of the island's many talented singers in recent years, the musicians have tended to be ignored. This current release reverses that trend by turning the spotlight onto the 'players of instruments', and in so doing we pay tribute to Kingston's legendary session men.

Now, because nearly all of these are straight-up instrumentals, they all pretty much operate in the same way, and each of them seem to have one thing in common that ends up either making or breaking the tune: the lead instrument. Because reggae riddims are inherently repetitive and steady, if left alone, they will naturally get stale. So, it takes a good melody of some kind to be laid atop that riddim in order to lend the song some much needed variety. And in a whole lot of these 27 tunes, that ends up coming to remarkable fruition.

It's hard to even really know where to begin with this album since there's so much goodness to be found within it, but the thick, whistle-ringing improvisational organ of Lloyd Charmer's "Ling Tong Ting" is an absolutely terrific place to start. Then the JJ All Stars get topsy-turvy with the audio channels on "Memphis Underground," by sending the melodic leads exclusively and *very prominently* through the left, and 90% of the riddim through the right; Herman Marquis' "Tom's Version," whose intro I'm pretty sure I've heard sampled in at least one hip hop tune before (Wu-Tang, maybe? It's honestly driving me crazy that I can't put my finger on it), then follows by doing a wonderful job of harmonizing its organ and trumpet, yielding this fully warm and satisfying haze; the legendary Augustus Pablo, who singlehandedly managed to transform the melodica from a mere plaything for children into an instrument with serious gravitas, shows why on a rootsy piece of dub called "Great Pablo;" and then towards the end, we get a bit of a surprise with a piece of gospel-reggae that's actually not an instrumental: the Harry J All Stars "Holy Moses," which is aided by a small set of female singers whose deployment of soul harmonies reminds of the backup singing that can be found on a bunch of Bob Marley hits.

But the closing title tune by the Music Doctors may be both the most remarkable and most fun track of them all, for the simple fact that it uniquely trades its leads between—not things like guitars, horns, and organs—but just bass and drums. And the bassist just seems to carefreely play this laid-back and very recognizable piece of melody from The Jackson 5's "I Want You Back;" it's so good!

So, a phenomenal collection of rare Jamaican reggae instrumental classics here, from the genre's premier label itself, Trojan. Yesterday, I posted about an excellent metal cassette from 1985 that's also called The Wild Bunch, and given how good that that album was, I really didn't think that this one could outdo it, but it very much did!

Highlights:

Selwyn Baptiste - "Mo' Bay" Boris Gardiner - "Memories of Love" The Dynamites - "Phantom" Sound Dimension - "Soul Food" Lloyd Charmers - "Ling Tong Ting" The Aggrovators - "The Sniper" JJ All Stars - "Memphis Underground" Lynn Taitt & The Jets - "Love Me Forever" Herman Marquis - "Tom's Version" The Tennors - "Copy Me Donkey" Winston Wright - "Heads or Tails" Augustus Pablo - "Great Pablo" Harry J All Stars - "Holy Moses" Music Doctors - "Wild Bunch"

#reggae #roots reggae #rocksteady #dub #dub music #music #60s #60s music #70's #70's music

6 notes · View notes

wildstrandsblog · 3 years

Text

An Unconditional Love Story: Take Flight, Sisterhood

Issue 2 - May 7, 2021

(Suggested listening)

My original plan after hiring Fernanda to help around the home was for her to work twenty hours a week in the morning time for the first four months after having our third baby, but that idea changed as we approached the end date. I was neither physically or mentally prepared to take on the full breadth of childcare for my three young children, ages three years old and under, and all the homecare, too. Life, however, was offering up a different set of plans for us. After giving Fernanda the greenlight she could stay on indefinitely, she said that may be all the time she had. Her visa was running out and she was having to fly back to Brazil with hopes of getting it renewed. She explained how it was a very rigorous process. She was scared it wouldn’t go through and wasn’t ready to let go of her dream of coming to America fighting back the tears. I wasn't ready to let her go, either. Her love and her light were the best thing keeping my little family afloat. We had no choice, though. She had to go. So in my Christmas shopping I found something that caught my eye, something I thought might be the perfect gift to tell Fernanda how much I thought of her, perhaps something we both needed. It was a necklace with an engraving that read, “Be Brave” on it. She was in tears receiving it with feelings even a little misplaced, unsure of what to do with that kind of encouragement from a near perfect stranger. I’m sure it wasn’t common. I remained stoic, putting all my energy back into the hope that the little message in the necklace would somehow bring Fernanda back to us.

Those four weeks she was gone for me were long and brutal to be without her. It was a hellish Christmas working through my husband’s depression and anxiety which were in need of unhealthy attention and me not strong enough for all of it still. Fernanda, however, got through all her tests with flying colors at the Brazilian Embassy like doors suddenly opened. She even had enough time to go run into the ocean, their summertime, wearing white, the custom for the Brazilian New Year starting things off brand new. I received her back in Virginia with exhalation and praise for getting through all the tough parts. I suppose I silently praised myself, too. I was hopeful for the dawning of new days with my newborn son beginning to sleep through the nights. But the pressure of supporting everyone as the family’s lone caregiver had gotten too much for me. My forearms and hands were feeling like hot irons stuck in a fire. I was barely able to hold a glass of water to my lips, holding on to too much psychological debris like many Empaths. I had no one to pour it into.

“She was holding up the part of the sky I couldn’t, not coming into my space, as I called on the mountains, seas, skies, and all the galaxies combined to support me. It was all I had left getting me through, getting the worst from too many loved ones I had once considered home.”

I poured as much as I could silently into my art and writing but it could only support so much. I went in search of help again, this time through an energy healer and found a woman fifteen years my senior. She was a Yoga Therapist who was the most intuitively-gifted person I’ve ever met and had three children of her own. Through her conversation and massage therapy work to dislodge some of the emotional trauma, I began to see many of the cycles I had been missing. Having written about some of these illuminations in a previous post (see “Pulling The String”), I’ll progress [quickly] through what happened next once I made the choice to surrender and got sent full throttle like a rocket crashing into the sky inside - a three fold process.

With the internal pressure of everything I carried getting greater - caring for three very young children, supporting a depressed and anxious husband with childhood trauma, supporting my own severe childhood trauma, large psychological upheavals within the worlds of loved ones, and even larger unknowns still left for myself from an invisible world continuing to open up my heart and mind and wary not to repeat the same “almost-death” part - by May 2019, I was left with only two choices to release it. It was a pressure so great it had me crying for a full hour and half in the hands of the Yoga Therapist and I could’ve probably cried longer. I kept thinking, “How is she tolerating this?” It was that kind of cry only an unconditionally loving mother could love, moaning, gut-wrenching, curled-up-in-a-ball, body-practically-seizing kind of cry. I was unable to speak though encouraged. The only words I could get out by the end of the session were, “My husband is hurting me.” It was that kind of hurt that can’t be touched, far deeper than any physical wounding. It was wounding from abandonment in my greatest hour of need, a care I had long needed, for me to be loved and to be heard unconditionally, not with questions just expansive listening that only requires a nod to know the person is still engaged. I had loved myself fully and unconditionally already. It was what ferried me through my opening processes and completed my individuation during my spiritual awakenings. I needed more, though. I needed to be seen for how human I was, and am, without feeling I needed to use any superpower to make anyone love my human self, that part of me that has always been drawn to a person and their pain, even a stranger, and never running away. It is the human and the ether in those tears that they have manifested from I have always loved.

My spirit was cracking and I couldn’t put the pieces of a fragmented self and family back together even though I had been trying. Nothing I was doing was helping. Even asking for help from others went disregarded or downplayed, and I was reminded of the voice of my mother who told me as a young child after telling me the story of her assault and rape in a public mall parking lot as well as her own home in front of her two young sons, “It is better to yell ‘fire’ than to call out for help. People run away when you ask for help. They come running when you yell ‘fire.’” Undeniably, I was getting myself to a similar place where my pain had nowhere to go, nowhere to be heard, and I was scared for my safety. My two choices were to go nuclear or get some space. I chose space and called one of my best girlfriends who was happy to put me up for an extended visit over the Memorial Day weekend. I couldn’t have known, though, that even in choosing the more sustainable approach, the Universe only had one set of plans for me and wouldn’t let me go until I saw the entire picture way beyond myself. It needed me to be a witness to the fact that I wasn’t the only human suffering, in desperate need of a universal culture shift and it was calling me up on my best girlfriend’s phone.

