Yeh Yeh

Award-winning violinist Joshua Bell’s forthcoming recording Butterfly Lovers features one of the most renowned works in the Chinese classical violin repertoire, the Butterfly Lovers Violin Concerto. Recorded with the Singapore Chinese Orchestra (SCO) and conducted by Tsung Yeh, the work is a distinctive adaptation for an ensemble of traditional Chinese instruments.

This box is the definite overview of Georgie Fame's Columbia recordings, gathering all 46 tracks from Fame's four albums for the UK Columbia recordings, with no less than sixty bonus tracks from non lp singles, non lp EP tracks, album outtakes, BBC sessions, a 1963 demo session and stray live recordings. Several tracks included have previously been issued only on limited Japanese editions of these Fame albums. Georgie Fame is a seminal figure in British popular music who helped to introduce the sounds of rhythm and blues, jazz, soul, ska and other ‘black’ music styles to a UK audience in the 1960s.

C. Spencer Yeh, Okkyung Lee, Lasse Marhaug - Wake Up Awesome (2013) {Software Records}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 237 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 96 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (png) -> 15 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 2013 Software / Kemado Records | SFT021
Electronic / Jazz / Experimental / Avant-Garde Jazz

Wake Up Awesome is the second volume of SSTUDIOS, a series of recordings that situates different experimental, avant-garde, and noise artists in new combinations of collaboration and spontaneous creativity. The album includes the trio of long-running Norwegian noise artist and Jazzkamer member Lasse Marhaug, experimental cellist Okkyung Lee, and New York-based sound collector C. Spencer Yeh, joining forces to create 15 tracks of collective improvisation and composed experimental sounds.

Following on from the hard-hitting blues of their debut album, Plays On caught the Climax Chicago Blues Band in somewhat transitional waters, testing any number of different musical styles, but never really setting on any. Certainly the funk thump that characterized their better later work was still an idea waiting to be explored, as the group instead fluttered between the scurrying jazz of the opening "Flight," the psychedelic tinge of "Hey Baby, Everything's Gonna Be Alright Yeh Yeh Yeh," the semi-Santana fusion of "Cubano Chant," and the heavy blues of "So Many Roads," all interrupted by "Mum's the Word," a dynamic Moog sequence that builds out of the theme from 2001, and then freefalls into total space rock.

Following on from the hard-hitting blues of their debut album, Plays On caught the Climax Chicago Blues Band in somewhat transitional waters, testing any number of different musical styles, but never really setting on any. Certainly the funk thump that characterized their better later work was still an idea waiting to be explored, as the group instead fluttered between the scurrying jazz of the opening "Flight," the psychedelic tinge of "Hey Baby, Everything's Gonna Be Alright Yeh Yeh Yeh," the semi-Santana fusion of "Cubano Chant," and the heavy blues of "So Many Roads," all interrupted by "Mum's the Word," a dynamic Moog sequence that builds out of the theme from 2001, and then freefalls into total space rock.

It is not clear what took Sony Classical five years to issue these performances, recorded by violinist Joshua Bell and the Singapore Chinese Orchestra in 2018. Having had it in the can, it would have made ideal pandemic-era listening. However, better is certainly late than never, and the recording is a real find. It made classical best-seller lists in the summer of 2023. Most musical fusions have one tradition or the other at the core, but in this one, the trips between Western and Chinese are so numerous that one loses track.