August 2007 Archives
A Song for Lucien (for Jon Lucien 1942-2007)
“I would say that my sound is a romantic sound. It’s water. It’s ocean. It’s tranquility.”—Jon Lucien
That Jon Lucien’s name is rarely evoked in casual conversation about Jazz and Soul vocalists of the past two generations is perhaps fitting for an artist who was often cast as an outsider. It wasn’t just the affectations of the Caribbean male that marked Lucien as an outsider when he first emerged in 1970 with his debut recording I Am Now, but his embodiment of something else—that something else that few, including his record labels, could ever quite wrap their heads around. If so much of the Soul music of the early 1970s yearned for the trinkets of a newly formed freedom—including the freedoms derived from uninhibited sexual passion—then Jon Lucien’s music, his rich Caribbean baritone and his cosmopolitan swagger were evidence of an always, already freedom.
It was all too easy to compare Jon Lucien to Barry White, Teddy Pendergrass and, much later, Luther Vandross (the sheer heft of their vocals would have it no other way), but in reality Lucien’s peers were song stylists like Johnny Hartman and Jimmy Scott—both tragically forgotten, even as Scott (and his natural falsetto) continues to toil in obscurity and Hartman remains the only vocalist to have collaborated with John Coltrane. What distinguished Lucien from those men was his ability to translate the gravitas of their instruments into something that was accessible and tangible, albeit “foreign” in both the literal and commercial sense, to audiences in the 1970s.
Simply put, Jon Lucien conjured sex in a way that was only comparable to the onscreen work of the late Calvin Lockhart - who, like his Caribbean contemporary, never quite found the vehicles to support his considerable talents. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was difficult for male Caribbean artists to exist beyond the huge shadows of Sir Sidney and King Harry; Lucien and Lockhart, I would argue, suffered accordingly. Ironically Lucien first came to the states in the 1960s playing bass in the Catskills behind a trio that once performed as part of the Harry Belafonte Folk Singers.
Nevertheless Lucien’s second recording, Rashida (1973), with its lush arrangements, unbridled percussive energies and Lucien’s vocals in fine form, ranks as one of the great “Soul” albums from the period. And yet to call Lucien’s music “soul” or “jazz” does a disservice to the music. This is something that was not lost on Lucien as he struggled with his record company at the time. As Lucien told Richard Harrington a few years ago, “There was a lack of vision, especially when we did the Rashida album… everybody was saying, ‘what do we call this music?’” Such questions kept RCA from giving Lucien’s recordings full promotional support, particularly in an era when many labels were still getting a handle on their nascent black music divisions. If the music didn’t sound like Sly Stone, Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, The O’Jays or Aretha Franklin, many labels didn’t believe there was an audience for it.
That Lucien had such an enduring following up until his death, was a tribute to the beauty and exquisiteness of those early recordings. Tracks like “Dindi” and Lucien originals like “Lady Love,” “Esperanza,” “Luella” and “Rashida” were simply gems, but many didn’t discover them until a decade after they were recorded and then only because of developments like the “Quiet Storm” radio format. “Rashida” in particular became one of Lucien’s signature tracks. “Gentle as the sigh of a morning breeze/Rashida calls my name” is how Lucien opens the song as he proceeds to tell a true story about a love lost. The song’s tension comes from “Rashida’s” return and Lucien’s lament that “when I needed you/you ran away…now your body’s yearning for my touch.” When asked about the song’s popularity, Lucien told Essence some years after “Rashida’s” release, “I don’t know. I guess the time that song came out there was no music like that around. Back then, black men were not singing songs with those kind of lyrics.”
Despite the brilliance of Lucien’s early recordings, he never found the audience he deserved. A subsequent move to CBS, which produced the stellar recordings Song for My Lady and Premonition (which included a lovely remake of Bill Withers’s “Hello Like Before”), did little to enhance Lucien’s sales. With Disco dominating the airwaves of black radio in the late 1970s (Lucien was of course never positioned to cross over), Lucien retreated into a world of depression and cocaine addiction. Reflecting on those years, Lucien told Essence in 1991, “The truth is, I was scared of the business. By the time I made my fifth album I began to realize that that I was doing all the music and coming up with all the ideas…I should’ve been getting producer credit. I just thought, I’ve gotta get out of here.” Lucien’s depression was exacerbated by the drowning death of his infant daughter. It would be nearly a decade before Lucien released another studio recording as he healed emotionally and physically back in the Virgin Islands, where he was born.