I left my home in haste, though clear conscious, kissing my children’s heads and waving goodbye to everyone. A few hours later, I was received into my girlfriend’s home, who I’ll call Lauren, leaving a pool party she had been at with her husband and two friends, another couple, to come be with me. After a long vent-fest and both of us feeling clearer about each of our troubles, no sips even needed from the wine we broke out, Lauren and I headed from her home to go see our alma mater, get some ice cream, and were making plans to head to the beach the following day to play some volleyball with friends. I was in love, totally in the space I was needing. We got diverted almost instantly on our drive with a text from her friend, the other woman from the pool party Lauren had left to be with me, who I’ll call Crystal. Crystal asked Lauren to come back to the townhouse to come pick up her husband, who I’ll call Tom, in a vague text where Crystal wrote how her boyfriend had hit her and Tom was beside himself. When Lauren and I got there, Tom said, “Kayt! Sing me something! You used to be a singer!,” to help get his mind off things. With care, I obliged and began singing the first thing from the library of recent songs I had just been listening to. I pulled out Queen’s “Another One Bites The Dust,” like an omen. Tom soon equalized and we all went inside the townhouse to collect the shoes Tom was missing - myself, Lauren, Tom, and Crystal - but something told me not to stray too far from the front door.

It was like a Hollywood film where all three white girls go inside the townhouse with the belligerent, drunk white guy without any reason, but the one thing different was than I had some. The unseen boyfriend off camera, who I’ll call Greg, was back on the scene within ten minutes. Greg walked back into his townhouse hitting me hard on my left shoulder with the front door I was standing in front of. The hit triggered something, remembering how I had just avoided a cataclysmic car collision on the drive down because of a surge of pain coming through my left shoulder that told me veer right, and right then a little sports car peeled out. I jolted as this unknown guy walked by with a strange feeling that said, “He’s got a gun.” I then saw him lunge for the door, his hand swiftly going for the lock. I reacted quickly by putting my left foot in between the door and the door jamb and had it slammed on looking the man square in the eyes. He left me to have it out again with Tom, a continuation from earlier, who was two sheets to the wind. Lauren, myself, and Crystal watched as two alpha males were facing off, ready to finish each other off this time in a drunken rage. I ran out of the townhouse and watched the rest of them stay inside. I was screaming for Lauren to get out of there but she wasn’t going to leave Tom behind. I looked down at my purse and had nothing to help me, no car keys, not even my phone. Do I just watch? I could already see what was going to happen next. I was going to hear and see more fighting, then a flash from gunfire, and a woman screaming. I couldn’t just stand there. I ran back inside the townhouse summoning up my big voice to tell Tom to back down. I was starting to get a response and he began to back away. The other guy, Greg, though, with shadows not keen on stopping, leaned in to raise the fight back up.

I turned to him, a black man with a white girlfriend who he had cruelly thrown down the stairs just hours earlier, was now aiming his sights at me. This was one of the unknowns not given in Crystal’s vague text while Lauren and I were off living carefree. Standing there, now, in the den of an unknown townhouse, I could feel how Greg wanted to believe I was there to help him. He was desperately hurting, fueled with anger as a mistreated black man and military veteran with mental illness whose mother, as well as his best friend, had just died a cruel death from cancer months before and he wasn’t coping. He had nowhere to go, just like me. Nowhere to be heard. He had made a choice that weekend, too, but he was going with nuclear. With racism, domestic violence, mental illness, gun violence, and a ceaseless cycle of blame and denial rampant, it was the inevitability I could no longer elude, darker than dark and beyond twisted. I found myself at the center of the Labyrinth, drawn to the Minotaur that looked more like a human to me with tears he hid.

