John Rabe is the host of 89.3-KPCC’s Off-Ramp, an eclectic mix of radio pieces designed to make you get your butt off the couch and explore Southern California. Here’s John’s personal list of music he discovered or rediscovered in 2011.

MUDDY WATERS-HARD AGAIN

I had this on cassette in the 1980s, and it’s hard to believe I forgot about it since then. Johnny Winter joins the venerable blues man and kicks him in the ass in a good way. This is one lively record.

JONI MITCHELL-HEJIRA

My coworker Peter picked this as his Album of the Week and I thought he was being a soft-hearted hippie until I bought it. Like very few other artists – maybe Elton John’s Madman Across the Water? — Mitchell makes music that sounds like nobody else, takes you to a real place, and reaches you there.

ASHFORD AND SIMPSON – AIN’T NO MOUNTAIN HIGH ENOUGH

In January, the Grammy Museum brought in a bunch of legendary songwriters – Hal David, Paul Williams, Lamont Dozier — but nobody made me cry like Valerie Simpson and the late Nick Ashford – the breaking of his voice, her intertwining vocals and piano, the real love they obviously shared. And the way he looked … like some sort of tawny lion. Wow. Here’s exclusive audio from that concert at the Grammy Museum courtesy KPCC!

VINCE GUARALDI-JITTERBUG WALTZ

[ed. note: unfortunately we couldn't find the song in full online but if any of you all can, let us know!] At some point during 2011, I can’t remember exactly when, I got infatuated with Fats Waller’s “Jitterbug Waltz”. I was humming it for weeks, asking bands to play it (not many can), and I bought a bunch of versions. The swingingest is Vince Guaraldi’s, and the kids need to know he did more than Linus and Lucy.

BILL EVANS-LUCKY TO BE ME

In 1958, Bill Evans took the tune from “On the Town” with the words What a day/ Fortune smiled and came my way/ Bringing love I never thought I’d see/ I’m so lucky to be me. Kind of a goofy, walking-home-after-the-first-kiss kind of song, and turned it into a looping, trancey elegy that captures the bitter and sweet of love. It’s kind of a goofy, walking-home-after-the-first-kiss kind of song, and he turned it into a transcendent anthem that captures the bitter and sweet of love.

JOHN RABE’S SHOW OFF-RAMP AIRS ON KPCC ON SATURDAYS FROM 12-1 PM AND SUNDAYS FROM 7-8 PM. VISIT OFF-RAMP AT KPCC.ORG.

Download: Nino Moschella “What U Do 2 Me”

(off Boom Shadow out now on Ubiquity Records)

Nino Moschella started out four-tracking funk-soul that sounded like Sly and Shuggie and Stevie in a mountain shack at midnight and exploded into fidelity once he visited the wider world. His newest Boomshadow is out now on Ubiquity. This interview by Daiana Feuer.

