JULY 2015 ISSUE
A sneaky peek of just some of what is in the July 2015 issue!
Tahirah Memory
Some of our jazzier readers will doubtless be familiar with the name Thara Memory. Well, it so happens, at the beginning of last year, that the Grammy winning arranger, trumpeter, bandleader and educator from Portland, Oregon was putting together a band for a performance in town – a show intended to feature his daughter Tahirah as one of three lead vocalists – when, on the day of the event, the other female singer pulled out due to serious illness. Who could he look to at only a few hours notice to plug the gap? Trumpeter and former student Farnell Newton had the answer: call Jarrod Lawson…
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Beres Hammond
It’s show time, and 5,000 people rise to their feet as a short, bespectacled, middle-aged Jamaican strides onto the stage with his shirt hanging out and wearing a string vest, his leather flat cap now a trademark after years of good service. This is Beres Hammond, and the reception he gets whenever he plays in England is the same. At the front there’s an army of women dressed to impress, and who’ll sing along with him all night – especially on songs like Can’t Stop A Man, Tempted To Touch and They Gonna Talk. No one sings about love and relationships with such tender insight as Beres Hammond, although he’s far from being your typical heartthrob, and spends no time at all worrying about his image…
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Slum Village
“We kinda like the rap Temptations. You could say that, you could definitely say that,” says Slum Village’s T3 on the phone from Detroit. “But here’s the thing: anytime you go through a 20-year career, a lot of things are going to happen.”
That’s something of an understatement. Slum Village, the Detroit group who started as a trio in the late ‘90s, have undergone the kind of knocks that most groups wouldn’t be able to recover from. That T3 is still here to tell the tale is credit to his persistence.
Having lost two original members in Dilla and Baatin to the great block party in the heavens, T3 is the only founder member of the group still alive [Young RJ, the other member in the current line-up began producing for the group in the mid-‘00s]. “The reason I always wanted to keep it going, and RJ wanted to keep it going, is to keep the legacy,” he asserts…
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Bilal
As much as To Pimp A Butterfly floats the proverbial boat for its lyrical content, the musical form of Kendrick Lamar’s chef d’oeuvre should not go unnoticed. The first hip-hop album in an age to use horns and hard swing as well as a backbeat benefits from the presence of a coterie of fine jazz musicians, as Bilal, another stellar guest, relates.
“He had all of my friends on there – Terrace Martin, Robert Glasper, Thundercat… these are guys I know on the jazz scene. It was really hilarious to come to the studio and see these characters in there!
“That was one of the things that made me love what Kendrick was doing,” Bilal says, chuckling slyly. “Bringing together these incredible musicians pushing the envelope of black music…to collect those people and put them together made me respect him more as an artist.”…
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