APRIL 2014 ISSUE
A sneaky peek of just some of what is in the April 2014 issue
Robin McKelle
Not everyone who grows up loving the music of Memphis gets to visit the city. Indeed, singer-songwriter Robin McKelle freely admits that it wasn’t until shortly before she began recording her fine new album for Okeh, Heart Of Memphis, that she actually spent time there – even though, as a child, her adoration for records by such as Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin had her swooning over that gritty southern soul sound. In the event, standing outside Stax and Sun studios, walking past the Lorraine Motel [where Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968] and generally inhabiting the same streets as many of her heroes and heroines, turned out to be every inch the thrill that she’d hoped for.
“I met Scott Bomar for a few days prior to recording, so as to get a feel for the place,” she says. “Sure enough, I was overwhelmed with the emotion I felt just from being there. It’s more than the music, of course; it’s the social history…
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Sam Prather
“I spent three years on this record. When I first started making it, I’d talk to my friends about direction. Some of them told me to make a smooth-jazz album, keep it right down the middle and try and make some money. Another one said, ‘Think about it: how many records will you get a chance to make in your career? You might as well make the record that you really want to make now’. So that’s what I did. If somebody gets a chance to hear it, they’ll find out who I am.”
Thus speaks Samuel Prather, DC born, bred and educated pianist, drummer and vocalist, of his superb second album, G.O!. The Samuel Prather Groove Orchestra, filled, as it is, with Sam’s buddies from Howard University and the wider Washington DC area – such as upright bassist Kris Funn [Kenny Garrett, Christian Scott], guitarist Samir Moulay [Macy Gray, Lonnie Liston Smith], and saxophonist Elijah Balbed [Larry Willis, Chuck Brown] plus guest vocalists Shacara Rodgers, Christie Dashiell and Micah Robinson – has undoubtedly provided us with one of the sparkiest listens of 2014 so far…
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Chuck Inglish
When the Cool Kids debuted in 2007, rap-revivalism was still a niche interest. Fast-forward seven years and the Chicago duo’s retro-nouveau approach now looks oddly prescient.
In today’s hip-hop world, rappers are finding ever new ways to tip their hats to the past. There’s Action Bronson making a career out of pretending he’s Ghostface circa Supreme Clientele, Joey Bada$$ revisiting ‘90s New York and A$AP Rocky dovetailing the lineages of Memphis and Harlem. Rap has never been on better terms with its history. The jury might still be out on whether this is all for the genre’s good, but Chuck Inglish – one half of the Cool Kids – can’t see what the problem is.
“The old school is where it started,” he says on the phone from LA, quite reasonably. “There’s nothing wrong with referencing what the fuck it started from. Some time, shit gets lost, and if you wanna represent what you grew up listening to, like I do, then I don’t wanna be in a hybrid genre. If I wanna make a rap album, I just wanna make a rap album.”
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Vijay Iyer
Literature has long been a well-known source of inspiration for jazz musicians and visual art has not lagged far behind. If the impact of painter Jean-Michel Basquiat on Jason Moran is well known, then another American keyboard maverick, Vijay Iyer, has drawn much stimulus on creations for the eye as well as ear. He is keen to discuss the importance of sculptor Rina Bannerjee to his new album Mutations.
“I was really intrigued by her work,” Iyer tells me via skype. “She was dealing with elements of the grotesque and the beautiful side by side, using her work as a platform to address questions of otherness, in the early part of the last decade, post 9/11 years. We were in this atmosphere of fear of the other, surveillance, mistrust and disgust.
“There was this weird conflation of alien and disease. She was exploring the collective unconscious and questions of race and identity through that work. That was partly what inspired the piece.”
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