Rainer Ptacek tribute

I was digging through the piles on and around my desk again on Monday, and ended up tossing most of it, but I did find this really wonderful album called The Inner Flame, which is a tribute to Rainer Ptacek, who co-founded Giant Sand with Howe Gelb. Ptacek died a long time ago -- 1997 I think -- and the album was recorded to help him and his family meet the medical expenses of his first bout with a brain tumor in 1996. He got the chemo and lived for another year, then had a recurrence, very sad...

Ptacek was an extremely talented guy -- and you can hear him either solo or with other artists on a few of these tracks. He also commanded immense respect among a broad range of musicians-musicians types. among the people who contribute here are Gelb, Calexico, Lucinda Williams, Emmylou Harris, Jimmy Page (!!), John Wesley Harding, Vic Chestnutt and others. The record originally came out in 1997 and was, apparently, reissued by Fire almost exactly one year ago. (I've got to clean off my desk more often.) So it's too late to do much about it, except maybe say, briefly, how god-damned beautiful it is.



I'm off for our final big track meet of the year, scheduled to last from 3:45 to about 10 p.m. and including 28 teams. It's super hot today. We will definitely be going out in a blaze, if not of glory, at least of heat and light.

Have a nice weekend then.

Calexico's Algiers

My favorite Calexico since Feast of Wire, reviewed late last week at Dusted.

Calexico
Algiers
Anti-

There’s a video for “Splitter” shot at the converted church near New Orleans where Calexico made Algiers. Joey Burns stands in front of an open doorway, the Crescent City Connection bridge just visible over his shoulder as he starts the song. He twitches out a one-note riff on his guitar, crooning in a spectral, cool tenor that has always seemed at odds with Calexico’s sweaty aesthetic. (It’s like water in the desert.) In a little while, the lens widens, and you see John Convertino, seated, pounding out a hard, staccato beat, all insistence and propulsion against Burns’s hallucinatory longing.


For the record, Calexico adds to the song’s foundation with keyboards, horns, multiple vocals, the multi-ethnic overload that has become one of the band’s calling cards. Yet in a way, this spare live take encapsulates everything that’s compelling about Calexico — the dialogue between tense rhythm and florid, dream-like yearning, the exceptional musicianship delivered casually, almost under the counter, and the sense of the mythic coming out of the most prosaic settings and character studies.

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Otis put up the official video for "Splitter," but I like this one better.
SPLITTER PREMIERE