We the soul of Mardi Gras.....

Carnival season is well under way, has been for more than a month. But in terms of what most people associate with Mardi Gras [the big public parades], the celebration shifted from first to second gear last Friday. This coming Thursday is when things really get revved up. [Sorry for the lame metaphor, in my spare time I'm learning how to drive a car with a stick shift].

Yeah right, spare time.

I'm very busy at the moment, but I'm gonna try to post a few Mardi Gras related tunes before Ash Wednesday. Some have been previously posted by folks who write better than I, so I'll mostly be sending you off to other blogs for the real scoop.

Btw....Baby Girl's first birthday was last week. Hard to believe it's been a year.

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Dan Phillips wrote a nice piece on this record 4 years ago. You can read it, here.

As is mentioned in the post, this tune can be found on the re-release of the Wild Magnolias first two Lps, titled "They Call Us Wild".

I'm including a clip which is ostensibly about making a 'suit'. The interviewer is not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, but if you manage to watch it all there are a few telling moments, such as when Agee makes a point of stating that it's a 'new suit'. There are also a few hints concerning history and background.

The second clip shows Agee with The Rebirth Brass Band and includes shots of the suit he's working on in the first clip.

Hope ya'll enjoy........

Wild Magnolias going to Melpomene....

I really meant to post this on Fat Tuesday but chances were about 50/50 that someone else would do the same and finding my copy of the 45 turned out to be harder than I expected, so ya'll got "Funky Soul" by David Batiste and The Gladiators instead.

Anyway, there's absolutely no reason not to post this song out of Carnival season. It's one of the funkiest records ever cut. In fact ya'll should go just ahead and get up out of your seats right now. The controls are set for the ground zero of funk.

And that's not just BS. I'm one of those who think the roots of funk as we know it today lie in the coming together of two very different African musical traditions in New Orleans. On the one hand the sound of Central Africa as distilled in Cuba, poly-vocal and poly-rhythmic. And on the other, the Islamic influenced melismatic uni-vocal tradition of the Sub-Saharan peoples who represented a large proportion of those brought to the continental U.S. as slaves.

In essence, the blues met the rumba in Congo Square.

And although not often mentioned, I think there was a third influence at work. That of Haitian/Voodoun drumming, which originates from a singular African culture and is in it's way different than that of Cuban Santeria or Palo Monte [the religious sources of the secular rumba].

Ya see, I think it's possible that the local Voudoun drum influence is what gives a distinct flavor to recordings made in New Orleans even when the musicians were consciously trying to copy elements of Afro-Cuban music. The "pseudo-mambo" recordings made in New Orleans, Southern Louisiana, Mississippi, and by extension Chicago during the 1950s are of far greater importance than many realize. I'm always shocked when I see them dismissed as "primitive" or "novelties" when to my mind they are the keynotes of a very important musical fusion in it's infancy.

I hadn't really thought about it before, but yeah, this tune is "pseudo-mambo" to the core.

Hope ya'll enjoy....I'm including Part 2, not only is it close to a minute longer than Part 1, but towards the end there's this telling moment when Willie Tee and the band drop out and all that's left is the pure essence of the thing.

Part 1.

Part 2.