If you were to make a soundtrack for a ’70s crime movie like Superfly or Jackie Brown, who do you want cast in it?
I would make a crime movie that has the Muppets in it. That would be cool. Maybe not Kermit and Miss Piggy but I want to make a gangster crime movie with all Jim Henson-type muppets. That would be silly.
You sort of have an accent from the East Coast.
My dad is from the Bronx. I’m born and raised in California. A lot of people say my accent sounds East Coast. It’s my dad for sure. And my mom’s from Minnesota. My dad’s overbearing. Not really, but he’s very influential, and I guess it comes out. I’m from Cali though. I love it here. I don’t think I’ll ever move. Are you from California?
Florida!
Oh, my grandfolks moved there when they got old. It’s hot and humid. I mean, it’s hot in Fresno—gets 110. But it’s dry heat. When we go to Florida in the middle of the summer, it’s humid and terrible. Man, and big old cockroaches. They’re humongous. Tropical bugs. I couldn’t stand the humidity. You’re always wet.
What kind of bugs are common in Oakland?
No cockroaches. We have mice and flies. I haven’t seen a cockroach. We had mice for a minute but they’re gone now—luckily. I put out some traps. We were expecting our two mice to multiply but they are gone.
It only takes mice two or three weeks to spring babies. In fact, rodents are the most successful mammal on the planet. I guess they didn’t like our house.
Who is the baby chanting on your song ‘I Love Myself?’
That’s my daughter, Stella. Me and my wife and her were in my home studio where I finished the album. Stella was playing the drums. She likes to have a microphone and hear her voice through the speakers. We were asking her questions: ‘What’s your dog’s name? Who are your friends? What do you love?’ That was how the vocals came about. She was like, ‘I love myself! I love the people!’ It was one of those happy accidents that came out. It’s a spoken-word Stella piece. She’s super musical. She’s going to be four in August.
You seem interested in doing things a little bit out of the box. ‘Ok, I am going to stick a song with my baby in between all these funky tracks…’
I am not trying to do anything that is status quo. There’s no point. If I don’t feel like it’s moving things forward, then it’s not worthwhile. Mainstream music might be satisfied with mediocrity and stuff, but for me, if it doesn’t challenge me, then naturally by extension it’s not a challenge. It’s got to perk my ears. But at the same time, I’m not doing it to be like, ‘This song is this type of song and it fits in this type of category and so on.’ When I put a collection of music together, one of my goals is to personally express something I think is fresh. That also lends itself to a flow. The stuff that comes naturally and easily most times is the stuff that is exciting and fresh and new and unexpected. It doesn’t come from a lot of struggle and laboring over it. The stuff you over-think and deliberate is the stuff that can fit into a box—because you have those constraints. Freedom allows you to do things that are fresh as opposed to doing things that have already been done.
Your stuff isn’t hard to take in. It’s digestible but I can pick out the little details happening at once.
I don’t want to create music that’s just heady. ‘Oh my gosh, this is so complicated and out there that it’s inaccessible.’ One of the goals is to make music that you can listen to easily and you don’t have to go to that place where you’re totally listening to every little thing. But if you want to delve into it, it’s there. That’s the challenge as a music maker. Off the bat you don’t have to get theoretical about it to dig, but you want to create something long-lasting so people can come back and hear something new. The music that I love the most is the stuff that originally just struck me and made me feel good. It gives me an emotion or something I can relate to. What I come back to are the intricacies and that brings up feelings too. That’s the beauty of art in general. It’s not a one-shot thing. It’s not just, ‘Alright, listen to this, put it down, you’re done with it.’ I think as a culture in time, that’s naturally what we’re doing. We get something, put it down, and it’s disposable. Good music isn’t supposed to be disposable.
What’s a record you’ve held onto since forever?
There’s so many! That’s a beautiful thing. There’s so much good music and it continues being created. The first record my mom bought me was Kind Of Blue by Miles Davis. She bought it for me when I was ten. I listen to that weekly to this day. That’s the best selling jazz record of all time. Thriller, you know—speaking of which, Michael Jackson was the first musician and entertainer that I consciously said, ‘Oh man, I want to do this. I want to dance.’ I was in grade school, and popping and breaking was huge. I heard Michael and I was like, ‘I wanna pop. I want to sing.’ He was an icon. David Bowie, later, Prince. My mom got me the red Thriller jacket. It wasn’t actual leather—that shit ended up falling apart.
Your mom seems pretty cool.
She was totally cool. When I was maybe eleven or twelve, my mom took me—a kid—to Purple Rain, which was very controversial when it came out. It was like, ‘Do you know what this movie is about?’ Prince and Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder—and Etta James was a huge influence. This was just the music that was in my house. Along with Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell and Jimi Hendrix and Coltrane and Miles and Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Mingus. My folks were into this stuff. My dad is a musician. They met in Greenwich Village. My dad was a performer at the same time when bop was in the Village. They were seeing Coltrane and Miles. Coltrane kissed my mother’s hand. Bop was huge and folk was huge in their world. That’s what they were digging. It was all going down in the same places. There was a club called the Bitter End that my dad was playing at, and Nina Simone was playing there, and at the same time Bob Dylan was playing there. Music wasn’t, ‘This is folk and this is jazz, and that’s where this goes and that goes there.’ It was all in the same club and area and thriving. Luckily that influence of my folks was accessible to me growing up. I feel blessed for that.
Did your parents give you any advice on what music is all about?
What I’ve learned is that music is about communication. Music is about expressing yourself. My dad didn’t want me to be in the music business. It wasn’t until I started making my own records and putting my stuff on the forefront and him being able to hear it, and that was just a handful of years ago. This was after I became a man—he was like, ‘Alright, you really want to do this? OK, I’m proud of you.’ He always supported me playing music for the sake of playing music but it was clear he didn’t want me to make a living at it because it’s such a hard thing. Very few people actually make it and many of them at the end of it lose everything. It’s not something you get into because you want to make money and be successful. You get into it because you have to. You will do this regardless of what’s happening around you. He knew it was a hard life because he went through it. I mean—now he is a school teacher. He still gigs but he was doing music as a living for twenty years and it was really hard to feed his family. He didn’t want me to live that life. But he realizes I understand that it’s up and down and it’s for the love of it.
Not everyone can articulate their life’s meaning that way.
It’s taken time. When I was a teenager, my idea was, ‘I wanna be famous.’ The important things with time become clear. I know for sure regardless of all the other stuff that exists in this business, I do my thing. I know it’s crucial to my existence to write songs, record them, perform them. That is the stability in it all. Nobody has control of that except for me. Nobody can tell me whether I can do that or not. Regardless of success—and maybe I am not a huge success. This is an underground thing after all. It doesn’t matter. The important thing is you stay focused on the point of it and the point of it is to express it and get it out, and if that’s to 100 people in your immediate community or to a million people globally—the point is that it has to be created for me to feel good about myself and to feel like I’m contributing to the world. I got to make music and that’s how it is. It’s still hard and all that other shit and you can’t ignore that, but when it’s all said and done, I know why I’m doing this. Sorry—this has gotten heavy.

