July 2008 Archives
A Love Supreme? John Coltrane, Lil Wayne and the Post-Trauma Blues
Tags: Improvisation, John Coltrane, Lil Wayne, Trauma
In his recent essay "Jazz and Male Blackness", scholar and musician Joao H. Costa Vargas describes the jam sessions held at The World Stage, a storefront workshop and performance space held at Leimart Park in South Central Los Angeles. The workshop was founded in the early 1990s by the late legendary jazz drummer Billy Higgins and spoken word poet Kamau Daaood. In the essay Costa Vargas examines the myriad ways that concepts of black masculinity are rendered, maintained, protected and re-imagined, all in the context of the artistic culture that the workshop facilitates. If there is a model of black masculine aesthetics that is more often than not recalled at the World Stage, it is that of John Coltrane. According to Costa Vargas, "Many of the Stage's musicians attempt to evoke the mood produced by John Coltrane's later performances...Fundamentally, most musicians try to perform Coltrane's spiritual intensity and musical seriousness through their personal renditions of tunes."
That John Coltrane would serve as a centerpiece at the World Stage and like-minded artistic collectives is not surprising, as Coltrane has been lionized by Black Arts communities as few others have been. Recalling Gil Scott Heron's "Lady Day and John Coltrane" ("until our hero rides in, rides in, on his saxophone") or Chuck D's assertion that critics treat him like "Coltrane/insane" the saxophonist has, in some sectors, been elevated to superhero status alongside male contemporaries like El Hajj Malik El Shabazz (Malcolm X) and Huey Newton.
Yet the high regard that Coltrane is held is somewhat ironic, given that few, except die-hard fans, know much about the saxophonist's personal life. Whereas figures like Malcolm X, Huey Newton and even jazz peers like Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington were highly visible and celebrities in their own right, Coltrane's existed on a much lower public register. Coltrane's transcendent stature instead has much to do with many of the iconic photographs taken of him in later years (Coltrane was only 40 when he died in 1967), where his image became a literal metaphor for artistic and spiritual integrity. And then of course there was the music, especially signature mid-1960s recordings like "Alabama" and A Love Supreme in which Coltrane seemed to draw directly from the traumatic realities of Black America.
Indeed the photographs of and music from Coltrane are so evocative of the 1960s--and the attendant struggles for Civil Rights, the articulations of Black Power and the embrace of non-Western religions--that many take for granted the genius of his performance in those later years, so much so that A Love Supreme's "Acknowledgment" seems cliché. Though many have described Coltrane's music late in his career as inaccessible, Coltrane was grappling with ways to push beyond the limits of his instrument(s). Every one of the blurts, honks and screams that Coltrane summoned on his way to an aesthetic of free-floating improvisation, was an attempt to bring into the world a tangible representation of the spirituality that his instrument(s) were fundamentally incapable of articulating. As such scholar Aaronette White could persuasively argue 35 years after Coltrane death, that Coltrane's model of improvisation can be used as an example for the "improvisational lives of profeminist men"--the bringing into the world through "stretching, blending, and transforming" a concept that many would have thought impossible.
While Miles Davis's move to plug into the Wah-Wah pad in the early 1970s was rooted in his own desire to hear something different, Coltrane's genius is that the source of his own seeking was his spiritual self. Davis freely admitted that he plugged in to make his music more attractive to black youth, then entranced by the music of Sly & the Family Stone, The Jackson 5 and to a lesser extent Jimi Hendrix--and to reap the financial benefits of such an arrangement. Coltrane, on the other had had little problem alienating mainstream jazz fans and even members of his own quartet, like McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones, in his efforts to find some semblance of spiritual transcendence. Many collective threw up their hands, though two generations later Coltrane remains the ultimate emblem of artistic integrity and his music one of the most enduring references to black trauma.
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No one is mistaking Lil' Wayne for John Coltrane. Debate if you must the merits of Wayne's own claims about hip-hop supremacy, but the reality is that no one on this earth sounds like Weezy. And perhaps that is the point. Two generations ago, Lil Wayne would have been the most popular rhythm and blues (not R&B) singer on the chitlin' circuit, likely making us forget who Bobby "Blue" Bland and Johnnie Taylor were. Many of us expend remarkable (and unremarkable) energy denoting the lyrical atrocities of everybody's favorite commercial rapper (and I stand accused), very few admit that some of these cats matter simply because of the sound of their voice--and in that regard Lil Wayne is peerless.
