Tones of Vinyl

Chalino Sánchez was handed a note onstage in Culiacán, Sinaloa on May 15, 1992. The next morning he was found dead in an irrigation canal. The grainy clip of that moment, the "death note" video, has millions of views, and our guest doesn't believe it's what the internet says it is.

Elijah Wald wrote Dylan Goes Electric, the basis for the Oscar-nominated A Complete Unknown. He also hitchhiked across Mexico with a guitar and wrote Narcocorrido, the first book to track down the corrido songwriters themselves.

We get into what a corrido actually is, how Prohibition-era smuggling turned it into the narcocorrido, the Coachella shootout that made Chalino a legend before the murder made him a martyr, and why kids in LA compared him to Eazy-E while writers reached for Tupac.

There's a theory floating around that a rhythm born in Africa somehow made its way

across the Indian Ocean, through Madagascar, out into the Pacific, and washed up in Thailand a few hundred years ago. And that it's still in there. Buried in a folk drum most people outside Southeast Asia have never heard of.

Salin Cheewapansri, who started on piano, switched to drums because the teacher was cool, and by her teens was doing session work in Bangkok. Then she left for Ohio to study journalism. Ended up in Montreal.

Somewhere along the way, she essentially turned herself into an on-the-ground anthropologist, putting in the kind of deep, grueling field research that most people with actual degrees gathering dust on a wall only read about. She skipped the academic formalities and just went out to do the work.

She didn't stop at theory. She got on a boat, more or less, and went to find the Urak Lawoi, sea nomads whose lineage stretches an absurd distance, Madagascar to Papua New Guinea, and sat with their elders. Recorded what's left of music that's maybe one generation from vanishing completely, the way so much of this stuff does, quietly, without anyone noticing until it's gone.

What came out the other side is Rammana. Just got a deluxe reissue, marble vinyl, because somebody involved clearly understood that a record about digging up buried history should have some weight to it when you're holding it.

Tonight we get into where this theory actually comes from, whether it holds up, and what it does to a person to go looking for the root of a sound and find out it's older, stranger, and more alive than anyone gave it credit for.

This is Tones of Vinyl. Let's go.

There's a theory floating around that a rhythm born in Africa somehow made its way across the Indian Ocean, through Madagascar, out into the Pacific, and washed up in Thailand a few hundred years ago. And that it's still in there. Buried in a folk drum most people outside Southeast Asia have never heard of.

Salin Cheewapansri, who started on piano, hated it, switched to drums because the teacher was cool, and by her teens was doing session work in Bangkok. Then she left for Ohio to study journalism. Ended up in Montreal.

Somewhere along the way, she essentially turned herself into an on-the-ground anthropologist, putting in the kind of deep, grueling field research that most people with actual degrees gathering dust on a wall only read about. She skipped the academic formalities and just went out to do the work.

She didn't stop at theory. She got on a boat, more or less, and went to find the Urak Lawoi, sea nomads whose lineage stretches an absurd distance, Madagascar to Papua New Guinea, and sat with their elders. Recorded what's left of music that's maybe one generation from vanishing completely, the way so much of this stuff does, quietly, without anyone noticing until it's gone.

What came out the other side is Rammana. Just got a deluxe reissue, marble vinyl, because somebody involved clearly understood that a record about digging up buried history should have some weight to it when you're holding it.

Tonight we get into where this theory actually comes from, whether it holds up, and what it does to a person to go looking for the root of a sound and find out it's older, stranger, and more alive than anyone gave it credit for.

This is Tones of Vinyl. Let's go.

Aaron Draplin is the founder of Draplin Design Co. and co-founder of Field Notes. He's designed for Nike, Patagonia, Ford, Esquire, Burton Snowboards, and the Obama administration. He designed a US postage stamp. He's done concert posters for Chris Stapleton and Jason Isbell. He wrote a book called Pretty Much Everything that's in its thirteenth printing. And he runs his entire operation out of a backyard shop in Portland, Oregon.

In this episode we start with vinyl — Aaron has a few thousand records on the wall — and end up somewhere much deeper. We talk about creativity, collecting, letting go, and the kind of work ethic that comes from watching your dad treat every single person in the room with respect. Aaron Draplin is the real deal. This one's worth your time.

John Simon is one of the most important and least celebrated figures in rock and roll history. As a producer, arranger and musician he was in the room for some of the most legendary recordings ever made. Music From Big Pink and the self-titled second album by The Band, Cheap Thrills with Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen's debut, and Simon and Garfunkel's Bookends sessions. All of it in a handful of extraordinary years in the late 1960s.

But there's another side to John Simon that most people don't know. He's a songwriter. A serious one. In this conversation we start with his own music, his first two solo albums John Simon's Album and Journey, recorded live with no overdubs, no click tracks, just great musicians in a room. We work our way through what it means to write a song, how to produce one honestly, and what it felt like to be at the center of one of the most creative moments in American music history.

We talk about The Band, Music From Big Pink, recording at Sammy Davis Jr.'s pool house, Musical Directing The Last Waltz, and what Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Rick Danko and Richard Manuel were really like in the studio.

John Simon is 84 years old, still playing piano weekly, still writing, and still thinking harder about music than most people half his age.

Discover how a tech professional turned a bedroom music blog into a Grammy-winning independent record label. In this premiere episode of the Tones of Vinyl podcast, we sit down with Souvik Dutta, founder of Abstract Logix.

Souvik is one of those rare humans who truly lives and breathes music every single second of the day. We dive deep into his incredible journey from Calcutta to building one of the most respected indie labels on the planet.

Inside this episode, we discuss:

• The Tech-to-Music Hustle: The relentless transition from a standard tech career to launching a record label.
• Working with Living Legends: What it’s really like to collaborate side-by-side with master musicians like John McLaughlin, Jimmy Herring, Zakir Hussain, and Colonel Bruce Hampton.
• The Return of Shakti: The inside story of reviving the iconic 1970s cross-cultural supergroup and taking home a Grammy Award for their massive comeback album, This Moment.
  

Whether you're an avid vinyl collector, a high-fidelity audiophile, or just obsessed with the magic of deep musical history, this conversation is for you.

Let's dive in.