Musicina Blender

Mashup in 5/4: Take Five Meets The River Man

Dave Brubeck vs. Nick Drake: Take Drake

There aren’t many tunes that have their rhythm is 5/4 time. These two are probably the most well-known—The Dave Brubeck Quartet’s 1959 recording of Take Five; and River Man, from the late British sing-songwriter Nick Drake, recorded in 1969.

I’ve got a supplentary source for each tune as well—pianist Brad Mehldau’s solo recording of River Man, from a 2003 concert in Japan; and Grover Washington, Jr’s version of Take Five, from 1992.

With help from my trusty Ableton Live software, here’s the mix. 

(Mashup art by RichLost)

Seal vs. Dylan: Beginnings On The Watchtower

Beginnings On The Watchtower (Musicina Blender mashup)

These two songs are not only in the same key, their tempos are only a couple of bpm’s apart. I’ve been wanting to mix “Watchtower” because it is one of the few Dylan tunes that actually has a straight-hard beat through the entire tune.  The Seal tune came to mind recently when my wife and I cut the rug on a Friday night and spent a few hours in our living room dancing to all kinds of stuff.  Man, I remember when that first Seal disc came out. It was one of those discs that everyone seemed to be playing, whether you were at a party, a friends house, a bar, or the radio. You couldn’t escape it. And it was great!

A Marvin Gaye Samba

Marvin Gaye vs. Celso Fonseca - I Heard It Through The Samba (Musicina Blender mix)

I recently saw an amazing YouTube video of Marvin Gaye singing an acapella version of “I Heard It Through The Grapevine”. I recorded the audio part of the video, and set out to find a way to put a different instrumental spin on the tune.  And like my previous mix of Ryan Adams’s Wonderwall, the answer was found with the sounds of Brazil.  

Celso Fonseca is a guitarist, singer, composer, and record producer, and has played with just about every significant Brazilian artist, from Gilberto Gil to Bebel Gilberto. His voice is quite similar to Caetano Veloso and his guitar playing has the similar style of Baden Powell. His first U.S. release, Natural (2003), features a cool instrumental called Buteco, which is the basic instrumental track under Marvin. In previous versions of this mix, I also included the original keyboard hook from “Grapevine”, but upon further listening, it came across as a bit too obvious, so I took it out. The end result is a totally new musical arrangement.

This tune was mixed on my laptop in a small apartment about 50 yards away from the ocean in the beautiful village of Hana, on the east coast of Maui in the Hawaiian Islands. An exquisite place!

A Train Ride Into The Bowels Of Your Imagination

Simon & Garfunkel - A Sound-Poem On the Underground Wall (Musicina Blender Mix)

Here’s a tune that still grabs me after 40 years. (Like most Baby Boomers attending college in the late 60’s, S&G were in high rotation on the dormroom turntable).  The song is a quick sketch, and portrays an introverted, aspiring graffiti artist, trying in the simplest way possible to “make his mark”. The tune ends with the killer line, “To seek the breast of darkness and be suckled by the night.”

For this mix, I used the live 1970 S&G recording of the tune, mixed with a few bars of Pat Metheny’s “Last Train Home”, blended with a hodgepodge of field recordings that I’ve collected through the years.  Trying to provide an ambient context to the lyrical Paul Simon-penned folk tune.

Rehab (Winehouse) vs Sidewinder (Sample)

Rehab (Musicina Blender Sidewinder Mashup)

Peter Gabriel vs. Derek Trucks

Lovetown/Volunteered Slavery (Musicina Blender mashup)

I was wallowing for a while with a bunch of song combinations that just didn’t seem to come together. It was nice to finally stumble into these two songs, which click together really well (for reasons all its own). Once I began the mix, I fell way deep into the rabbit hole.

This cool Peter Gabriel tune was initially released on the soundtrack of Jonathan Demme’s Philadelphia. Volunteered Slavery was written and first recorded by the legendary Rahsaan Roland Kirk. You can find the Derek Trucks Band version on their brilliant Songlines disc.

Elvis the Queen

Elvis Presley / Queen / Louis Jordan - Crazy Little Cruel Thing Called Caldonia

I once won a karaoke contest a few years ago, singing Crazy Little Thing Called Love. I picked the tune because I had just visited Graceland in Memphis and was in a real “Elvis” mood. The tune by Queen always reminded me of something that Elvis would’ve done. And it also seems remarkably similar to Don’t Be Cruel. To really get the boogie woogie feel of it all, I went to the source—the great Louis Jordan recording of Caldonia, from the 1940’s.

Finally Together - Steely Dan and Horace Silver

Song For My Father/Ricki Don’t Lose That Number (with guest star Rickie Lee Jones)

This remix has been on my mind for a while; I finally got down to it and “put it in the blender”. Steely Dan’s biggest hit single was a blatant “expropriation” of Horace Silver’s Song For My Father. Both songs are now classics in their respective genres. It just seemed the right thing to do to mash em up together, I tried to give the mix a “live concert” flavor by adding Willis Conover’s introduction to Horace at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. And it wouldn’t be right not to include a little interlude from Rickie Lee Jones to connect those cultural dots.

A few weeks ago I was talking to long-time jazz record guy Dick LaPalm, who told me that Horace is very ill. This mix goes out to him, his wonderful musical spirit, and his great recorded work, which will endure.

Brazilian Wonderwall - Ryan Adams vs. Baden Powell

Canto de Wonderwall (Musicina Blender Mashup)

I discovered the Oasis tune Wonderwall basically by osmosis many years ago, when it used to seep loudly out of my teenager’s closed-door bedroom stereo. A few years back while drifting around online, I heard a terrific acoustic version by Ryan Adams, from a 2003 EP called Love is Hell.

Recently while listening to Adams, the tune weirdly reminded me of a classic 1966 recording from Brazilian guitarist and composer Baden Powell, a tune called Canto de Iemanja, from the album Os Afro Samba. Dont know why—maybe it was the acoustic guitars, or the slow languid romantically melancholic mood. After playing them back to back, I knew this was a mashup that could work. Put two beautifuls together and sometimes it creates a third beautiful. Whataya think?

Craig Armstrong Meets The Stones & Santana

Sympathy For The Devil/Inhaler/Soul Survivor (Musicina Blender Mashup)

I discovered Craig Armstrong a few years ago from his work with Britain’s Massive Attack. This Scotsman is a brilliant composer, producer, and pianist. And he can rock too. Here’s his Wikipedia entry. Here’s his MySpace page.

This is a cool three-way mashup, featuring Armstrong’s tune Inhaler, from his 2002 disc, As If To Nothing. The Mick Jagger vocal, of course, is a classic. And I sprinkled some rhythm from the Soul Survivor track from Santana’s debut disc from 1969.

Michael Hedges (Guitar); Me (Bass); Myself (drums); I (Producer)

Michael Hedges Trio - Aerial Boundaries

As an experiment, I wanted to see if I could create a credible rhythm section (bass and drums) with this tune. (Listen to the original in the post below). My goal was to propel the tune a bit and give it some pop without taking away the essence of the guitar work. All the drums and bass parts were constructed from scratch, from various drum samples and plugins on my main sequencer (Ableton Live).

As a listener, I am very attuned to rhythm sections (having listened to a zillion jazz records for my day-job). I’ve played around with drums too, but am terribly uncoordinated with it. Creating drum tracks digitally is the best I can do. I worked on simply “fiilling the space” as best I could. It was a very tedious project, but I learned a lot about beat making and midi bass playing and feel confident in doing stuff like this in the future.

Enjoy!

Peggy Lee vs. Bob Marley

Reggae Fever

Peggy Lee’s original recording is about as simple and bare as can be—just a single voice, with bass, finger snaps, and minimalist percussion.

I decided to fill the musical space w/cool ambient sounds from Bill Laswell’s dub/remix of Marley, a disc called Dreams Of Freedom. This tune sounds cool on headphones. And the Marley tune, of course, is Exodus.

Sly Stone / Family Affair remix

Fam Affair

I assembled my first DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) in late 1999. My two favorite pieces of software at the time were the amazing ACID from Sonic Foundry (now owned by Sony) and a sweet little program called ReBirth from a Swedish software company called Propellerheads. (This company later created the very popular program REASON and has since discontinued with ReBirth. You can actually get a free copy of ReBirth right now from the Propellerheads website.)

Family Affair was mixed in early 2000 with Acid and ReBirth. It’s really the only remix I’ve done from those days that I think still holds up. The sax solo is David Sanborn, from a tune called Savannah, from his disc, Hearsay.