Day: November 18, 2022

Old Fellas New Music Episode 35 Thursday, November 17

On By paulmcguire2013In InnovationLeave a comment

Episode 35, Thursday, November 17

This is episode 35 of Old Fellas new Music. Nine great songs all newer than 2015 along with fun conversation. We hope you give this a listen!

This week – Nine new songs!

Cedric Burnside – Get Down

Khruangbin with Vieux Farka Touré – Tamalla  (2020) – Austin City Limits & KEXP 

(2022) (CBC The Block)

Valerie June – Shakedown

Trinidad Cardona, Davido, Aisha – Hayya Hayya (Better Together)

Gwenifer Raymond – Sweep It Up

Beatrice Deer – The Storm

Buffalo Nichols – How to Love

Julian Taylor – Wide Awake

Joachim  Cooder –  Heartaching Blues

Cedric Burnside

Get Down  First up is a nice party track from Cedric Burnside. 

Burnside is an American electric blues artist. He is the grandson of late blues great R. L. Burnside. He even toured with the elder Burnside at the age of 13 as a drummer.  From the 2021 lp “I Be Trying”  

The National Endowments for the Arts has a nice feature on him  https://www.arts.gov/honors/heritage/cedric-burnside 

Hayya Hayya (Better Together)

26,827,786 views  Apr 1, 2022

This is the first single of the multi-song FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022™ Official Soundtrack. 

Artists: Trinidad Cardona, Davido and Aisha. Such a great song. I am sure you will be hearing this a lot over the next few weeks. Oh and make sure you watch the video!

Valerie June

is an American singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist from Memphis, Tennessee.  The track, Shakedown come from 2017’s “The Order of Time “ album.  Rolling Stone magazine ranked the album at No. 24 on their “50 Best Albums of 2017”  Shakedown is a nice southern blues and gospel-based groove.  https://www.popmatters.com/valerie-june-shakedown-singles-going-steady-2495403955.html

Beatrice Deer’s ‘SHIFTING’ Is a Multilingual Merger of Darkness and Light (Exclaim)

By Jordan Currie

Published Dec 08, 2021

Montreal-based singer-songwriter Beatrice Deer understands how to merge opposite worlds to birth a fresh, inventive new one. A blend of modern folk tales with traditional Inuit ones serves as a landscape for her music, where the sounds of classic indie pop and rock are interwoven with Inuit throat singing. On top of this, the half-Inuk, half-Mohawk artist also sings in three languages: English, French and Inuktitut, at times switching between multiple within one song. Her approach to bringing these elements together is skillful and graceful on her sixth studio album SHIFTING, where she explores the emotions surrounding getting older and moving on to another phase of life.

On paper, SHIFTING may sound daunting and overly complicated for those who only speak one language, but Deer’s ability to craft a seamless flow between her songs and highlight universal themes of transformation and growth can lead any listener to enjoy the journey. “Emotionally, spiritually, and physically, the transition towards our authentic selves continues,” she shared of the album. “As I shift into the position where I’m meant to be, I want to keep using what I’ve learned to help others.”

CBC Q

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-50-q/clip/15883464-beatrice-deers-album-combines-inuk-musical-traditions-modern

Canadian singer-songwriter Beatrice Deer joined Tom Power to talk about merging her Inuk-Mohawk heritage with indie rock sounds on her latest album, Shifting.

Aired: Dec. 9, 2021

Gwenifer Raymond – Sweep It Up  

https://guitar.com/features/interviews/gwenifer-raymond-welsh-acoustic-virtuoso-and-game-designer/

Gwenifer Raymond is a Welsh guitarist originally from Cardiff Wales but now living in Brighton, England.  Critics are categorizing her style as following in the  American Primitive genre like forbearers John Fahey.  In addition to being an accomplished musician,  she has earned an MA and a Ph.D. in Astrophysics. She also is a computer programmer, first in artificial intelligence, and later as an audio programmer for video games. She continued to study and play gigs in coffee houses and pubs.

From 2018’s You Never Were Much of a Dancer,  “Sweep it Up”   

Here’s more! Gwenifer Raymond at the Brighton Toy Museum. 

Khruangbin with Vieux Farka Touré – Tamalla  (2020) –

I saw this band first on Austin City Limits & KEXP 

Khruangbin and Vieux Farka Touré have announced a new collaborative album. Ali is in honor of Vieux’s late father Ali Farka Touré; the artists recreate and pay homage to his work across the new album. It’s out September 23 via Dead Oceans

Khruangbin is an American musical trio from Houston, Texas. The band comprises Laura Lee on bass, Mark Speer on guitar, and Donald “DJ” Johnson Jr. on drums.[2]The band is known for blending global music influences, such as classic soul, dub, rock and psychedelia.[3][4] Their debut studio album, The Universe Smiles Upon You (2015), draws from the history of Thai music in the 1960s, specifically from Luk thung, while their second album, Con Todo el Mundo (2018), has influences from Spain and the Middle East, specifically Iran.[2] Speer, Lee, and DJ also host “AirKhruang” radio shows on NTS Radio and Facebook Live.[5] In September 2022, the band released the album, Ali in collaboration with Vieux Farka Touré, featuring songs by Vieux’s father, Ali Farka Touré.

