For all of you retro music lovers out there, I'm very excited to announce that a Vintage music CD titled
This Is Vintage Now will soon be available to the public.
This is Vintage Now is a compilation of music from all of the Vintage genres and eras that we love the most. The album features music from legendary artists such as
Beverly Kenney, Big Jay McNeely, Caro Emerald, Carole Creveling, and others.
David Gasten, producer of
This is Vintage Now and frontman of contributing artist
David Gasten & the City Kids, was kind enough to do an interview with me and provide samples of music from the compilation for your enjoyment. David explains that this album is truly special and important to the Vintage community because it's the first compilation to feature Vintage-style artists that are fully bilingual between the original period and today.
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| David Gasten ("photo courtesy Bryce Boyer") |
*Fellow Bloggers- if you would like to be a part of promoting This Is Vintage Now, be sure to scroll down to the bottom of this post for more info!*
As a lover of many genres of music, how did you fall in love with the Vintage lifestyle and its music?
Oh my word, HUGE question! My love affair with Vintage has a lot of its roots in the Nineties Swing Revival. Before 1997, I liked classic jazz but didn’t really like swing because I thought it was granny music and cartoon music. The weekend that Princess Diana passed away in 1997, I was hanging out with some friends, and my best friend at the time and his girlfriend were practicing swing dancing. They put on this Dutch import compilation called Swing! and started dancing, and as I listened to the music, I thought, “Good grief! This rocks! There must be some kind of swing music that I like then, because I like this.” The next year, the girlfriend’s father, who was (and still is) a friend of mine, asked me to DJ a weekly swing lesson that he was starting—this was 1998. His name is Dr. Miles Jones, and I still look up to him as an important influence and mentor in my life. Dr. Jones learned swing in Paris, France, and was really adamant about keeping everything high-energy and jumpin’ like the way he experienced it there. During the year and a half that I DJ’ed for him, I just fell in love with the music, the class, and the pretty girls in the cute outfits—I was spoiled for life.
DJ’ing swing at these lessons was really embarrassing at first because I didn’t know a thing about swing music and we had three CD’s and a really awful CD player, but I applied myself and learned everything I could about the music and about DJ’ing swing. By the time we were done, I had a little collection of CD’s and a nice DJ setup, and was pretty adept at working the room. The entire time I was DJ’ing, I continued to see that there was this strain of swing music that grabbed people in the same way that the Swing! compilation grabbed me, and I tried to figure out what that sound was and why people like myself went gaga over it. It turned out that that sound was called Jump Blues, and that led to me falling for Sam Butera, Louis Jordan, Louis Prima, Wynonie Harris, and Bill Haley, and also starting the concept that would end up becoming the Heavy Jump Blues group David Gasten & the City Kids.
I should also mention that my love affair with silent movies is another other reason for my love for Vintage. That started in 1998 too with German silents like Nosferatu, Faust, and Metropolis, and got really out of control. I now run the website Polanegri.com about the silent movie actress Pola Negri, and appeared in a documentary about her called Pola Negri: Life is a Dream in Cinema (2006). My first love in movies is German silents, but I watch all kinds of movies up to about 1967. Old movies in particular really solidified what the Vintage lifestyle and values are for me. They taught me a lot about being an old-fashioned gentleman, and I even ended up picking up the vernacular to the point that “swell” and “hep” sound better than “cool” to me now.
One more thing that I think got me into Vintage was reading anthologies of newspaper comic strips like Krazy Kat and Dick Tracy as a kid; that I think probably had the earliest effect on me falling for Vintage. I still love Vintage newspaper comics but haven’t had the opportunity to really dig into them; I’ll get to it yet.
Do you have a favorite musical era?
I think my favorite periods are probably the 1950’s and the 1980’s, although for me the 1950’s are about Jump Blues, Bachelor Pad Music, and Classic Jazz more so than about Rock and Roll. I think you could probably count the early 1960’s, maybe up to 1963, as the 1950’s too.
With the 1980’s, that’s after the Vintage era, but it’s when I grew up, so it’s very nostalgic for me. I love Heavy Metal especially—I run another website called Betsybitch.com about Bitch, the first lady-fronted American metal band to be signed to a label, and their lady frontman Betsy Bitch. I also love New Wave, Westcoast/AOR, British Neo-Prog, New Romantic Music, Power Pop, and some 80’s Synthpop and College Rock. I mention this because I’m a defender of a lot of 1980’s music genres that have been kicked to the curb unjustly. Many music critics demonize the music of the 1980’s because they hate the politics of Reagan and Thatcher, not because the music is actually poor quality. I care about good music and I like my music politics-free, so I ignore their fabricated muso-political narrative and try to evaluate the music on its own merits.
What inspired you to produce the compilation This is Vintage Now?