L.A. RECORD PRESENTS NINO MOSCHELLA WITH CHIN CHIN AND ARMEN NALBANDIAN PLUS DJs ON FRI., JULY 31, AT THE DAKOTA LOUNGE, 1026 WILSHIRE BLVD., SANTA MONICA. 7 PM / $10 / 21+. DAKOTALOUNGE.COM. NINO MOSCHELLA’S BOOMSHADOW IS OUT NOW ON UBIQUITY. VISIT NINO MOSCHELLA AT NINOMOSCHELLA.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/NINOMOSCHELLA.

Download: “Oh Yes, Los Angeles” mixtape by When You Awake

Jody from the fantastic blog When You Awake—your sympathetic destination if homesick, lonesome, riled, fiery or any mindstates in between—presents us with this week’s mixtape, dedicated to cosmic cowboy/cowgirl rock songs about the city of Los Angeles. (City of doom and freeways, too.) Listen to Jody’s radio show Mondays 2-4 PM on Little Radio and go see her DJ at Gold Dust at Footsie’s in Highland Park one lucky day each month! And now to the tape…

1. John Mayall “Vacations”
“Ten hours in a plane – England left behind / Back here in L.A. – Wonder what I’ll find / Summertime, my plane is coming down / I’m a wandering man and this is gonna be my town.” An ode to Los Angeles from the man that gave us Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac and more.

2. Gene Clark “Los Angeles”
Gene Clark was one of the original Byrds who ended up leaving the group because of—get ready for the irony—a fear of flying. Roger McGuinn famously (or infamously) told him, “You can’t be a Byrd, Gene,
if you can’t fly.” He went on to release a number of amazing solo records and some amazingly beautiful and haunting songs that have been covered by everyone like “Through The Morning, Through The Night” (which also happens to be one of my favorite songs ever) and “Train Leaves Here This Morning.”

3. Jim Ford “Working My Way To L.A.”
Country soul! Kentucky born Jim Ford was living in New Orleans when he decided to make the move out to L.A. I, too, moved to Los Angeles from the South (Nashville, Tennessee, to be exact), so this tune holds a
special place in my heart.

4. Flying Burrito Brothers “Sin City”
Nothing says Southern California Country quite like Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers. Sing it, boys.

