She was born Jamesetta Hawkins in Los Angeles in 1938, but her early managers figured Jamesetta would have more allure as Etta James. Though she was anointed the “Matriarch of the Blues”, her honest, expressive vocal style lent itself to various genres, such as rhythm & blues, pop and jazz, and earned her multiple Grammy awards. She opened for the Rolling Stones on several occasions, and was inducted into both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Blues Hall of Fame.

But Ms James didn’t much care for labels. In “Rage to Survive: the Etta James Story”, an autobiography written with David Ritz, she explained that she resented being classified as a blues singer:

Sure, I can sing the blues all night long. I love the blues. I honor the form. But another part of me knows I can sing country and western just as soulfully. Not to mention hard rock. I hate restrictions. The survivor part of me, though, said take the money. And I did.

Plenty of ink has already been spilt over Ms James’s various ups and downs, professionally and personally, her battles with drug addiction, her fearlessness and unfettered persona. In a 1978 interview with NME she even aligned herself with that era’s punks and rock musicians:

“I was originally like a punker, know what I mean, like the punks are today, I’d spit in a minute. And I notice Mick [Jagger] does that same facial expression that I see, so then I sit in the dressing room and I think it’s really weird how these guys have gotten over.”

That fiery spirit reared its head in early 2009, when Ms James derided Beyoncé for her rendition of “At Last” at Barack Obama’s inauguration ball (despite applauding her version of the song on the “Dream Girls” film soundtrack). “I tell you that woman he had singing for him, singing my song—she’s going to get her ass whupped.”

For a 70-year-old woman to still have some heckling in her indicates a rather clear rage to survive, one that accompanied her until her last days at the Riverside Community Hospital in California, where she died on January 20th, aged 73. (In tribute, Beyoncé referred to Ms James on her own official website as “one of the greatest vocalists of our time. I am so fortunate to have met such a queen.”) The Reverend Al Sharpton is expected to preside over Ms James’s funeral this weekend. Others still will dance to her music, nice and slow if they are lucky.

This story originally appeared at THE ECONOMIST.

photo by blogowitz

Galactic has a unique sound built from eclectic influences—jazz, rap, electronica, jam-band music and bounce (a local take on hip hop)—honed over years of performing live. They have shared the stage with B.B. King and The Roots, among others, and they have recorded with a variety of other artists. “From the Corner to the Block” (2007) featured a slew of rappers and MCs including Boots Riley of The Coup and Gift of Gab from Blackalicious.

But the band remains devoted to the New Orleans music scene and often collaborates with local talent. “Ya-Ka-May” (2010), the last album, was a love letter to the city (named after a traditional New Orleans soup). “The Other Side of Midnight” is a fine follow-up, but still no match for seeing these guys in person.

Now on a world tour, the band’s guitarist, Jeff Raines, answered a few questions from the road via e-mail about the new album, the music of New Orleans and learning from other musicians.

Why did you decide to make a live album from New Orleans?

We recorded our new album for a multitude of reasons. First and foremost is that we live here and wanted to record in the most comfortable environment possible. We also wanted to have options in terms of inviting our musician friends from around town to come play. Our own studio is close by. We did our first live album at Tips exactly ten years ago so we felt like it made sense on that level as well.

From a musical or cultural standpoint, what’s changed in New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina?

From a musical standpoint I don’t think all that much has changed since the storm. Certainly in the first few years there were less people playing music and going out to the clubs. These days the club scene seems pretty vibrant. There are new brass bands popping up and the bounce rap scene has been getting some national attention.

How does your new album reflect New Orleans music and culture as it is today?

I think this record reflects what Galactic has been doing recently. We have been touring with a fantastic trombone player so we are bringing a more full-bodied horn section feel. Having Cyril Neville on the show singing at that venue also strikes me as being something special to New Orleans.

How have collaborations changed your sound or approach to songwriting?

When we go into our demo-writing process the material that might lend itself to having some kind of vocal element becomes obvious. We sometimes will send the artist we are working with a few ideas and go from there.

What sets funk apart from other music genres? What makes funk “funk”?

I guess funk represents a certain feel in music that usually makes you want to get up.

What is Galactic’s version of funk? How is your music unique?

We’ve been able to develop a sound over many albums and years of touring. I think a lot of that comes about through a shared history of playing shows together.

You’ve sometimes been called a “jazz jam” band. Do you embrace that or shrug it off?

We don’t pay much attention to names the media invent to try and classify what we are doing.

What’s the most recognisable way New Orleans has shaped the sound of your band?

Through the songs we’ve learned and then done our own versions of. We’ve always covered songs by local brass bands or our local musical heroes. I think learning all this music has affected us as a band.

Galactic is currently on tour. The band is at work on their next studio album, to be released next spring.

The full interview is also at INTELLIGENT LIFE.

Mr. Parker will put this ideology to the test during a July 19 performance in the Purcell Room at London’s Southbank Centre (Belvedere Road; 44-207-960-4200; southbankcentre.co.uk) during the upcoming “Great British Jazz: Six Decades of Tributes, Stories and Improv” festival, which runs through July 26 and will also feature Tomorrow’s Warriors Jazz Orchestra, a tribute to John Dankworth, and the musician Soweto Kinch.

This four-part jazz “mini-series” is just one small part of Southbank’s massive 60th anniversary of the Festival of Britain, which features months of events and performances across many genres. The four jazz concerts are presented as a celebration of key moments in the evolution of jazz in Great Britain and the musicians that helped defined British jazz since the first Festival of Britain took place in 1951.

On July 23, Gary Crosby will lead the Tomorrow’s Warriors Jazz Orchestra as they debut new arrangements by the tenor and soprano saxophonist Steve Williamson, known for his albums that incorporate various American, African and Jamaican influence.

On July 25, “What The Dickens: A Tribute to John Dankworth and the Big Band,” will recount the formation of the Dankworth Seven in 1950 and perform one of the late John Dankworth’s ’60s-era suites. The band is led by Dankworth’s bass-playing son, Alec, and will include artists closely associated with Dankworth bands over the years, including Henry Lowther, Mark Nightingale, Andy Panayi, Tim Garland and Jim Hart.

Lastly, Soweto Kinch, a rapper and saxophonist whose fast, bop-style playing is truly a force to see, will perform a tribute to the alto saxophonist Joe Harriott on July 26 at Queen Elizabeth Hall. Harriott, originally from Jamaica, was a prominent Caribbean British jazz player whose career spanned bebop, free jazz, and fusions of jazz and Indian music.

The full story is at the NEW YORK TIMES

When asked how he compared to other musicians pursuing visual art at the time — Tony Bennett, Joni Mitchell, David Bowie — Davis added, “they paint flowers and [expletive].”

The full blog post, on an exhibition of Miles Davis’ artwork in London, is at the NEW YORK TIMES.

Photo: Compton Cassey Gallery

Several hundred people who gathered at the Southbank Centre to see Soul Rebels Brass Band were so into it the show that they boo-ed loudly when the band did not play an encore. Get the Blessing did its best to deal with an annoyingly delayed sound-check, and Led Bib just blew through their set full-on.

Onstage, 68-year-old Mulatu Astatke is as subtle and understated as the Ethiopian jazz he created. The music, a hybrid of traditional Ethiopian music and jazz, is subdued, somewhat melancholy, and at times psychedelic. Mr Astatke, the originator and composer of songs in this canon, plays his principal instrument, the vibraphone, with a light touch. Between songs, there is no small talk. He thanks the crowd, and coolly introduces the next number.

Mr Astatke has completed a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard and been an artist-in-residence at MIT in recent years. But the seeds of his “Ethio-jazz” were planted in the 1950s and 1960s when he studied classical and jazz composition in Britain and America and honed his techniques while at Berklee College of Music, where he was the first African student. On visits to New York he hung out with jazz musicians such as John Coltrane and performed with the Duke Ellington orchestra in Ethiopia in the 1970s.

The full interview with Mulatu Astatke is at the ECONOMIST. The interview also continues here, after the jump.

Mr Astatke’s name resurfaced in 2005, when his compositions appeared in the soundtrack of Jim Jarmusch’s film Broken Flowers. A busy time of performing, recording, teaching, and composing has since followed.

Mr Astatke is doing a world tour at the moment and Baobab spoke to him on his London stop when he performed at the Barbican Centre with the London-based group, The Heliocentrics.

Baobab: While at Berklee in the late 1950s and early 1960s, you started to combine what you were learning about jazz theory with the Ethiopian music you had grown up with. How did that happen?

Mulatu Astatke: My experiences in Boston and New York opened my eyes. I became a student of jazz composition and learnt how the music comes together. It helped me quite a lot, and helped me to find Ethio-jazz. There were so many great musicians at that time, and I lined up with everyone else to watch them. I met John Coltrane, I saw Bud Powell. Now I see people lining up to see me in Paris and Berlin. That’s so beautiful to me. I’ve been very lucky.

