Esperanza Spalding and the Future of Fusion

Destroying Jazz:

Esperanza Spalding and the Future of Fusion

by Michael Gonzales | Wax Poetics

With the release of Miles Davis’s revolutionary records In a Silent Way in 1969 and Bitches Brew the following year, the genius trumpeter, with the invaluable assistance of an amazing crew of young collaborators, created the musical future shock later called fusion.

Best described as improvised music that incorporates rock, funk, and soul into the grooves, fusion “revamped…Black music’s avant-garde through the use of electronics,” musician and cultural critic Greg Tate explained in 1983.

However, when rock critic Lester Bangs wrote that In a Silent Way “gives you faith in the future of music,” he had no idea the prophecy of his words. A few years later, Miles Davis’s alumni, including keyboardist Herbie Hancock, pianist Chick Corea, guitarist John McLaughlin, and saxophonist Wayne Shorter, formed their own innovative groups Head Hunters, Return to Forever, Mahavishnu Orchestra, and, of course, Weather Report.

Yet, from fusion’s early days as a noisy musical contender, many narrow-minded jazz aficionados and critics were unable to appreciate the sonic change when acoustic became suddenly antiquated. Appalled by upstarts infiltrating their music with electric guitars, Moogs, wild percussion instruments, tape loops, and synthesizers, purists referred to the new musical movement as anti-jazz. In Considering Genius (2006), jazz traditionalist and essayist Stanley Crouch stated that fusion was “the aesthetic death valley” of jazz.

Yet, while the genre became quite popular, not many women instrumentalists ventured into fusion. With the exception of Alice Coltrane, Bobbi Humphrey, Joni Mitchell, Patrice Rushen, Meshell Ndegeocello, and a few others, fusion has long remained a male-dominated field.

Read the Full Essay @ Wax Poetics

Onaje Allan Gumbs--"Inner City Blues" (Just Like Yesterday)

New Music from Pianist Onaje Allan Gumbs from Just Like Yesterday featuring Omar Hakim, Victor Bailey, Bill 'Spaceman' Patterson, Chuggy Carter and Marcus McLaurine.

Onaje Allan Gumbs / Just Like Yesterday

1. What You Won't Do For Love What You Won't Do For Love
2．Betcha By Golly Wow Betcha By Golly Wow
3．Hot Dawgit Hot Dawgit
4．Ribbon in the Sky Ribbon in the Sky
5．Inner City Blues Inner City Blues
6．I'll Be Around I'll Be Around
7．That's the Way of the World That's the Way of the World
8．Quiet Passion Quiet Passion
9． A Child is Born A Child is Born
10. The Tokyo Blues The Tokyo Blues
11．Dolphin Dance Dolphin Dance
12．Yearning For Your Love Yearning For Your Love

Remembering Duke Ellington

reprinted from Popmatters (1999)

A Duke Ellington Primer

by Mark Anthony Neal

Duke Ellington

The Duke: The Essential Collection, 1927-1961

(Sony/Legacy)

It is only now that we are seriously beginning to explore the complexities of African-American performance. For years it has been so easy to interpret the great Louis Armstrong as a cooning, shuffling sycophant, who was way past his musical prime by the time "Hello Dolly" became his most requested tune. We now know that Armstrong, like so many of his generation, fell victim to a racist society in which he felt compelled to embody America's worst racial fantasies in order to continue to perform his craft. No doubt the experiences of Canada Lee and Paul Robeson, were constant reminders that America would never reward, and would blatantly punish, (Nina, Abbey -- holla if ya hear me) those African Americans who resisted the small spaces they were required to inhabit.

These examples are what make Duke Ellington's legacy even more astounding. Yeah, brother could floss with the best of them (Puffy should take some lessons), but bruh was also all business. For more than 50 years, Ellington used his music to examine the complexities of black life (the shuffling, the hustling, the loving, the scheming and the being) and to challenge the contradictions of American Democracy, contradictions that have, until recently, denied "Duke" his rightful place among other American geniuses. Columbia/Legacy's new box set The Duke attempts to put Ellington's musical legacy into some kind of fitting context. Spanning from 1927-1961, The Duke compiles over 60 Ellington recordings from his most formidable years.