5. Arlo Guthrie “Coming Into Los Angeles”
I’ve always loved the way he says “Los Angeleeeeze”. It’s like that Swiss Dairy ad I see all around town: you can’t say “Los Angeleeeeze” without smiling. Forced L.A. positivity!

6. New Riders of the Purple Sage “L.A. Lady”
I’m a total sucker for male/female vocals and the background vocals on this tune by Grateful Dead member Donna Jean Godchaux are no exception. She’s kind of low in the mix and only comes in for a short stint right at the end, but she straight-up sounds like a young Loretta Lynn with the way she sings “cry.”

7. Leslie and the Badgers “Los Angeles”
The only song on this mix recorded post-1980, this beautiful tune was released last week on their first full length record, Roomful of Smoke. When I truly like a song, it goes on repeat in my car, on my
computer, everywhere and well…let’s just say I’ve only had it for a week and it’s already in my Top 25 Most Played Songs in iTunes.

8. Guy Clark “L.A. Freeway”
I first heard this song in the movie Heartworn Highways, which is a must-see documentary that covers a handful of country troubadours like Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle, David Allan Coe and more. All versions of this tune are great, but I much prefer Clark’s understated version that appears at the beginning of the film to his proper studio recording or Jerry Jeff Walker‘s version.

9. John Phillips “Topanga Canyon”
Papa John Phillips (of the Mamas and the Papas) wrote a number of love songs to Los Angeles, including “California Dreamin’” and “Twelve Thirty”, but I decided to choose this from his 1970 solo record John The Wolf King of L.A. which focuses on Topanga Canyon. I love how this song builds from a single guitar to a full on sing-a-long.

10. Jimmy Payne “L.A. Angels”
When I was putting this mix together, I found that a number of musicians have a love/hate relationship with L.A. There are so many songs about coming to L.A. to find fame and fortune and then failing and moving home. My experience of L.A. has been so different, however, and I really wanted to end this mix with a song that perfectly describes my feelings for this vastly underrated town. I mentioned this desire to my friend Chad Brown (of local L.A. band C.B. Brand), and he told me he had just the track to ease my troubled mind. Ease it he did with this brilliant little gem of a tune. I just want to say, I love you L.A. Thanks for all the wonderful years.

Other notable L.A. tunes:
The Beatles’ “Blue Jay Way”, the Kinks’ “Celluloid Heroes”, Joni Mitchell’s “Ladies of the Canyon”, Rosewood Thieves’ “Los Angeles”, Chuck Berry’s “Promised Land”, Neil Young’s “L.A.”, Love’s “Maybe The People Would Be The Times Or Between Clark And Hilldale.”

Were there wireless keytar solos, bass slaps, auto-wah drenched guitar scrapes and electronic sounds that harkened back to Burgertime-era arcade games? Yes, and it was worth every minute of it. A week ago I read about a special live performance for, get this: Nissan Live Sets on Yahoo! Music which was to be filmed at Fox Studios in Century City—three massive corporations banding together for an evening of creative expression. You know, business as usual. On this mundane Thursday night the gangrenous heart of Los Angeles gave up its dead and something beautiful bloomed in the afterbirth: the humble genius of Herbie Hancock and the radiance of Joni Mitchell.
The band warmed up on “Chameleon” and, when its third coda came around, were knee-deep in fusion. They played with great skill and personality, but without greater purpose. After a trio of Headhunters-era tunes, unannounced guest Joni Mitchell stood center stage and presided as de facto band leader. After a stirring ovation, she performed the signature Blue-era tune “River” with new wrinkles and vocal phrasings. Shaky and unshakable, Ms. Mitchell reveled in the ability of her all-star band, which included bassist Marcus Miller and Zappa alum Vinnie Colaiuta on drums.
Mr. Hancock’s hole-punched piano scores eliminated common chords and inserted new notes throughout. After three songs with Ms. Mitchell, he settled into a solo piano meditation on his classic “Maiden Voyage.” Soon turntablist C-Minus was invited on stage to replicate Grandmixer DXT’s famous cuts as the band tore into and out of their unlikely encore, “Rockit.” Only then, with subtlety and muscular riffing equally balanced, the scales tipped toward unrestrained jubilation.

— Chris Schlarb