Synth Qua Non

Tomita - Arabesque No. 2

We'll finish off the long March with a 50th anniversary special.

This one seems to always circulate from a speed-corrected cassette of the FM broadcast, but for whatever reason it took me all of 13 seconds flat to find the Quadraphonic BBC pre-FM LPs on Soulseek.

Back when synthesizers were new and impossibly futuristic gear, and wild beasts roamed an Earth covered in plankton, today's superstar was one of the first to make a career out of manipulating their twiddly little knobs, and to make their sounds the basis for his entire musical output.

His music seems almost quaint or primitive now, but when he was in his heyday he was among the vanguard, at the cutting edge of what was then unprecedented technology.

His name was Isao Tomita, but like a lot of stars he went by just the single name Tomita.

Born in 1932, he began really hitting the public consciousness in the 1960s, as the composer of many of Japan's TV soundtracks.

When the first modular synths hit in 1968/69, he began to move into using them exclusively, focusing just as much on the sound design aspects as the composition capabilities of the new equipment then applecarting everyone's musical expectations.

As the 1970s progressed he became globally renowned for a kind of Classically tinged Space music, performing across the world to adoring audiences and pushing the then-nascent world of sound synthesis forward into what became modern Electronic music.

If you need an hour introduction to the universe of Tomita, this show -- which I've deliciously downmixed from the Quad LPs to a nice, wide stereo field -- is as appropriate as any you might come across.

Tomita

Hammersmith Odeon

London, UK

3.26.1976

01 BBC introduction by Brian Matthew

02 Dawn (Children's Corner No. 4)(from Daphnis and Chloe)

03 Snowflakes Are Dancing

04 Clair de Lune

05 Synthesiser Sounds demonstration

06 Arabesque No. 2

07 Firebird Suite

08 Passepied

Total time: 54:45

Isao Tomita - synthesizers & keyboards

Michael Reeves - piano on Firebird Suite

sourced from Ben Ward's 24/88 capture of a quadraphonic BBC transcription LP

converted to 16/44 stereo CD Audio, edited, tracked & remastered by EN, March 2026
297 MB FLAC/direct link

That's the path we Marched, hope you enjoyed it. I'm already trying to suss out April, which might begin with a seminal Centennial.

In the meantime, paste your stereophonic ears to this formerly Quadraphonic excursion into the Tomitaverse, precisely 50 years to the day it happened!--J.

4.22.1932 - 5.5.2016

I String the Body Electric: Melvin Sparks 80

Melvin Sparks - Midnight Creeper

As the last embers of the weekend fade, we'll celebrate a milestone berfday for another superman of string driven things.

Today's guitar god has been gone 15 years, but today he'd have been 80.

If you love all that Prestige and Blue Note Soul Jazz stuff, where guys take turns playing wicked solos over New Orleans-style second line grooves, today is your day and this is your guy.

For he was kind of Prestige house guitarist in the late 1960s and early 1970s when all that was hot, contributing to seminal sessions that are now the stuff of Hip-Hop sampling lore.

All those Leon Spencer and Charles Earland platters feature him heavily, and he was such a smoking player that it wasn't long before he began recording as a leader.

By the time he passed, from hypertension and diabetes in 2011, he had 15 of his own records under his belt.

Back in the '90s, when I was learning the drums, I must have practiced daily to 30 songs he's on.

If you had a dollar for every time I worked out to Rusty Bryant's Fire Eater -- wherein the legendary drum deity Idris Muhammad attempts to remove everyone's clothes using only his tom-toms and kick drum -- you'd be able to open the Strait of Hormuz by making the dudes an offer they couldn't refu$e.

Anyway he toured relentlessly throughout his life, and there's a whole bunch of recordings of him on the Internet Archive from various audience captures and whatnot.

There's even a couple of really nice DAT soundboards, including a couple from the same week 20 years ago this Fall.

To celebrate our departed stringslayer, I brewed those two shows up into a nice 2 1/2 hour Master Class in Pure P Funk Power.

Melvin Sparks

The Big Easy

Portland, Maine USA

10.21.2006

01 Alligator Boogaloo

02 Fire Eater

03 Charlie Brown

04 Pick Up the Pieces

05 Conjunction Mars

06 Miss Riverside

07 Midnight Creeper

08 Thank You

09 The Governor

10 Funky Good Time

11 Let the Music Take Your Mind/closing Sparks remarks

Total time: 2:27:40

disc break goes after Track 06

Tracks 06-08 are from the Thunderbird Café, Pittsburgh PA 10.27.2006

Melvin Sparks – guitar & vocals

"Big" Paul Wolstencroft - Hammond B-3 organ

Shawn "Doublefoot" Hill - drums

Judd Nielsen - Hammond B-3 organ (replaces Big Paul on Tracks 06-08)

The Nigel Hall horns guest on horns and vocals on Tracks 10 & 11

master soundboard DATs

edited & remastered for unity by EN, March 2026
904 MB FLAC/direct link

I've got one more for next Thursday to close out the month in synthtastic style for you, with some of that lush pre-broadcast vinyl you always see me out working the corner, in a King Biscuit Flower Hour miniskirt, to acquire.

Tune in in a few days for that, after you've hooked up to the powerplant and absorbed some of these Melvin Sparks from the birthday boy, born this day in 1946 and still lighting up the dancefloor from The Great Beyond!--J.

3.22.1946 - 3.13.2011

String Modulator: Bill Frisell 75

Bill Frisell Quintet - Moon River

Sorry this is on the late side... I was tweaking the Easter, so to speak. Ever tweak the Easter? It can crack your Egg. But let's March on with this super milestone birthday for a major player of our times.

He should need minimal, if any, introduction to anyone familiar with, oh I dunno.... music? I covered him a decade-plus ago when I first started this page, but since he's hitting 75 today let's do one of Joshy's li'l obsesso-posts. You know, where I post way too much music because I can't choose one thing, because it's all so tremendously awesome and all that Jazz.

Is he the most ego-less guitar player ever to pick it? I swear, when I was preparing this post I was dumbstruck -- given how geetarists are notoriously high on the notes-per-dollar, hey! this is my band and I haven't dominated the tune in nearly 11 seconds! Turn it up!! quotient -- by how our daily Maestro is so comfortable laying out and giving his mates the spotlight for extended stretches, and by how economically perfect his choice of notes and phrases always is.

It's gotta be in some way due to this predilection for brevity and the terse, impactful line over the thunderstruck, loud one that really defines him as a player, and enables him to function in so many contexts at such a high level of musicality.

The one time I ever saw him in person, it was 11AM on a Saturday morning in a church in SF, for free too. His music fits between the pews or in the Rock arena, and everywhere in between. It doesn't hurt that he's one of the most recognizably-toned guys ever to do it, either, with a sound that varies from the crystalline to the crunchy.

You know what? If I had to boil it down, about what makes Bill Frisell the living legend he is, it'd be to paraphrase Miles Davis (100 in May!) and say that whatever he plays, he plays it cliché-free.

And that's not something very many guitar players can claim with a straight face. Usually they're making a LOOK AT ME face, right? Talk about cliché.

Since he's undeniably one of the toppermost guitarists of our lifetimes, I have put together a little folderino worthy of the towering talent, so to say.

There's two full shows, from 2006 and 2015, totaling three hours that goes by in about three minutes, because the music is so good and transportive in that classic way that suspends time, or seems to.

Additionally, at the last minute at 1AM last night, I was bored with the usual cavalcade of numbtastic violence and depredation on YouTube Premium and decided to take a crack at a little Easter Egg compilation.

Taking as my canvas the Live Download Series our hero had up online starting back in 2008, where he did digital-only issues of 22 different concerts spanning 1989 to 2015, I took one song, more or less at random, from each volume he put out and strung them together into one of my long, non-existent macro-shows.

It consists almost entirely of covers, where BF takes a standard tune of the last 100 years and twists it into an inviting confection on the spot, and with one track from each volume it totals an additional three hours. That oughta keep y'all busy for a minute!

Anyway I just kinda tossed it together in under 24 hours, so hopefully I got all the tracks at a similar volume. Just don't expect anything but the usual all killer, no filler fare you'd expect from a Maestro the caliber of Bill Frisell.

1.

Bill Frisell Quintet

Jazzbaltica 2006

Kulturzentrum Salzau

Salzau, Germany

7.1.2006

01 You Are My Sunshine

02 1968

03 Probability 13

04 Raise 4

05 Monroe

06 What the World Needs Now

07 Subconscious Lee

Total time: 1:11:35

Bill Frisell - guitar

Ron Miles - trumpet

Greg Tardy - reeds

Tony Scherr - bass

Kenny Wollesen - drums

256/48K audio extracted from a PAL DVD of a European digital satellite broadcast

spectral analysis is lossless to 20 kHz, making this essentially equivalent to a preFM source

converted to 16/44 CD Audio, edited, tracked & remastered by EN, March 2026
538 MB FLAC/link is below

2.

Bill Frisell Quintet

"When You Wish Upon a Star"

Jazz At Lincoln Center

Appel Room

Lincoln Center

New York City, New York USA

1.16+17.2015

01 J@LC intro & band introductions

02 When You Wish Upon a Star

03 The Days of Wine and Roses

04 Once Upon a Time In the West

05 As a Judgement

06 Farewell to Cheyenne

07 The Windmills of Your Mind

08 Moon River

09 Tales from the Far Side

10 Goldfinger

11 You Only Live Twice

12 Psycho 1

13 Psycho 2

14 Alfie

15 Alfie's Theme

16 The Shadow of Your Smile

17 Suite from "The Godfather"

18 Theme from "Batman"

19 The Fishin' Hole (Theme from "The Andy Griffith Show")

20 Somewhere Over the Rainbow

Total time: 1:29:11

disc break goes after Track 11

Bill Frisell - guitar  

Eyvind Kang - viola  

Thomas Morgan - bass  

Rudy Royston - drums  

Petra Haden - vocals

the ensemble provide action narration on Track 18

256/48k audio extracted from an HD YouTube Premium file of the "Jazz At Lincoln Center" livestream of the event

spectral analysis is lossless to 16 kHz with music to 20 kHz, making this essentially equivalent to an excellent FM source

converted to 16/44 CD Audio, de/remuxed for better balance, edited, tracked, repaired & remastered by EN, March 2026

575 MB FLAC/direct link to both shows, plus the secret surprise

I know it's a bit to chew on, but you'll probably survive all these wonderful sounds, made by the very greatest practitioners of the Art, some kind of way. I believe in you, OK?

I'll be back come Sunday, with yet another Six String Samurai, to whom I'll offer necessary and well-deserved tribute, and on yet another milestone birthday too. But do enjoy the birthday boy's toys here as we honor Bill Frisell, born this day in 1951 and showing no signs of the fatigue usually present when someone wields an axe this impressively.--J.

Cape Town Business

Louis Moholo's Spirits Rejoice  - You Ain't Gonna Know Me 'Cause You Think You Know Me

Enough of the Apocalypse, this bores me. It's time for another tribute to musical excellence and human transcendence! Who's with me?

Quick, someone find me a cultural figure too few people know about, their minds consumed as they are by pulsations of pure propaganda from the profligate, paranoid pigs in possession of power.

It has to be someone celebrating a birthday or a concert anniversary, that's all I ask. It can also be someone who died recently, although I hate those for obvious reasons.

We ain't gotta worry about any power possessing pigs passing away, because they never die. And when they do, they're just replaced by even more maniacal predators. You have to ask yourself at some point, what sort of person would even seek power in a system this porcinely, proactively pernicious? But I digress.

Now, about that birthday thing. Ah, here's one.

I was in the shower earlier, waxing poetic about what my all-time favorite record labels are. I came up with the usual Blue Notes and Prestiges, the obvious Charismas and Strata-Easts, and all those we love to Harvest and that give us Vertigo.

Another one that steamed into my (admittedly wet) brain was Ogun. Anyone who's not a culturally bereft twit must know about the treasured Ogun label, no? This has been a favorite imprint of Joshy's since he toddled about in his little Red diapers. Or at least since he went to college, anyways.

Well, if Ogun had a house drummer, it was undoubtedly today's birthday brahmin of the batterie.

Because our hero didn't just fight South African apartheid, back since the days of Nelson Mandela's initial imprisonment, with words. He fought it with bands.

Bands that, in those days -- can you believe that things were even more insanely oppressive than they even are now? -- for whom featuring a blend of Black and White faces was a revolutionary act fraught and wrought with real, physical danger.

Sure, it took another 30 years to fall and for Mandela to finally ascend and replace the autocratic bigots with actual, viable leadership.

But you could say that Apartheid in South Africa was doomed the moment Louis Moholo -- born this day in 1940 -- and Chris McGregor formed The Brotherhood Of Breath in 1964, and folks in Cape Town and the surrounding areas saw what that looked and sounded like on a stage, in front of people.

To celebrate was would have been Louis Moholo's 86th b'day, let's forget about the fuckery fanning the eternal flames of division, and fire up a sizzler of a set that features the man leading a whole slew of Ogun stalwarts through a transcendent 1999 UK set of sublime and unifying Spiritual Jazz. Who's with me? Thought so.

Louis Moholo's Spirits Rejoice

Y Theatre

Leicester, UK

9.30.1999

01 A Song/Usaka   

02 Wedding Hymn 

03 Amatchasanqa   

04 Besame Mucho/Khanya  

05 You Ain’t Gonna Know Me ‘Cause You Think You Know Me 

Total time: 1:18:21

     

Kenny Wheeler - trumpet & flugelhorn

Paul Rutherford - trombone

Evan Parker - soprano & tenor saxophones 

Jason Yarde - alto & tenor saxophones  

Keith Tippett - piano   

Paul Rogers - bass 

Louis Moholo - drums

off-air mono FM capture of indeterminate origin; original broadcast date may be 12.27.1999

edited, retracked, repaired, denoised & remastered by EN, March 2026
427 MB FLAC/direct link

This show has all the happy Moholo hallmarks: the sweeping, strident melodies that sound like National Anthems of non-existent countries. The blasts of anarchic freedom that resolve to sentimental, nostalgic passages. The funkafized interludes you can dance to. All wrapped in the signature organic authenticity of someone who doesn't just play music, but lives it like a well-worn ethos of experience.

He passed at 85 last June, but Louis Moholo will never die as long as there are connections to be made the assholes of autocratic authority don't want made, and there are arbitrary boundaries to be obliterated by the beauty such connections produce. On that, to paraphrase the late Don Cornelius, you can bet your last money.--J.

3.10.1940 - 6.13.2025