Baobab: Since then you seem to have focused on fusing traditional Ethiopian music with jazz and worked hard to develop a distinct voice and style. Is that fair?

MA: Fusion and contribution, that’s my thing. There have been tribes in Ethiopia for centuries. Then we see Charlie Parker and the music he’s playing using diminished chords. I always say that Africa gave to jazz its whole feeling and conception. Not only the drums, but the science. Musicians are like scientists, just with different chemicals. There’s no difference between science and music, we just deal with sound. We are scientists of sound.

Baobab: Ethio-jazz has a melancholy sound to it. Why is that?

MA: We play five against twelve. This is a pentatonic scale that has been fused with a 12-tone progression. My thing was to combine these two without losing our character. The five is floating on top. You see this in Asia, in Japan, in Algeria. We have four different modes, and three modes for church music. It’s very beautiful. It’s all in how you approach the scales and the notes.

Baobab: You’ve opened a jazz village in Addis to train young Ethiopian musicians. What are your goals for the centre?

MA: It’s an information centre. We host jazz concerts and Ethiopian plays, and teach Ethio-jazz. We want to promote music to young pupils who have talent but who have never had a chance. We’re teaching the science of music—arranging, composing. I tell my students, learn the science of music first, don’t just jump in too quick. There is a line you have to follow.

Baobab: What kind of music are your students interested in?

MA: Lots want to study Ethio-jazz, but many like dancehall, reggae and hip hop—music with more dancing and jumping. There are few outlets for classical and jazz. There are more and more guitar and bass players now because all they see on television is people with guitars jumping up and down.

Baobab: Your music was featured in the soundtrack for Jim Jarmusch’s 2005 film Broken Flowers. How did that collaboration come together?

MA: I was playing in New York and I was told he was coming to the show. I didn’t know who he was but said to invite him anyway. He said he had been looking for the right music for his film for six years, and he thought my music was it. I said “no problem”. Six months later he called, and that was it. And people have loved it.

Baobab: In what other ways has your music reached a wider audience?

MA: I’ve been sampled by hip-hop artists like Naz and now the Somali rapper K’Naan. Man, it’s exploding, I tell you.

Baobab: You recently composed a score for an Ethiopian film called “Lalumbe.” How did you approach the project?

MA: The film is a love story about people from the Hamer tribe in the south of Ethiopia. This was the first time I’ve worked with their tribal music and culture—hey hold drums on their back and jump and clap. I used different instruments and dancers to create beautiful fusion music for the film.

Baobab: You’re also working on an opera. How is it shaping up?

MA: I’m still working on it. The composition includes excerpts from Ethiopian hymns for Lent. The opera will include choirs, strings, trombones, and an ancient Ethiopian conducting stick. I hope to perform it in a church in Lalibela in North Ethiopia that is carved from a single stone and also in Europe. I decided to work on this project while I was at Harvard. It will be a big challenge for me but I want to see what people will say.

Baobab: Do you think that the music you’ve created over the years is revolutionary?

MA: It’s a cultural revolution. Why not give the world something different?. As long as you can play your own music and combine it with something else, you will have no problems. But it is a challenge, a beautiful and great challenge.

Photo: passetti

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.

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.

A series of recent live music performances at London’s Southbank Centre by–or inspired by–Ornette Coleman, a free jazz legend, was equal parts amazing, exhausting and surprising. Never dull.

Having never seen Coleman perform live before, two things became clear to me by the end of the week: his playing oozes with the blues, and he doesn’t want to alienate his audience, no matter much his avant-garde approach to music might suggest otherwise. His music may seem challenging or inaccessible, but the invitation to participate is always there.

The full blog post is at INTELLIGENT LIFE.

It’s one thing to listen to scratchy old recordings of your favorite jazz artist, but seeing filmed live footage of greats like Ella Fitzgerald or Clifford Brown ripping it is a completely different kind of treat for the real fan.

For the devotee, it’s all in the details: Until I saw late ’50s television footage of Dizzy Gillespie playing, I had no idea that the cheeks he was so famous for puffing out while playing could sometimes push his black, horn-rimmed glasses slightly out of position on his face. Until watching footage of Miles Davis playing “So What” with the Gil Evans orchestra, I didn’t know that Davis would often lick the inside of his mouthpiece before putting the horn to his mouth for a solo.

The full blog post, on London’s Jazz in June festival, is at the NEW YORK TIMES.