Buffalo Nichols – How to Love 

Blues performer Carl ‘Buffalo’ Nichols was born in Houston, Texas, but was raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Per Wikipedia,  Growing up in Milwaukee, Nichols found his place behind the guitar. In poring over records from other artists, he would sometimes listen to a song as many as 200 times to understand the chord or riff and play it. Nichols traveled across West Africa and Europe, discovering how tradition could be updated for contemporary listeners. That’s his mission in releasing Buffalo Nichols. “Part of my intent, making myself more comfortable with this release, is putting more Black stories into the genres of folk and blues”, he said. “Listening to this record, I want more Black people to hear themselves in this music that is truly theirs”.  From 2021’s self titled lp   

Here’s a nice comprehensive article on Nichols from Rolling Stone Magazine.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/blues-buffalo-nichols-1296676/

Julian Taylor – Wide Awake

Seeds by Julian Taylor

an excerpt that gives you some idea of the work Julian Taylor has done over the years.

It’s rare in this era to see an artist build slowly and reach a new level of widespread acclaim two decades into their career. But Julian’s ethos, work ethic, and artistry has always had a timeless quality to it. And so, he’s built things slowly in a DIY fashion, withstanding highs and lows along the way, ultimately reaching the peak of his powers with his latest solo work. Fans and critics have noticed, granting Julian the Solo Artist of the Year honour at the Canadian Folk Music Awards (and nomination in the English Songwriter category), plus two Juno Award nominations in 2021, as well as a Polaris Music Prize nomination. 

https://juliantaylormusic.ca/about

Joachim  Cooder –  Heartaching Blues  from 2020’s On That Road I’m Bound

Joachim Herbert Cooder is a  percussionist and keyboardist best known for his collaborations with his father, Ry Cooder. His primary instrument is the electric mbira, a variation on the traditional African thumb piano. This gives you an idea of what he plays.  

 Here, Cooder covers an old Uncle Dave Macon song  Heartaching Blues. 

For comparison  here’s Uncle Dave Macon version   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Msk98ITgJG8

Advertisement

What is credible? How do you know?

On By paulmcguire2013In Academic Life, Historical Thinking, My Researcher's Journal, post-truthLeave a comment

In an increasingly complex post-truth world, people in general – students and teachers in particular – struggle to discern credible sources of online information. Their ability to judge multiple sources of information has and will have a major impact on their collective ability to make decisions in a modern, democratic society.

This is the area of research I have been working through over the past month.

We need to better understand the challenges presented by a post-truth. As a term, post-truth is relatively new. Most of us probably became aware of post-truth with the 2016 election of Donald Trump. He didn’t invent post-truth but Trump and other politicians have used alternative facts as an every day tool with impunity.

What strategies and techniques can be developed to provide educators and students with appropriate tools to effectively evaluate what is credible and what is baseless information? Is this even possible to do?

In a world that possesses an abundance of information, more readily available than at any other time in history, we swim in a sea of disinformation, suspicion, and confusion (Chinn et al., 2021). Accordingly, our ability to make decisions that affect our everyday life is severely hampered (Barzilai & Chinn, 2020). This is the world of post-truth; here, the forum of political debate can be filled with half-truths and outright lies. What is ‘true’ is up for debate on every news channel (Buckingham, 2019). The challenge of acquiring information has been complicated by several factors including the increased prevalence of misinformation; the outright rejection of established claims; the discrediting of facts over personal beliefs; a declining trust in the institutions that provide us with information and the fragmentation of that information (Barzilai & Chinn, 2020). 

 

This is not a new situation. Many generations have had to contend with information sources designed to distract and misinform. Thomas Jefferson witnessed the increased flow of political pamphlets brought about by the advent of movable type. While this technical innovation allowed for the spread of cheaply produced rhetoric and opinion, it also opened the door to a more questionable collection of reading material. Jefferson’s solution then is as relevant today. Rather than ban the half-truths and false claims of the pamphlet, Jefferson argued that people needed to be taught to discern truth from fiction (Wineburg & McGrew, 2019).

What are some features of a post-truth world? One common theme focuses on the inability of people to spot unreliable information. They may rely on a single source for their information or have little experience with fact-checking sources (Chinn et al., 2021). The widespread availability of digital information can also make it a challenge for people to decide who possesses expert information (2021). It cannot be taken for granted that the public has the skill set required to assess the trustworthiness of the experts they are reading. There exists the tendency for people to ‘choose’ their own expert opinion, especially when the information confirms previously held beliefs (Barzilai & Chinn, 2020).

This is an area that I would love to learn more about. Authors like Sam Weinburg and Jason Steinhauer who recently wrote History Disrupted: How Social Media and the World Wide Web Have Changed the Past are writing for a non-academic audience. Both, I think, would call themselves Internet entrepreneurs (Weinburg, p. 8, 2018). Both write for a general audience because it is this audience that needs to acquire the tools to assess what is credible information and what is a potentially dangerous fantasy. This is not an academic debate.

These few paragraphs were written as part of a doctoral paper. The more time I spend with academics, the more I am convinced that we need to have this debate outside of the academy. Over the next few posts, I will include more from this paper in the hope that someone finds this discussion important. Maybe this will encourage more discussion. Otherwise, what value does this piece really have?

This is a problem for everyone, but for educators how we develop 21st-century critical thinking skills is becoming an essential feature of their professional lives. How well do we understand this?