Tuned In To Music

Bootsy Collins was not only one of the great funk bass players of the 1970s, he was one of the great bass players of all time. Most musicians who begin their career as side men spend years climbing the mountain of national recognition before they reach the top, if they ever do. Bootsy started at the summit when he first appeared as James Brown's 19 year old bass player in 1971. In this, the first of two podcasts devoted to the Bootzilla, we listen to Bootsy playing with James Brown, the JBs, Parliament and Funkadelic.

Throughout recorded history, all over the world, you look at people and you find at least one thing that never changes. People make music and dance to it. The music changes, the dances change but humans dance. Everywhere. All the time. Lately a lot of them have been dancing to music that melds elements of rock and electronica with an immense bottom end. In this program we join them with tracks from Justice, Digitalism, !!!, Daft Punk and more, because . . . heh . . . we're human after all.

In our previous podcast we locked the singers out of the studio; in this one we let them back in. The Girls in the Band presents music from six bands that feature women vocalists. All of the groups identify themselves as bands, it's not about "Marketable Chick and the Nameless Backup Band". The bands are also early in their careers. Some, like Stars and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, have raised a lot of buzz. Others, like The Vincent Black Shadow and The Duke Spirit haven't. At least not yet. Check them out. Maybe hear a band you like, maybe find something interesting and new. In any case, we hope you hear something you like.

In Music Without Words we lock the vocalists out of the studio and listen to a program of purely instrumental music. Sometimes bands that feature vocalists turn out an instrumental song or two, sometimes musicians are equally comfortable writing both vocal and instrumental songs, sometimes music focuses on rhythm rather than melody and vocals become less important. And sometimes the band just lets loose and plays. Hear examples of all these things as we present music from Justice, The Allman Brothers Band, Frank Zappa and much more in Music Without Words.

Larry Levan, the superstar DJ at the Paradise Garage, had a fine ear for music and an exceptional ability to put together music in the club that sent his dancers into orbit. After conquering the dance floor, he brought his live deejaying skills into the studio and became one of the most successful dance remixers of the late 1970s and early 1980s. This is our second podcast featuring the extended remixes that Levan created for the Paradise Garage.

This is the third in a series of podcasts devoted to the music of San Francisco in the late 1960s. In this podacst we listen to some of the second wave San Francisco bands that began forming around 1967 when many of the first wave bands were releasing their first records. The second wave San Francisco bands are notable for the wide variety of music they produced and we sample some of that variety here. In this podcast we listen to the music of Sly and the Family Stone, It's a Beyootiful Day, The Sons of Champlin, Dinosaurs and Santana.

This is the second of two podcasts devoted to a survey of the first wave of bands that came out of San Francisco in the mid to late 1960's. Some became megastars and some never did much after their first album but they all burst onto the scene playing great music that defined both a musical genre and a cultural phenomenon. In this podcast we listen to the music of Big Brother and the Holding Company, the Grateful Dead, and Quicksilver Messenger Service.

This is the first of two podcasts devoted to a survey of the first wave of bands that came out of San Francisco in the mid to late 1960's. Some became megastars and some never did much after their first album but they all burst onto the scene playing great music that defined both a musical genre and a cultural phenomenon. In this podcast we listen to the music of Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish, and Moby Grape

In this podcast we listen to three versions of the song Jingo: the original written by a kid from a small village in Nigeria who dreamed of coming to the US, a version that became a signature song for a megastar Latin Rock group, and a disco version that became an international dance hit. The story of Jingo illustrates what can happen when people refuse to be limited by musical categories and listen to music with open ears.

The Paradise Garage and its famous DJ Larry Levan have become legends in the nightworld of underground dance. Forged in the world that produced both disco and hip-hop, it is here where we find the roots of house, garage, techno and all the forms of dance music that developed in their wake. In Part 1 of this series we play some of the music that lifted the dancefloor at the Paradise Garage into orbit. Most of the tracks heard on the show are extended dancefloor mixes.