VA -Tiger Goes Calypso (Esso, 1966)

This is a fine LP from 1966 put out by Esso gas for promotional work. It is a collection of Calypso, Reggae, and Ska songs. Two of the tracks have to do with Esso gas. A rare little promo item with pretty good songs. It features Young Killer with “Tiger in your tank” and some big names of the calypso scene, like Mighty Sparrow and The Merrymen. Enjoy it!

Tracklist:
1 Young Killer – Tiger in your tank
2 Carlos Malcolm Orchestra – Tribute to Don Drummond
3 The Merrymen – Never on a sunday
4 Westside Symphony Orchestra – Jamaica ska
5 Clarence Curvan Orchestra – Mama dis is mas
6 The Mighty Sparrow – She’s been gone too long
7 André Tanker Flamingoes – Linstead market
8 The Mighty Dougla – Leave me

VA – Tiger Goes Calypso (1966)
(192 kbps, back & front cover included)

Dave Van Ronk – Gambler´s Blues (1965)

Guitarist, singer, songwriter, and native New Yorker Dave Van Ronk inspired, aided, and promoted the careers of numerous singer/songwriters who came up in the blues tradition.

“Gambler´s Blues” was the 1965 reissue of  the 1959 release “Dave Van Ronk Sings Ballads, Blues And A Spiritual”, Van Ronk´s first record. It contains the tracks “If You Leave Me Pretty Momma,” “Backwater Blues,” “K.C. Moan,” “How Long,” and “John Henry,”

“Not infrequently I am taken to task for the manner in which I approach my material,” folk singer and guitar player Dave Van Ronk (1936-2002) wrote in the liner notes to Ballads, Blues, and a Spiritual. A white New Yorker singing traditional Southern black songs, he distinguished himself from others who adopted this repertoire by imitating the way he heard black musicians perform. “Although I can appreciate the ‘white approach’ to Negro folksongs and enjoy the work of many of its adherents, I still reserve the right to sing these songs in the style to which I am accustomed, partly because of habit, and partly, I confess, because I feel that my way is the ‘right way’.”

Dave Van Ronk – Gambler´s Blues (1965)
(192 kbps, cover art included)

VA – Wann wir schreiten Seit an Seit – Hymnen & Kampflieder der Arbeiterbewegung

This collections features worker songs from the 20th century and the last half of the 19th century. The recordings were done between 1966 and 1984 at the “Arbeiterfestspiele” and “Nationale Jugendfestival” in the GDR.

The “Solidaritätslied” (“Vorwärts und nicht vergessen”) is an interpretation by Ernst Busch, the vocals on “Venceremos” were done by Dean Reed.

Tracks:
01 Wann wir schreiten Seit an Seit
02 Brüder, zur Sonne, zur Freiheit
03 Auf, auf zum Kampf
04 Arbeiter-Marseillaise
05 Brüder, seht die rote Fahne
06 Dem Morgenrot entgegen
07 Warschawjanka
08 Matrosen von Kronstadt
09 Der Rote Wedding
10 Solidaritätslied
11 Die Moorsoldaten
12 Die Thälmann-Kolonne
13 Thälmann-Lied
14 Badiera rossa
15 Venceremos
16 Black and white
17 We shall overcome
18 Die Internationale

VA – Wann wir schreiten Seit an Seit
(192 kbps, front cover included)

Jackie Mittoo – Keep On Dancing (1969)

By the time this 1969 solo record was released, organist/arranger Jackie Mittoo had already established his reputation as an important contributor to the Skatalites’ catalog and Clement “Coxsone” Dodd’s Studio One label. Under Dodd, Mittoo wrote a large chunk of the famous Brentford Road rhythms that would light up the charts, both in their original rocksteady form and as reworked gems for the dancehall crowd of the early ’80s.

Like many of his fellow session players, Mittoo channeled U.S. soul and funk influences to help concoct a unique Jamaican musical style in the ’60s and ’70s. And while recent retrospectives, like Hearbeat’s admirable “Tribute to Jackie Mittoo” two-disc set, make a first-choice selection easy, this and other of the organists many solo releases on the Studio One imprint beg a listen. One soon discovers Mittoo and Dodd’s various house bands (the Soul Vendors, Sound Dimension, and the Soul Brothers) produced more than enough prime shots to fill several roundups. A fine slice of rocksteady and reggae-soul instrumentals from one of reggae’s brightest lights.