The Duke is one of many products associated with the celebration of the centennial of Ellington's birth. Given the pervading racism of American society and 20th century cultural criticisms, specifically, Ellington was often denied the broad accolades bestowed upon other American composers and musicians like George Gershwin or Benny Goodman, during his lifetime. As Harold Cruse suggests in The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, his fire and brimstone study of black intellectuals, "Ellington could be denied this kind of recognition only because of the undemocratic way the cultural machine in America is run." The irony of Cruse's charges are that Ellington, in many ways, embodied the tenets of American democracy. As Stanley Crouch has asserted, Ellington was "inspired by the majesty he heard coming from musicians of all hues and from all level of training...whenever they said the music was dead, Duke was out there, writing music and performing the meaning of his democratic birthright..." Examples of this practice include the prominent role women vocalists like Ivie Anderson and the great in her own right Mahailia Jackson played in his recordings, his willingness to explore music with African and East Indian influences, and of course his well known and highly prolific musical collaboration with composer and arranger Billy Strayhorn, who was incidentally an "out" homosexual. For Ellington, the big band was a metaphor for Democracy and he composed and arranged songs that took advantage of the myriad of talents and styles contained within his bands

While Ellington is clearly one of the most recognizable black artists of the 20th century, he emerged within a society, industry, and critical establishment that was at best condescending and contentious. The racist social science theories of the likes of John Wesley Powell and Lewis Henry Morgan were widely circulated and legitimized within popular culture (ya gotta check out Lee Baker's brilliant From Savage to Negro), thus powerfully impacting upon public perceptions of African-Americans and their roles within the larger society. Such perceptions were furthered by the presence of the minstrel stage, which fixed an image of African-Americans and their purported antics in the popular imagination.

Unfortunately this occurred at the expense of the real humanity of African-Americans caricatured via those minstrel traditions and those who found humor, including blacks, in those caricatures. The subsequent careers of Ernest T. Hogan, composer of the classic "All Coons Look Alike to Me," the aforementioned Louis Armstrong and Stepin' Fechit, whose cinematic performances became the measurement of "cooning" for many African-American audiences, are better understood when examined within this context. The willingness to describe artists like Miles Davis, Abbey Lincoln, Nina Simone or say Lloyd Price as "angry," was partly related to their refusing to embrace the type coon antics of previous generations of black performers. Somehow, Ellington, through his grace and public humility, was able to find middle ground where he resisted the type performance personas that many of his peers were saddled with, while still articulating a powerful social conscience.

The Duke consist of three discs, the first of which chronicles the years 1927-1940, the second and most potent of the disc captures Ellington recordings from the post-war years of 1947-1952, and the last disc features recordings from 1956-1961. Ellington's restless and boundless creativity allowed him to constantly rework earlier themes and this SONY/Legacy collection exposes some of those efforts. The first disc features tracks like "Black and Tan Fantasy" and an early arrangement of "In a Sentimental Mood," which was given it's most popular treatment in the early '60s when Ellington collaborated with fellow jazz giant John Coltrane. The disc also includes "East St. Louis Toodle-oo" and an early version of "Caravan." Both songs allude to the changing dynamics of African-American life, where the unprecedented migration of blacks from the deep south forced musicians like Ellington to be cognizant of the different regional tastes that could be contained in an singular audience. The most well known song on the disc and perhaps Ellington's most recognizable song is the classic "It Don't Mean a Thing (If it Ain't Got that Swing)" with lead vocals by Ivie Anderson. That "swing" has evolved as an ever changing metaphor for energy and change within African-American culture. Who could forget Malcolm X's admonishment to Civil Rights leaders that it was time to "stop singing and start swinging" or Barry Michael Cooper coining the term "New Jack Swing" to describe the hip-hop/R&B hybrid that Teddy Riley advanced in the late '80s.

