BERNIE WORRELL AND THE BEAUTIFUL AFRICAN AESTHETIC

Losing Bernie Worrell to cancer last Thursday is indeed a sad event, but unlike Prince’s departure, we were given a heads-up that Worrell’s earthly end was near. What makes me equally sad is the vast number of people who don’t know who Bernie Worrell was, and his influence on music. Think about Alexander Pushkin’s enormous […]

LIVE: ANNABEL (LEE) IN L.A.

Annabel (Lee) member Richard E. hipped me to a recently-produced video of the group, armed with an orchestra, performing “Find Me” from their By the Sea … and Other Solitary Places album. I later found a live clip of “Suki Desu” from the group’s YouTube channel. You know how I feel about By the Sea […]

9 PRINCE ALBUMS I PLAY THE MOST

About a year after the release of Prince’s Dirty Mind album, Music industry publication Billboard attempted to answer the question “What is Black music” by creating a Black Singles chart. Reductionist tactics like Billboard’s are worthy of a lengthy post, but I’ll say only this for now: Black creatives and their output over the years […]

PRINCE’S MUSIC WAS REPPING THE BLACK EXPERIENCE FOR 40 YEARS (AND MANY OF YOU DIDN’T KNOW IT)

It’s been about three days after learning that Prince became an ancestor, and the sadness I continue to feel is strange — as if a part of my innards was forcibly extracted, a clearly unhappy event, but my brain refuses to fully compute what just happened. I’m not the only person with out-of-sorts emotions. Prince […]

AN ALBUM (OR TWO) IN MY HEAD 0065

MAXWELL MAXWELL’S URBAN HANG SUITE 1996 20 years ago yesterday, after a bout of hesitation by Columbia Records and Modern Soul recording artist Maxwell, Urban Hang Suite was released to a consumer market where — for right or wrong reasons — American music executives and many performing artists cowered into creative capitulation by the powerful […]

AN ALBUM (OR TWO) IN MY HEAD 0064

GEORGE BENSON THE NEW BOSS GUITAR OF GEORGE BENSON WITH THE BROTHER JACK MCDUFF QUARTET 1964 Understanding why guitarist George Benson is often called Bad Benson requires a simple exercise going play any song with him on it. Bad Benson — who also released a studio album with that moniker in 1974 — made his […]

AN ALBUM (OR TWO) IN MY HEAD 0063

MIROSLAV VITOUS INFINITE SEARCH 1970 If the reputation of bassist Miroslav Vitous is not a sufficiently strong selling point make his album Infinite Search a part of your Jazz music collection, then perhaps these four other band member names are: Jack DeJohnette, Herbie Hancock, Joe Henderson and John McLaughlin. Vitous, 21 years old at the […]

REMEMBERING MAURICE WHITE

Many of us feel pain after hearing the news of Earth Wind and Fire co-founder Maurice White’s return to the Creator. The emotional outflow has been all over social media since last night, and for good reason. Through EW&F, Maurice help to build an African-inflected, multi-genre sound that extended across astral, diasporic, rhythmic and […]

GOODBYE DAVID BOWIE, AND THANK YOU

It’s been almost 24 hours since I heard about David Bowie’s leaving this planet, and I still can’t compute. This isn’t the time to do name-calling, so I’ll simply say that some artists — you know, the ones whose reputations lead with the cars they drive or consumer product tattoos on their faces — will […]

HENRY GRIMES IS 80 TODAY

Jazz great Henry Grimes celebrates his 80th birthday today! You all know how much I dig him at this point. I look forward to hitting his birthday bash this Friday. In case you can’t see Grimes in person this week, watch this clip of him performing at an Arts for Art event earlier this year […]