When first reported in July of 2010, imaginations began to stir: what brilliance would spring forth from the collaboration of Questlove, Salaam Remi and Amy Winehouse? I’d say this is a pretty good window into where it was headed, and the world would surely be a lesser place without this music in it.

Thanks to Questlove & Salaam Remi for giving us a chance to ponder what the world has lost in the smoky, illustrious and ethereal voice of Ms. Winehouse & time to admire the beauty that the three of you captured before anyone knew it was too late.

The complete collection of unreleased songs from Amy Winehouse, Lioness: Hidden Treasures will be out on 6 December in the U.S.. (via Swift.FM / Questlove)

Amy Winehouse – Halftime

I am unqualified to write about Gil Scott-Heron’s life or death, and I want you to know that I know this before I write about him or what I think his music means to the world and to me. I make no pretense of authority, knowledge, insight, personal interaction with or particular credible depth with which to pursue writing about him. What I can tell you is that everything I do know of Gil Scott-Heron I learned because of how deeply and profoundly his work moved and continues to move me and the understandings I am grateful for that I came to discover through choosing to be exposed to his body of work.

Gil-Scott Heron’s poetry, his books, his music and his legacy, the source of debate and controversy almost since the day his name came into popular culture, have become permanently knotted threads woven into the fabric of the modern American literary and musical landscapes. His influence on hip-hop is incalculable by any measure. His poetry and lyricism are studied and discussed at length by scholars, authors, writers, poets and rappers far and wide. His music and spoken word recordings remain a wellspring of animus that spreads itself across multiple genres.

As influenced by the pro-Black radical movement as he was a searing voice of the movement itself, Scott-Heron’s work carries an intense weight that some are unprepared to hear: beautiful melodies laced with messages of empowerment and vitriolic phrases bubbling up from a well-founded anger felt among Black people who came of age during his generation. Scott-Heron consistently made astute and unflattering observations regarding the corrupt activity of politicians and the political process; the confounding persistent, willful ignorance by white America towards the growing, vast expanses of dirty, crime-and-drug-infested ghetto streets which stretched from one end of this continent to the other during the mid-late 20th century; and, the disenfranchised millions who lived in them, a people whom his words & music impacted and represented, particularly African-Americans.

Gil Scott-Heron entered the legacy he would leave behind during a painful and damaging time in this country when it was, at the very least, considered criminal to simply be a person of color by a large percentage of the people who were in positions of political, economic and social authority in America. Gil Scott-Heron voiced rebellion against an undeniably oppressive system designed to, in no uncertain terms, keep people of color and other minorities in a state of abject poverty and self-hatred intended to perpetuate itself across generations. Scott-Heron was unafraid to use his voice to attack the figures behind the bully pulpits who acted as if they were beyond reproach, to point out obvious hypocrisy and purposeful ignorance to impoverished inner city affliction wherever it existed, willing to attack both the white power structure and individuals falsely calling themselves Black revolutionaries with an equal fervor. Because Gil Scott-Heron devoted himself to speaking out without fear of retribution, he was the subject of investigations, harassment, and threats by people from both sides of the ongoing social conflict that existed in America during and after the Vietnam war. Though lionized by fellow musicians, critics, poets, and culturally significant figures throughout his career, Scott-Heron was often the outsider trying to find a way to describe to all other outsiders how to find a way in, over or around the obstacles that stood in their path.

To try and describe him with anything less than a string of hyperbolic phrasings and unsuitable adjectives would be to eschew the importance of his contributions. I have heard him referred to as “the black Bob Dylan”; while I find this phrase well-intentioned, I personally find it a little bit insulting because it requires someone hearing that reference to place him in a box or a category that can be easily digested. However, not unlike Dylan, he used his words and music to move people in a way that was intended to affect lasting changes in the world.

When Gil Scott-Heron came out with his first, and to many his most important, contribution to music & poetry “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” in 1970, he was making a call-to-arms, both demanding that Black people should stop allowing themselves to simply settle for the status quo and, at the same time, openly lambasting the homogenized television culture of a post-Vietnam America that paid no attention to the plight of the inner city except as fodder for the television news. But Scott-Heron’s words and music, a truly unique blend of his influences — Langston Hughes (by far his biggest influence), John Coltrane, Billie Holliday, Richie Havens, Otis Redding, Jose Feliciano, and multi-instrumentalist Brian Jackson (with whom Scott-Heron collaborated for many years) — transcended a single work, performance or recording. From 1970 to 1982, Scott-Heron released 13 albums and published three books, performed and toured feverishly, and created a series of recordings that teemed with the rhythms of the streets, blending both African and Latin percussion with timeless new progressions in jazz and blues.

Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson – Home Is Where The Hatred Is

Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson – New York City

There’s no denying the sad irony that Scott-Heron, who long touted the evils of drugs and alcohol in songs like “Home Is Where The Hatred Is”, “The Bottle” and “Angel Dust” became, himself, crippled by throes of addiction. At some point in the 1980′s, Scott-Heron became as notorious for his failure to make public appearances as he was admired for his body of work. His public appearances became fewer and far between, leading many to simply write him off entirely. Scott-Heron spent the last ten years of his life being arrested, placed into court-ordered drug rehabilitation or incarcerated a number of times for cocaine possession, jailed in 2001-2002, 2006 and arrested again in 2007. From somewhere within him, though, a part of his damaged spirit found the desire to push him into regaining his foothold on his life’s work.

Recording what would be his final work, I’m New Here (a collaboration with XL Recordings founder and owner Richard Russell), Scott-Heron was no longer merely enraged with the stubbornness of his own demons grinning impishly at the marks he made on a world that, in some sense, had turned and left him in exile to carry out their demands. Gil Scott-Heron, at the time of his death, left behind no mere footnote to his legacy or solemn bookend to his work. On first listen, I’m New Here may sound like the words of a defeated or angry man giving up his will to modern convenience, abated by time and circumstance. My initial reaction to the album and the subsequent remixes was a kind of disgust, the thought that Scott-Heron, whom I deem a personal hero, was being taken advantage of by XL Recordings and the UK media in an effort to exploit him and capitalize on his weakened condition brought on by virtue of his addiction. On repeated listening, and knowing what I know of the relationship between Scott-Heron and Richard Russell now, I see something much less sinister and much more profound. These are not the incoherent ramblings of a once-great poet and performer being coddled by white media magnates in an effort to seem racially unbiased; they are the willful collaborations between a man genuinely moved by Scott-Heron’s work and the reactions of a man who knew exactly how far he had leapt from the precipice of all he rallied against, seeing his humanity with clarity and recognizing the frailty of the very human conditions he struggled with.

In his passing, a hope exists within me that those who come to Gil Scott-Heron’s work will pay less attention to the gaps and more attention to the important building blocks and pieces which remain. The struggle of Black people to overcome that Scott-Heron encouraged and the ignorance to the plight of the inner city by white America that he fearlessly criticized may seem like a footnote in American history to the untrained eye. But I can’t listen to Scott-Heron’s voice, his inflection, his passion without asking myself all the time if anything has really changed or, if what’s really happened, is that the game remains the same while we as a culture have not truly progressed but simply shifted the blame.

Tonight at Hi-Tone Cafe, Memphis will be treated to a visit from Santa Ana, CA’s genre-bending glitch-hop collective Free The Robots. Chris Alfaro, the mastermind behind Free The Robots, combines his original works with samples, unique progressive melodies and crunching beats with elements of traditional jazz, psych, electronic and hip-hop. Add in some guest MC’s and you have a formula that has garnered him worldwide attention, sharing bills with everyone from Glitch Mob to Prefuse 73, Afrika Bambaataa and Flying Lotus and producing/remixing for a bevvy of up-and-coming artists.

Joined by the newly-licensed Glitch Dr. (a nom-de-guerre of legendary Memphix co-founder DJ Redeye Jedi) and DJ’s Witnesse & Handsome Mark, the show has been reported to me by people who have seen FTR as “spectacular” and “not to be missed”.

[ 18+ / $10 Advance / $12 Door / Hi-Tone Cafe - 1912 Poplar Avenue, Memphis / RSVP ]

Sister Crayon – I’m still the same Person (Free The Robots Remix) by Free the Robots

Impulse (Free the Robots Remix) by Free the Robots

Artist: Herb Alpert
Label: A&M
Catalogue: AMS 7500
Date: 1980
Format: 7″
Highest Chart Position: 30 [US Billboard Hot 100 Singles]

Herb Alpert – Rotation

This track comes from the album Rise [Buy From Amazon] which was a huge hit. The title track stayed at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts for something like 7 or 8 weeks.

Herb Alpert is one of the most important and influential people in the history of recorded music, revered not only for his lengthy and legendary career as a musician (spanning 5 decades) but for his pioneering work as one of the co-founders and chairs of A&M Records and Almo Records. On a personal level, he was always one of my father’s favorite musicians, and I would also call myself a big fan of both the man and his work.

