More than a basic record producer, Kip Hanrahan has created a unique universe, where many influences combined to create strange « scores », the sound of culture clash in New York City in late 1970’s and early 1980’s. Like his own identity, born in jewish-irish family, raised in puerto-rican Bronx, connected with all minorities in the world… For us, he selects 5 gems from his souvenirs… « I’d also liked to have sent and written about Gould playing Schoenberg’s op. 11, one of Baden Powell’s early recordings and an early Jobim… But… Oh, well… »

Totico Y Sus Rumberos
What’s Your Name?

« First off, Totico really, REALLY wants to know your name, so you should let him know! If you know it! This was from the first recording session, as far as I know, involving Puntilla, who’d just arrived in New York from the Mariel situation. As always, he was really the musical center, the arranger of this certainly, and when I asked him why he felt a need to perform that piece, and, in fact, how he knew it, he told me that all the American pop songs like that were exotic and forbidden and wonderful, and, thanks to the radio, an important part of their lives on the island, though in a different way… »

Lorraine Ellison
Stay With Me

« A few years ago Taj Mahal confirmed the story of this recording, the story floating around since the record came out in the late sixties: that Lorraine Ellison really did record this in one take at the very moment that her husband was leaving her, right there in the studio. So what we’re listening to is not a the sound of a singer conveying desperation and pain, but the sound of a woman singing desperation and pain. It’s gorgeous, almost too gorgeous, but also painful and really guilty to be listening to it in the first place, and to find it so beautiful. »

Joe Cuba Sextet
Bang Bang

« I really hate and love this track. It was the soundtrack to a lot of our early teenage lives, kids of my age, from The Bronx. It was playing everywhere, all the time, for what seems like ages – on every radio we’d pass on the street, at every party we were at, trying to get laid, in every bodega when we bought the groceries, sung by every supper sitting on the steps of his building, and even sung by all of us (I”m talking about the hook….) in every building hallway where we could coax an echo out of the walls, and the dark. Man, it still sucks, and it’s still so sweet. »

Music of the Comoro Islands
Mrenge (boxing match accompanied by drums)

« What I find so calmly fantastic about this recording is that it’s a recording of music IN it’s context, amongst and surrounded by the people, breathing as they do (to the turns of the boxing match?). It’s so immediate and comfortable, even as it’s from people so far away, so distant… Although I’ve been near, I’ve never been to the Comoros, so I can only imagine the quality of light and colors, or invent them, and in that distortion alone is music, in a way. »

Deep Rumba
Prelude To Un Golpecito Na’ Ma

« Man, that fucking genius, real deep musical and rhythmic genius, Negro actually INVENTED another clave! The first new one in our life times! AND he’s funny as hell with the lyrics. »