The second disc presents the Ellington sound as it is being challenged by the emergence of Be-Bop and Rhythm and Blues. Tracks like the rollicking "Antidisestablishmentarianismist," "Creole Love Call," and "Brown Betty" find Ellington holding on to, if not furthering his vision of the big band. The best testament to Duke's genius was that his popularity did not wane, despite the fact that the big band sound, was for all intents, dead. The jewel of the second disc is the more than seven minute version of "Take the A Train." which features the brilliant vocals of Betty Roche. The song was a reminder that throughout the 20th century, Harlem, remained the Mecca of African-American life. And while other cities clearly influenced what we acknowledge as African-American culture (see Suzanne Smith's Dancing in the Street: Motown and the Cultural Politics of Detroit), Harlem became, and too some extent still is, the fictive capitol of "Black America." Seemingly every black migrant who stepped off a train at Penn Station or a bus at Port Authority, were told that the quickest way to Harlem was via the "A" train.

The last disc finds Ellington engaging in projects that represented both his broad artistic interests and his willingness to challenge the status quo in the recording industry. "Star-Crossed Lovers' is taken from his 1957 recording Such Sweet Thunder which explored many of the themes prominent in the Shakespearean works, Othello, Henry the Fifth, and A Midsummer's Night Dream. "Come Sunday" is, of course, from his great work Black, Brown, and Beige, which Ellington debuted in 1943. The version contained on disc three of The Duke features the vocals of the legendary gospel singer Mahailia Jackson. Their collaboration on that track and throughout the 1957 recording of Black, Brown, and Beige is perhaps one of the greatest collaborations in all of American popular music. As Wynton Marsalis stated during one of the many events that celebrated Ellington's legacy during the past year, "Duke Ellington is America's most prolific composerof the 20th century, in both number of pieces (almost 2,000) and variety of forms. His artistic development and sustained achievement are among the most spectacular in the history of music." The Duke is a great introduction to Ellington's artistry and achievement.

The Cutting Edge of 'Kamaal the Abstract'

Q-Tip's Return to Grace
by John Murph

This decade, many a rap and R&B artist, from Missy Elliott to Mya, have seen their albums stalled or put on permanent hold. But Q-Tip’s Kamaal/The Abstract has the dubious distinction of being one of the most delayed hip-hop records in the history of rap, nearly done under by seven long years of corporate hemming and hawing.

The story of Kamaal/The Abstract is an epic battle of creative artistic control against an increasingly homogenized and claustrophobic mainstream market.

The album, which was released last month, was originally scheduled to hit the streets in early 2002 as the follow-up to Q-Tip’s first solo, and highly controversial, album, Amplified (Arista, 1999). With Kamaal/The Abstract, there was much at stake. Longtime fans felt that for his solo debut, Q-Tip had abandoned the thoughtful verses he waxed with A Tribe Called Quest, for a decidedly more glamorous, blinged-out approach. Kamaal/The Abstract was to be Q-Tip’s return to grace

Kamaal/The Abstract was a move to show both Q-Tip returning to the more experimental approach of Tribe as well as delving deeper into the group’s jazz aesthetic, an aesthetic that made ’90s discs such as The Low End Theory and Midnight Marauders enduring classics for both hip-hop and jazz heads. On Kamaal/The Abstract, Q-Tip recruited the heavyweight talents of saxophonist/flutist Gary Thomas, alto saxophonist Kenny Garrett and guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, giving them plenty of room to shine. And instead of balancing the jazz equation with high-profile, hip-hop guest artists, he explored more conventional instrumentation and many times opted to sing rather than rap.

While pre-release media coverage was mixed, the underground buzz about the record generated a lot of excitement in the music world. Unfortunately, that exhilaration didn’t touch the powers that be at Arista Records, who initially kept postponing the release date. And then label execs put Kamaal on ice, arguing that it didn’t have a single hit on it.