I nearly forgot to mention: Today is Herb Alpert’s birthday, and I want to wish him the happiest of birthdays.

Here’s a rare promotional video for the song I found on YouTube, too.

Never ceasing to amaze and fascinate, Kutiman (whose groundbreaking Thru-You video album was chosen by Time Magazine as One of the 50 Best Inventions of 2009) has returned with another video in the vein of the Thru-You series. Digging on an even deeper level, he returns to form with this new song entitled “My Favorite Color”. This bit of smoothed-out jazz is in a class of its own, furthering the mystique that Kutiman has helped to generate in a class of his own.

Kutiman – My Favorite Color

One of the illest and most unique hip-hop acts to emerge from the early 1990′s in Los Angeles was the collective of Aceyalone, Myka 9, Self Jupiter, P.E.A.C.E. and DJ Kiilu — otherwise known to the world as Freestyle Fellowship, whose impact is unquestionable and about whom not nearly enough is written. Emerging from a burgeoning West Coast hip hop scene, FF unleashed their visions with precision — jazz-laden beats supporting untouchable improvisational lyrical skills (the true forefathers of both horror and backpack), scatting, a strong Afrocentric message, skits built into songs, intellectual raps and styles that few other acts could even touch.

Packing out the Good Life Cafe in LA with regularity, the list of people whom they influenced is a who’s who of their peers — in particular Nocando, Busdriver, Jurassic 5 and The Pharcyde. Their first major release, Innercity Griots, is an Olympian feat of lyrical mastery, wordplay and soundscapes unlike any before or since. Truly one of the purest of all hip-hop classics, this collection of songs perfectly captured to tape the sound that FF consistently constructed with their untold live performance sweat equity. I played *the shit* out of this album on cassette and I go back to it regularly just for reference — it’s one of a handful of truly perfect hip-hop albums ever made from beginning to end.

The Fellowship arrived at a time when true school hip-hop really hadn’t become mainstream (unless you count M.C. Hammer and Vanilla Ice which, truthfully, you shouldn’t). At the risk of dating myself, I was barely out of short pants when I, and several hundred others, piled into the basement of the old Metropolis Cafe in Manhattan’s Union Square (which now houses Blue Water Grill) for a Giant Step show way back in 1993 to see the Fellowship shop blow up, and it’s a show that left an indelible mark on me.

In that barely air-conditioned room, elbow to elbow with a restless throng, we waited on FF to show up for a scheduled Midnight appearance. Was there an opener? Probably. By the time FF hit the stage with a jazz combo at 2:45 or 3am, the whole room was swaying, and they ripped the joint from end to end with a lengthy, mostly freestyle-laden set that didn’t let out until the sun came up. A room full of slack-jawed and bleary-eyed zombies filed out of that basement & I don’t think anyone who witnessed that show was ever quite the same. Other people whom I have talked to who were in that room with me remember the night with great affection and, in hushed undertones, still talk about.

This album should have, by any standard, catapulted Freestyle Fellowship to the logical next level. But nearly as quickly as word of their genius spread from coast to coast, they were forced to disband for a four year period due to the incarceration of Self Jupiter.

In 2010, word arrived that Freestyle Fellowship was back in the lab and fortunately for the listening world, new tracks are emerging. The Fellowship will be appearing during this year’s SXSW showcase. I hope that you’ll get a chance to check them out, and in the interim, I can’t urge you strongly enough to purchase and listen to Innercity Griots. If you’re a true hip-hop fan, I sincerely believe repeated listening of this album has the power to transform you in the best of ways.

Freestyle Fellowship – Hot Potato
Freestyle Fellowship – Shammy’s/Heat Mizer
Freestyle Fellowship – Respect Due

[ Freestyle Fellowship will appear during SXSW at Fuze - 505 Neches [sched] Saturday, March 19th at 12pm ]

Big ups to Jeff Weiss for his interview with Self Jupiter for Pop & Hiss from last summer. Read it and read his site, Passion of the Weiss if you know what’s good for you.

Dexter Wansel – You Can Be What You Wanna Be

[Buy Life on Mars/What the Worlds Coming to from Amazon]

The duo of Olaf Hilgenfeld and Iftah Gabbai is definitely not your run-of-the-mill techno, disco or jazz. So then, color me intrigued by Skinnerbox & their unusual (and efficient marriage) of disparate styles, particularly when it matches so clearly with the musical calico I’m hearing out of European electronic music lately.

