Naturally 7

My first reaction on hearing Naturally 7 do their cover Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight” was “Where the hell are the guitars???”. Actually my first reaction was “damn they’re good”. Head over to www.myspace.com/naturally7 and have a listen.

The New York based group are all committed Christians and it is from gospel singing that founder member Roger Thomas developed the style of singing that he calls ‘vocal play’.

Evidentally this is different to  a cappella singing in that members don’t just sing without instruments, they sing ‘as instruments’ with each member mimicking a different sound. Check out the “drummer”  in the clip below – he’s the one on the drum riser.

Here is some stuff about them…

The origins of the group date back to New York City in 1999 when Roger Thomas started the group with his brother, Warren, and five other talented singers they had come to know over the years from singing around the city. Having been in and out of several traditional male groups over the years, Roger developed an affinity for a cappella sounds and a unique ability to create distinct harmony arrangements. When invited to sing at a major a cappella competition in New York, they won the competition, moved onto the nationals and took away two more wins.

Riding the wave of this newfound success and still unable to decide if Naturally 7 were going to be an a cappella group or a traditional band, Roger had a novel idea: they could be both.

He remembered as a child, his brother Warren always wanted a drum set but their mother always told him no because it was just too noisy. So Warren learned to make true drum sounds, with different ways of making the kick, toms, snare, cymbals, and other drum sounds, to compensate for not having real drums to play. Roger approached Warren with the idea from their childhood, and asked if he could become the band’s drummer, so to speak, to accompany Naturally 7 on up-tempo songs.

Today Naturally 7 are Roger Thomas (musical director, arranger, 1st baritone, Rap), Warren Thomas (percussion, guitar, clarinet, 3rd tenor), Rod Eldridge (1st tenor, scratching, trumpet), Jamal Reed (4th tenor, electric guitar), Dwight Stewart (2nd baritone), Garfield Buckley (2nd tenor, harmonica) and Armand “Hops” Hutton (bass).

On 4 February 2009, they performed “Wall of Sound” for the 2009 TED Conference, here is the “authorised clip ( I will get the TED clip as soon as it’s released)…

Highly Recommended (and there really are no guitars – I’ll get over it)

Website at www.myspace.com/naturally7

Casual Projects

Casual Projects are a big band. No not that kind, I mean there are a lot of members – eight of em.
Pat Lillicrap – Vocals
Muchtar Johnson – Vocals
Julian Abrahams – Guitar/Vocals
Munro Melano – Keyboards/Vocals
Dan Bray – Saxophone/Synths
Nick Keeling – Vocals/Synths/Trombone
Kane Watters – Bass
Yen Nguyen – Drums

“Time” is the third single from the 2008 “No Rest”, it’s a ripper. Full of really aggressive guitar licks, Australian voices rapping and some of the wickedest funk grooves that have ever bumped up against a killer rock beat. When it it hits the middle eight it just kills. This is awesome stuff. I have had it on high rotation on the MP3 player for the last month and it shows no sign of leaving.

Hype from their site

” Combining elements of hip hop and rock, “Time” was produced by heavyweight producer Tony ‘Buchman’ Buchen (Macromantics, Pigeon John, Abby Dobson, Blue King Brown, The Whitlams and Kid Confucius). Delivering a beat which punches through a funky guitar riff ‘Time’ combines Casual Projects’ trademark lyrical honesty with a hook that could catch a shark. With Halloween just around the corner, the band decided to shoot the ‘Time’ video clip on site at the very spooky Kenmore ‘Haunted’ Psychiatric Hospital in Goulburn, NSW. There’s nothing like a zombie love story to tear at the heartstrings. Keep an eye out for this one!

Check out the video here …

The rest of the stuff at the Myspace site is just as good. The band currently have a residency at the Evelyn Hotel  here in Melbourne for the next couple of weeks. Don’t miss your chance to see what all the fuss is about.

Highly Recommended.

Website at www.myspace.com/casualprojects

Alias is Brendon Whitney,  and Well Water Black is an awesome amalgm of drum machine beat wrangling, real drums and some really captivating vocals. I could probably do with out the rap but it does work as does the bits of guitar that litter this track.

Dont get me wrong this is seriously well crafted and arranged. The production is inventive and keeps everything moving forwards at a reasonable clip. I really enjoy this when it shows up on the MP3 player. The other tracks at www.myspace.com/alias are well worth a look.

Recommended.

With a name like “Highland” I think I could be forgiven for not expecting a German electronica hip hop band.

Add to the country of origin, they rap in english and sing in english, italian and latin. No lack of confusion there – hip hop meets Europop. What is clear though is that they are really interesting to listen to; melodic, challenging and with a solid hip hop groove.

The track that caught my ear and has since been on high rotation is the slick epic number called “Se Tu Vuoi” – listen and also enjoy the atmospheric scenery provided by the east Scottish coastline and Dunotter castle.

