She Moves Like This – Karlus Trapp

Some of the best music I come across on the internet is by independent artists, most people seem to stick to the mainstream stuff… fair enough… but sometimes it pays to go searching around and see what the independents have produced. It never ceases to amaze me that most of these bands never get the recognition they deserve, hardly anyone’s ever heard of them and yet here in the UK.. and elsewhere… they churn out TV talent shows featuring some of the worst singers I’ve ever heard…. half of them are tone deaf. Then at the end of the show someone gets a record contract and makes a small fortune.. I’m not saying the winners are all bad, some of them are very good… but others… well, how can I put this?.. well, they’re crap. Needless to say I wouldn’t be taking any of that nonsense to my desert island, Simon Cowell and his crowd wouldn’t be welcome.. it’s not my sort of music, though I know many people like it.., I don’t.

This next song proves my point as far as I’m concerned. Karlus Trapp…, never heard of him? well neither had I until I came across him on the IAC, Independent Artists Company website. The site is bristling with some really good music.., and all by artists that I’ve never heard of…, many of them much, much better than the XFactor mob.. and by a mile. The song I’d take to my island is called She Moves Like This… a real funky blues song, it’s brilliant. He’s from Staten Island, and he’s well known around New York according to what I can find out about him, which isn’t much. But I’m going to link to his song on the IAC so you can have a listen yourself. Saturday night on my little beach and this blasting through the laptop speakers.., ohhh!!, I’m going to have a cup of coconut vodka.., or maybe three because this song just hits the spot.

The link will take you to the page for the song on IAC, when you get there just click the play button and the IAC player will launch and play the song automatically for you. And if you’ve never heard Karlus Trapp before you’re in for a treat… here’s the link SHE MOVES LIKE THIS , have a little blast of that and liven up your Saturday, it works for me.  Coconut vodka anyone?

Star de Mozambique… Wazimbo And The Nightbird

The song in this post is quite simply one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard, just a guy singing and playing his guitar without any other accompanyment. His name is Wazimbo.., and he started his singing career in the early sixties, he’s from Mozambique. In 1979 he became the lead singer with a band of very talented musicians and singers called Orchestra Marrbenta Star de Mozambique, who were the main band at the time for a radio station, Radio Mozambique which was the national radio station, and they became very popular.

In 1988 they did some recordings called the Harare Sessions. The story goes that during a break in recording Wazimbo picked up his guitar and sang this song, the tape machine was still running. When the tapes were eventually taken back to London for mixing the engineers played them through and discovered this song on them… it’s called Nwahulwana, try saying that when you’ve been on the coconut vodka… anyway, the song was discovered then, no one knew it was there. Nwahulwana means Nightbird, only, as far as I can make out, it’s about a nightbird who moves from bar to bar at night in the town.., it’s about a woman.

The song was used in a Microsoft advert apparently… although I’ve never seen it… but it was also featured on the soundtrack for a movie called The Pledge, starring Jack Nicholson and produced by Sean Penn.. this was in 2001… and that’s where I first heard the song. It’s another one of those songs that just instantly stuck in my mind and when the end credits rolled I tried to see what the song was and who it was by, but I missed it. I then forgot about it, didn’t hear it for ages until a friend of mine gave me a disc with some albums on, and on one of the albums there it was, Nwahulwana.. a complete surprise to me but I was overjoyed to finally have it, if only by accident…. but that’s how the song was discovered in the first place, in London and by accident.

And so it’s become an ever present on my mp3 player, in the car, around the house, it’s always there for me to play… and it’s a must have for my desert island collection.., a must have. I’ll post the song here, but if you search YouTube you’ll find a very good quality video of Wazimbo singing the song, it’s well worth a look. The guy just has an amazing voice.