I'm John Tejada.
I am Reggie Watts.
And we have a project called Wajatta.
Watts, Tejada.
Wajatta.
The j is silent.
This is Sarah Vaughan.
Out of all the the famous, I guess the most successful jazz singers of the 50s and the 60s
Sarah Vaughan, I liked her voice. Her tonality is like super, super pure. Really crisp and clean.
It was just incredible. It has everything.
It has emotion, execution, tonality, texture, timing, all that stuff.
I think she's one of the greatest singers of all time.
This was just recently repressed. Future Sound of London, 'Lifeforms.'
Their first album 'Accelerator' was sort of club-based
and then they kind of flipped the script.
It's got a little bit of atmospheric found sound, hip hop beats, vintage synthesizers.
I don't really actually know this record very well, but it's Cannonball Adderley.
Cannonball Adderley was, yeah, amazing. He's blazing fast but also
a really sensitive player with a really nice tone that was definitely his own.
It wasn't Coltrane, which was the most prominent saxophone player. That's what I really loved about it.
My dad was more of a Cannonball Adderley fan than he was a Coltrane fan.
It's definitely helped my ear for finding melodies, for sure.
Reissue, the double vinyl of Main Source, 'Breaking Atoms.'
This is probably my favorite 90s hip-hop album. Large Professor at his best.
I'm happy to have it on vinyl again. Sounding proper with double vinyl. Never had that before.
You always get 30 minutes per side, and you can't play it out.
So this will sound a lot better on the turntable.
I just like this guy. I don't know this record very well, but, Neon Indian. I just really dig this dude.
I've seen him, or heard him, spin live, actually both times at Sundance, weirdly.
But he just destroys it. The first time I heard it, I felt like, Oh am I in Berlin right now?
It was just a perfect Berlin set but in like an Acura tent.
Last time I heard him at another after-party at Sundance and I didn't even know it was him.
And I was talking to somebody and I just kept listening and drifting off the music
Going like, what is this music? Oh my god that's great.
And I knew I was a DJ, because I could hear the live crossfade.
And I was like, what is this? What is this? And then finally I went downstairs
and stumbled upon him. He was under the stairs.
They put him under the staircase. And he's just there, just spinning.
And I was like, oh, of course it's him. Anyway, really cool guy, young dude.
Killing it. Neon Indian.
I used to get in a lot of car chases in Montana
and I used to race a lot of other like jetters and things like that late at night.
I'd just put this on and that would be my super-aggressive driving music.
Hearing Ministry for the first time really affected me
because it was the first time I heard aggressive electronic music.
It was like rock, but it was electronic.
And I'm a huge fan of Nitzer Ebb, but that was a different approach.
There's was a lot more minimal, more machine-like
and Ministry was heavier, grittier.
They really fucked with guitar tones running through digital processing and synthesizers.
So it was a little bit more my style, technology-based, heavy, dark rock n' roll.
The word 'techno' has being used in LA electro since like '84.
This is 'Techno City' by E.V.I.A.N. These guys did a lot of these records on Macola.
That's just a great cover.
That's awesome. You've got a seahorse keytar player.
Yeah, and then a starfish laying it down with rhymes.
And that was the world class Wreckin' Cru, that was Dr. Dre and all that pre-NWA.
They already knew that they were world class.
Which one, which one. I'll do 'Surfer Rosa.' Pixies, classic, everybody knows it.
As a kid, I mean the cover was pretty hot. That's what got me, of course, at first.
Then I heard it and, man, it really changed a lot for me.
'Gigantic' was a huge one for me.
It was just great. It was like really super smart, Midwestern Bob Mouldian, Hüsker Dü kind of vibe.
But, like, evolved. With amazing vocals and the vision, it was just so unified.
There was no other band that sounded like the Pixies, and no band since, really.
A band to be included in the innovation of rock and roll.
I've got Phortune, 'Can You Feel The Bass,' which I know and play, still.
That's the old 'Can You Feel The Bass?'
But I don't have the b-side, 'String Free,' which is kind of like an 80s Chicago piano jam.
Again, another classic record. I just went for high school stuff mainly.
But yeah, Bjork's voice is just so strange, it was such a strange elf, like a weird pixie elf singing carefully
but then also just honking out notes like a blues singer, kind of.