Lucien was in the midst of a fairly successful return (at least by smooth jazz standards) when he was forced to bury another daughter. Dalila, Lucien's 17-year-old daughter, was a passenger on the ill-fated TWA 800, which crashed in July of 1996. Saxophonist Wayne Shorter’s wife also perished in the crash; Shorter was Lucien's brother-in-law from an earlier marriage. Like so many of his fans, Lucien found comfort in his music, recording much of 1997's Endless Love while he was in mourning. In the liner notes to the album, which was dedicated to Dalila and all who perished on TWA 800, Lucien wrote, “My infinite love, Dalila: I have always been your father and will continue to be, throughout all our lifetimes, on earth and in forever after. Visit me soon, my darling. You are my music.” And indeed in the last decade of his life, Lucien recorded some of the most personal music of his career, making the break from the dictates of the mainstream labels and founding his own label, Sugar Apple.
Lucien spent much of his later years battling kidney disease—he received a transplant a few years ago—and ultimately it was complications from that disease that called him home. Lucien bravely told Richard Harrington back in 2003 that “I’m not going anywhere until the Lord wants me.” And apparently on August 18, 2007, the Lord had need of a rich Caribbean baritone, but as Lucien told his own Dalila, the spirit of Jon Lucien will live on in his song.
Love Me Tender: The Complex Legacy of Elvis Presley
In a televised interview about a decade before his death, Ray Charles was asked to comment on the legacy of Elvis Presley, and to paraphrase, he responded that Presley didn’t do anything but shake his ass and black folk been doing that for centuries. As a contemporary of Presley and a musical innovator in his own right, Charles could afford to be a little salty, but his comments capture the view from this critic, that so much of what does make Presley important has little to do with the music he recorded.
To be fair, on the issue of race, Presley has often been the target of blame for nefarious practices that were not of his making. Yes, Presley may have covered Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog” (written by two young white Jewish guys Leiber and Stoller) or Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right," but Presley’s motivations for recording those songs likely had more to do with an affection for the music. Presley was exposed to rhythm & blues, gospel, country and the nascent strains of rockabilly in his early years and simply sang the music that was always in his head. The same can’t be said about record company executives who quite consciously mined the black rhythm & blues charts—the race music charts—to find songs that could be covered by white artists like Georgia Gibbs, Patti Page, and Pat Boone who were part of a cottage industry of covering songs by Ruth Brown and Little Richard. The race politics of the time made it difficult for black artists to get the support and distribution to gain mainstream audiences and Presley often gets unfairly indicted here, because he was simply the most popular and visible of those white artists singing so-called "black" music.
Presley has also been judged by the myth the he was racist, purported to once utter that “all black folks can do is by my records and shine my shoes.” The quote has long been proved a myth and many of Presley’s black contemporaries—B.B. King in particular—have often described him as respectful to them and their music. But there is no way to discuss Presley without dealing with the reality of race. Simply put, if Presley had been a black man, there would be nary a mention of the 30th anniversary of his death. Instead, I’d like to argue that Presley’s lodging into the consciousness of America has little to with his music—enjoyable yes, groundbreaking no—but has everything to do with notions of white male sexuality that he unleashed to the American public.
Presley’s primary competitors within the pop music industry in the mid-1950s were older white male crooners like Perry Como, Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra. Many of the more than 60 million people who tuned into the Ed Sullivan Show in September of 1956, did so, so that they could see Presley—unlike those aforementioned singers—“shake his ass”. Indeed when Presley appeared on the show for a third time, a year later, CBS famously shot him from only from the waist up, choosing to censor the wild gyrations that Presley engaged in. Prior to Presley’s emergence, black bodies often served as metaphors for the dangerous excesses of sexuality in American society, but Presley’s embrace of American youth music--and black masculine expression--transferred those anxieties on to white masculinity. Pop music would never be the same and figures such as Mick Jagger, Jim Morrison, and even Marvin Gaye, Kurt Cobain and D’Angelo all benefited from the presence of Presley as the prototypical sexualized male pop icon.
While we can lament that it was Presley’s whiteness that made him the lasting icon that he his, his legacy is much more complicated. Indeed, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and notably Ray Charles were never gonna achieve Presley’s status, in large part, because they were black and could not circulate through American culture in what was still a critically racist society. Ironically it was Presley’s embrace of rhythm and blues music that created a wider audience for it and allowed many of those aforementioned black artists to cross-over. Ultimately though, the fervor that exists over Presley, thirty-years after his death, has to do with what he represents to those who hark back to a more comforting view of American society. The young Elvis Presley is a reminder of that last moment of American innocence—before the watershed moments of the Civil Rights Movement, before the Vietnam war became the definitive generational divide, and before the End of Camelot. As America is continuously rendered as anything but innocent—and legitimately so—Elvis Presley’s legacy offers a comforting cocoon.
Faith in Rhythm
“Somewhere I hear a revival/somewhere I hear BOP playing/It is playing in the hip-hop walks/of young boys who hit strange notes with hands on triggers/Bam, Bam, Bam MAX MIX UP the BEAT!”—Umar Bin Hassan, “AM”
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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.
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I saw Max Roach just once—he was quietly sitting, with a lovely, younger woman sitting next to him before a performance of the Alvin Ailey Dance troupe. Emboldened as I was by those heady days in the early 1990s—the Book of Tate still clearing space in my brain—I simply walked up to him and introduced myself. Mr. Roach was cordial—he was very enamored with that woman sitting by his side—and I not so gracefully walked backed to my seat, ebulliently saying to my new bride “that was Max Roach!”
What's an R&B Girl to Do?
Let me be clear upfront; there’s little that I personally find “girlish” about Deborah Cox or Amel Larrieux. They are, by all accounts, fully grown women. But grown-women—grown black women—seemingly are of little value in the world of contemporary R&B, and increasingly within commercial culture in general—unless they can sell cleaning products or deliver punch-lines with the panache of a tired cleaning woman. Thus the 30-somethings Cox and Larrieux find themselves out of favor to the fickle audiences that the music industry has coalesced around contemporary R&B and have to find new venues to ply their trade. While generational peers have either been musically born again (Kelly Price and Chante Moore) or steadfastly trying to compete with coquettish divas five or ten years their junior (Tamia, Brandy and Monica immediately come to mind), Cox and Larrieux have surprisingly staked out a claim in the world of jazz standards.
Deborah Cox has always possessed a lovely, if not strikingly distinct, vocal instrument. And while she never simply blended in with the crowd, she also is not the kind of artist that audiences, save hardcore fans, have missed. In this sense Cox’s decision to take on the legacy of Dinah Washington with Destination Moon entails less risk than it might have for vocalists on that next commercial tier and likely provides a genuine opportunity for Cox to develop a new audience. Washington is a formidable figure; her ability to brawl with the rhythm & blues boys of the late 1940s and sweetly nuance big-band arrangements on signature tunes (now standards) like “What a Difference a Day Makes” and “This Bitter Earth” made Washington one of the unique female vocalist of the 20th century. Cox wisely chooses the more softer tones in Washington’s oeuvre—covering the aforementioned “This Bitter Earth," “What a Difference a Day Makes,” and “Destination Moon”—though she does more than credible renditions of “Misery” and “Baby You’ve Got What it Takes.”
In this regard Destination Moon recalls an earlier Washington tribute album. Arguably Aretha Franklin’s Unforgettable: A Tribute to Dinah Washington was the great Aretha album, before she broke through commercially 40 years ago this summer with I Have Never Loved a Man. Michael Awkward writes in his new book, Soul Covers, that Franklin’s tribute was a “compelling manifestation of [Franklin’s] early attempts to master the nuances of black vocal traditions.” As Awkward notes, the Washington tribute album was produced during Franklin’s six-year apprenticeship at Columbia records and it was only after her subsequent move to Atlantic in late 1966 that she became the singer that we all know her as. And perhaps Destination Moon is Cox’s opportunity to begin honing and expanding her craft, but the fact that she is doing so more than a decade into career is yet another example of the fundamental ways that the recording industry has changed in the last two decades. Under contemporary conditions, even Franklin wouldn’t have survived lean years, like the ones she had at Columbia before becoming the “Queen of Soul.”
Amel Larrieux initially broke through as one half of Groove Theory, a formation that woefully underutilized her musical sensibilities. As the daughter of noted dance critic and scholar Brenda Dixon Gottschild, it made sense that Larrieux found traditional '90s R&B somewhat confining. Infinite Possibilities (2000), Larrieux’s debut recording, possessed an independent spirit that Epic, her label at the time, struggled to market, even during the height of the so-called neo-Soul moment. Forming Blisslife records with her husband, Larrieux literally chose an independent path for subsequent releases including Braveheart (2004), Morning (2006) and the recent Lovely Standards. On the latter, Larrieux takes on the music of Frank Loesser (“If I had a Bell”), Rodgers & Hammerstein (three tunes, including “Younger than Springtime”) and Duke Ellington (“I Like the Sunrise”). And thankfully, there is no a drum machine to be found.
The feel throughout Lovely Standards is much more intimate than Cox’s Destination Moon, and though it’s easy to read both recordings through some nostalgic lens that places these songs and their songwriters in dogged opposition to those produced for the current crop of R&B divas, the fact of the matter is that Cox and Larrieux provide these songs with a youthfulness that might, in fact, introduce the standards to a younger generation.
Finding Forever, Finding Nina
Though Nina Simone died little more than four years ago and is 40 years removed from her commercial peak, her music—and spirit—continues to be recalled and resurrected in the music of the hip-hop generation. The most recent occasion is Common’s just released Finding Forever, where his “Misunderstood” (with brilliant production from Devo Springsteen) is framed by a live version of Ms. Simone’s “Don’t Let Me Be Understood”. It is arguably the most arresting (though “Driving Me Wild” with Lily Allen comes close) tune on Finding Forever. And such is the case in virtually every popular instance that the hip-hop generation summons Ms. Simone’s essence.
More than a decade ago it was Lauryn Hill who referenced Ms. Simone in a bid to attach some relevance to her presence in an industry largely tailored to young men with little motivation to be creative. “I could do what you do, EASY!” Hill told her peers, “so while you imitatin' Al Capone/I be Nina Simone and defecating on your microphone.” There are those of us who wonder what the world might be like if El Hajj Malik El Shabazz or Ella Baker would have circulated through American culture to the extent that second-rate rappers and NFL players on paid administrative leave do so now. Hill’s lyrics were a reminder that when Ms. Simone had the mic in her hand and indeed had the attention of the nation, she made real, real.
With the exception of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit," Ms. Simone’s “Mississippi Goddamn” ranks as one of the most incendiary songs every recorded by a black artist in the United States (though if thinking across the Afropolitan landscape, we’d of course have to mention Fela Kuti and Robert Nesta Marley). And not to discount the work of artists like Chuck D or Paris, but neither was going to be physically lynched or murdered for recording “Welcome to the Terrordome” or “Bush Killa.” The threats to Ms. Simone’s body, spirit and livelihood were real as she told the American public that “I hope you die, die like flies” in response to their failure to come to grips with the so-called race question.
Many of the recent tributes to Nina Simone seem to gloss over the fact that Ms. Simone was known to have a personality that could be best described as ornery. Ms. Simone’s bitterness was likely the product of the social, artistic and political expectations singularly placed on her, given the reality of the centrality of her music to social movement across the globe. And as a women performer who likely toured with far too few other women in her entourage and far too few people who understood the realities of black female celebrity—and we could include the late Esther Phillips and Phyllis Hyman to the equation for the sake of argument—Ms. Simone likely had little recourse other than to embrace caricatures of her that suggested that she was “difficult.” Ironically, Ms. Simone is probably more relevant to understanding Ms. Hill’s current legacy than she was a decade ago.
Part of what Nina Simone gave voice to were the losses. One of her signature tunes, “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” was written in tribute to her friend, playwright Lorraine Hansberry (author of A Raisin in the Sun), who died prematurely of cancer. By the time she recorded “Why? (The King of Love is Dead)” shortly after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.'s (“will the murders never cease?”) the losses were mounting. In a live concert recorded shortly after King’s death, Ms. Simone quietly recalls the immediate losses—Langston Hughes, John Coltrane, Otis Redding, literally within months of each other—as she ask “do you realize how many we have lost?” And this is not to forget the nameless and faceless masses who regularly sacrificed limb, sanity and life for the movement.
For the hip-hop generation, the losses have been indexed in the literal tremors of Mary J. Blige’s voice. As the late Sekou Sundiata said so eloquently about Blige “so… she sings in and out of key/your voice shakes too when the truth comes due.” Thus it was so fitting when Blige and Ms. Simone finally had the opportunity to sit down and digitally break bread courtesy of will.i.am on Blige’s “About You.” When Blige echoes Simone’s “You know how I feel” on the song’s chorus a real cross-generation connection is made between the singular voices of the Civil Rights and hip-hop generations.
Of course it was Talib Kweli, son of a literary critic and scholar, who really brought Nina Simone into the hip-hop generation’s gaze. Inspired by the late Weldon Irvine, Jr, Ms. Simone’s longtime musical director, Kweli’s “For Women” (from Reflection Eternal) was a brilliant update on Ms. Simone “Four Women.” As Michael Eric Dyson wrote at the time, “By baptizing Simone’s sentiments in a hip-hop rhetorical form, Kweli raises new questions about the relation between history and contemporary social practice, and fuses the generational ambitions of two gifted artists.” As Common’s “Misunderstood” suggest, the hip-hop generation continues to drink from the waters of Nina Simone and the music of that generation is all the better for it.
Compared to What?
A few years ago, after the release of Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape, I made the point that MeShell Ndegeocello—revolutionary Soul singer—was the artistic progeny of Eugene McDaniels. To many, McDaniels is still an obscure figure, though his composition “Feel Like Making Love” is one of Roberta Flack’s most well known hits. Unfortunately McDaniels was not too obscure for former Vice President Spiro Agnew, who was rumored to give Ahmet Ertegun, the late founder of Atlantic Records, a call in the early 1970s to complain about the criticisms of the Nixon administration that McDaniels lodged throughout his underground classic Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse. McDaniels was dropped from the label shortly thereafter.
Ironically, McDaniels’s most stinging critique, “Compared to What?”, was not even on Headless Heroes, but was recorded a few years earlier by the aforementioned Flack (on her debut First Take) and Eddie Harris and Les McCann, who recorded a live version at Montreux in 1969. Lyrics like “The President, he's got his war/Folks don't know just what it's for/Nobody gives us rhyme or reason Have one doubt, they call it treason” were just as politically relevant in 2003 when the Coca-Cola company remixed to song for their “Real, Compared to What?” campaign, which featured Common, Musiq and Donnie, among others. I can’t imagine that McDaniels was happy about his artistic legacy was being reduced to selling brown caffeinated fizz.
Fast forward to 2007 and it’s Ndegeocello that makes good, recording a version of “Compared to What?” on the soundtrack to Talk to Me, the recent Don Cheadle biopic about the legendary black radio personality Petey Green. Ndegeocello’s version invest the song with a sparseness, that plays closer to the Flack version of the song than the much more well-known Harris and McCann version. As usual Ndgeocello has a way with making songs her own, whether it’s Jimi’s “May This Be Love” (from Bitter) or her breathtaking remake of “Fantasy” on the recent Earth, Wind and Fire tribute recording.
