JULY 2016 ISSUE
A sneaky peek of just some of what is in the July 2016 issue – OUT NOW!
Incognito
The internet has its worrying aspects for modern music, but it can be a pretty amazing tool, too. Ever seen the Red Bull Music Academy Youtube videos? Led by their guy Alessio Bertallot, they’ve been putting groups of musicians into a room – occasionally in twos and threes, sometimes by themselves – and getting them to do their thing over an a cappella vocal track by one of the greats, just to see what turns out.
Three years ago, for example, Incognito bossman Bluey Maunick was asked to lay down some rhythm guitar under Marvin Gaye’s vocal from What’s Going On, while, at different times before an after, Thundercat added bass, Nate Smith hit the kit and Jason Lindner played some sparkly keys. The result is, to say the least, well worth Googling. Look out, too, for Bluey’s contribution to Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean alongside Marcus Miller, Billy Cobham, Enric Rava [trumpet] and Stefano Bollani [piano] – try searching for Marvin Gaye All Stars and Billie Jean’s All Stars, respectively.
“You heard those?” smiles Bluey with some pride as we sit down for what’s become our annual chat about the new Incognito album, in a restaurant near Highbury & Islington station. “You only get to listen to it down once and then you gotta go for it… ”
Maxwell
Twenty years ago I took an advance promo copy of Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite to my elder brother’s houseparty up in Yorkshire and a bunch of 40-somethings danced to it like it was the best soundtrack to nighttime fun they had ever heard. They weren’t even soul fans.
Two years later, not long after a record company launch for album number two, Embrya, at the London Aquarium, Maxwell told me he didn’t mind if people found his new musical direction a little hard to fathom at first because his goal was to create an artistic mosaic for his fans – or, at least, those who stayed the course – that would make sense over time.
In 2009 he released BLACKsummers’night, the first of a mooted three-part trilogy that again moved him on into new creative territory, at the same time selling more copies than he’d ever managed before, and backed up by the promise that parts two and three would soon follow. Now, seven more years down the line, and with our hero just passed his 43rd birthday, the first of those successors, BlackSUMMERS’night, is finally upon us.
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Oddissee
“I was watching this documentary on polar bears, and how their environments are endangered as a result of the ice caps receding,” begins Washington-raised rapper-producer Oddisee. “The bear was so attuned to hunting seal, it didn’t know how to eat anything else. So there was a polar bear walking through the Canadian territories, and also a brown bear. The polar bear walked over a stream of salmon, and it walked past berries. The brown bear was gorging on berries. In the end, it flashes to a polar bear rummaging through a garbage bin on the outskirts of town.”
What does this have to do with Oddisee or his music? Simple: the Washington-raised rapper-producer sees a parallel between survival methods in the wild and the music industry.
“That to me,” he says, “is what it feels like when people don’t know the opportunities that they walk past, and what they’re reduced to.”
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Theo Croker
The scientific definition of the term escape velocity is the speed an object must reach in order to leave the gravitational pull. The metaphysical meaning is the state in which a person must vibrate in order to transcend.
Trumpeter Theo Croker drops this knowledge upon me while achieving the quite considerable feat of not sounding like a Paltrowlian celebrity fool with a lifestyle website to promote. We’re sitting in a swish café in central London where the juices, sporting names such as ‘Green Jersey’, ‘Tandem’ and ‘Boris Bike’, offer good health to the body topped with a slice of slick city pretention. Croker’s high tower of dreadlocks marks him out from the shiny suits.
“Yeah, these people look like they’re doing well,” he says wryly.
Escape Velocity is also the title of Croker’s new album – for the reasons stated above – but his choice of a kale, apple, kiwi, lime and ginger cocktail also flows from his commitment to a full-on personal detox. Several years ago, as he was in the middle of a residency in Shanghai, China, Croker hit a wall as the speed of his socializing turned his head.
“I reached the point of overconsumption and overindulgence in everything, from food to drink to… everything… ”
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