Tracklist:
Clean Up
Taste Of Soul
This Scorcher
Water Hole
Blue Lou
Taste Of Living
Juice Box
Keep On Dancing
Mellow Fellow
Can I Change My Mind
Spring Time
Hang ´em High
Lazy Bones
Hello Studio One

Jackie Mittoo – Keep On Dancing (1969)
(192 kbps, front cover included)

Augustus Pablo – Rockers Meets King Tubby In A Firehouse

Rockers Meets King Tubby In a Firehouse, is a dub album by Augustus Pablo and King Tubby, released in 1980. “Rockers” was a commonly used nickname given to Pablo. It features Mickey “Boo” Richards, Leroy Wallace and Albert Malawi on drums, Robbie Shakespeare on bass guitar, and Earl “Chinna” Smith on guitar. The backing band is credited as the “Rocking All Stars”.

Pablo produced the album and played piano, organ and melodica. The album was recorded at King Tubby’s Studio. “Fire House” is a reference to the Waterhouse section of Kingston, where King Tubby’s studio was located. Prince Jammy also made contributions to this album but goes uncredited.

On this collection, Pablo’s sound predominates: his eerie melodica lines snake in and out of the mix, and the gentle-but-firm grooves that always typify a Rockers production are in full force. King Tubby contributes the special element of dubwise alchemy that was his own trademark, administering echo and delay at judicious intervals and keeping the general atmosphere mysterious and seductive. Because of the nature of the music and its consistently high quality, highlights are a bit difficult to pick out, but they include the very dread “Zion Is a Home” and the equally fine “Dub in a Matthews Lane Area,” which could be used as a master class in dub technique.

Augustus Pablo – Rockers Meets King Tubby In A Firehouse
(160 kbps, no cover art included)

Augustus Pablo – Rockers Meets King Tubby In A Firehouse

Rockers Meets King Tubby In a Firehouse, is a dub album by Augustus Pablo and King Tubby, released in 1980. “Rockers” was a commonly used nickname given to Pablo. It features Mickey “Boo” Richards, Leroy Wallace and Albert Malawi on drums, Robbie Shakespeare on bass guitar, and Earl “Chinna” Smith on guitar. The backing band is credited as the “Rocking All Stars”.

Pablo produced the album and played piano, organ and melodica. The album was recorded at King Tubby’s Studio. “Fire House” is a reference to the Waterhouse section of Kingston, where King Tubby’s studio was located. Prince Jammy also made contributions to this album but goes uncredited.

On this collection, Pablo’s sound predominates: his eerie melodica lines snake in and out of the mix, and the gentle-but-firm grooves that always typify a Rockers production are in full force. King Tubby contributes the special element of dubwise alchemy that was his own trademark, administering echo and delay at judicious intervals and keeping the general atmosphere mysterious and seductive. Because of the nature of the music and its consistently high quality, highlights are a bit difficult to pick out, but they include the very dread “Zion Is a Home” and the equally fine “Dub in a Matthews Lane Area,” which could be used as a master class in dub technique.

Augustus Pablo – Rockers Meets King Tubby In A Firehouse
(160 kbps, no cover art included)

Miriam Makeba – Miriam Makeba (1960)

Miriam Makeba had just made a splash in New York nightclubs and earned a fistful of press only a few months earlier when RCA Victor Records snapped her up and recorded her first album in May 1960. Clearly, the label was hoping to repeat the success of her mentor, Harry Belafonte, whose Belafonte Folk Singers accompanied her on some tracks and who wrote a blurb for the album’s back cover.

Like Belafonte, she was a black singer with an exotic, folk-based repertoire who could translate her music into a sophisticated club act. In addition to the Belafonte troupe, which appeared on the calypso tune “The Naughty Little Flea,” a song that sounded like a Belafonte number, the Chad Mitchell Trio joined her on “Mbube,” aka the Weavers’ “Wimoweh,” and Charles Coleman was her duet partner on the comic Austrian tune “One More Dance.”

She also turned in an early version of “House of the Rising Sun.” Such familiar material offset the songs sung in her native South African tongue of Xhosa. Makeba had an expressive voice and was extremely versatile, as the range of material indicates. But despite the critical raves, she may have been a bit too exotic to be commercial on her first album, which was not a big seller. RCA let her go to Kapp Records for her second album, but came calling again three years later.

Tracks:

The Retreat Song
Suliram
The Click Song
Umhome
Olilili
Lakutshn, Ilanga
Mbube
The Naughty Little Flea
Where Does It Lead?
Novema
House of the Rising Sun
Saduva
One More Dance
Iya Guduza

No link.

The Weavers – Folk Songs Around The World (1959)

The Weavers had the most extraordinary musical pedigree and pre-history of any performing group in the history of folk or popular music.

