The Murray Street team, believe it or not, does more than just records.  We produce award winning radio.  Check out some of our productions at murraystreet.com and on PRX.  Two wonderful places to see what’s happening on the cutting edge of radio.

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Alexa brought up an excellent point this morning as we were listening to Gary Bartz’s 1973 album I’ve Known Rivers and other Bodies.  A sexy title to what I would call “modern” or “ahead” Jazz.  The sound goes all over the place and it seems like any kind of melody is a cast-away convention of the old world.  My liking for this genre is… well “growing.” Generally, I compare this kind of music to the sounds a three year old makes: screaming words and being frustrated by almost everything.  There’s a sense that they’re making things sound different just for the sake of being different.  A important exercise maybe once in a persons life.  Obviously, I’m being over dramatic here and missing some basic and key elements to enjoying this genre.  I never claim to know what “real” music is, but right now, at this point in my life, this music does not speak to me.

Alexa pointed out that if we have unlimited vetoes then we basically would only listen to what we like and we wouldn’t learn anything.  Learning, as Alexa pointed out, should be painful.

So I present a NEW RULE!  The new rule is Alexa and I each get only 10 vetoes for this entire journey.  That’s a grand total of 20 vetoes for 3,000 or 4,000 albums.  That’s between .6% and .5% for you math freaks.  It could be a long ride.

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We found this record naked and haphazardly thrown inside another album jacket. I lost a quarter to Matt since I guessed the artist was Odetta or another female singer of the sort. It turned out to be Harry Belafonte Live at Carnegie Hall (1959, RCA). He’ll forever be know for his ‘Banana Boat’ song, but here it’s mostly ”Cotton Fields,’ ‘John Henry’ and other folk songs.

Belafonte returned to Carnegie Hall in 1960 to record another album. Once we break on through the B’s, I’ll let you know how that sounds.

It’s a very soulful album. I give it 4 Murray Streets (out of 5 from the yet to be established rating system).

Listen to side 1 here:

Belafonte Live at Carnegie Hall (1959, RCA)

See what we’ve been listening to and what our thoughts are!

This will update very regularly so please check back often.  An “X” under my name (Matt) or Alex’s means we liked it.  More X’s indicate the intensity of our liking.

Your Friend,

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PS: You can also find a link to this directly on the right-hand column under blogroll.

Well here we are!  The infamous Murray Street Productions team taking the final leap into uncharted waters.  In our humble office we have an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 records on vinyl.  This blog is a documentation of our journey to go through each and every album.  We’ve started on the letter “A” and will work our way to “Z.”

We don’t have rules to this self-imposed challenge.  We do make our best efforts to listen to each album in it’s entirety.  If we really hate something we do have veto power to skip it, but nothing has been vetoed yet.  We don’t have to adhere to the alphabetical order, if we see something we like, we listen to it, but it seems to be easiest to keep track of what we’ve listened to this way.

We’ll post any of our thoughts that strike us.  Interesting tidbits and maybe just maybe quick snippets of clips, within the limits of copy write law.   Please let us know what you think.  We hope you’ll join us and enjoy!

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