Interesting/relevant thing of the day: "natch" as a slang word has been around since at least the 40s (apparently if I read more comics I would know this). All this time I've been associating it with annoying modern abbreviations like "obvi" and "hilar"...I guess on some level that means there's not much difference between awful internet slang and Harlem jive talk.
Anyway, here's a supremely cool record I bought this past week: Taj Mahal's 1968 album The Natch'l Blues.
(Actually, I got it for my dad's birthday, but in between the purchase and the gift-exchange, I happened to get really attached to it. Oops.)
In fact, this album is so cool I decided to revive my short-lived 'Album of the Week' tag, because I've definitely been listening to it nonstop since Sunday.
The album cover is what first caught my eye, Taj's moonish mask of a face staring back at me from the records section at Green Apple Books. It looks like it was meant to be framed (unlike the CD version, which scraps the border in favor of a darker cover, probably because the original layout didn't look as good in a 5x5 inch plastic case). In any case, it's super intriguing. As soon as I saw it, I immediately snatched it up...although I don't think many people come to Green Apple with the intention of scouring the bottom-row blues music stack. Even if my dad already had this one, I would totally buy it for myself based on the album art alone.
I came home and put it on the record player to make sure it played ok, and proceeded to melt into a puddle of sweet, sweet blues. If you only listen to one (ok, make that two) songs from this album, let them be "Corinna" and the closing number "Ain't That a Lot of Love." While definitely rooted in blues, I love that the songs are infused with a healthy dose of soul and 60s pop, too. A lot of Taj Mahal's stuff crosses over into various other genres (see Kulanjan), and this album is proof that he was doing it from the start.
Anyway, after listening to the whole thing, I was secretly kind of hoping my dad already had the album so I could keep it. Turns out he didn't (shucks), and actually he'd been looking for it for a long time! So now he has one of his faves, and I have another record to keep an eye out for.
In other news, Happy George Day! Here's a collection of photos from when George had a perm, because why not??