Music Monday

THE LEGENDARY ALICE RUSSELL.

Makes you want to ask a few Q's... like...

Adele?

Who's Adele?

Bahaha just kidding (p.s. note - check out Adele's album 21 - her studio band is pretty much comprised ofr my favourite session/groove/heavy-ass-jazz-funk musos on the planet right now - Pino Palladino on Bass, James Poyser on Keys, Chris Daddy Dave on Drums - alumni of D'angelo, the Roots, Common, Erykah Badu, lots of good ish (and john mayer... but no biggie - Pino is a MOFO!)).

Anyways, comparisons aside it's always good to see a resurgence of women with big voices on the charts. UK Soul Songstress Alice Russell needs more mainstream recognition. Let's fix that. Did some cool stuff with the Quantic Soul Orchestra n' the Bamboos too! Y'all should check that out. Buy her records, they're a bit left-of-centre and incredibly soulful. If you haven't watched the video already let me tell her, there is probably no one else in the UK who matches her voice. Definitely worth a whurl if you like BIG soul vocals with a dash of strange.

Speaking of pipes. Been getting into NZ singer Kimbra. Like Russell, Kimbra has a really soulful, jazzy slightly alternative sound. Her album 'Vows' drops THIS FRIDAY. HECKYEAH! Triple J Feature album too. Really lush, summery stuff. Good beats, amazing voice. Check-k it.

STUDIO ISH


LIVE ISH

And Another Thing

I really like the format of Dom's blog and 1songday. So to bring a bit of predictability (and hopefully some more regular posts) I'm going to have "themed" posts for different days of the week.

Monday - Music Mondays (hahah copied right from Dom. Hope you don't mind!) where I post tunes (new & old) with some accompanying words. Hopefully once I figure out how to embed mp3's and stuff then that'd be ace.

Friday - Food Fridays. If I get the chance to go get some eats or hit up a joint for some food, I'll post up a food related post. Maybe a recipe if you're lucky.

If I can think of any other categories I'll put them up. Hopefully this'll force me to do more posts. Or at least two a week.

And one more thing.

I love this series posted by AMOEBA music on youtube called "What's in my bag". It's pretty fascinating to see what records my favourite artists are buying/digging/enjoying..

LINKS AWAKENING

Some good stuff from the internet:

1. WATCH: How to reduce carbon emissions?

By making cities more dense + sharing infrastructure/objects.

"I would submit to you that all of these things are not only possible, they're being done right now, and that it's a darn good thing. Because right now, our economy by and large operates as Paul Hawken said, "by stealing the future, selling it in the present and call it GDP." And if we have another eight billion or seven billion, or six billion, even, people,living on a planet where their cities also steal the future, we're going to run out of future really fast.But if we think differently, I think that, in fact, we can have cities that are not only zero emissions, but have unlimited possibilities as well."

http://www.ted.com/talks/alex_steffen.html

2. LISTEN: Awesome band - Snarky Puppy



3. READ:

These are two great music blogs for anyone into eclectic music that is more on the groove, funk, soul, hip-hop and jazz side-of-things.

http://www.giantstep.net/

http://revivalist.okayplayer.com/

Also thought this was really cool - really no-nonsense, straight-up resource for web development explained in very simple non-scary terms:

http://www.dontfeartheinternet.com/resources

"Are you a print designer, photographer, fine-artist, or general creative person? Do you have a shitty website that you slapped together yourself in Dreamweaver in that ONE web design class that you took in college? Do you not have a site at all because you’ve been waiting two years for your cousin to put it together for you? Well, we’re here to help. We know that you have little to no desire to do web design professionally, but that doesn’t mean that you want an ugly cookie-cutter site or to settle for one that hasn't been updated since Hackers was in theaters."