Rare and interesting instruments - part 1

We live in the internet era.

We can count ourselves lucky, because anyone who interested in music have the ability to explore rare/ancient or other types of instruments via the internet. In fact, 15 years ago I couldn't imagine these instruments even exist. So this list could be useful or interesting for anyone - even you grown up on electronic music like me.

In these posts (this is part one),  I will show you some songs played with that particular instrument. If you have other interesting instruments (or songs) just drop me a comment, and I can expand the lists.

Kelly Rowland and a Freemasons remix

In the latest post I wrote that  sometimes a remix is better than the original song. Here I will show a remix which is not just better then the original, but lots of people never even heard the original.

The original song "Work" by Kelly Rowland was leaked on May 31, 2007 onto the internet. This original song didn't have critics, and reached a good place on the charts in the US and some other countries, though the Freemasons team felt that they can improve this song further.
So in  2007, The Freemasons started to work with Kelly Rowland, to produce the remix for the non-American markets.

Not to say, Freemasons made an excellent work:

Whats interesting is if we look at the views counter at Youtube, this 'arabic' style remix got like ten times more views than the original song. You can find the original here.

Freemasons

Freemasons are a British dance band.

Their name is taken from the Brighton pub which they frequently visit.

According to Wikipedia: 

The duo also record and remix under the similar sounding "Freemaison" name, which is also the name of their record label that was founded in 2005.

The band is founded in 2005 and they are currently active as well, for our pleasure :)

Shakira and a not so typical remix

When the She Wolf came out in 2009 ( which is the sixth studio album by Colombian singer-songwriter Shakira) it was a big hit.

As we can read in Nielsen SoundScan:

She Wolf had sold 379,000 copies in the United States and over 2 million worldwide.

(Nielsen SoundScan by the way is the biggest information and sales tracking system created by Mike Fine and Mike Shalett, this is the official method of tracking sales of music and music video products throughout the United States and Canada.)

When looking back to the charts we see that "She Wolf" debuted at number fifteen on the Billboard 200 chart with sales of 89,000 units.

And according to Wikipedia:

..the album was Shakira's lowest charted album so far. After two weeks, the album sales total was 158,000 units.

However, the album has been moderately successful worldwide, having been certified Gold in Russia, Ireland, Switzerland and in many more countries.

It's not surprising when sometimes a remix is better than the original song. I will show a remix of the song 'She Wolf' in this post, which was became widespread in Europe. 

Its just 1:20 minutes long created by 'Deeplick Productions', and its a little bit special. The style of this remix reminds me of a Kelly Rowland song ('Work') which was also remixed and it became much better song after it. I will write about this in another post.

Enjoy.

You can find a longer version of this remix HERE.

King of Bongo - 2

In the last part I tried to show the history of this famous song called "King of Bongo" (you can find the link for the first part here). I wrote that this song has a long story. It has its roots from a 1939 recording of "King of the Bongo Bong" by the trumpeter Roy Eldridge. You can find this old recording here.
It also uses the background music from a Black Uhuru's song from their "Anthem" album.


The music has been reused for other songs such as "Mr. Bobby" which was originally released in a stripped-down form without any wind instruments on the "Bongo Bong" single in 1998.

We can read this info from Wikipedia (source) 

"Mr. Bobby" is the last single from Manu Chao's second album, Próxima Estación: Esperanza. Originally, the song was released in a stripped-down form without any wind instruments on the "Bongo Bong" single in 1998. 

The song, which is a tribute to reggae legend Bob Marley, had success in European countries such as Spain, Italy and Switzerland.

***

Of course this song continues its "career" because we can see lots remixes of this song nowdays, too .There are different styles such of DnB, or other reggae remixes. The following remix has a very nice intro: