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 of homage, the same musicians returned to London’s Barbican on September 11th, this time to celebrate the legacy of the Black Panthers.

The full blog post, on the Tongues on Fire: A Tribute to the Black Panthers performance in London, is at INTELLIGENT LIFE, and also continues here, after the jump.

Photo: archie4oz

Founded in Oakland, California in 1966, this revolutionary African-American organisation was created by those who had lost faith in the power of non-violence to face down police brutality. At the time the FBI labelled the group the greatest threat to America’s internal security. The party ended up disbanding in the 1980s.

For this show the group called themselves Tongues on Fire and included Corey Glover, a vocalist from the band Living Colour, along with Abiodun Oyewole and Umar Bin Hassan of the Last Poets, a spoken-word collective that began in New York in the late 1960s and is generally credited as a precursor to politicised hip-hop. Together they performed compositions that blended funk, soul, rock, hip hop, reggae, and free-form jazz. As the band played, collages of images created by Emory Douglas, longtime Minister of Culture for the Panthers, were displayed across three large film screens inside the auditorium at London’s Barbican Centre.

Douglass’ drawings, now over 30 years old, are still powerful. His stylised images of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger floated across the screens alongside those of Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton, who founded the Panthers. Phrases such as “US govmt stop killing black people now”, “kill the pigs”, and “community control of the police” scrolled across those images.

When asked how he hoped the audience would respond to the performance, Oyewole, a spoken-word artist, said, “They’re people. They understand the problems we had and still have. And the Panther movement is well-documented. These people have ears that can understand.”

More Intelligent Life asked David Murray to elaborate on the performance, the music and the legacy of the Black Panther Party.

More Intelligent Life: Why did the members of Tongues on Fire decide to get together?

David Murray: We were asked by producer Valérie Malot, who had a long association with The Last Poets and Living Colour. The Roots and I met in the 80′s and I played on one of their earlier records. Umar Bin Hassan and Abiodun Oyewole sent four poems each, which I observed and edited for three weeks before I wrote a note. Eighty hours later, I had finished the eight compositions.

MIL: How much time was spent preparing and rehearsing?

DM: The concert in London was the result of one studio rehearsal in New York, a
rehearsal in London and an extended sound-check prior to the concert.

MIL: What do the Panthers and the artwork of Emory Douglas mean to you?

DM: The history of the Panthers was part of my maturation in the Bay Area growing up. The Black Churches, The Nation of Islam, R&B scene, Blues scene and the Hippie Movement were also were also integral to my development as a musician. The Panthers are pillars of the neighbourhood of which I lived in Berkeley. The work of Emory Douglas was extremely visible throughout the scene.

MIL: What specific aspects of the Black Panther legacy are Tongues on Fire
celebrating, and why?

DM: The positive aspects come to mind when reflecting on the Panthers. The food and childcare programmes. The gathering and self-awareness rallies. The Panther Church. Getting young people interested in organising communities and helping people.

MIL: What are the most relevant attributes of the Black Panthers to people in 2010?

DM: It’s important that black people today from different countries unite instead of
just functioning with those from their specific ethnic and tribal communities. In Paris only a few years ago, after the suburbs fires, they formed a black coalition for the first time. The Black Panther party was part of that.

MIL: What does the legacy of the Black Panthers mean to you?

The Panthers were a transparent organisation, which was advanced at the time.
Their willingness to bear arms was a gutsy tactic which challenged the US constitution. Hopefully their experience will inspire the next generation of African people in the world led by our highly intelligent leader, Barack Obama, and other prominent leaders will encourage our people to move ahead and prosper.

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 at INTELLIGENT LIFE.

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% since 2002. The median age of concert patrons in 2008 was 46; in 1982 it was 29.

But jazz is not dead, yet. Among other groups, Skerik’s Syncopated Taint Septet is proof:

The full blog post, on the status of Jazz in 2009, is at INTELLIGENT LIFE.

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 are incendiary and violent moments throughout the film (based on actual events), but there is also plenty of humour and humanity.

The full blog post, on the 20th anniversary screening of Do The Right Thing in London, is at INTELLIGENT LIFE.

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 room and it would survive the launch unscathed.

The full blog post is at INTELLIGENT LIFE.

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 on the Ethiopiques album series (which came out in the 1990s to spotlight Ethiopian music from the 1960s and ’70s). He was also a guest artist with the Duke Ellington orchestra when they played Ethiopia in the ’70s.

At his recent performance at Koko in Camden, Astatke, now in his late 60s, took the helm at the vibraphone, surrounded on all sides by the younger members of the Heliocentrics on horns, cello, percussion, drums, guitar, keys and bass. Cutting through lush textures of organ, guitar and bass, Astatke hunched over the vibes and went to work.

The full post is at INTELLIGENT LIFE.

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 getting together just two days prior to an upcoming performance, the results will be anyone’s guess. “The performance will be raw, often improvised,” Shlomo wrote. “Maybe not the most polished or slick of performances, but hopefully you’ll get some real magic in there.”

The full blog post is at the NEW YORK TIMES

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 mastery at the level of Mix Master Mike or DJ Premier.

Two young men make up Playdoe: Spoek and Sibot, a black rapper and a white scratch champion, both from Johannesburg. At a recent concert at the Social, a tiny underground bar just outside London’s Soho, Sibot, wearing a T-shirt and a sideways-tilted baseball cap, manned the turntables while Spoek, in high-tops, faded purple jeans and an African kofia-styled hat, worked the microphone, occasionally touching various keys and knobs next to him onstage.

The full blog at INTELLIGENT LIFE

I was reluctant to pick the book up because I prefer to think of Run as he used to be: an MC for one of the most influential and popular New York hip hop acts of the 80s. It’s Run, after all, who convinced me that I needed to wear white hi-top sneakers with bright, fat laces to my middle school every day. Today, it’s safe to say he’s convincing folks to do a lot more than just wear cool kicks.

The full blog post at Mother Jones.

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.