After that, Q-Tip’s career floated, in limbo; another disc, Open (Hollywood) also stalled. It wasn’t until he pulled a Rocky Balboa last year with The Renaissance (Motown Records), that his recording career landed back on solid ground. So the thawing and release of Kamaal/The Abstract is a long time coming.

It must have been incredibly frustrating for Q-Tip to watch Kamaal/The Abstract held back while other risk-taking albums recorded later—Outkast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below (ironically also on Arista), Common’s Electric Circus, Gnarls Barkley’s St. Elsewhere and Kanye West’s 808s & Heartbreak—became critical and commercial successes. With Kamaal/The Abstract, Q-Tip proved himself to beprescient in challenging the status quo of what a hip-hop artist could do.

Read the Full Essay @ The Root

Robin DG Kelley on Thelonious Monk

from Simon & Schuster

"The piano ain't got no wrong notes!" So ranted Thelonious Sphere Monk, who proved his point every time he sat down at the keyboard. His angular melodies and dissonant harmonies shook the jazz world to its foundations, ushering in the birth of "bebop" and establishing Monk as one of America's greatest composers. Yet throughout much of his life, his musical contribution took a backseat to tales of his reputed behavior. Writers tended to obsess over Monk's hats or his proclivity to dance on stage. To his fans, he was the ultimate hipster; to his detractors, he was temperamental, eccentric, taciturn, or childlike. But these labels tell us little about the man or his music.

In the first book on Thelonious Monk based on exclusive access to the Monk family papers and private recordings, as well as on a decade of prodigious research, prize-winning historian Robin D. G. Kelley brings to light a startlingly different Thelonious Monk -- witty, intelligent, generous, politically engaged, brutally honest, and a devoted father and husband. Indeed, Thelonious Monk is essentially a love story. It is a story of familial love, beginning with Monk's enslaved ancestors from whom Thelonious inherited an appreciation for community, freedom, and black traditions of sacred and secular song. It is about a doting mother who scrubbed floors to pay for piano lessons and encouraged her son to follow his dream. It is the story of romance, from Monk's initial heartbreaks to his lifelong commitment to his muse, the extraordinary Nellie Monk. And it is about his unique friendship with the Baroness Nica de Koenigswarter, a scion of the famous Rothschild family whose relationship with Monk and other jazz musicians has long been the subject of speculation and rumor. Nellie, Nica, and various friends and family sustained Monk during the long periods of joblessness, bipolar episodes, incarceration, health crises, and other tragic and difficult moments.

Above all, Thelonious Monk is the gripping saga of an artist's struggle to "make it" without compromising his musical vision. It is a story that, like its subject, reflects the tidal ebbs and flows of American history in the twentieth century. Elegantly written and rich with humor and pathos, Thelonious Monk is the definitive work on modern jazz's most original composer.

Faith in Rhythm (for Max Roach)

photo by John Abbott

Faith in Rhythm
by Mark Anthony Neal

Perhaps the word that most captures the significance of Max Roach is faith. Yes the faith, in those early days, that he would always keep time as the winded lyricists and at least one fickle Monk, dared the time/space continuum to challenge their intellects—one more time. But there was also Max Roach’s faith; Faith that the rhythm would deliver the genius of a generation of “old southern men, full of northern pain”—that the rhythm would always deliver music that we could dream to and finally that the rhythm would deliver even a grain of freedom—“We Insist!”—for those whose only possessions were their bodies and the rhythms contained within those bodies.

Read More at CRITICAL NOIR @ Vibe.com

MusiQology 101 with Guthrie Ramsey, Jr.

MusiQology 101 with Dr. Guy
by Mark Anthony Neal

By day Guthrie Ramsey, Jr. is a not-so-mild-mannered ethnomusicologist and college professor (and part-time baseball player), but by night he dons his Funkenstein cape and transforms into Dr. Guy, an accomplished pianist and leader of Dr. Guy’s MusiQology. Y the Q?, the first release from Dr. Guy’s MusiQology, pushes the boundaries of what some might refer to as “Smooth Jazz," and draws on references like Quincy Jones, Joe Sample, Toni Morrison (“Sula’s Groove, “Dorcas’s Lament” and “Milkman’s Dues”), Herbie Hancock and the Doobie Brothers, while giving love to the Philly community that he now claims.

