Sunday, December 22, 2024
Tuesday, October 17, 2023
Sunday, June 11, 2023
Sven Vath Retrospective What I Used To Play
For this uniquely personal retrospective spread over twelve vinyl discs, Sven Väth takes us back to the early days of his DJ career. On What I Used To Play we meet great pioneers of electronic music, gifted percussionists, obscure wave bands, and innovative producers of a bygone ‘new electronic’ era. Rough beats and irresistible grooves from the identification stage of house, techno, and acid remind us not just how far electronic music has evolved over the past four decades, but how great it was to dance to EBM, techno, and house for the very first time.
If there is one protagonist of the electronic music scene who has remained curious, innovative and at the very cutting edge of music for over four decades, it‘s Sven Väth. His multi-layered artist albums and Sound of the Season mix compilations have been defining the genre for over two decades, and even today, he is constantly on the lookout for the next top tune to add to the highlights of his next set. At least, that’s the case when he’s not producing them himself as an artist or remixer. "Actually, it's always been part of my DNA to think ahead," and nothing had been further from his mind than looking back at his past, but when in spring of 2020 the international DJ circuit had to be scaled down to virtually zero, the ‘restless traveler’ suddenly had time. Time to stop and reflect on "how it actually was back then, at the very beginning of my career..."
"It was a great trip and with every track, beautiful memories came flooding back".
In the London apartment, he had just moved into, Sven has set up a "little music room", where he cocooned himself for several days, "to look way back for the first time and review my musical journey through the eighties, so to speak."
The interim result was six thematically oriented playlists with a grand total of 120 tracks from ‘early 80s’ to ‘Balearic late 80s’, together with excursions into afrobeat, European new wave, and EBM sounds and a few epochal techno/house tracks from the USA in between. From these ‘Best of Sven Väth's favorites’, the project What I Used To Play crystallized. Sven remembers how the Cocoon team reacted to his proposal: "They found the idea of making a compilation out of it MEGA from the beginning and everyone said 'Sven, go for it', but then, of course, the work really started, namely, to clear the rights and to get clean sounding masters of the up to 40-year-old tracks. There was also disappointment, of course. We couldn't clear certain titles because the rights holders in the USA had fallen out with each other or simply disappeared from the scene. In short, it wasn't easy, but now I can safely say we got the most important tracks."
Finally, after two years of research, curation, design, and administrative fine-tuning, the "little retrospective" from 1981 to 1990 is available. The exquisitely packaged, and three-kilo heavy box set is not only physically impressive, WIUTP is also the definitive record of Sven Väth's musical development. On each of the twenty-four sides of vinyl, you can trace track by track, what influenced him during which phase, and how he took off as a DJ from his parents' Queen's Pub straight into the spotlight at Dorian Gray. There and at Vogue (later OMEN), Sven became the style-defining player in the DJ booth that he still is today.
released February 3, 2023
Monday, May 01, 2023
Thursday, December 29, 2022
Thursday, November 03, 2022
Monday, February 22, 2021
Daft Punk Story Comes To An End/ Epilogue Video
Tuesday, January 12, 2021
Cafe Society
Josephson created the club to showcase African American talent and to be an American version of the political cabarets he had seen in Europe earlier. As well as running the first racially integrated night club in the United States,[3] Josephson also intended the club to defy the pretensions of the rich; he chose the name to mock Clare Boothe Luce and what she referred to as "café society", the habitués of more upscale nightclubs, and that wry satirical note was carried through in murals done by Anton Refregier, Russian immigrant who is more well known for the San Francisco Rincon Annex murals. Josephson trademarked the name Café Society, a phrase coined but not trademarked by Maury Paul, a society columnist who wrote as "Cholly Knickerbocker" for the New York Journal American. He also advertised the club as "The Wrong Place for the Right People".[4] Josephson opened a second branch on 58th Street, between Lexington and Park Avenue, in 1940. After that, the original club was known as Café Society Downtown and the new club—designed for a different audience—as Café Society Uptown.
The club also prided itself on treating black and white customers equally, unlike many venues, such as the Cotton Club, that featured black performers but barred black customers except for prominent blacks in the entertainment industry. The club featured many of the greatest black musicians of the day, from a wide range of backgrounds, often presented with a strongly political bent. Billie Holiday first sang "Strange Fruit" there; at Josephson's insistence, she closed her set with this song, leaving the stage without taking any encores, so that the audience would be left to think about the meaning of the song. Lena Horne was persuaded to stop singing "When it's Sleepy Time Down South" written by Clarence Muse, Leon René and Otis René, Pearl Bailey was fired for being "too much of an Uncle Tom", and Carol Channing was fired for an impersonation of Ethel Waters.[3]
Relying on the keen musical judgment of John Hammond, the club's "unofficial music director",[3] Josephson helped launch the careers of Ruth Brown, Lena Horne, dancer Pearl Primus, Hazel Scott, Pete Johnson, Albert Ammons, Big Joe Turner, and Sarah Vaughan, and popularized gospel groups such as the Dixie Hummingbirds and the Golden Gate Quartet among white audiences. Many of these acts had first been presented at Hammond's Carnegie Hall concerts, From Spirituals to Swing, in 1938 and 1939. Its defining star in the early 1940s was Josh White, who first appeared there with a gospel group, the Carolinians, then went on to head the bill as a solo performer for four years.
As part of the challenge to integrate America's segregated society, Josephson's club was the scene of numerous political events and fundraisers, often for left-wing causes, both during and after World War II. In 1947, Josephson's brother Leon Josephson was subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, which led to hostile comments from columnists Westbrook Pegler and Walter Winchell. Business dropped sharply as a result, and the club closed the following year.[1]
In Summer 1948, jazz pianist Calvin Jackson played with singer Mildred Bailey and dancer Avon Long.[5] On December 5, 1948, dancer Pearl Primus closed a successful return engagement before heading off for a year's research in Africa on research as a Rosenewald Fellow.[6]Thursday, November 19, 2020
Sunday, November 15, 2020
Thursday, November 12, 2020
Monday, November 02, 2020
Cotton Club
The Cotton Club was a New York City nightclub from 1923 to 1940. It was located on 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue (1923 to 1935), then briefly in midtown Theater District (1935-1940).[1] The club operated during the United States' era of Prohibition and Jim Crow era racial segregation. Black people could not initially patronize the Cotton Club, but the venue featured many of the most popular black entertainers of the era, including musicians Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Jimmie Lunceford, Chick Webb, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Fats Waller, Willie Bryant; vocalists Adelaide Hall,[2][3] Ethel Waters, Cab Calloway, Bessie Smith, Aida Ward, Avon Long, the Dandridge Sisters, the Will Vodery Choir, The Mills Brothers, Nina Mae McKinney, Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, and dancers such as Katherine Dunham, Bill Robinson, The Nicholas Brothers, Charles 'Honi' Coles, Leonard Reed, Stepin Fetchit, the Berry Brothers, The Four Step Brothers, Jeni Le Gon and Earl Snakehips Tucker.
At its prime, the Cotton Club served as a hip meeting spot, with regular "Celebrity Nights" on Sundays featuring guests such as Jimmy Durante, George Gershwin, Sophie Tucker, Paul Robeson, Al Jolson, Mae West, Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin, Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice, Langston Hughes, Judy Garland, Moss Hart, and Jimmy Walker, among others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_Club
