DMT 43

This is the album Sakura by Susumu Yokota. I think it is classified as Ambient Music, but maybe there is too much happening for that. I have several CDs by Yokota and all of them have interesting covers. Today I wanted to find out more about him and discovered that he was also a graphic designer and that died in 2015. This is a good article about him – LINK.

There is also Song of the Sleeping Forest, from another album. I have been listening to this a lot:

I hear several classical music samples in that piece. Amazing. How was he able to do that? The licensing would be a nightmare… unless it flew under the radar? But no matter, it is an amazing piece I can’t stop listening to.

DMT40

Guitarist Zsòfia Boros has great chops. She covered Vicente Amigo’s Callejón De La Luna on her album En Otra Parte. LINK to her version + LINK to his recording. If you listen to the two recordings you can hear the difference between classical guitar and flamenco guitar. One is round and glides and the other is spiky and snarls. One is calm and the other emotional. One wears a suit and the other ripped jeans. ;-)

The song I am offering as DMT 40 is Milonga by Jorge Cardoso, a beautiful composition beautifully played.

PS: thanks to Steve, who turned me on to Zsòfia Boros

DMT39

Sakamoto (on Guitar), an album of compositions by Ryuichi Sakamoto, arranged for guitar by Jonathan Bockelmann.

LINK to Apple Music

DMT38

I love this album cover. The photograph shows Ralph Towner, 82 years of age, playing guitar. He wears loose black clothing and sits on a piano bench, perhaps. The album is called At First Light. Solo guitar recordings. Towner sounds great. I first listened to Ralph Towner in the 70’s: Solstice, from 1975, followed by Sargasso Sea, with John Abercrombie, in 1976. I don’t love the music but I love that it exists, if that makes sense. I have to be in the right mood to listen to it. To hear Towner play guitar like that at age 82 is very inspiring.

LINK to the album on Apple Music but I am sure it can be found on every streaming service.
Here is another great image – LINK.

DMT37



Ahmad Jamal died on Sunday, aged 92. In the late Fifties his group worked as the house trio at Chicago’s Pershing Hotel and, in 1958, released the live album, Ahmad Jamal Trio At the Pershing: But Not for Me, which stayed on the Ten Best-selling charts for 108 weeks. DMT37 is the song Poinciana from that recording. Such a great vibe!!

DMT36


Nostalgia, from the album Brilliant Trees, by David Sylvian. A wonderfully melancholic, perhaps even maudlin, track. I hear an electric guitar plugged directly into the console (no amp), something Holger Czukay often did. The voice at the beginning would have come from Holger’s dictaphone, as he recorded lots of such snippets from AM radio around the world. 

You might also enjoy Plight & Premonition Flux & Mutability, two albums Sylvian and Czukay recorded together, released on one CD in 2018.