I could feel how broken Greg was as I was yelling at him to back down. I was now standing inside his pain because he had let me in. He may have even loved me in that moment because someone was finally showing up to be with him in his great hour of need and he wanted to show his appreciation in the same way he had been shown love all these years. With me working to save Tom from annihilation, Greg decided he would now point the intended gun at my head and said “You’re a fucking racist!” and my life flashed. Bang. Episode 1. I felt my mind shift in that moment, in surprise I was able to walk away. It was a flashlight Greg was holding to scare me with his gun was too far away, although none of it I truly knew, it was all still just a feeling. Reality struck on my drive home with Tom while escorting him away from the scene he kept racing back into even after the police were called and Lauren stayed behind with Crystal to give testimony. Tom in anguish revealed to me Greg had pressed a gun against his head, repeating, “Oh my God!,” multiple times in his storytelling, after he had tried to stop Greg from brutally beating his girlfriend in front of him and almost died. Tom continued saying how the world was fucked and we might as well blow it all up. In the end, both men were eventually arrested. And in the alternative ending where my presence wasn’t there taking Lauren away from the pool party, I imagine things may have happened so quickly they might’ve even made it just in time for the 6 o’clock news.

After an explosive first part to the trilogy crashing me into the sky inside, Episode 2 began with the swirling mind of an Empath that got sent through the imaginal realm of time and space of personal traumas, ones I had experienced and further back that were not my own. None of the original pain I was carrying before I left my home that weekend got disposed off. They were all now amplified, carrying Lauren’s, Tom’s, Crystal’s, and Greg’s pain. Lauren, who I had hugged leaving her home the next day, both of us promising not to disconnect, was now avoiding me. I was struggling with the fact she was banging on her bubble, too, but in too much denial about her abuse from her husband’s alcoholism. I wanted to help her. I was also sad she wasn’t loving me the way I needed to be loved, too, even having gone through a shared traumatic experience. I was beginning to attract more negative energy at this point including my husband’s, direct from his childhood trauma. The psychological levies were broken and spilling. I called my husband’s father in a desperate plea for help again to talk his son out of his anger aimed at me. His father handed the phone over and I got told, once more, how I was the one spiraling out of control. I couldn’t deal with hearing it again. I threw the phone down. Not again.

Then out of nowhere we got a call from my father-in-law’s wife who was screaming over a voice message I could hear even through the standard audio of my husband’s phone. My father-in-law was dead, his wife finding him on the floor when she got home just a day and half later after the last words I spoke saying, “I need your help,” not even a week after having the Universal gun pointed at me. We were all in shock. It was an aneurysm with no symptom leading up that would’ve alerted us that took him. I lead my husband through each step of shock turned trauma and stepped up to lead the last rites of passage for my husband’s family through our completely unexpected loss. I had never done anything like that before. I felt called and my husband’s family believed I was the one to do it. Things were moving so fast there were only glimmers of Fernanda during this time. I imagine her watching a fallen woman, gray in skin color, pushing through severe episodes of apathy, still directing like she knew to do, unable to feel anything besides a rollercoaster of sensation, waking up in agony, and being thrown curve balls left and right. My reputation was now up for debate by my family and Lauren who had been talking behind the scenes during all of this. My family, with negative projections of my mother now placed on me, all thought I had gone crazy and were hell bent on fixing the situation. They believed I was out of control. In the midst of it all, Fernanda was there doing exactly what I needed her to be doing. She was holding up the part of the sky I couldn’t, not coming into my space, as I called on the mountains, seas, skies, and all the galaxies combined to support me. It was all I left to get me through, getting the worst from too many loved ones I had once considered home.

[Issue 3 coming May 14th!...]

SNEAK PEEK:

“One could believe that would be the end to the merciless saga, just like I did, but that was just the eye of the storm. Episode 3 still held a second wall to break through which opened up a month later while I lay on my front lawn and police showed up.”

#Spotify #writer #writing #Empath #unconditional #unconditional love #take flight #sisterhood #wildstrands

0 notes