// Category Archive for: Music

Interview With: Toronto R&B Musician Jhyve, Part Two

By Paul Casey

About a month ago, I had a conversation with a talented musician from Toronto. Jamaal Desmond Bowry goes by the name Jhyve and makes modern R&B. He also has a touch for Rap. His latest album, Supermegafutureshit, resulted from a collaboration with producer Soul. The album is an atmospheric thing and another sign of how the genre is regaining its standing with listeners and musicians. Get low, change the tone, push through a whole bunch of compatible influences.

I spoke with Jhyve for about an hour and our conversation covered many things that I feel are important, especially right now. While we discussed Jhyve’s history and how his music has developed, we also got to talk about how R&B has changed over the years and why it is that so many unfairly reduce its ability to address human problems. Read Part One of the interview.
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Waxing Nostalgic Connecting The Dots: Depeche Mode, “Black Celebration”

By Jeffery X Martin

The doom and gloom of Eighties music, which arguably began with the appearance of The Smiths (see last week’s article), stayed relegated to the underground for most of the decade. Bands like Bauhaus and The Damned morosely swayed around the borders of the Alternative Nation, not gaining widespread recognition in America until much later. Depeche Mode, a four-piece band from Essex, managed what seemed at the time to be impossible; not only did they gain the respect of the Goths and Gloomers of the time, they also achieved mainstream success through the heavy rotation of their music videos. The reason for this was simple.

They were pretty.

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Music Review: Various Artists, Purple Snow: Forecasting The Minneapolis Sound

By Paul Casey

Purple Snow: Forecasting The Minneapolis Sound collects music from many musical outfits that helped shape the sound of the title. While the title is a nod to the importance of that miniature-sized and prodigiously talented man, the collection assembled by Numero Group has a broader interest. This is a work of love and commitment. It is a history lesson for those who think great artists are created in a vacuum. Everybody who has sat back and had a sob over the genius of Prince, Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis, or Alexander O’Neal and assumed they came out fully formed, should have a listen to this compilation.

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Interview With: Toronto R&B Musician Jhyve, Part One

By Paul Casey

About a month ago, I had a conversation with a talented musician from Toronto. Jamaal Desmond Bowry goes by the name Jhyve and makes modern R&B. He also has a touch for Rap. His latest album, Supermegafutureshit, resulted from a collaboration with producer Soul. The album is an atmospheric thing and another sign of how the genre is regaining its standing with listeners and musicians. Get low, change the tone, push through a whole bunch of compatible influences.

I spoke with Jhyve for about an hour and our conversation covered many things that I feel are important, especially right now. While we discussed Jhyve’s history and how his music has developed, we also got to talk about how R&B has changed over the years and why it is that so many unfairly reduce its ability to address human problems.

Just because you have grown up to believe that one genre is THE STANDARD, it does not mean this is everyone’s experience. Just because Rolling Stone tells you that the only worthwhile R&B is that one Marvin Gaye record they heard at a party that one time, don’t assume this is all the genre has to offer. Not all sex songs are vacant. Some have a lot to say about the human problem. Sex is not all R&B has to be, either. Things are changing, and hopefully soon R&B can encompass all manner of concepts and ideas. What will remain is its fearlessness and passion.

I have tried to present the conversation as close as possible to how it happened. I have edited and cleaned it up to make for a more pleasant reading experience but the meaning and the order of chat are the same. Part Two will be posted on Wednesday, December 4.

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Music Review: Sebastien Grainger, Yours To Discover

By Less Lee Moore

Sebastien Grainger’s first album post-Death From Above 1979 included a band called The Mountains and established a distinctive musical style far removed from his work with Jesse F. Keeler (review). Five years later, Grainger has something new to offer—this time without The Mountains—and he’s expanded his palette considerably, while still retaining some of what made that first solo debut so compelling.

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Music Review: Saâda Bonaire, Saâda Bonaire

By Less Lee Moore

There’s a lot to be said about the decidedly bizarre time capsule that is Saâda Bonaire. They weren’t so much a band as an experiment, but one that definitely pays off.

In 1982, Bremen DJ Ralf Behrendt, a.k.a. Ralf von Richthofen, embarked on a musical project that he hoped would replicate something akin to the influence Caribbean and Indian music was having on British pop. Behrendt had an exposure to and fascination with Turkish music due to his work in the German government’s immigration department. He enlisted local Turkish and Kurdish musicians, as well as his then-girlfriend Stephanie Lange and her friend Claudia Hossfeld (who both wrote the songs), to create Saâda Bonaire.

Thirteen tracks were recorded for EMI in Kraftwerk’s Studio N with producer Dennis Bovell, including “You Could Be More As You Are” as the intended single. But then, it all hit a snag.

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Waxing Nostalgic Connecting the Dots: The Smiths, “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore”

By Jeffery X Martin

The Eighties came down like a back alley pummeling. When you’re young and impressionable, looking desperately for things to believe in, you can get caught in a strange whirlpool. Music, movies, and books all swoop down in a tsunami of ideas and perspectives, some totally new, some reinforcing things you already thought. Sometimes, these things simply served to enhance emotions you didn’t know how to express properly, and you find yourself identifying with people and situations you’ve never actually encountered or experienced. There’s a strange ability you have as a teenager to cut through the pretense and the art and find the base emotion, and you inhale it, and it’s like a medicine. It plugs in and builds a bridge between synapses, neuron pathways, and it burns down like acid blood, to a sub-atomic level and you absorb it. It becomes you. You become it.

“Park the car by the side of the road. You should know time’s tide will smother you. And I will, too.”

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Music Review: An Evening With Neil Gaiman And Amanda Palmer

By Jeffery X Martin

“Happy loving couples make it look so easy/Happy loving couples always talk so kind.”
—Joe Jackson, “Happy Loving Couples”

When Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer got together, it seemed to be the perfect pairing, a gentle collision of geek-o-spheres, the kind of thing the word “adorkable” was coined for. Witness the reserved writer and the flamboyant cabaret singer gliding around the world, about three feet off the ground, being fabulous and sweetening up Twitter with their frequent declarations of love for each other.

That’s cool, if you like shit like that.

Some people don’t like to see happy couples. I understand that. I used to be that way. But it takes a lot of work to be bitter all the time. I enjoy that dynamic now, that chemistry. It’s nice to be around people who enjoy being together, not taking caustic pot shots at each other and gleefully wishing for the other’s slow painful death.

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Music Review: Various Artists, It’s A Scream How Levine Does The Rhumba: The Latin-Jewish Musical Story 1940s-1980s

By Melissa Bratcher

Ruth Wallis

The Idelsohn Society For Musical Preservation has an important mission: to look at Jewish history and the Jewish experience through recorded sound. Their motto: History sounds different when you know where to start listening. With their two CD set It’s A Scream How Levine Does The Rhumba: The Latin-Jewish Musical Story 1940s-1980s, they have created an important document that explores the connection between Jewish and Latin music. With vast liner notes, essays, archival photos and ephemera, it is a fascinating compilation.

It’s A Scream How Levine Does The Rhumba is surprisingly varied despite its narrow scope. There are Latin artists doing Jewish songs and Jewish artists embracing Latin beats. There are novelty songs from the early 20th century, disco beats, straight-up funk, and blazing salsa tunes.

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Music Review: Patrick Cowely, School Daze

By Less Lee Moore

As a big disco fan, I’m ashamed to admit that Sylvester is not a name I mention when discussing my favorite tunes of the genre. “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” and “Do You Wanna Funk” are two of Sylvester’s biggest hits and besides being fantastic tracks, have another thing in common. They were both composed and produced by Patrick Cowely.

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