Beth Gibbons, vocalist of both Portishead and Rustin Man, turns 46 today. Here’s to one of the best, most soulful, female voices English music has ever produced. After the jump a selection of her best clips, but let’s start with this haunting cover of the Velvet Underground:

Beth Gibbons & Rustin Man “Candy Says”
 

 
Thanks to Grizz Gom Jabbar Robinson.
 
After the Jump, videos for “L’Annulaire”, “The Rip” and “Glory Box” (live)...

3iO’s Robert Mitchell
 
Music that has a sense of humor tends to get a hard time among people who consider themselves “serious” music fans. Why is this? Is it because music itself has to be seen to be serious? That the music makers have to mean it (maaan) and it’s impossible to wear your heart on your sleeve if it’s matched by a raised eyebrow and a smirk?

3iO are an acoustic jazz band who last year released an album called Back To New Roots, which features jazz-style covers of a host of big dance tunes from the last 15 years. LOL!! Right? Or is this an acceptable style of guffaw on a par with coffee table favourites Nouvelle Vague? Here’s a bit of info on the band via the Soundcloud page of their excellently named record label Hell Yeah: 

Let’s keep it simple, this dance meets jazz concept started as a joke: take a bunch of friends, discover that they are highly talented jazz musicians and propose them to do something a bit different, play and perform your favourite E-dance / alternative hits / chill out timeless classics into their contemporary jazz style…. shake it as it was your cocktail of choice and you have Serotonin Fuelled Jazz Covers.

3iO are Richard Maggioni (piano), Juan Manuel Moretti (double bass) Matteo Giordani (drums), they are not newcomers in the italian jazz circuit, they have already two albums on their back and with BACK TO NEW ROOTS they challenge themself with a new repertoire: Fat Boy Slim, Groove Armada, Chemical Brothers, Royskopp, Underworld, Spiller, DJ Shadow… just as you never heard them before.

So is this “serious” music? Or is it just a big joke that can be easily dismissed as not being worthy of much attention? While there is definitely a smirking knowingness about this project, the lol-factor is not all that great and I think some of this album actually sounds really good. But I will leave it up to you to decide whether this is “real” music or not (bearing in mind that we’re big fans of both Zappa and Sparks here, two acts who feel no fear of adding humor to their work): 
 
3iO “Right Here Right Now” (original by Fat Boy Slim)
 

 
 
3iO “Born Slippy (nuxx)” (original by Underworld)
 

 
 
3iO “Organ Donor” (original by DJ Shadow)
 

 
 
You can hear (and purchase) 3iO’s album Back To New Roots in full here.

Thanks Tara!

 
By now you’ve probably heard that assisted suicide advocate, Dr. Jack Kevorkian, AKA “Dr. Death,” died this morning at the age of 83.

But what you might not know is that Kevorkian was an accomplished painter and jazz musician.

Yep, it’s true. One day I was crate-digging in some record store in New York City and I came across his jazz CD, Kevorkian Suite: Very Still Life for a buck, so I bought it. The CD booklet has several full-color reproductions of his paintings, and as you can see in the video below, the subject matter of his paintings often pertained to rather macabre things, as I am sure will come as no surprise.  And yes, that’s his music, he’s playing flute and organ. Not bad, but it wouldn’t be the last thing I’d want to hear…
 

 
Eunice Kathleen Waymon was born 77 years ago today in the tiny town of Tryon, North Carolina. As Nina Simone, she’d go on to become the most powerful singer/songwriter of the Civil Rights era, blending the rawest aspects of jazz, blues, soul, and gospel into a unique style that buoyed her message of liberation.

As a generation of despots falls in the Middle East and people confront the forces of greed in Wisconsin, it seems apropos to recall what Simone bestowed on the world…
 

 
After the jump: Simone repossesses the Beatles’ “Revolution” and Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” in the name of avant-garde freedom blues…

 
Pianist Billy Taylor died yesterday at age 89, leaving a lasting legacy as America’s consummate jazz advocate.

Soon after getting his degree in Music Education, the Washington D.C.-raised Taylor became the house pianist at New York’s legendary Birdland, where he stayed throughout the ‘40s and ‘50s, playing with Bird, Dizzy and Miles and solidifying his role as a fixture and statesman in the city’s jazz scene.

But Taylor is perhaps best known as this country’s premier jazz educator, among the first to declare jazz “America’s classical music.” His long-running Jazzmobile project has produced concerts and educational programs throughout the American Eastern seaboard for 45 years.

Taylor was also the first to bring jazz thought and theory to mainstream American radio and TV. He was the jazz correspondent on CBS News Sunday Morning and on NPR.

But before all that, as the McCarthy era faded and Jim Crow was on its last gasp, Taylor was music director on an NBC show called The Subject is Jazz, which ran in 1958.
 

 
After the jump: Watch Nina Simone sing the Taylor-penned Civil Rights movement anthem “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free”…

Dexter Gordon
 
Jazz photographer Herman Leonard has died. Leonard’s black and white photographs of jazz greats such as Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington were masterpieces of lighting and mood. He captured moments in time that became an indelible part of jazz culture. Like the musicians his camera chronicled, his photographs sang.
 

Billie Holiday

 
Abbey Lincoln died today at the age of 80. She mattered in the world because she was a female jazz singer who stood up and became active in the civil rights struggle in the ‘60s when she could have remained neutral and safe.

She made great art. Nat Chinen wrote an excellent obit for her in the New York Times.

Here she is with her then-new husband, the drummer Max Roach, performing “Driva’ Man” from their 1960 album We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite.

This was a dangerous mind.
 

Abbey Lincoln and Max Roach

 
Get: We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite [CD]

 
Let’s remember jazz saxophonist Eric Dolphy, who would have turned 88 today. Over his 30 albums as a bandleader, Dolphy showed an amazing versatility and development, emerging from his be-bop roots into some wonderfully accessible avant garde creations, like his last, Out to Lunch, for Blue Note.

People celebrate that album as a classic of new jazz for good reason. It’s innovative and gritty instead of abstract and simply free for its own sake, as Dolphy seems to transfigure the idea of melody rather than rejecting it out of hand. It’s simply beautiful and compelling, and worth having in your library if you don’t yet.

Dolphy’s death at 36 from diabetes in 1964 in Berlin was especially tragic because it wasn’t from typically regarded circumstances—he was substance-free and didn’t even smoke.

“He was a musical centipede,” notes drummer Han Bennink in the documentary below. “I could hear that he could do everything.”
 

 
Get: Eric Dolphy - Out To Lunch (The Rudy Van Gelder Edition)