More than 50 years after their heyday, however, their origins, the level of their success, the forces that cut the group’s future off in its prime, and the allure that keeps their music selling are all difficult to explain – as, indeed, none of this was all that easy to explain at the time. How could a song as pleasant and tuneful as “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine” be subversive?

The quartet went from being embraced by the public, and selling four-million-records, to being reviled and rejected over the political backgrounds of its members, and disbanding after only four years together. Yet, despite the controversy that surrounded them, and the fact that their work was interrupted at its peak, the Weavers managed to alter popular culture in about as profound a manner as any artist this side of Bob Dylan – indeed, they set the stage for the 1950s folk revival, indirectly fostering the careers of the Kingston Trio, among others, and bridging the gap between folk and popular music, and folk and the topical song, they helped set the stage for Dylan’s eventual emergence. And the songs that they wrote or popularized, including “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine,” “Wimoweh,” “Goodnight Irene,” “Wreck of the John B,” “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” and “On Top of Old Smoky,” continued to get recorded (and occasionally to chart) 50 years after the group’s own time.

Tracklist:

A1 – Around The World
A2 – Bay Of Mexico
A3 – I Know Where I’m Going – Hush Little Baby
A4 – The Frozen Logger
A5 – Darling Corey
A6 – Follow The Drinking Gourd
B1 – Tzena, Tzena, Tzena
B2 – Suliram
B3 – Sylvie (Bring Me A Little Water)
B4 – Greensleeves
B5 – Along The Colorado Trail
B6 – Hard Ain’t It Hard

The Weavers – Folk Songs Around The World (1959)
(192 kbps, cover art included, vinyl rip)

Ernst Busch – Zeit-, Leid- , Streitgedichte – Erich Mühsam & Klabund (Aurora, 1966)

Erich Mühsam was an anarchist who despised dogma & close-mindedness in reform movements, particularly as manifested in Marxism. He believed adamantly in the power of the individual & the power of the lowest classes of society.

A radical critic of bourgeois society, Erich Mühsam rejected all forms of state control and advocated political anarchism from an early point. He fought for a radical form of soviet democracy in the 1918 November revolution, was sentenced to fifteen years’ imprisonment in a fortress in 1919 for “literary high treason,” and not pardoned until 1924. He published the anarchist monthly magazine “Fanal” from the fall of 1926, calling for “social revolution.”

Mühsam was arrested immediately after the Reichstag fire, and severely maltreated. He was regarded as a “November criminal” – a particularly loathed Marxist. Erich Mühsam was taken from the prison in Berlin’s Lehrter Strasse to Sonnenburg concentration camp, from there to Berlin-Plötzensee prison, and finally to Brandenburg concentration camp. At the beginning of October 1933, he was put into Oranienburg concentration camp, where he was also subjected to violence. Erich Mühsam was murdered by an SS commando in the night of July 9-10, 1934.

“Streit & Kampf 

Nicht nötig ist’s nach Schritt und Takt
gehorsam vorwärts zu marschieren.
Doch wenn der Hahn der Flinte knackt,
dann miteinander zugepackt
und nicht den Nebenmann verlieren !

Schlagt zwanzig Freiheitstheorien
euch gegenseitig um die Ohren
und singt nach hundert Melodien –
doch gilt es in den Kampf zu ziehen,
dann sei der gleiche Eid geschworen !

Aktionsprogramm, Parteistatut,
Richtlinien und Verhaltungslehren –
schöpft nur aus allen Quellen Mut !
Ein jedes Kampfsystem ist gut,
das nicht versagt vor den Gewehren !

Darum solang kein Feind euch droht,
verschont einander nicht mit Glossen.
Doch weckt euch einst der Ruf der Not,
dann weh das einige Banner schwarz und rot
voran den einigen Genossen!”

Erich Mühsam

Klabund was the pseudonym of Alfred Henschke (born Nov. 4, 1890, Crossen, Ger. – died Aug. 14, 1928, Davos, Switz.), an Expressionist poet, playwright, and novelist who influenced German literature with his adaptations and translations of Oriental literature. Notable among his free, imaginative renderings of Chinese, Japanese, and Persian literature are Li-tai-pe (1916), Lao-tse (1921), and Der Kreidekreis (1924; The Circle of Chalk), a drama that inspired the German playwright Bertolt Brecht to write his play Der kaukasische Kreidekreis (The Caucasian Chalk Circle).

