Today I welcomed the first band, namely Take Berlin, to #BringARecordTakeARecord. Yvonne and Jesse, who plays guitar with me sometimes in Rev. Vince Anderson & The Love Choir, squeezed me in before they begin their European tour in early September to bring me their wonderful Paul Mauriat LP, el condor pasa. Now, the DISCOGS page for this album says the genre is Funk/Soul, Rock in the style of Lounge, Funk, but I'd have to disagree. I'd categorize this music as Light Orchestral in the style of Easy Listening, the dearth of which in my collection is at the genesis of this whole #BringARecordTakeARecord project. To backtrack, when my girlfriend Amy helped me move the RCA Victor out of my bedroom and into the livingroom, which is where all my records are, the first record I put on was Loves Of My Life by Hugo Montenegro. The sound of that music on that record player swept us back to a bygone era during which I was actually alive and my mother was a pretty housewife who worked part-time at the movie cinema and kept a green bakelite "wireless" on top of the fridge blasting exactly that kind of instrumental pop music. I'd listened to the record perhaps once if that, and suddenly grew a huge, urgent appetite for more records that genre, in that style. But having kicked my record buying habit successfully quite some time ago I didn't want to sink back into spending time and money shopping for old records. Interestingly, three of the nine incoming records so far in #BringARecordTakeARecord have been sixties instrumental jazz/pop/orchestral LPs, fulfilling my desire to prance around doing my chores like I'm in a Sophia Loren movie with loud, groovy, sexy tunes with no words blasting out of record player speakers. This kind of music deeply informed my aesthetic as a young child and in no small way contributed to the instrumental pop and rock sounds of Moisturizer. Take Berlin and I had a lovely time listening to the Mauriat record while they flipped through looking for one to take. The versions of Love Story and el condor pasa were lovely light & breezy, the George Harrison cover is twangy & funky but the real killer track Etude In The Form Of Rhythm & Blues is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoC_OnkW71o. Once can never have too many etudes. Thank you Take Berlin!
