My blog adventures started in 2005 when I opened a blog at Blogger. After some time and the nice feel I got for RapidWeaver, my site publishing tool, I decided to host my blog on a dedicated server. This experience held up for more than four years. I recently realized that one of the reasons why I didn't post more often is the rather cumbersome workflow of RapidWeaver when it comes to blog publishing. Every time I had to post a new entry, I needed to launch the software if it was not already opened, create the blog entry, save my changes, publish them to my website and this will take quite some time as RapidWeaver will push the whole blog, archive & al!

So I decided to move on and stop using RapidWeaver for maintaining my blog (but I still use it to maintain this website). Besides sparing some CPU cycles in the process and saving some network bandwidth, I was looking for something to which I can post easily from my web browser, my email client and, why not, from my phone while on the road.

After testing posterous.com and tumblr.com I went for the latter as it offers more customization and flexibility, has a pretty-straightforward interface that I like and allows one to use Markdown for posting, besides the wealth of themes.

So time to update those links! Please update your bookmarks to point out to:

• For English-only posts: blog.upbeat.fr (which you can access right from the toolbar) and the RSS feed is at blog.upbeat.fr/rss.
• For French-only posts: journal.upbeat.fr which you can access right from the toolbar) and the RSS feed is at journal.upbeat.fr/rss.

This blog won't be removed for the time being. I also took the opportunity to update the website design to make it more straight-forward. I hope you'll like it.

Cheers!

It has been 16 years. 16 years that Gil Scott-Heron, the legend who influenced a whole generation of hip-hop artists with his rather unique voice and proto-rap style, hasn't released a new album. And then I'm New Here hits the streets. And it hits them pretty hard.


It's not only the streets that it hits this hard but my ears too. I just dig the voice, the composition and the poetry! Actually, some of the tracks such as Me And The Devil, New York Is Killing Me or I'll Take Care of You make me speechless before this 59 years old man's art.

I got my copy of the album from eMusic.com. Some people criticize the short length of this very fine album, as if it was a scale against which quality can be measured. Unless they are led to believe that more is better, something that mind-tricking marketing has been pushing us to believe in order to rip us off yet another amount of bucks.

Either way, you can't listen to Gill Scott-Heron and stay neutral. Either you'd love it or you'd hate it. But let your ears be the judges, wouldn't you?

Gil Scott-Heron - Me & the Devil by Dubmission

If you are in Paris this spring, he is going to be on concert at the New Morning on May 10!

Tags: Hip-Hop, Soul, Spoken Word, Music, Legend

Hey, it's the week-end on this side of the planet. Right past midnight so it's technically Saturday and before hitting the bed, I thought I'd share with you yet another very nice band I found out about while reading the concerts section of Vibrations Magazine February issue a few days ago.

Take a collection of very good Soul/Funk bands who have the gist of a typically 70s sounding "Afro-Soul". Namely The Dap-Kings (yeah the guys who play with Sharon as in Sharon & The Dap-Kings), The Budos Band, and El Michels Affair. Get a musician from these bands here and there to make a beautiful cocktail and you get the Menahan Street Band who released an album in 2008 called Make The Road By Walking, a very fine piece of grooving soul.

When I received the CD yesterday, I carefully unwrapped it and put it in my CD player and hit the play button. Almost instantly, I was travelling back in time. And just by looking at the CD cover, you can tell to which epoch that might be. Right, to the 70s. While I was born in that decade, I have no recollection as a kid of what it means to be living in the 70s. But popular culture is plenty about that period. Make The Road By Walking sound like an OST of some awesome blacksploitation movie, one you'd want to watch over and over again. It's an amazing tour de force, hats off to Menahan Street Band for coming up with such record that can make you travel with leaving that comfy armchair of yours.

There is nothing to throw in this 10 tracks album (well there are 11 tracks but the last one doesn't appear on the official track list and it is only 9 seconds long so it can barely qualify as a track). I do have a preference though for Tired of Fighting and The Traitor.

Tags: Music, Soul, Seventies, Funk, Groove

During the last few years the Afrobeat musical genre, which was created back in 1960s by Fela Kuti and fellow drummer Tony Allen, has garnered quite a lot of attention and numerous bands have sprung up to take the flame of that really interesting genre that blends Jazz and Funk higher up. The SoulJazz Orchestra is certainly one of the most interesting bands out there nowadays.


