Last summer members of The Roots performed a fiery tribute to Ornette Coleman, a free-jazz saxophone legend. With Vernon Reid on guitar and David Murray on saxophone, the show featured several generations of inventive African-American musicians on a London stage. The result was largely exciting, occasionally long-winded and certainly momentous. In a similar spirit...
Introducing is a talented, Oxford-based nine-piece band with a very specific goal. Every show they perform is essentially the same. With the exception of slight variations in their encores, the set never changes. Their mission? To perform DJ Shadow’s first LP, “Endtroducing”, in its entirety, from start to finish. The full blog post is...
Long before we debated what real punk-rock was, what true hip-hop was, or what made indie-rock authentic, jazz heads grappled with what is and isn’t jazz music. Now, the debate is whether jazz is dying off or not. America’s jazz audience is not only shrinking, it’s aging. Attendance at jazz performances has dropped 30%...
I’ve seen “Do the Right Thing” many times, and have observed and participated in many debates about its value and meaning. But this particular London screening reminded me of just how well it captures the little things that not only set people off, but also calm them down and even make them laugh. There...
Kanye West’s self-help book is a small, spiral-bound thing, too big for your back pocket but a perfect fit for the coffee table. Its bright yellow, blue, pink and green text is printed on glossy black paper, often in quite large sizes. It’s durable, so much so that you could throw it across the...
In short, Astatke is a big fish in the Ethiopian jazz pond. He studied music in England and is reportedly the first African student to attend the Berklee College of Music in Massachusetts. He’s credited with combining Ethiopian melodies with Western funk and jazz to create what often gets called “hypnotic grooves”, most notably...
If you’re like me, and grew up listening to – and mimicking – cassette recordings of rap artists like Biz Markie and the Fat Boys beat boxing, Shlomo is now on the radar. And not in a throwback, nostalgic kind of way; the Leeds-based, Israeli-Iraqi-German beatbox artist rips it. Since the musicians are only...
Playdoe is difficult to describe in standard hip hop terms. The group lacks the gangsta bravado of NWA, and has none of the political urgency of Public Enemy. There’s no Wu-Tang Clan brashness and little of the slick, polished production of Jay-Z or Kanye West. Don’t expect smooth lyrical flow like Common, or DJ...
Words of Wisdom, a recently published book from Rev Run of Run DMC, is part Stuart Smalley, part Russell Simmons; sort of a pocket-sized, bathroom-reading, Christian alternative to Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power, a book that made rounds in hip hop circles a few years ago. I was reluctant to pick the book...
Boots Riley talked with me about politics, and vented about how the biz shortchanges idiosyncratic bands like the Coup. The INTERVIEW appears on motherjones.com, and appeared in the November/December 2007 issue of Mother Jones Magazine.