Take Me Higher

I’m addicted to a certain type of music lately that I can’t seem to find anywhere but my own house.

It started out simply enough. I wanted to listen to a simple Jobim song. So I popped in “Por Todo Minha Vida”. Then I realized that I’m secretly in love with Astrud Gilberto, who gave voice to so many of Jobim’s greatest songs. (Her breakthrough being “Girl From Ipanema”, of course.) Now I had to listen to all the Gilberto songs I had, in addition to the straight Jobim. Well, this lead to “Samba Una Nota”. Love that song. The performance I have is collaboration between Astrud Gilberto and Stan Getz. It’s incredible. “Hey,” I said to myself, “didn’t Ryan give you a disc with another version of that song not too long ago?” Why yes Self, he did! He gave you music from Stereolab’s “Alluminum Tunes: Switched On, Vol. 3.” And, if you have to be exact, “One Note Samba/Surfboard” is collaboration with Herbie Mann, another great interpreter of Jobim. And “Surfboard” is, of course, one of Esquivel’s signature tunes. So off I went into Esquivel land.

I thought I had finally reached the end. Naturally, I could take the Jobim angle further and further if I really wanted to. Elliot Smith’s old band Heatmiser had a quite rollicking number entitled “Antonio Carlos Jobim” on their album “Cop and Speeder”. But that wasn’t quite the same.

So the Brazilian groovin’ curse was out of my body. Or so I thought.

Then my wife and I watched a film called “CQ”, directed by Roman Coppola, which details the making of a fictional erotic, French, Sci-Fi film in the late 1960s. It’s kind of a Barberella/James Bond thing. The movie itself was alright. The music, however, was amazing.

It’s by the band Mellow. It may not be a band you recognize. But one of the principal members, Patrick Woodcock, who co-wrote one of my favorite Air songs, “Ce Matin La”. That’s not a bad pedigree. To say that this music was groovy would be an understatement. I was humming and grooving to the music for days on end. I searched for the soundtrack in local stores, to no avail. I needed immediate gratification.

So I surfed on over to my favorite legal repository for musical sampling, Epitonic and lo and behold, they had Mellow. So I did some sampling and downloaded “Take Me Higher”. And I was happy.

But it lead elsewhere. And further. Soon I was sampling Llorca and bustling to their song “Indigo Blues”. Could life get better?

Apparently. The French, whose music I used to abhor, much to the chagrin of Geek Friend and his soul-mated Boston cohort, are growing on me.

Llorca led me to Les Sans Culottes, who have a quite groovy song “Les Sauvages”. Every time I hear this song, I feel my rimless glasses turning into Horn-rims and I suddenly get an urge to grab a Tom Collins and a smoking jacket.

But it didn’t end there. Oh no. There’s also Miss Mary, Persephone's Bees, Quix*o*tic and The Oscillators.

I can’t stop. I’ve suddenly reverted to my old Esquivel ways. I’m spending time in my 60s mod basement and thinking of how groovy it would be to see a man on the moon and the wonders of plastics.

It’s a sickness. But a good one. Damn these bands and what they will do to my CD Budget! Damn my inexplicable obsession with proto-sixties corniness!

Now, if you’ll excuse me I need to dig out my Jet Set collection and listen to “Lolita Ya Ya”, a groovy remake of the theme from the Stanley Kubrick film.

I accept my dorkitude gladly.

Discuss