In April 2010, David Gasten & the City Kids cut a four-song recording with producer Randall Frazier, who does a lot of work with The Legendary Pink Dots, Nurse With Wound, Bill Laswell, and other experimental artists like that. I knew that the interest in Vintage-style music was growing, and I wanted to promote what I perceived to be a growing movement of artists like us instead of doing the stupid “check out my band” thing. I started thinking about all the really vibrant, exciting Vintage-style artists that I had been discovering, and realized that they were scattered all over the place and needed to be brought together under one umbrella. I came up with the idea of a compilation called This is Vintage Now and it grew from there.
When I listened to This is Vintage Now, I was amazed at what an excellent job you did choosing such an eclectic selection of music. I'm sure it was difficult to have to pick and choose. What was it like being able to work with these musical legends? Do you see a second edition This is Vintage Now compilation in the future?
Why thank you! Actually there is so little music that really fits the “Vintage Now” sound that I did not have much to pick from, and in fact had to seek out a couple of artists for placement on the compilation. I suspect that once people figure out what “Vintage Now” is and it starts getting popular, it’s going to get a lot easier to find groups and harder to decide who will make the cut.
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| The beautiful Beverly Kenney ("photo by Chuck Stewart, courtesy SSJ Records") |
With most of the big names, I actually didn’t work with them directly. With Beverly Kenney and Carole Creveling, I worked with SSJ Records in Japan and jazz historian Bill Reed in Los Angeles. With Big Jay McNeely and Caro Emerald, I worked with their respective management groups, which are both based in The Netherlands. Every one of these folks has been great to work with and very accommodating.
We need to get This is Vintage Now a good label home and get it released to the public first, but I would absolutely love to build it into a franchise, kind of like Metal Blade Records’ Metal Massacre series. I can only speculate as to who would be on This is Vintage Now Vol. II, but if I had my way, I would LOVE to have Pinky Winters be on it. Pinky Winters is another collectible1950’s lady jazz vocalist that’s still with us; I didn’t add her to the original compilation because I didn’t want to overload it with lady jazz vocalists, but I would really like to give her featured billing on the second volume.
I love that you added the single "The Deacon Don't Like It" from your band David Gasten and The City Kids because I really love your musical style. Can you tell me a little about the band? (And for my readers, where can we go to hear more?! :)
Again, thank you! The inspiration for the group goes back to 2000, right around the time the swing lessons I was DJ’ing were winding down. I met a post-vaudeville era entertainer named Little Anthony and started working for his courier business. He was managed by a friend of Jack Ruby’s, and was the first white entertainer to headline Charles Taylor’s Cotton Club Revue, a previously all-black variety show based in Harlem. I decided that I wanted to be an entertainer like Little Anthony, and started developing the concept for a jump blues-style group with an over-the-top entertainer frontman. Little Anthony ended up taking me under his wing for two years and teaching me about being an entertainer, which is very different than the way of entertaining that most musicians practice today.
As far as David Gasten & the City Kids goes, right now the group is inactive because I am concentrating on promoting This is Vintage Now and this new musical arm of the Vintage movement. I feel very strongly that we need to introduce the “Vintage Now” way of doing things first. Once that gains some traction, there will be interest in more music from all of the artists on the compilation, including David Gasten & the City Kids. And when that happens, be prepared for a shock! Imagine an entertainer that’s a three-way mix of Bryan Ferry, Iggy Pop, and Freddie Mercury that fronts a show like Gary Glitter and the Glitter Band except even more intense, with a “dirty”-sounding, saxophone-based horn section with no annoying trumpets, and a rhythm sound that’s so danceable it shakes most all the wallflowers off the wall and onto the dance floor. That’s what David Gasten & the City Kids will be like.
As for music samples, you can go to myspace.com/dgck and hear some rehearsal tapes where I was working with the live version of the band to hone the intense sound that I was looking for. We had the lively, energetic part down at that time, but didn’t actually get the intensity right until we went into the studio, so keep that “work in progress” concept in mind as you listen.
Where do you draw inspiration for your unique sound?
Well, I would credit the Christian new wave group Daniel Amos for teaching me how to free associate and pull influence from everywhere; their closest musical cousin is XTC, if that helps place what they sound like. I literally have to sit down and think what little things I noticed in music or in life that got me going with some certain sound or technique that I use, and I have a whole toolbox full of stuff like this. Just as an example, that really heavy cymbal sound that you hear in “The Deacon Don’t Like It”, I know that I got that from “She Shook Me Cold” by David Bowie; that’s from his metal album The Man Who Sold the World (1970). I love the primal cymbal sound in that song and really latched onto that, and listened for similar sounds as I researched music. I had exaggerated that cymbal sound in my head to the point that when we did the recording, we had to use two heavier grade cymbals and a heavier grade high hat to get the sound that I was hearing.
