Remembering David Mancuso, Loft Lord

When placed in chains, they created spirituals that gave birth to much of the music you hear today. Gave them tough, green leaves — long thought to be degenerative cabbage shoots — and the resulting simmered collard greens they made have graced the menus of countless restaurants. Shut their writers out of the mainstream publishing […]

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 […]

AN ALBUM (OR TWO) IN MY HEAD (0062)

JOSÉ JAMES YESTERDAY I HAD THE BLUES: THE MUSIC OF BILLIE HOLIDAY BLUE NOTE 2015 An interesting personal but peripheral observation: I couldn’t immediately come up with a list of male baritone Jazz vocalists whom I listen to on a regular basis. My personal prejudice probably relegated baritones to R&B or Country-Western music, I’m not […]

AN ALBUM (OR TWO) IN MY HEAD (0057)

My blog will eventually cover music and other creative paths with as much passion as what I currently place on the news or social topics of the day. A step toward this goal will be to publish weekly bits which will highlight one or two albums I’ve been playing during the past week. I don’t want you to think these […]

RONALD SHANNON JACKSON, 1940-2013

I delayed making this post about drummer and composer Ronald Shannon Jackson because a part of me hoped that the news was a bad rumor, but I consider Vernon Reid an extremely reliable source for this instance—Ronald Shannon Jackson has left us at the age of 73. I’ve written on another site about my […]

GOODBYE, RICHIE HAVENS

Hearing that Richie Havens passed away this week after 50 years of delivering beautiful music to the world doesn’t blunt this sharp sense of loss. Havens’ singing voice riveted to my brain the first time My Father played his records during my early childhood. I was very familiar with Folk music at this point […]