Read More at CriticalNoir @ Vibe.com

Phyllis Hyman: A Diva for All Time

Remembering Phyllis Hyman

by Mark Anthony Neal

"She's more important than her music — if they must be separated — and they should be separated when she has to pass out before anyone recognizes she needs a rest and i say i need aretha's music"— Nikki Giovanni.

When Nikki Giovanni wrote "A Poem for Aretha" it was as much a cautionary tale as a celebration of Aretha Franklin's groundbreaking talents. She wrote it during what was arguably the height of Franklin's popularity — a moment that established her as the most popular black female entertainer ever. And it was that immense popularity that most concerned Giovanni, as she wondered aloud whether or not Franklin would ultimately visit the same fate as so many other black women entertainers before her. Names like Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington and Esther Phillips (who was no doubt dying a slow death when Giovanni's poem was first published) are more than footnotes to black musical genius; they are constant reminders of the travails and dangers that black women face in an industry that seemingly cares little for them and has always seemed to place more value in their sexuality than their talent. One can only wonder if Phyllis Hyman had ever read Giovanni's poem before she took her own life in June of 1995. Though Hyman never achieved the popular success Franklin did, she still stands as a diva among divas.

Living All Alone gave audiences a small glimpse of the feelings of loneliness and depression that had begun to engulf her. Born in Philadelphia and raised in Pittsburgh, as a teen Hyman didn't think herself much a singer. As she told Jacquelyn Powell in a 1981 profile, "I didn't know I could sing… Not like Nancy Wilson, or Dionne Warwick." But pianist Dick Morgan thought different, and after hearing Hyman sing at local clubs in Pittsburgh in the early '70s, asked her to tour with his band. It was while Hyman was doing regular gigs in New York City at Rust Brown's and Mikell's in 1975 that bandleader and producer Norman Connors first heard her. A year later he tapped her to sing the lead in his version of the Stylistics' classic "Betcha by, Golly Wow." Nearly 30 years after its release, it remains one of Hyman's most memorable performances.

Hyman initially signed as a solo artist with Buddah Records, which had difficulty finding the right material to make her the crossover star they wanted her to be. Though Hyman would have minor success singing mainstream R&B and disco, as witnessed on tracks like "You Know How to Love Me" (1979) and "Can't We Fall in Love Again," recorded with former Miles Davis sideman Michael Henderson in 1981 (the duo was first paired together on Connor's "You Are My Starship" in 1976), she was more at home within the jazz and pop-jazz idioms. Though she didn't sell many records during her two-album stint at Buddah, Phyllis Hyman (1977) and Somewhere in My Lifetime (1978) remain a testament to her link to some of the great torch singers, such as Nancy Wilson and Abbey Lincoln. Hyman was eventually given the chance to fully shine within the jazz tradition when she accepted a role in the Broadway production Sophisticated Ladies, a revue of Duke Ellington's music in which she sang Ellington classics such as "Prelude to A Kiss," "I Got It Bad and That Ain't Good" and a stirring, heart-wrenching rendition of "In a Sentimental Mood."

Hyman received a Tony Award nomination in 1981 for her work in Sophisticated Ladies but Arista, her label at the time, failed to capitalize on her new found mainstream popularity, instead trying to re-capture the dance-floor magic of "You Know How to Love Me," her first "hit" for the label. The awful "Riding the Tiger" from her 1983 recording Goddess of Love is an example of these efforts, though the song did help introduce Hyman's music to gay audiences, who reportedly embraced the song as a favorite at drag performances in the mid-'80s. Hyman would finally find a label receptive to her unique talents in Gamble and Huff's Philadelphia International Records (PIR).