In early 2008 I blogged about Insurrection, a very groovy song featured in the SoulJazz Orchestra. Back then, I dared to write:

I've never heard something as innovative in the Afrobeat landscape as Insurrection, save for Antibalas. It has a very Funky tone made of an elaborate intertwinement of African and Occidental Drums with warm Saxophones. The Musical genre created by Fela Kuti is alive and kicking!

That same year, the band released another album, Manifesto. I blogged about that one as well and my words were dithyrambic:

They have recently released a new album called Manifesto and I think it’s even better than Freedom Go No Die. This album is actually redefining Afrobeat in my humble opinion. The Afrobeat landscape has exploded in the last few years. Seun and Femi Kuti, sons of the late Fela, released amazing albums. While Seun kept the sound rather close to the original Afrobeat, Femi intertwined it with Jazz. But when it comes to innovation, musicality and an excellent sense of Funk, The SoulJazz Orchestra is the top dog.

A few days ago, I heard that they were releasing a new album, Rising Sun and I finally got it yesterday. Yesterday? Well, you may think that it isn't enough time to review an album. Mind you, I spent almost all evening and my morning commuting time listening to it. And guess what? OK, that ain't hard... I just dig it!

The SoulJazz Orchestra continues to surprise me as this album is more jazzier than the previous releases, more grounded and laid-back with the occasional explosiveness I've witnessed while listening to their previous releases sprinkled here and there.

While Agbara and Negus Negast are amazingly groovy, Lotus Flower and Serenity are very fine pieces of Jazz and dot not really sound like Afrobeat. They remind me of Build An Ark. The remaining songs are somewhere in between. This is a very welcome diversity.

All in all, Rising Sun is a very strong release, a release that has more soul in it and less just-groove-till-the-end-of-night attitude that makes you vibrate but only for a short period. Rising Sun is here to stay!

You can listen to song samples on the band's official website. You can also watch this official videoclip of Agbara:

I've also found Negus Negast on YouTube.

EDITED TO ADD: I forgot to mention that they are going to be in concert at Le Cabaret Sauvage in Paris on April 15, 2010 and I'm going to be there ;-)

Tags: Music, Afrobeat, Groove, Jazz, Funk

Isn't it a wonderful joy just to sit back and listen to some good piece of grooving Music? Well, thanks to Bibi Tanga and the Selenites, I've been doing that quite a lot this week-end.

After listening to their awesomely groovy Red Wine song on Radio Nova, I decided to buy the album, Dunya. I listened to it about 6-7 times now and I like it a lot. Know what? It makes my soul and body chant!

It's funky, groovy, swinging... The kind of Music that brings in pleasure with every breath you take (to all Police fans out there, no offense meant!) and make you feel great about Life, about the present. Just visit their MySpace page and listen to the few songs there. If you are into the groove, you'd like it.

Enjoy!

A decade or so ago, I had the chance to read George Orwell's 1984 for the first time in French. It made a very strong impression on me. The World that he described so well and with immense talent looked like a possibility that we "humans" are capable of "committing".

A few weeks ago, while chatting with my friend Rodolfo, he pasted a link to a cartoon by Stuart McMillen called Amusing Ourselves to Death. In this cartoon, the author "transcribes" the writings of Neil Postman's book which has the same title.

From what I understood from the cartoon and could infer from the Wikipedia entry regarding this book (I plan to read it and I didn't want to be spoiled by the contents of the Wikipedia page), Neil Postman compares George Orwell's 1984 with Aldous Huxley's A Brave New World. Guess what? While Huxley's name rings a bell or two, I didn't know he wrote such a book. My unculture will always amaze me. So I decided to commit thoughtcrime and read these three books in a row beginning with Orwell's in its original edition (I'm almost done reading it and it is making an even stronger impression than the first time I've read it about ten years ago), then Huxley's and finishing my plusculture saga with Postman's. Thanks Rodolfo, not only you are helping me feed this brain of mine but also adding to Amazon's bottom line (from which I ordered all three books) ;-)


Stuart McMillen's cartoon is featured below. I hope it will make a strong impression on you as it did on me and let you consider the path of plusculture or, may I say, doubleplusculture: