"Goodbye My Lovely Apartment" Upward's Profile

Time to pile on the old with the new, I'm leaving my old place for a new purgatory if you will with no knowledge of whether I'm moving up or down but just satisfied to be moving. I've been back in the states for over a year now and I'm not going to take it any longer, well, maybe several more months or more... But at least I've a vacation en route and just in time to prevent the agonizing spread of mundane-ality. Its good to be active on the site again as it will further encourage my drive to keep on going. 3/16

Lets see, What's my mood lately? Maybe a bit restless and driven and trying to figure out what to do next. Ready to embark on my post-carnival diet of kung fu, books, music and fresh vegetables--lots of fresh vegetables. I sure do miss sauteed chinese spinach and spicy pork eggplant dishes and marinated cucumbers, whole fried fish hongshao style. I can babble like this for days after most holidays, no sense of concise word or thought. Splendid.2/18

Welcome to my pages! I can offer general and detailed information for just about any place that I've lived including the surrounding countryside. This means New Orleans, Santiago de Chile and Qingdao, China. If you have any questions or comments just drop me a line, I look forward to making new friends and homes abroad in this new year! Best wishes, BC1/3

This website seems like such a great community of travellers and thinkers that I had to join. I can point to just about any place on a map and find reviews and pictures given by people who care about the places they are from and the places they want to go. I would love to meet people in the places I plan on visiting and I would be more than happy to host others in my little corner of the world. Networking has never been so insightful.11/20/04

Swordplay

Kung Fu is a Chinese term used to depict the oldest and most complete physical education system known to man. It refers to all ancient Chinese Martial systems--nearly 2,000 in all. Inclusive In the study of anyone of these systems Is the exploration of philosophy, psychology, and self-awareness. Kung Fu students may find their Art to have nearly all the posture of ballet, the acrobatics of gymnastics, and every imaginable fighting technique known within the martial arts. It is truly "one step beyond a Martial Art". It Is the study of human energy; how to develop it, maintain it, and preserve it.
Kung fu and tai chi are my favorite ways to exercise and relax, build strength and focus. The art is far more than exercise though, it is something that I want to continue throughout my life. It helps everything make sense, no matter how good or bad things are going. This is a photo of master yang jwing-ming, I briefly studied at one of his satellite schools while living in Santiago de Chile. Since I've been back in New Orleans I picked up where I left off with White Crane style.

Tricky--Pre Millenium Tension

by Stephen Thomas Erlewine
Maxinquaye was an unexpected hit in England, launching a wave of similar-sounding artists, who incorporated Tricky's innovations into safer pop territory. Tricky responded by travelling to Jamaica to record Pre-Millennium Tension, a nervy, claustrophobic record that thrives in its own paranoia. Scaling back the clattering hooks of Maxinquaye and slowing the beat down, Tricky has created a hallucinatory soundscape, where the rhythms, samples, and guitars intertwine into a crawling procession of menacing sounds and disembodied lyrical threats. Its tone is set by the backward guitar loops of "Vent," and continued through the shifting "Christiansands," and the tense, lyrically dense "Tricky Kid," easily Tricky's best straight rap to date. Occasionally, the gloom is broken, such as when the shimmering piano chords of "Makes Me Want to Die" ring out, but nearly as often, it becomes bogged down in its own murk, as in the long ragga rant "Ghetto Youth." While the lyrics are often quite effective in conveying dope-addled paranoia, what ties the album together is its layered rhythms and soundscapes. Though it might not sound that way immediately, Pre-Millennium Tension is as much Tricky reaching back to his hardcore rap roots as it is a sonic exploration. As such, it stands as a transition record for Tricky, but its overall effect is only slightly less powerful than Maxinquaye or Nearly God.

Review by Jesse Jarnow
Whether or not pianist Ethan Iverson is literally using it, all of the Bad Plus' These Are The Vistas sounds as if it was recorded with the sustain pedal of the piano depressed. It's actually probably mostly the fault of producer Tchad Blake (Soul Coughing, Cibo Matto, Los Lobos), who applies his incredible treatments throughout the album, shining through especially in his work on David King's chaotic drums. Nonetheless, the Bad Plus sound as if they are in a cavernous space. The band rolls out the now-requisite jazz covers of pop tunes (in this case, Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," Blondie's "Heart of Glass," and Aphex Twin's "Flim"), but it is their attitude (the very fact that they hired Blake to begin with, for example) that carries them the distance. The band itself is quite compelling. Iverson is a complex piano player. His skills come to bear on the abstract epic "Silence Is The Question," which closes the album, as his spidery piano lines melt into chaotic statements, left hand meeting subtly with bassist Reid Anderson, right hand meeting crazily with King. What is impressive is that the trio manages to sound contemporary using only piano, bass, and drums, and without resorting to electronic gimmicks. Whether or not the band is reinventing jazz is irrelevant. These Are The Vistas is good, interesting music.

Typically, we're better off ignoring the boasts of a rapper who claims to describe his own music, but when the Roots' lead voice Black Thought opens up his group's debut album by saying, "You are all about to witness some organic hip-hop jazz," it's a good idea to listen up. Organic is a fitting adjective for a hip-hop crew whose m.o. is as different from the typical studio-locked DJ/MC combo as grass is to Astroturf.
Nothing wrong with a little artificial grazeland, of course, but the Roots are making tasty roughage that blooms into real songs, where raps wind around bass, drums, keys, and horns, and where instruments coil up to voice cadences--where music and lyrics meet and grow together naturally, not coincidentally. You can hear the Roots' heart pump hardest when they pull off the things loops and samples cannot: just check the vocal/instrument interchanges of "Essaywhuman?!!!??!" or the left-turn instrumental digression midway through "Mellow My Man" to witness the living sounds of rap.

The Roots' Philadelphia-based groove collective build slick acid jazz playing around the smooth East Coast rhyming of A Tribe Called Quest and wild West Coast freestyling to create sounds as formless and fluid as jazz, but never unrecognizable as hip-hop. The music picks up where the mad scatting and melodic trills of L.A.'s defunct Freestyle Fellowship left off, and wakes up the tired hype of jazz/rap cross-polination to new possibilities. The roots of this kind of fusion have long been around, though perhaps these Roots are hope for a new dawning. --Roni Sarig

Review by Matthew Hilburn
Talvin Singh first rose to notoriety running a popular Monday night London club, Anokha. That experience led to the release of the album Anokha: Soundz of the Asian Underground, a highly regarded sampling of Asian-esque sounds from artists who performed at Anokha. O.K. is Singh's debut release, and it was nine months in the making. The title was chosen because of the universality of the word O.K., which can be understood almost anywhere. It is mostly a reinterpretation of hypnotic Indian classical music with plenty of flute, sitar and of course tabla. There's also Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan-like devotional qawwali and traditional Okinawan dance music mixed in to make O.K. truly pan-Asian. Singh's subtle craftsmanship in fitting the old with the modern make this album seductive and one of the best efforts yet as blending Asian sounds with techno. "Light," a truly wondrous fusion of Indian flute and rich atmospherics, encapsulates what Talvin Singh is all about and should convince even the most skeptical.

by Stephen Thomas Erlewine
Kind of Blue isn't merely an artistic highlight for Miles Davis, it's an album that towers above its peers, a record generally considered as the definitive jazz album, a universally acknowledged standard of excellence. Why does Kind of Blue posses such a mystique? Perhaps because this music never flaunts its genius. It lures listeners in with the slow, luxurious bass line and gentle piano chords of "So What." From that moment on, the record never really changes pace — each tune has a similar relaxed feel, as the music flows easily. Yet Kind of Blue is more than easy listening. It's the pinnacle of modal jazz — tonality and solos build from the overall key, not chord changes, giving the music a subtly shifting quality. All of this doesn't quite explain why seasoned jazz fans return to this record even after they've memorized every nuance. They return because this is an exceptional band — Miles, Coltrane, Bill Evans, Cannonball Adderley, Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb — one of the greatest in history, playing at the peak of its power. As Evans said in the original liner notes for the record, the band did not play through any of these pieces prior to recording. Davis laid out the themes before the tape rolled, and then the band improvised. The end results were wondrous and still crackle with vitality. Kind of Blue works on many different levels. It can be played as background music, yet it amply rewards close listening. It is advanced music that is extraordinarily enjoyable. It may be a stretch to say that if you don't like Kind of Blue, you don't like jazz — but it's hard to imagine it as anything other than a cornerstone of any jazz collection.

Review by Bret Love
If you're down with progressive hip-hop and aren't hip to the sounds of the collective formerly known as Solesides, you need to check out this two-CD retrospective. DJ Shadow, Chief Xcel, and the Gift of Gab (aka Blackalicious), Mack B. Dog, and Lateef and Lyrics Born (aka Latyrx) are among the finest artists in Bay Area hip-hop, laying the groundwork that forms the foundation of the West Coast alt-rap scene. With a cratedigger's attention to detail, you can hear Shadow's skills all the way back on 1993's "Entropy," while Blackalicious' dextrous lyrics on 1994's "Lyric Fathom" are evidence of the clique's trademark abstract expressionist rhyme style. For those who have followed the Solesides crew's careers, there are plenty of unreleased cuts, rare B-sides, and remixes here to make this a worthwhile investment. For those who haven't, freestyle throwdowns like "Lateef's Freestyle" and posse cuts like "Blue Flames" are ample evidence that this is one of the most potent crews in hip-hop.