I had moved from DC to SW FLA in 1990 and by 1995 was
suffering culture shock ... buying mostly trivial music at the local music
store and making the occasional score based on a written review (e.g.,
Massive Attack's Blue Lines.) 1995, went to Key West on vacation, had
dinner at a spot called Dim Sum and while perusing the menu, came to realize I
was totally captivated by the background music ...asked the waiter who
somewhat dismissively referred me to the DJ / bartender, who turned out to be
a young guy from Ecuador by way of New Orleans, who was only too happy to talk
to someone who had noticed the music ... What I was hearing turned out to be
the Electric Hush album by a group called Heights of Abraham...
before I left, the DJ (Donald Porter ... or "Tranceporter" as he chose to be
known) had given me a list of "if you like that then you'll like these" albums
to search out ... and before I'd left Key West, I'd spent a couple hundred
dollars at Spec Music, grabbing up titles from the list ... but there was no
copy of Electric Hush to be had.
FFWD to the following spring, when I got my first PC and an internet
connection ... immediately out looking for cool music ... searching for
Brian Eno gave me 100s of leads to similar stuff ... but most importantly,
I found a source for Electric Hush ... and in the meantime established that
the online world of music was an infinite playground ... by the end of the
decade, I had stumbled into the next big influence in my life:
thedownbeat.org, a community of downtempo heads who gave me a huge amount
of leads on good music and where i forged some friendships that endure to this
day, tho I have only met a few of the people in "real life" ....
Additionally online, i came across the MixMeister software (a gift from
a guy who had to ditch his purchase because is soon-to-be-wife wasn't keen on
him spending all his free time mixing music) ... having that software led me
to the MM community and, in due course, a place in the internet radio effort.
All this while, I built and maintained a website (BeatConscious, where
you're standing now) to memorialize my interest in this incredible music ... a
small unadvertised site, BeatConscious received only a modest amount of
visitors in the beginning (thankfully allowing me to make all the typical
newbie webmaster mistakes mostly in private) but over the years I would hear
from more and more people who stumbled onto the site while looking for
whatever ... and very rarely, the folks I would hear from would be musicians
who had, apparently, been idly trolling the web looking for references to
themselves or their musical output ...
And ten years almost to the day from my original introduction to Heights of
Abraham that night in Key West, I received an email from Sim Lister
(sax player for HoA) who
let me know that the band was preparing to release a new album after nearly 10
years of time off ...
So it is my distinct pleasure to advise you -- whoever you may be -- that the
album Two Thousand and Six is out, the group sounds as wonderful
as ever (when it comes to vocals, Jake Harries is the Chet Baker of
Acid Jazz) and you can hear one of the tracks, As the Night Descended, on the
latest BeatConscious show to stream from mmRadio, entitled Melt.
Update: Another
set featuring these guys has just been uploaded to mmRadio ... or
listen here for a brief time....
I'm calling it: At the AcidLounge
Tonite, and it features a couple of HoA tracks:
New World City from the latest album and Dolphins from their first
release, Electric Hush. Heights of Abraham was my
introduction into the world of acid jazz, it's only fitting they should star
in this series ....