As such the markings on Wayne's body, like the slurs, blurs, bleeps and blushes of his vocals, index some variety of trauma, that quite frankly, existed well before Hurricane Katrina. Though his comments elicited some laughter, Cornel West recently observed as much when he suggested during CNN's Black in America roundtable that Wayne's physicality bore witness to catastrophic events. Has there ever been a rap figure whose very body articulated such a depth of vulnerability?
Unlike historical figures like Doug E. Fresh and Biz Markie who used their voices to create new sounds, Lil Wayne, like Coltrane is really using his voice to find alternative registers for what has clearly been a life lived in absurdity and pain--even if some of it might have been self inflicted. And perhaps it is as it should be, as Lil Wayne's urges us to come to terms with the first edge of the Post-Katrina Blues.
"Just Be Good to Me": R&B's Forgotton Era (Part 2)
Tags: Clarence Avant, Dick Griffey, Jimmy Jam, SOLAR Records, Tabu Records, Terry Lewis, The S.O.S. Band
The real visionaries of R&B in the late 1970s were two recording industry veterans, who created recording labels out of the ashes of failed projects. Dick Griffey's SOLAR label was born after Griffey parted ways with Soul Train producer Don Cornelius ending their joint venture Soul Train Records. Clarence Avant founded Sussex records in the early 1970s, with Bill Withers as his most prominent artists. After Sussex folded for financial reasons in 1976 (Withers ended up at CBS), Avant returned in 1977 with Tabu Records. What the Griffey and Avant shared was an ability to discover and development new talent.
Among the groups eventually signed to SOLAR were Midnight Starr (and their producing members, the Calloway Brothers), Lakeside ("Fantastic Voyage"), The Whispers ("And the Beat Goes On"), Shalamar ("This is For the Lover in You") and The Deele. Within the The Deele, Griffey identified the producing potential of Kenny Edmonds and Antonio Reid. One of Edmonds's early songwriting efforts was with label-mate Midnight Starr's classic "Slow Jam". By the end on the 1980s Edmonds and Reid were of course popularly known as LaFace, one of the dominant R&B production houses in the period.
At their peak in the late 1980s and early 1990s, LaFace shared a friendly competition with producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. Jam and Lewis initially founded a group in Minneapolis in the early 1980s called Flyte Time. When Morris Day and others joined the group shortly thereafter, they became simply known as The Time and became a part of the musical camp Prince was developing in the Minneapolis area. The group's 1982 debut What Time is It? contains classics like "Gigolos Get Lonely Too" and "777-9311". At the time Jam and Lewis came to the attention of Clarence Avant, who signed the duo to produce the third album of Tabu's best known artists, The SOS Band with Mary Davis on lead vocals. The immediate product of that collaboration was "Just Be Good to Me", which began a string of hits for the SOS Band until Davis departed the group in 1987. When their production responsibilities began to conflict with their work with The Time, Jam and Lewis were famously fired by their management (Prince). Out on their own, they would produce Tabu artists like Alexander O'Neal and Cherrelle and others such as Cheryl Lynn ("Encore"), eventually leading to their groundbreaking work with Janet Jackson with Control (1986).
The seeds to Jam and Lewis's vision can be found in that initial hit they had with the SOS Band. In "Just Be Good to Me", the audacity and brashness of this generation of R&B producers and performers can be easily discerned. The song begins with simple drum programming (and that familiar cowbell), followed by a cacophony of synthesized noise that suggest the coming of something grandiose (you can almost hear God coming over the horizon) before the song settles into a rapid staccatoed dance rhythm neatly packaged inside a rolling baseline. It was a sound, like the post-human noise the Calloway Brothers crafted for Midnight Starr on tracks like "Freak-A-Zoid" and "Wet My Whistle", that simply redefined the sound of R&B with traces of that moment still being heard in the rhythms of the Dirty South. In retrospect, there was no reason for these young producers to think so boldly of themselves, except for the fact that they could--and because R&B mattered so little to the bottom line of the music industry, no one was gonna call these folk on their brash designs.