There’s a taste of Richie Hawtin meets Mark Farina meets 808 State in these songs. Do I have your attention?

Under the surface, there are also tastes of Herbie Hancock and Quincy Jones influence in this particular collection, dotted with edgy Grace Jones/Nina Hagen/Lene Lovich-esque references (thanks to the vocals of occasional guest Elle P) — an embrace of experimental 80′s synth/Moog influences enmeshed with a love of Italo-Disco and New Wave lives in every corner of this music, it’s easy to fall in love with instantly and, later, return to analyze it’s cleverness. Even with it’s technoodling, Skinnerbox’s recordings here are (at their core) jazz music — completely experimental, and definitely out there.

Check out these tracks, courtesy of the band themselves. If you dig it, be sure and check out this terrific live set of theirs from Paris in October of 2009.

Skinnerbox – “King of Diamonds”
Skinnerbox – “Turtletaube”
Skinnerbox – “Varvantakis”

[Purchase : MySpace Page]

The legendary Gil-Scott Heron, the black radical poet, musician, composer, author, purveyor of spoken word and singer (whom many refer to lovingly with titles like “the black Bob Dylan” and “the godfather of rap”), has been long presumed dead due to his conspicuous absence from music. Though kept alive through retrospectives and reverential referencing of him by those whom he influenced, Scott-Heron himself seemingly vanished 15 years ago after an experimental and efficacious music career which spanned four decades. Like several of his contemporaries, Scott-Heron accrued a tremendous following and much of his success during the 1970′s and 1980′s, a short time after which he seemed to all but disappear. When Scott-Heron began failing to show up for scheduled concerts, rumors began to circulate over the course of many years about his cocaine abuse & health troubles.

So the stories swirled around: could it be true that one of the most important voices of self-empowerment for black people, who pushed for that empowerment in songs like “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” and “Whitey On The Moon”, or songs that dealt with hardcore issues like “Home Is Where the Hatred Is” or “The Bottle” lamenting the struggles of drug abuse and alcoholism in the black community, that this man had become ensnared by the demons he lambasted? The stories, it turned out, were unfortunate yet true: a spiraling Scott-Heron spent many years struggling with his addiction culminating in a one & one-half year prison sentence in 2002 on a cocaine possession charge and conviction. During these dark times, Scott-Heron quit making recordings, quit performing, and seemed to have become a footnote of a by-gone era.

But today, Scott-Heron seems convincing in letting us know: that lost incarnation of Gil Scott-Heron, who left us 15 years without a new studio recording, has taken a walk down a dusty avenue in Harlem. A revived and emphatic Scott-Heron appeared last night on BBC 2 in an interview with Stephen Smith. Gil-Scott Heron, we now know, will be returning in February 2010 with a new album from XL Recordings, produced by Richard Russell, entitled (oddly enough) I’m New Here.

For now, you can sign up for updates about the new record and download a free track, “Where Did the Night Go” at his recently-launched website, http://imnewhere.net and, if you so desire, watch the BBC 2 interview with Stephen Smith in which we get an intimate look at Scott-Heron who, this year, celebrated his 60th birthday. More details on his new album will be released here as they emerge.

Gil Scott-Heron – “The Bottle”
Gil Scott-Heron – “Where Did the Night Go” [from I'm New Here]

[I'm New Here official site : XL Recordings]

I just haven’t been updating lately and I don’t know why. I am listless and bored with everything (not to mention being deep in the struggle), I found myself sleeping less and writing more. Just not here. It’s the mid-summer lull before the cool of autumn prevails. I’m an autumn baby, you see, so we suddenly bloom when the leaves are turning their cool oranges and muted browns and such.

Anyways, in my sullied state, I’ve found myself returning over and over to this song all week. Inspired by a request from I’m Waking Up To…” (asking what folks wake up to in the morning), I’ve decided to let the cat out of the bag about the one track that does it for me first thing in the morning. It feels empowering and essential, like the sun itself. Over time, I’ve tried the Rotary Connection’s original version, then that of the late Minnie Riperton. As lovely as each was, it did not hold the same power for me as this version, performed by Nuyorican Soul and deeply remixed by the unmistakable loving and powerful genius of London’s 4hero. At times, I find it so beautiful I’m brought to tears. The remix’s broken beat symphony is everything I need to start my day. Maybe you’ll think so, too.

Nuyorican Soul – I Am The Black Gold of the Sun (4hero Remix)

This track is available on 4hero’s very hard to find The Remix Album, Vol. 1 from Amazon.Com.