Band members are the singer Nicole Heiland and the rappers Dean Burke and Patrice “Lady Scar” Gansau. Their music is written and produced by Mike Michaels, Mark “MM” Dollar and Mark Tabak, who are also behind the artists and bands such as Music Instructor, The Boyz and Ayman. Dean Burke has also worked with Music Instructor and Lunatics. Highland as a group however existed only for a few years.

Head over to their website and have a listen to the three tracks on offer there. My pick is “Veni Vidi Vici” – it’s eminently danceable.

Grand Analog have been classed as “rap ’n’ roll dub and soul”. It’s actually not a bad description. The band is fronted by Odario Williams. Members include Darcy Ataman, Damon Mitchell, Ofield Williams, Alister Johnson and Warren Bray.

The thing I like about them is the left of center take on urban music. Head over to www.myspace.com/grandanalog and have a listen to a couple of tracks, Start with “Around This Town“, there is a lot of music lying under the surface here. Bass lines and grooves that just keep pushing at the edges and the vocals and subject matter aren’t the usual fare. Usually with most of this style of music I just hit the next button, there is a just a sameness about it all that doesn’t keep my interest, but these guys have managed to survive a couple of months on the MP3 player.

“Back in the day, if Grand Analog had come out, we would have been tagged as some weird, alternative hip-hop thing and I’d be touring with Arrested Development. Now, especially with all the mash-ups, the mixing of rock and electro and punk bands that have DJs, it’s all acceptable and it’s perfect timing for us”

This is “I’ll Walk Alone” lots of yummy dub goodness…

Websites can be found at www.myspace.com/grandanalog and www.urbnet.com/grandanalog/

Anchorsong is the solo project by Masaaki Yoshida from Tokyo, Japan. He comes from Tokyo’s underground live music scene. Armed with an Akai MPC2000XL and a Korg Triton he builds up the songs layer by layer, right in front of the audience and the audience seem to find the process fascinating to watch and it sounds amazing.

It’s dance music with a pedigree that follows the Hip Hop, House, Techno, Electronica line, it’s not Rock music. But he plays live on stage, no computer. He actually hits his “instruments” physically, it’s not perfect and some of the chances he takes don’t always come off just like any other live band and but he is reacting to the music he creates as he creates it. I admire that.

He made his international reputation mainly through his uploads to YouTube. In this one he is performing with a string quartet…

Not everyone’s cup of tea but I found him interesting.

I was wandering through Last-FM and clicking acts at random to see what happened (think of it as musical Russian Roulette… you never know which one is going to knock you out) and found
Polish foggy/jazzy duo: Milton Waukee (producer, instrumentalist) & Jorge Saxon (DJ, turntablist) otherwise known as “Cmy” (it’ss Polish for “moths” or “barflies”).

This struck me as a really interesting outing, a combination of jazz and hip-hop that didn’t try too hard. It has a great groove to it, there is some light and shade in the production, something of a rarity I find and an almost “chill” ambience about it. I probably should have saved it up for the weekend but it seems to have a bit more energy than is apparent on the first listen.

Here is a video from the Last-FM site….

Let me know what you think?

He started studying classical violin at the age of four and by the time he reached college decided that he wanted to do jazz instead. Since then he has incorporated it into his love of hip hop.

He says in an interview that he wanted to show that you could make classical music relevant to people and bring hip hop to classical music. Strange as the combination may seem, it works. Just as for a previous generation classical music and rock were a marriage made in heaven.

Armed with fourteen years of Classical training in violin and an undergraduate degree in Jazz Studies from the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music, Dateh strives to write music that incorporates many different musical influences. From riffing over old school hip hop beats in the style of “Tribe Called Quest” to spitting impressive improvisatory licks ala Clifford Brown, Paul Dateh’s music is rich with soul and thriving with energy.

Here is a Youtube piece that he does with Inka One a DJ also from LA

He performs in LA with his band The Live Movement, listen to Hip Hop Vocalese

While on the subject of hip hop violin, check out this next clip. Another violinist jamming to hip hop.

Now if you’re into young black dudes mangling the english language, wearing clothes 20 sizes too large to parade their underwear (this is sexy? I think not), and videos with naked women salaciously gyrating for the camera then you will probably be thinkng uh huh hip hop.

Now as you may guess from the preceeding comment that I’m not a big fan, and it would be a very safe assumption. Still from time to time, something comes out of even this style of music that I can connect with at some level. American Keith Murray stopped me long enough to listen. Powerful stuff.

Def Jam Poetry – Keith Murray “Man Child”

Formerly a member of the rap supergroup Def Squad in the nineties he has after a hiatus moved on to renew his reputation as a major rapper and hip hop artist.

From hiphopruckus.blogspot.com

Rapp-Murr-Phobia (Fear of Real Hip Hop) features multi-platinum R&B recording artist Tyrese, Method Man and Murray’s Def Squad bandmates, Redman and Erick Sermon. Sermon also executive produced the album. The first single off of the album, the summer anthem “Nobody Do It Better,” featuring Tyrese and Junior, is already impacting major radio markets and will go for adds shortly.

And so of course here is the first single from the album Keith Murray and Tyrese – Nobody Do It Better