By Bob Tarte

I recently received an e-mail from my good friend and fellow Beat columnist Dave Hucker, threatening to drag me in front of the International Web Crimes Tribunal at the Hague unless I added his recent "Hey Mr. Music" installments to my technobeat.com Web site. And by "recent," he was referring to the fact that I hadn't updated the site since 2003.

Remarkably, despite the dearth of any material post-dating the break-up of the Beatles, the "Technobeat" Web site still received between 1832 and 2681 hits per day this month--which made me wonder how much traffic I might get if I actually caught up the content. But content wasn't the only problem. I designed the site late last century in the days before large monitors became the norm. So it also needed a more modem look that replaced the postage stamp-size area I'd reserved for text and graphics to a window you could view without resorting to scanning electron microscopy.

By the time you read this, I should have finished the reconstruction. That is, if Mr. Hucker, who egged me on to update in the first place, gets around to sending me the info he wants on his home page. Otherwise, I have no choice but to drag him in front of the Internet division of Interpol. All of this I do simply to serve the public--and also with the hope of pointing more traffic toward my bobtarte.com Web site and selling copies of my two books, Enslaved by Ducks and Fowl Weather, which every reader of this magazine should immediately buy.

Check out the site, which includes all "Technobeat" columns since 1990 and all "Hey Mr. Music" columns since 1997, and let me know what you think of the new design. You can e-mail me at r.tarte@att.net and Uncle Huck at huckero@ btintemet.com.

Oliver Mtukudzi is another smoothie, and on the opening track of Tsimba ltsoka (Heads Up). "Ungade We," he's got a small combo jazz thing tugging at the seams of his Zimbabwean tuku style, which makes me wish he'd cut a disc of American standards. I can almost hear "Ain't Misbehavin'" sung in Shona in my head. Though Mtukudzi never seems close to working up a sweat when he sings, in a few perfectly modulated phrases his smoky voice suggests he's seen it all. His band is first rate, too. Nobody wields a pair of sticks with as much snap as drummer Clive Bobby Mutyasira, who helps anchor the pleasing tug of war between the choppy rhythm and the fluidity of Clive Mono Mukundu's lead guitar, Samson Mtukudzi's sax and Namatai Mubariki and Mary Bell's backing vocals. The opening track, with its stuttering swing tempo, does it all the best and keeps pulling me back to this pleasurable cd.