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.

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Remembering Luther Vandross

Luther Vandross: How Many Times Can We Say Goodbye?
by Michael A. Gonzales

Growing up in New York City, the late Luther Vandross—who died five years ago today—spent the first thirteen years of his life within the concrete confines of the infamous Lower East Side. Raised a few blocks away from the murky waters of the East River, not far from where smelly men used to sell fish on South Street, he lived in Smith Houses projects.

He was enraptured by the voices of LaBelle and Diana Ross, the three-minute symphonies that drifted from sound factories like the Brill Building and Motown, the lyricism of Smokey Robinson and Hal David. All these sounds inspired Vandross to walk the pop path.

“My friends and I would sit in our apartments listening to music and daydreaming about the singers we loved,” Vandross admitted during our first meeting in the fall of 1996. Sitting in a swank hotel suite a few months before the release of Your Secret Love, his tenth and last studio album for Epic Records, we were about 60 blocks and a million miles away from Vandross’s old ‘hood.

“We were obsessed. ‘I wonder what it’s like backstage at an Aretha Franklin concert?’ we would say. Or, ‘You know Diana Ross and Aretha Franklin both live in Detroit—I wonder if they go to lunch together, then go get their nails done?’ That was the kind of stuff going through our minds.”

Yet, unlike most young music fans who eventually move on to lead mediocre lives, Luther was determined to become a part of his own pop daydream. Accordingly, after being turned-out by Dionne Warwick conjuring her chilly mojo from the stage of Brooklyn’s famous Fox Theater, Vandross resolved that he too wanted to be a star.

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Missy Elliott:The Real Queen of The Dirty South

All Hail Missy, The Real Queen of The Dirty South
by Michael A. Gonzales

It’s been thirteen years since the futuristic sound of Portsmouth, Virginia native Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott’s debut Supa Dupa Fly changed the sound of Black music in 1997. With the release of her first single “The Rain,” Missy seemingly became an “overnight sensation.”

Yet, contrary to what many fans might’ve known at the time, Melissa Arnette Elliott (born July 1, 1971) had put in much work behind the scenes before becoming a visible success, and eventually a five-time Grammy winner. “Since day one I’ve always did the kind of music that I wanted to do,” Missy recalls. “Of course, when I told my mother that I was going to be a superstar, she thought that I was crazy. She wanted me to join the army or the navy, like my father.”

However, the teenager who had grown up worshipping Michael Jackson had different plans.

“I met Timbaland in 1988 soon after his group SBI (Surrounded By Idiots) with Magoo and Pharrell had broken up,” she says. She had formed a group called Fayze with two other girls and recruited Tim as Mosely as their producer. “We tried to get Teddy Riley’s attention, but he wasn’t checkin’ for us.” Nevertheless, after a chance meeting with Donald “DeVante Swing” DeGrate of the bad boy soul quartet Jodeci in 1992, she and Tim (and the group, whom DeVante renamed Sista) were invited to join his budding production team Swing Mob in Rochester, New York. Jodeci was working on the follow-up to their platinum-selling debut Forever My Lady, an album that would be titled Diary of a Mad Band.

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Michael A. Gonzales on D'Angelo

Black Pop Kool-Aid: D’Angelo’s “Left & Right”
July 17, 2009 ·
By Michael A. Gonzales

“To me, there is a difference between artists and stars,” soul singer D’Angelo told me way back in 1995. And there was no doubt that he placed himself in the former category no matter how much the rest of the world wanted to place him as the latter. “I don’t want people to tell me how great I sound, but then I don’t build on it,” he added. “What comes first is the music. I want to make dope music. It’s been like that from the beginning and it’s going to stay like that.”

Twenty-one years old at the time, the former child gospel singer named Michael Eugene Archer was in the process of transforming himself into a powerhouse soul man with his stunning debut disc Brown Sugar.

Yet five years after the release of that groundbreaking album, which sowed the seeds of the so-called neo-soul revolution, the young Virginia native had a lot riding on his sophomore project Voodoo. Literarily taking his sophisticated sound to the “next level,” D’Angelo’s Voodoo was a stunning work of art that quickly became the talk of the town.

Nevertheless, following the runaway success of the damn-near pornographic (some prefer the term provocative) video for the second single “Untitled (How Does it Feel)” and a subsequent sold-out tour, D’Angelo retreated from the spotlight.

With the exception of a few cameos including an appearance on Q-Tip’s 2008 album The Renaissance, the man many hoped would be the savior of R&B has been musically inactive since 2001. There were reports about his escalating depressions and alleged drug use, and it looked as if the rigorous demands of the music business caused the young artist to have a classic rock-star crack-up.

In last year’s Spin magazine article “Body & Soul,” Roots drummer and former D’Angelo collaborator Ahmir “?usestlove” Thompson asserted that the pressures of being considered a pin-up boy put the brother over the edge.

“Everybody is not built to be a sex symbol,” agrees Nelson George, author of the recently released autobiography City Kid and the classic soul book The Death of Rhythm & Blues. “Just look at how it fucked up his hero Marvin Gaye.”

Read the Full Essay @ SoulSummer