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Eclectic Flavas on This 12" Vocal Houder with Nu Disco & Latin & indie flava's - Dickie Landry’s saxophones have challenged, soothed, and blown minds around the world in his lengthy career as a jazz and avant-garde blower of the highest regard. He was a founding member of the Phillip Glass Ensemble and (according to Wikipedia lore) introduced Paul Simon to zydeco, one of the indigenous sounds of his native southern Louisiana. Rarely, though, does Dickie’s saxophone make you want to get up and dance like a crazy person.
Such is the effect of “Hang The Rich,” a nugget of slinky, ecstatic punk-funk that was until recently completely lost to the sands of time. Recorded in 1986 (or thereabouts) in New Orleans and featuring vocalist Evelyn Erhard, percussionist Billy Ware, drummer Ricky Sebastian and Dickie himself on saxophones and a Roland Jupiter 4 synthesizer, it’s the kind of song that compels you to move any which way you can, drunk on indignance and the power of satan’s music.
The track came to DFA via LCD Soundsystem’s Korey Richey, who knows Dickie from back home in Louisiana. After a lengthy search, we located the original tapes in a storage locker somewhere in the Southeast and finally were able to get a clean, quality transfer done here at DFA HQ.
From there, we only had one person in mind for a more DJ-friendly edit: Glasgow’s JD Twitch, one half of Optimo and a selector of similarly puckish spirit. Twitch’s ability to contextualize these older, skronkier sounds for a modern dancefloor are in full display on his version, which hits hard and jagged but then opens up into those ineffable rapturous moments.
Please note the information is done on a artist keyword match and data is provided by LastFM.
Saxophonist and flutist Dickie Landry's story is about as far-flung as one can imagine, moving from white R&B in the American South to improvised and contemporary minimal / process music in New York during the 1970s, all the while hanging around with the primary figures in New York's post-minimal and concept art scene. Though less visible from the 1980s onward, Landry has recently returned to his Louisiana homeland and splits his time between playing in a popular swamp-pop band and reinvestigating what made his playing so desirable to people like Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson.
Landry’s own music from the 1970s is a fascinating amalgam of minimalism, free jazz, and psychedelia, indicative of the kind of omnivorous creativity that pervaded Downtown Manhattan at that time.
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