A consumptive who spent many years in sanatoriums, Henschke identified with the eternally seeking wandering poet and called himself Klabund, a name derived from Klabautermann (“hobgoblin”) and Vagabund (“vagabond”). Restlessness and versatility characterize his work. He composed poetry in a variety of forms, and he created a new prose form, the “Expressionist novella.” Notable in this genre are his autobiographical “novels of longing,” with themes of sickness and love; biographical “novels of passion,” with sensual portraits of historical figures (e.g., Pjotr, 1923; Peter the Czar); and his greatest achievements in prose, two “novels of fulfillment”—Bracke (1918; Brackie, the Fool) and Borgia (1928; The Incredible Borgias).

Ernst Busch worked with Erich Mühsam in 1928 in the working men drama “Judas” and one year later in the play “Sacco und Vanzetti” at the “Piscator Bühne” (Berlin). The Erich Mühsams songs “Lumpenlied” and “Der Revoluzzer” became a regular part of Ernst Buschs musical repertoire. So it was self-evident that he would dedicate an edition of his “Aurora” project (“Eine Chronik in Liedern, Balladen und Kantaten aus der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts”) to Erich Mühsam. The recordings were done in 1965, the double EP was released in 1966.

Ernst Busch – Zeit-, Leid-, Streitgedichte – Erich Mühsam & Klabund (Aurora, 1966)
(192 kbps, cover art included)

Ernst Busch: Frank Wedekind – Spottlieder (Aurora,1964)

Frank Wedekind, original name Benjamin Franklin Wedekind (born July 24, 1864, Hannover, died March 9, 1918, Munich), was a German actor and dramatist who became an intense personal force in the German artistic world on the eve of World War I.

A direct forebear of the modern Theatre of the Absurd, Wedekind employed episodic scenes, fragmented dialogue, distortion, and caricature in his dramas, which formed the transition from the realism of his age to the Expressionism of the following generation.

The son of a German American father and a Swiss mother, Wedekind lived in Switzerland from 1872 to 1884, when he moved to Munich, where he remained until his death. He was successively an advertising manager, the secretary of a circus, a journalist for the satirical weekly “Simplicissimus”, a cabaret performer, and the producer of his own plays. The electric quality of his personality has been attested by his contemporaries.

Wedekind’s characteristic theme in his dramas was the antagonism of the elemental force of sex to the philistinism of society. In 1891 the publication of his tragedy “Frühlings Erwachen” (“The Awakening of Spring”, also published as “Spring Awakening”) created a scandal. Successfully produced by Max Reinhardt in 1905, the play is a series of brief scenes, some poetic and tender, others harsh and frank, dealing with the awakening of sexuality in three adolescents. In the Lulu plays, “Erdgeist” (1895; “Earth Spirit”) and “Die Büchse der Pandora” (1904; “Pandora’s Box”), he extended the theme of sex to the underworld of society and introduced the eternal, amoral femme fatale Lulu, who is destroyed in the tragic conflict of sexual freedom with hypocritical bourgeois morality. These two tragedies inspired Alban Berg’s opera Lulu. The character of Lulu is most identified with actress Louise Brooks, who portrayed her in G.W. Pabst’s masterful silent film version of “Die Büchse der Pandora” (1929).

In 1918, Bertolt Brecht attended the funeral of Frank Wedekind. He later wrote in his diary, “They stood perplexed in top hats, as if round the carcass of a vulture. Bewildered crows.”

Wedekind was a prophet in the darkness. He had come before his time. A moralist who wore the mask of an immoralist, he had been the terror of the German bourgeoisie, alternately praised for being a saint and condemned for being a devil. He did not follow any group, or subscribe to any political ideology of the day. And his expressionistic visions preceded the rise of expressionism by several decades.

During Frank Wedekind’s lifetime, his plays were persecuted and only performed in censored versions. They were considered pure pornography, for he dared to deal with issues of sexual freedom and release, problems of puberty, moments of ecstasy between the sexes, and moments of misunderstanding and violence. Wedekind’s language was brilliant and poetic, constructed mainly of cascades of short one-line sentences often consisting of only one or two words, like verbal exchanges between pistols. His plays broke through all the clichés of the theatre of his time, and today he is considered one of the founders of modern drama.

Celebrating the 100th birthday of Frank Wedekind, Ernst Busch released in 1964 as a part of his “Aurora”-series a booklet with two EPs featuring “Spottlieder” by Frank Wedekind, accompanied by Walter Olbertz.

Tracklist:
EP 1: Im heiligen Land, Der Anarchist / Der Zoologe von Berlin, Der blinde Knabe
EP 2: Brigitte B., Mein Lieschen, Die Wetterfahne / Die sieben Heller, Diplomaten

Ernst Busch – Frank Wedekind – Spottlieder (Aurora, 1964)
(192 kbps, front cover included)