There no small irony that the major black crossover stars of the era--all unprecedented in many regards--like Prince, Rick James, Whitney Houston, Lionel Richie (whose self-titled solo debut in 1982 was primed to be the Thriller, well before Thriller), Luther Vandross (though it took him longer than the others) and of course Michael Jackson, were all products of the very R&B world that their success helped to obscure. Yet this was the R&B World that kept black radio afloat and primed the success of contemporary artists like Mary J. Blige, Usher Raymond, and Beyonce two decades later.
"Just Be Good to Me": R&B's Forgotton Era (Part 1)
As a practice, R&B music--the more formal corporate product of the post-1970s era--has been given short shrift by the critical intelligentsia. The volume of writing on Soul, Jazz, Hip-Hop and the more traditional Rhythm & Blues has easily dwarfed any significant critical forays into contemporary R&B music, save the brilliant work done by scholars and critics such as Sasha Frere-Jones, Daphne Brooks and Jason King on the hybrid musical landscape that R&B's furtive relationship with hip-hop production has wrought. Even the smart work that Oliver Wang is doing on the retro pop-Soul artists like Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones and Nicole Willisis really a nod to the throwback days of the late 1950s and 1960s.
And if such a gap in critical assessment of R&B exist, nowhere is it more pronounced than in the music produced in the early to mid 1980s--a time when mainstream pop-top-40 radio (after its homophobic and racist retreat from Disco), in concert with MTV's then musical apartheid approach to programming pop music, effectively undermined the social experiment that was pop radio in 1970s. Ironically this was only a few years after many of the major labels had invested heavily in black acts with the hope of crossing those artists over to white mainstream audiences. Enter the recession of the late 1970s and early 1980s and what was left was a musical environment that was as segregated as it was when the "Hot Soul Singles" charts--soon called "Black Singles" charts--were still referred to as the "Race Music" charts.
In this context a generation of artists and producers emerged, with new technologies at their disposal, like the first generation of Roland TR-808 and Linn LM-1 programmable drum machines and very little pressure to make music for the mainstream (read: white folk). For producers like James Mtume, Reggie Lucas, The Calloway Brothers (Reggie and Vincent), and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, the period represented a chance to innovate, while reinvigorating the music in the aftermath of too much infusion of corporate cash. It was George Clinton who famously described the music as "rhythm and bullshit" in the late 1970s, as he called out for "One Nation Under a Groove." As many of these young producers cut their first rugs to Parliament Funkadelic they took heed: "Here's our chance to dance our way, out of our constrictions."
While mixed company in post-Civil Rights, multicultural America can all hum Motown, Atlantic-era Stax, Al Green, Aretha Franklin, and The Stylistics, check the silence when names like Midnight Starr ("Curious"; "Slow Jam") Patrice Rushen ("Forget Me Nots"), The SOS Band ("Take Your Time"; "Weekend Girl"), Frankie Beverly and Maze ("We Are One"; "Before I Let Go"), Stephanie Mills ("Never Knew Love Like This"; "What Cha Gonna do with My Lovin'" ) Atlantic Starr (with Sharon Bryant on lead: "Silver Shadow"; "Send for Me"), The Deele ("Sweet November"; "Two Occasions"), Cheryl Lynn ("Encore"; "Got to Be Real"), Kashif ("Stone Love"; "Are You the Woman?"), Alexander O'Neal ("Fake"; "Criticize"), DeBarge ("Stay with Me"; "I Like It") and Loose Ends ("Slow Down"; ) are rolled out.
