| [My] attitude is, 'Once you finish with a genre, you move on.' Once you've crossed a bridge, burn it so you don't allow yourself the opportunity to go back. I think I got that lesson from the years I spent with Miles Davis. He changed music three or four times, and the reason why he could do that is because he never looked back. |
|
 |
 | | James Mtume at the Hammersmith Odeon, London, in January 1985. | | (David Corio/Redferns/Getty Images) | | |
| quote of the day |
| "[My] attitude is, 'Once you finish with a genre, you move on.' Once you've crossed a bridge, burn it so you don't allow yourself the opportunity to go back. I think I got that lesson from the years I spent with Miles Davis. He changed music three or four times, and the reason why he could do that is because he never looked back." | | - James Mtume, 1946 – 2022 | |
|
| rantnrave:// |
Jazzy Fruit
You may or may not have understood, when you were dancing to the NOTORIOUS B.I.G.'s "JUICY" in the 1990s, that you were dancing to a sample of an '80s R&B hit written and produced by a percussionist and keyboardist who was a key member of MILES DAVIS' '70s band and whose father played tenor sax on a string of classic jazz sides in the '50s and '60s, but that's the thing about music, it keeps flowing across time and space and genres and generations as if there were no walls in the way, which there aren't, giving life—and reason to dance—to anyone in its path who cares to listen. Which is all to say, JAMES MTUME was basically a river.
Mtume, whose death at age 76 was reported Sunday, was best known in jazz circles as Davis' percussionist circa the albums ON THE CORNER, AGHARTA and PANGAEA, and in R&B and funk circles for the band to which he gave his last name, whose biggest hit was "JUICY FRUIT," an ode to oral sex that made its way over the years to the Notorious B.I.G. and countless other hip-hop, R&B and pop artists (and, hilariously, to the legal department at WRIGLEY, maker of Juicy Fruit gum, as Mtume recounted in this Red Bull Music Academy interview). He was joined in both of those projects by the equally genre-fluid guitarist REGGIE LUCAS, with whom he also wrote and/or produced hits for artists including ROBERTA FLACK and STEPHANIE MILLS. On his own, there were socially conscious jazz solo albums, a lot more production work and a stint as a DJ at New York's KISS FM.
There are plenty of artists who'll tell you they don't care about artificial constructions like genre; they're just making music, following their muse wherever it takes them. Mtume wasn't one of those. He was a river with distinct sections; every change of direction was planned. "One of the axioms and principles that I try to do music by is always be honest to the idiom that you're writing in," he told an interviewer for the NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSIC. "If I'm writing in jazz, then it's straight up jazz, if I'm writing funk, it's straight up funk, if I'm writing pop, then it's straight up pop. It's just about honoring the music and also never being afraid to embrace change." Or, to put it another way, never being afraid to acknowledge you *want* to change, to keep moving, to keep seeking new ways to dance.
Back to the Garden
Two years before James Mtume hooked up with Miles Davis, MICHAEL LANG was riding around the grounds of the most famous rock festival ever held, on his motorcycle. A concert promoter by trade, Lang was one of four men behind the original WOODSTOCK, but he became the public face of the festival, thanks in no small part to his frequent appearances on-screen in MICHAEL WADLEIGH's epic film about the event. If he had done nothing else, Lang would be remembered as one of the most influential concert promoters of all, a change agent who helped a generation define itself, and maybe even understand itself, while codifying the spirit, if not the exact rules, of the multi-day rock music fest in a way that still resonates today.
Lang, who died Saturday at 77, did in fact do something else. His other pursuits included artist management (JOE COCKER was a longtime client), running a label (BETTY DAVIS and KAREN DALTON were among the artists who recorded for his JUST SUNSHINE imprint) and producing films. But he never let go of Woodstock and Woodstock never let go of him. This particular change agent spent the next half-century trying to repeat what he'd already done, with famously diminishing returns. Woodstock '94 mixed a lot of '90s rock and alt-rock with a lot of rain. Woodstock '99 featured almost exclusively male acts and descended into violence and chaos. Woodstock 50, planned for 2019, never happened, losing its financial backing, its venue and many of its artists—including several who had played the original 1969 fest—before Lang and his partners finally threw in the towel. It was as if his own festival was trying to tell him: Find a new way to dance.
Whose Generation?
I'd like to add an asterisk to the above item. The idea that a generation defined itself through Woodstock begs the question of what "generation" and "itself" really mean. The original Woodstock took place the same summer, in the same state, as the HARLEM CULTURAL FESTIVAL, a groundbreaking Black music event that had been all but lost to mainstream history until QUESTLOVE put it back in the public eye with his fantastic 2021 documentary SUMMER OF SOUL. Among the uncomfortable questions that documentary asks is: Why? Why did a film about Woodstock become a cinematic and cultural event while extensive footage of the Harlem Cultural Festival was locked away for half a century? Why was one remembered and one forgotten? Why did a white audience's history become "history"? Why did a Black audience's history not?
As I was putting together my thoughts on James Mtume on Sunday, I looked up his band on SETLIST.FM, the internet's go-to crowd-sourced record of concerts and setlists. As far as readers of setlist.fm know, Mtume played a total of 11 concerts. Ever. And no one remembers a single song played at any of them. This is a site that has 240 *pages* of MEGADETH concerts and can tell you exactly which METALLICA song Megadeth slipped a snippet of into the middle of its final encore in Milwaukee on Jan. 7, 1986. It can't even tell you if Mtume even existed in 1986.
There are *always* blind spots.
Rest in Peace Also
Lyricist MARILYN BERGMAN, who with her husband, Alan, wrote the words to classic film songs including "The Way We Were" and "The Windmills of Your Mind" as well as the theme songs to TV shows including "Maude" and "Good Times"... Singer CALVIN SIMON, a founding member of Parliament-Funkadelic as well as George Clinton's pre-P-Funk group the Parliaments. He became a gospel singer in later years... Argentine electronic musician FLAVIO ETCHETO... HARRY COLOMBY, New York high school teacher who managed Thelonious Monk (and Mose Allison and, later, Michael Keaton), and who kept teaching English and social studies because "I had no illusion about how much money there is in jazz."
| | - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator | |
|
| in search of the rainbow seekers |
|
 | | The Liminal Space |
| | The case for a post-royalties music industry | | By Dan Fowler | | Anyone who cares about the future of artist sustainability and empowerment should view this moment as an opportunity for a step change in our very definition of what a musician is, and how they monetize and value their work. | | |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| alkebu-lan: land of the blacks |
|
 | | The New York Times |
| | The Vitality of Black Criticism | | By Daphne A. Brooks | | Before his death, Greg Tate spoke with four other critics at the Pop Conference about the need for Black writers to face down racist institutions and take the lead in cultural conversations. | | |
|
|
|
|
 | | Trapital |
| | Master P on Bringing Culture to Corporate America (live from TMRE) | | By Dan Runcie and Master P | | Master P shares his thoughts on what corporate America can learn from hip-hop culture. He then talks about his work to get distribution in some of the more competitive spaces on retail shelves across the country, Snoop Dogg, Shaq, and some of his business endeavors. | | |
|
|
| what we're into |
 | | Music of the day | | "No Words" | | Mtume Umoja Ensemble | | "It's kinda different. I was gonna say strange, but it's not strange." From 1972's "Alkebu-Lan: Land of the Blacks." | | |
| | |
|
| Music | Media | | | | | | Suggest a link  | | "REDEF is dedicated to my mother, who nurtured and encouraged my interest in everything and slightly regrets the day she taught me to always ask 'why?'" |
| | | |
|
No comments:
Post a Comment