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From The Desk Of OK Go’s Damian Kulash: James Booker

OKGoThis past winter was an eventful time for OK Go, between the release of third album Of The Blue Colour Of The Sky, disputes with EMI over its YouTube videos and an eventual split with the label and the creation of Paradacute Records. But even after all the dust settled, the music is still stuck in our heads—because OK Go definitely still has it. Of The Blue Colour Of The Sky brings us little nuggets of unbridled optimism set to catchy pop beats with Damian Kulash’s funky falsetto soaring overhead—and, in typical OK Go fashion, some of the most awesome videos ever made. OK Go is taking time between dates on its worldwide tour supporting the LP in order to guest edit magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our Q&A with Kulash.

JamesBooker

Kulash: New Orleans piano god James Booker referred to himself as The Black Liberace and The Bayou Maharajah. He was classically trained as a child and a showboating, hollering, eye-patch-wearing, Schlitz-drinking lunatic as a adult. My favorite album is Resurrection Of The Bayou Maharajah, a collection of recordings made during his five-year stint as the house pianist at the Maple Leaf from ‘77 to ‘82. On the first track, a 10-minute medley of five different songs, he romps across the entire territory of singing—whimpering, screamiing, yodeling and singing like a dove—over a dizzying piano improvisation set to the backbeat of the audience clapping. It’s incredible.

Video after the jump.

2 replies on “From The Desk Of OK Go’s Damian Kulash: James Booker”

There’s something thrilling and musically honest about listening to the audience clapping in the background. It is almost as if you can feel the energy in the room. This made me remember a similar, but much shorter, live track by Cannonball Adderley and his quintet called Mercy, Mercy, Mercy (Joe Zawinul in the keyboards is quite the start in the track). The audience is just so loud and exited! They openly express how good they feel by listening, which is in my opinion, something that is less and less common nowadays. We are becoming too polite I guess.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRrFWp4DUho

Thanks for sharing this today. Is completely awesome!

Natalia.

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