And then of course there was the dude that was like 'why are people always looking at me? I don't know.'
That's why I always called The Sugarcubes the Icelandic B-52s.
There's just a dude saying stuff.
'Got me a car...' y'know.
As a kid, it put me in another mind space
that I'd never been in before without even any drugs. It was just very transportive but very alien.
It was kind of hard to listen to at first, and then I just couldn't stop listening to it.
Got some Plaid here, 'The Digging Remedy.'
For use of melody and contemporary electronic stuff
they're just super inspiring, ever since the Black Dog days.
There's just nobody like them.
I think this is probably my favorite Smiths album.
It was more atmospheric and experimental than other Smiths records.
"Last night I dreamt..."
"...that somebody loved me."
That song, it takes so long to start. It just takes forever, forever
and then finally it just hits. And I just loved how it just drug you through this
like this media mud before it got to the song.
And 'Death of a Disco Dancer' was great
because it was kind of political commentary on the uncaring record industry
who only care about their bottom line at the cost of someone's life.
It had a huge effect on me.
And, at the time, doing a lot of Robitussin, which is a dissociative.
A really interesting drug to listen to this album on, y'know when you're in your car next to a grain silo.
So if you find yourself next to a grain silo and it's really cold at night
and you're on Robitussin, this is a great record.
Another old friend's record, with a reissue with a couple extra cuts.
Jan Jelinek, 'Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records.'
This is a, I don't know, house/minimal techno record, just made up of samples.
And a few people do that. He really kind of pioneered it with his Farben alias.
And it sort of takes the... Thomas Brinkmann was putting pieces of tape on records
and just letting them play and letting clicks make music.
Oh wow.
So that's where 'Clicks and Cuts' kind of came from.
Yeah. I should have found a Brinkmann record, but this is the evolution.
Seattle kids are lucky. They're growing up in a lovely green city.
I moved to Seattle in 1990.
One of the reasons I moved to Seattle is because I heard about this band Soundgarden.
My friend Melanie was a big lover of Soundgarden, particularly the song 'Big Dumb Sex.'
When I heard that song, I was like, what is happening right now?
I mean it was just audacious, so much profanity, but like rockin'.
This record had a huge effect on me. I became an instant Soundgarden fan.
And it wasn't too shortly after Soundgarden that I discovered Led Zeppelin.
Kind of realized that Soundgarden was the evolution of Led Zeppelin.
They were kind of like a dark entity based band that were kind of channeling a world.
Kind of an esoteric kind of magic-based paradigm or whatever.
It wasn't really so much about Chris Cornell. It was about Soundgarden.
And then actually going to The Soundgarden, it's maybe over ten windmills
that have these like weathervanes, but they have a tube on the front part
and each tube has a slit cut into it
and as the wind goes over it, it creates a tone. Like blowing over the top of an empty bottle.
You'd hear this ghostly oooh...
And then I realized, oh that's all the distortion sounds
that Soundgarden creates before a lot of their songs.
You just hear this...
and I was like, oh Soundgarden, man, that's amazing.
This record, 'Badmotorfinger,' for me...
This is when they got their new bass player Ben Shephard.
It just changed my life. I'd never heard anything like that before.
The rhythm on that...
just constantly, just an onslaught.
Matt Cameron playing that beat over and over again, over and over again.
And the guitarist coming in, layering in over that rhythm.
And then hearing his voice come in like a screaming banshee in a storm.
It was just...
Just blew me the fuck away.
Soundgarden, Nirvana, all that was the last great movement in rock and roll.
Last time that rock n' roll was dangerous.
When Kurt Cobain committed suicide, I remember being in Capitol Hill
and hanging out at my friend's place, saw a person pass by the window
another person passed by the window, then a few more and a few more.
I'm like, what's going on? And I put my head out of my friend's apartment
and all these people were streaming down Denny Way to go to the Seattle Center.
So we just join them and went down and there was this vigil held.
And I just thought to myself, this is never gonna happen again.
No matter how great a singer, we're not gonna see that kind of a response
to someone of that generation who was affecting people in that way.
I don't think again, just because of modern internet and all that stuff.
I felt really privileged to be part of that moment
and to hear all these bands come up, these Seattle bands
speak their mind about the influence of Nirvana. It was awesome. It was cool.
Thank you so much for sharing your records and talking with us today.
Yeah, thank you.