On “Compared to What?” she also makes subtle lyric changes—“possession is the motivation” becomes “possessions are the motivation”—changes that makes us all complicit in ways that I don’t think the McDaniels original intended. But that has always been the genius of Ndgeocello—her ability to hold a mirror up to the culture by holding that mirror up to herself and the folk first. And tragically, folk still ain’t checking her out the way they should. With The World Has Made Me The Man Of My Dreams (her 7th full-length recording) due in the fall, hopefully some of that will change.
Freedom’s Desire
“I’m someone who will get heated about politics,” rapper Pharoahe Monch tells Time Out New York’s Jesse Serwer, adding that “then the next minute, I just want to lay back with a glass of Hennessy and suck on some big ol’ titties.” To which critic Jalylah Burrell astutely observes that Monch “exhibits a Black square male anxiety that undermines the cool pose he’s trying so hard to assume.” A squareness that, she argues, “circumscribes all Black males who aren’t thugging and or/pimping.” Monch has likely been taking notes from Common—and both no doubt remember the challenges Big Daddy Kane faced nearly 20 years ago trying to channel his inner Al Green in a world for which most would have preferred Malcolm X. And it’s not that we haven’t desired our AfroBoHo icons (damn near all nerds in reality) in sexual terms—I’m thinking of the Stephen Shames photo of a bare-chested Huey Newton holding a copy of a Bob Dylan album (which incidentally graces the cover of Robert Reid-Pharr’s new book Once You Go Black) and have you seen Zadie Smith lately for that matter—but we are disturbed when our heroes speak back to our desires. We forget, perhaps, that our heroes often desire the very freedom(s) that we have emboldened them to purchase on our behalf—freedom(s) amorphous, personal and yes, carnal.
Desires for freedom or better yet freedom’s desire is palpable throughout Pharoahe Monch’s new recording. Desire opens with a rendition of the Negro spiritual “Oh Freedom” which segues into the Monch original “Free.” In the hands of another artist this might be an all-too-obvious nod to yet another drama about a rank-and-file rapper locked into a label deal that they didn’t like; Of course it’s about the paper—like our icons shouldn’t want to be fairly compensated for their talents (“Your A&Rs the house, the label’s the plantation/Now switch that advance for your emancipation/MCs in the field, like pick cotton for real”)—but, Monch offers a more generous view.
"Oh Freedom” is a obvious reference to Black America’s “greatest generation”—Nina Simone could have been shot for writing and singing “Mississippi Goddamn”—while the lyrics to “Free” are legitimately obsessed with clarifying the means of production of the very thing Monch desires your consumption of. But when Monch employs some of the on-the-ground rhetoric of the Civil Rights Movement in “Free’s” chorus (“you can spit in my face/hold me down/I’ll keep my feet firm to the ground/Because I’m free”) the point is powerfully made that freedom has always been a thing of perspective; I believe I be, therefore I be.
We talk little about freedom these days; Fitting perhaps for something that might have only been tangible for those generations, who could only imagine walking off the very plantations—or into the voting booths—that fueled their spirits of resistance and desires for freedom in the first place. Freedom’s power was the way that it powered our imaginations—our desires for that “something else”—an open signifier for the comforts that we need to get from day-to-day. Freedom doesn’t guarantee that you won’t be Sean Bell or Kathryn Johnston; Freedom only dictates that you have faith in the processes that bring recourse and in that regard, perhaps we’ve never been free.
And this is where I give the rappers—some of them artists—credit. Too often those on the Left romanticize about the salt-of-the-earth Negroes, who encouraged the outrage against American apartheid, as if they remain unchanged since 1947. Rappers have been so much better at this. Here’s a game for you: Find the rapper that demands recourse from the State (“you mean ‘New Jersey’? as Tony Soprano queries daughter Meadow”)? Say what you will about the gleeful celebration of illicit economies—and I ain’t romanticizing about them MFers on their criminal grinds—but this is a do-for-self-generation. What James say, “open up the door, I get it myself.” Thus when, Monch gives love to his “blue collar workin', beer guzzlin', bootleg DVD sellin', keep hustling” peers (though he left out the strip club workers, that he obviously knows a little bit about) on “Push,” freedom resonates in a way that is more than tangible—it’s real.
