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Los Super Seven - Heard It on the X
Music CD CoverArtist: Los Super Seven Edition: Music CD CD Release Date: 2005-03-22 Music Label: Telarc Soundtracks: - The Burro Song - Los Super Seven, Burns, Joey
- Cupido - Los Super Seven,
- Talk to Me - Los Super Seven, Seneca, Joe
- I'm Not That Kat Anymore - Los Super Seven, Sahm, Douglas Wayne
- My Window Faces the South - Los Super Seven, Livingston, Jerry
- Let Her Dance - Los Super Seven, Fuller, Robert
- Learning the Game - Los Super Seven, Holly, Buddy Charle
- The Song of Everything - Los Super Seven, Sahm, Douglas Wayne
- Ojitos Traidores - Los Super Seven, Orozco, Correale Gi
- I Live the Life I Love - Los Super Seven, Dixon, Willie
- Heard It on the X - Los Super Seven, Beard, Frank Lee
- See That My Grave Is Kept Clean - Los Super Seven, Jefferson, Blind Le
Free Music Notes for Heard It on the XFree Music Review: Songs Tex- X Hit: 5 StarsI agree one should listen to each Los Super Seven as a separate project. I truly enjoy this cd and listen to it fairly often. I grew up in Fort Worth, Texas and vividly remember sitting on the porch with a transister radio stuck to my ear listening to music I had never even imagined existed. (at least till my mom dragged me into the house and made me go to bed/or usually took the radio away cause I would listen under the covers)
Border radio was a seminal influence on my musical upbringing and I believe many others of my generation. As the late 60's progressed we were listening to a wide range of genres of music. Check our album collection and you'd find Buddy Holley, Hank Williams, Beatles, Stones, Muddy Waters, Santana, Bob Wills, Ravi Shankar, Miles, Zappa, Coltrane, and plenty of others that never made it big but were great in a variety of styles. We didn't care what type of music as long as it was good.
I'd like to share a review of this cd I stole from iTunes (don't worry, I give credit at the bottom):
Los Super Seven isn't a band, per se-- it's a collective, organized by manager Dan Goodman, who comes up with a concept for each of the group's albums and assembles a band to fit. For their third album, Goodman turned to music journalist/record producer Rick Clark, whose giveaway CD's for the Oxford American journal ar3 highly regarded in certain quarters. Inspired by ZZ Top's classic boogie rock tribute to border radio, "Heard It on the X," Clark came up with a sharp idea: a salute to the heyday of AM radio on the Texas/Mexico border, when rock & roll, blues, country, jazz, Western swing, and mariachi mixed freely. Clark and Goodman drew up a list of songs and musicians to play them, recruited two different core bands- indie rockers Calexico and a group featuring Charlie Sexton, who also served as the third producer on this album (along with Clark and Goodman), with drummer Hunt Sales- and then brought in a bunch of Texas-identified singers. Some-like Raul Malo, Joe Ely, Rick Trevino, Ruben Ramos and Freddy Fender- were Los Super Seven veterans, while others- John Hiatt, Lyle Lovett, Rodney Crowell and Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown- were new to the game. That list of musicians signals that Heard It on the X is not nearly as Latin-centric as its predecessor, Canto, which theoretically means it may play to a wider audience, but in 2005, with all this roots music and versions of songs that are 30-40 years old, it's unlikely that this will get much play outside of roots fanatics and those who long for the heyday of Musician magazine. That said, Heard It on the X is executed about as well as it could be. The song selection is expert, touching on lesser known tunes by such Texas giants as Doug Sahm and Buddy Holly and standards by Blind Lemon Jefferson, ZZ Top and Bob Wills, adding a few cult favorites and a new tune or two along the way. While this certainly reads like an eclectic listen on paper, in practice it flows easily, thanks to both the house bands, the professional (albeit a bit too clean) production, and the fact that the borders separating these genres are virtually nonexistent these days. There's no real cross-pollination within the grooves themselves (having Ramos sing the title track doesn't quite qualify, since it till comes across as bloozy boogie rock), the styles merely rub shoulders with each other, and since all the musicians already travel in these circles, there are no real surprises (well, apart from Hiatt's mannered vocal on "I'm Not That Kat (Anymore)," but on second thought, that's not much of a surpise, either). But surprises are overrated, particularly with so many similar albums shooting too high and missing the mark. Here, the songs are excellent, performed by the right musicians, and the result is a highly enjoyable record for anybody into any of the featured artists or songwriters. If this doesn't pack the thrill or sense of discovery that the original recordings have, mark that down to the ultimate triumph of border radio - its influence has been so strong and so far-reaching that listeners take its innovations for granted, so an album as nonchalantly diverse as this seems like a welcome everday occurrence.
Album Review provided by All Music Guide /2008 All Media Guide LLC
Heard It on the X PosterThis supergroup with ever-changing personnel (no longer limited to seven) is less a band than a bilingual concept and boundary-crossing vision. The third and most rambunctious release under the Los Super Seven banner takes its title from the ZZ Top anthem celebrating the Mexican border radio of the 1950s and '60s. With the title track sung by Tejano mainstay Ruben Ramos, the transgenerational duet on "Cupid" by Freddy Fender and Rick Trevino, and the alcohol-fueled mariachi of "The El Burro Song" performed by the Mavericks' Raul Malo (a ringer of Cuban descent), the Hispanic imprint on the project remains much in evidence. From the northern side of the musical border, Lyle Lovett revives Bob Wills's "My Window Faces the South," Rodney Crowell renews Buddy Holly's "Learning the Game," and Joe Ely covers Holly acolyte Bobby Fuller's "Let Her Dance." Perhaps the album's dominant influence is that of the late Doug Sahm, whose Sir Douglas Quintet was a Tex-Mex trailblazer. Sahm's spirit is channeled here through two songs he wrote--"I'm Not that Kat (Anymore)," sung by John Hiatt, and the jazzy "The Song of Everything," performed by Raul Malo--and another one he recorded, "Talk to Me," given a soulful reading by Delbert McClinton. However wide the musical range, the results rarely fall short of super. --Don McLeese
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