As for David Gasten & the City Kids’ overall sound, it’s a new genre called Heavy Jump Blues. To my knowledge, the only other group that does anything like this is the now-defunct Japanese group Dick Boogie and the Boogie Woogie All-Stars. Heavy Jump Blues came out of my quest in the Nineties Swing Revival to understand this music called Jump Blues that everyone loved so much. I fell in love with Louis Jordan, Louis Prima, Sam Butera, Wynonie Harris, and Bill Haley, and bought as much as I could by all of those artists and spent hours listening to them. I realized that there was room to intensify the Jump Blues sound even more, and that some of the clues as to how to do that lie in 70’s glam rock, 70’s hard rock, and 80’s heavy metal. When I got into Gary Glitter and The Glitter Band, that in particular solidified the Heavy Jump Blues sound for me. And then I’ve pulled and developed bits and pieces of things from all over the place like how I was describing above.
I also want to add that even though I was the “foreman” of our recording project, it was also a collaborative effort. David “Ribs” Farley is my main partner and collaborator, and he played bass. The guitar player is Michael Chodosh, the drummer is Jeffrey Kennison, and Joshua Perron and John Grace joined me on handclaps and gang vocals. All of these guys added their own ideas and background to it as well.
This Is Vintage Now is like an appetizer platter for vintage music newbies, providing a taste of every vintage genre. Since you are so passionate about music, do you have any other favorite artists or albums to recommend to vintage music "virgins"?
Here’s a really short starter list:
Beverly Kenney: Beverly Kenney Sings for Playboys (1958) is the best vocal jazz album I’ve ever heard. I recommend everyone that’s into Vintage music get this album. Beverly Kenney has changed my life and completely altered the way I listen to lady jazz vocals, and this is her masterpiece. I cry almost every time I listen to it, it has that much of an effect on me. Verve Reissues is finally releasing this album on MP3 in December 2010; it’s also available on CD as a Japanese import.
Louis Jordan: Rock Doc! Louis Jordan on Mercury 1956-57 (2008) collects most of the really intense, rockin’ Jump Blues that Louis Jordan did with Mercury Records in the late 1950’s, with high-octane versions of many of his best-known songs. Louis Jordan was the most famous and best-selling black artist of the 1940’s. He had 18 #1 hits on the R&B charts back in the day, which is a claim to fame nobody except Stevie Wonder and Aretha Franklin have ever been able to top (they both have 20 #1 R&B hits apiece). When Jump Blues got really intense starting in the late 1940’s, Louis Jordan was slow to transition into those more intense sounds. But when he finally did it, he did it and how! Louis Jordan’s music is some of the happiest music you’ll ever listen to and never gets dull; this 2-CD set is a really good place to get going with his rockin’ side.
Various Artists: Ultra-Lounge Volume 4: Bachelor Pad Royale (1996) is a reissue compilation from the mid-1990’s that’s still available cheap. It’s a good introduction to the fabulous world of Bachelor Pad Music. Bachelor Pad Music’s golden era was the late 1950’s and early/mid 1960’s. It was popular with young single guys in their 20’s and 30’s that had the discretionary income to buy expensive hi-fi players and decorate their houses with space-age furniture. It’s really fun, sexy, over-the-top, adventurous music, and a lot of it focuses on guys’ interest in girls. Henry Mancini’s “Pink Panther Theme” is probably the most famous and recognizable Bachelor Pad tune, so this is more where that came from. This compilation doesn’t have Mancini, but it has period recordings from Sam Butera, Nelson Riddle (“Route 66 Theme”), Martin Denny, Julie London, Jack Fascinato, and The John Buzon Trio, so a lot of the greats.
Also, get the albums the tracks on This is Vintage Now come from!
There are three unreleased tracks on the album, and those are by David Gasten & the City Kids, The Pharohs, and Ilana Charnelle; you’ll have to wait for the album to come out to get those.
Thank you so much for producing this amazing compilation for us! Where can we go to hear the rest?
You’re so welcome! As mentioned, right now This is Vintage Now is not yet available to the public; I’m looking for a label home for the compilation as we speak. But “Like” our Facebook page or become a fan at our ReverbNation site and we’ll keep you posted on updates.
Bloggers, would you like to be a part of the Vintage Now movement?
Help get This is Vintage Now released faster and hear the whole album right away! I have a prerelease download of This is Vintage Now that is available to bloggers and other industry people. If you would like to write a “coming soon” feature or a review about the compilation, or do an interview with me like this one, email me at davidgasten {ā} yahoo.çøm and I will hook you up with the prerelease download. We will back-promote your post on our sites too. When record companies get on the web and see all this excited discussion about This is Vintage Now in the blogosphere when it hasn’t even been released yet, it will let them know that there is a demand that they can release the album to, and that will elevate their interest in picking up This is Vintage Now for distribution. So let’s work together and get this compilation out!
—David Gasten, producer of This is Vintage Now