Living All Alone (1987) powerfully captured the full range of Hyman's vocal gifts, but it also gave her audiences a small glimpse of the feelings of loneliness and depression that had begun to engulf her. As her friend and manager Glenda Gracia told writer Esther Iverem, Hyman was "uncovering the riddles of stuff in her life…sometimes when you start that process, the demons that you confront may have more for you than you might have thought you would find." Part of the process for Hyman was dealing with very real feelings of loss after the death of her friend, songwriter Linda Creed, the long-time writing partner of Thom Bell (the duo penned "Betcha By Golly Wow" among other classics). Creed's "Old Friend," which appears on Living All Alone, was one of the last songs she wrote before her death.

Four years later Hyman returned with Prime of My Life (1991), which proved to be the most mature recording of her career as well as the last released during her lifetime. Tracks like "Meet Me on The Moon" and "When I Give My Love (This Time)" exhibit what producer Barry Eastmond refers to as "Phyllisisms." The record also contained her only chart-topping R&B hit, "Don't Wanna Change the World," which ironically was a throwback to her dance-diva days, complete with her first rap performance. Though the title of the album suggested that the then 42-year-old Hyman was at peace with her life and career, "Living in Confusion," a track she co-wrote with Kenneth Gamble and Terry Burrus, suggested a deeper darker reality. In the song's chorus Hyman sang, "seems like I'm always going through changes/Living in confusion…" Things took an even darker turn when Hyman's mother and grandmother died within a month of each other in 1993.

Hyman was working on what would be her last recording, ironically titled I Refuse to Be Lonely when she chose to take her own life on June 30, 1995, leaving behind a note that stated simply "I'm tired. I'm tired." When I Refuse to Be Lonely was released in November of 1995, it became one of Hyman's fastest selling recordings. According to Esther Iverem, so much of the recording was supposed to be about how Hyman "claws back from the brink, back from the place where she fought depression, loneliness, alcoholism, obesity and a consuming anger at lesser voices enjoying more commercial success."

Hyman's depression is telling in that the male-centered recording industry has rarely dealt with how gender impacts how artists are perceived, or with the way various artists choose to deal with the pressures of celebrity and the constant need to please fans, producers and A&R folk. Women artists are also forced to conform to some perceived notion of beauty. More than six feet tall, Hyman also battled her weight, often ballooning close to 300 pounds. Though folks remember Dinah Washington dying of a drug overdose, few remember that she overdosed on diet pills — an addiction directly related to her feelings that her body wasn't the right size. More often than not, women in the industry who struggle with these issues are described as "difficult," as was the case with Hyman, or even Mary J. Blige during earlier moments in her career. While these women may indeed have been "difficult," folks in the industry rarely ask why, or more specifically, how their experiences in a decidedly patriarchal and often sexist industry may have informed their personalities.

And it's not just women in the entertainment industry. As Iverem wrote in a 1996 Essence feature on Hyman's death, her passing "offers a particularly poignant example of the private struggles that many talented, intelligent black women face." Many women face this reality with a resolve that suggests that such darkness is in fact inevitable. In her book If You Can't Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holliday scholar Farah Jasmine Griffin reflects on an interview Mary J. Blige did with Dream Hampton in 1997, where the "Queen of Hip Hop Soul" responds to the invocation of Billie Holiday with the quip "Dead. Like Phyllis Hyman. Dead." According to Griffin, for a young woman like Blige, the lives of Hyman and Holiday are only a reminder of "Death. Pain. Sadness."

In the end we are only left with the music of Phyllis Hyman. Though the recently released Ultimate Phyllis Hyman is a good introduction to her music, fans might want to instead take a look at The Legacy of Phyllis Hyman, which was released in 1996. For those desiring to hear Hyman at her most exquisite, it might be worth the effort to track down a copy of Pharaoh Sanders's obscure Love Will Find a Way (1978), on which Hyman sings the gems "As You Are" and "Love is Here." As Roberta Flack told mourners at a memorial service for Hyman, "God is a spirit, music is spiritual so every time you hear Phyllis sing she lives."