There are of course exceptions. A cross-over figure like Chaka Khan managed to straddle the Funk world via her work with Rufus, while her solo career--"I'm Every Women" era Chaka--pivots with the emergence of contemporary R&B. The same can be said for George Benson, who transitioned from elite jazz guitarist to a major purveyor of pop radio-friendly R&B, largely courtesy of his chart-topping ballad "This Masquerade" (1976) and his foot-tapping live remake of The Drifters' "On Broadway" (1977). As with so much so-called black music from the late 1970s and early 1980s, George Benson's success on both the Pop and R&B charts is often forgotten. Musically, Benson's sound was enhanced by his work with band-leader and producer Quincy Jones, who began the 1970s with string of funk-heavy jazz releases (of which Body Heat is most typical) and began to push for a more pop-ish sound (with a nod to Gamble and Huff, I'd say) with the release of Sounds...And Stuff Like That in 1978. Sounds... featured the vocals of goddaughter Patti Austin, Ashford and Simpson, Chaka Khan, Gwen Guthrie and a then unknown Luther Vandross.
For Jones, 1978 marked his first collaboration with Michael Jackson (on the soundtrack for The Wiz), which of course lead to their future accomplishments with Off the Wall (1979), Thriller (1982) and Bad (1987). Of the three albums Jones produced with Jackson, Off the Wall was likely the most influential in the R&B world (see Rod Temperton's song writing for the connection), as young R&B producers drew from the examples of Jones, Gamble and Huff, the aforementioned Clinton, Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers (Chic) and the adult Stevie Wonder to create sounds pitched for the post-Bakke, B-Movie era (with a nod to Gil Scott-Heron).
Great Expectations? Venus and Serena Set Their Own Bar
NBC's annual Breakfast @ Wimbledon broadcast was recently transformed into Breakfast with The Williams, as sisters Venus and Serena held center court. On the line, the Wimbledon Singles Championship at the All-England Club. Though the Williams sisters have long proven their abilities as elite tennis professionals, their presence at center court on a championship day at a Grand Slam event always generates interests--as much for the tennis as for the on-air commentary about their outfits, athleticism and general demeanor.
Venus and Serena Williams have won 14 Grand Slam events between them, including the championship Venus just won against her sister at Wimbledon. Venus's victory--her 5th at Wimbledon, trailing only the legendary Billie Jean King (6), Steffi Graf (7) and Martina Navratilova (9) in number--establishes her as the best grass player of her generation. As for Serena, she has won at the All-England Club twice in her own right, to go with her six other Grand Slam championships. The sisters Williams are by far, the most recognizable current American tennis players. Nevertheless, on-air affirmation of the genius the Williams have displayed throughout their careers has been grudging.
NBC commentator Mary Carrilo, perhaps raised the bar even more in this regard, as she admitted during the championship telecast some disappointment that the sisters hadn't lived up to expectations and become the all-round tennis champions that Chris Everett and the aforementioned King and Navratilova were during their careers. Carrilo went out of her way, while ostensibly congratulating the sisters on their collective performance at Wimbledon, to make that point that the grass courts at the All-England Club favor the most athletic players, hence the domination of the Williams sisters. And while this "brawn over brains" argument remains specious is most respectable circles, Carrilo evoked it to establish a bar between the greatest women players of this generation and the greatest women players of all-time. Fair enough.
Perhaps realizing that she had crossed some line, Carillo quickly added that the Williams sisters had made the choice to engage in other activities, as opposed to someone like Navratilova who did little more than breathe and play tennis (and tearing down more than a few stereotypes in her own right) during a career that spanned four decades. But it is this very point that has made the sisters Williams so refreshing, as the sum total of their success would not be defined by their path-making achievements as black women tennis champions. This is a generational dynamic, established nearly two decades ago when black athletes such as Michael Jordan and Ervin "Magic" Johnson, in particular, sought to brand themselves beyond the arena. The sisters Williams have refined such attempts by becoming fully engaged in their various enterprises like Aneres and Eleven, while still at their athletic peak; a critical decision given how many professional tennis players peak in their mid-twenties.
Father Richard has received much of the credit (and derision) for the success of his daughters, but perhaps the desire of Venus and Serena to be more well-rounded adults represents the influence of the woman who often sits at center court with her heart torn whenever the sisters are forced to play each other. Like Tina Knowles mother of Beyonce and Solange, Oracene Williams represents the kind of force of nature that creates greater expectations for her daughters and so many of our daughters--and this is the part of the story that the Mary Carrilos and John McEnroes of the world will never get right.
--Mark Anthony Neal
