Love and Death

The slightly stilted language, as if through a veil of translation
The rhythm and cadences came from a different place
Performing with a twinkle in the eye, full of hints and allusion
The marked confidence, the groove, we've got our own thing

Speaking of heaven, but not hell
Singing of love, but not hate
Trickster tales that leave you in the lurch
But, crucially, clear-eyed about death

...

Laments and celebrations walk hand in hand
And comfort lies in the company you walk with
The hidden realms one passes on the journey
The dreamy truths revealed along the way
Hold tight, for friends will one day sway off the road
And, at the tail-end of the journey, your traveling companion will be your shadow


After seeing Ebo Taylor perform at age 89

Love and Death, a playlist

A soundtrack for this note (spotify version)

• Heaven by Ebo Taylor
• Love and death by Ebo Taylor
• Atwer Abroba by Ebo Taylor
• Kwaku Ananse by The Apyaga Showband
• Aba Yaa by Ebo Taylor
• Bue me by Pat Thomas and Ebo Taylor
• Amponsah by Pat Thomas and Ebo Taylor
• Ohiani Sua Efir by Ebo Taylor
• What is life? by Ebo Taylor
• Love and death by Ebo Taylor and Uhuru-Yenzu

I caught Ebo Taylor and Pat Thomas on the former's farewell tour in Austin on May Day 2025. Then aged 89, he relied on his very capable 6 piece band (helmed by two of his sons) to do the heavy lifting. Ageless afro-funk grooves, nasty keyboards and the horns. Pat Thomas's voice too, still had that honey-coated baritone and the vocal range that could hit the high notes that would excite you. They still had it, they still had that ineffable style that emerged fully-formed in their Seventies heyday. Heaven for this exiled soul.

Bonus beats: I captured a few snippets of their live performance with my cell phone: Heaven , Love and Death and Kwaku Ananse, some mellow highlife Ene Nyame A Mensuro, encore

File under: music, appreciation, Ghana, virtuosity, Ebo Taylor, Africa, highlife, funk, afrobeat, culture, observation, perception, review, poetry, toli

Writing log: May 2, 2025

The Polyrhythmic Temptations of Erykah Badu

"What good do your words do when they can't understand you?"

The above chorus seemed to have rhetorical heft midway through Erykah Badu's recent concert at the Fox theater in Oakland. You see, she seemed about to escape the song form, en route to dissolving into a polyrhythmic ether of sorts. Just when lift-off appeared inevitable however, hip-hop brought her back to earth, then, after a short tribute to Michael Jackson, the soul returned. Standing in the audience nodding my head as I observed the proceedings, I started thinking about the relationship between artist and audience. What happens when your muse takes you off the beaten path? What concessions, if any, should one make on the one hand, and, on the other, how much should you, the audience, indulge the performer? Because it was a close run thing you know.

This polyrhythmic temptation, this polyphonic inclination, has taken up much of her last two albums. Indeed during the last two concerts I'd seen of her, there was no attempt made to coddle the audience. During the earlier one, in support of Worldwide Underground, she was in the throes of a liquid type of electronic soul music and had began drinking from the polyrhythmic fountain. During the last one - in 2008 in support of New Amerykah Part 1 - polyrhythms possessed her completely. To compound the musical dissonance further in this latter instance, she had made the mistake of following The Roots onstage - a frequently lethal decision on the best of days, and definitively so if the audience isn't ready to be a guinea pig for one's new directions. I enjoyed myself - to my ear it sounded much like a Funkadelic affair, a beautiful mess in short, but I'm not sure that everyone felt the same. For example, The Wife had some words later on - and she wasn't cooing. This past February's concert was fun and more audience friendly (the band was gearing up for the big push in support of her new album). She has pulled back, it would seem; one still wonders however.

Let it first be stated that I dig Erykah Badu, that on the strength of Baduizm and especially Mama's Gun, I will follow her to the musical ends of the earth and beyond. As we wait for the new album to be released in short order, the question most of her audience is asking is whether she will reign in the demons that she wears on her sleeves. Musically also, we're asking whether she'll submit to a sonic conception that is more recognizably song-like and whether melody and old fashioned soul singing will feature. The snarky will ask how long can a soul singer be post-song. The music these days is all riffs, beats, polyrhythms. Blame the sampler (that new accoutrement that has been accompanying her of late), blame Jay Electronica perhaps for a carnal and musical temptation. At times she seems consumed with sonic tics and mannerisms reminiscent of Michael Jackson after 1993. It's no doubt very exciting in the studio but rendered live, it can be challenging.

When someone like Giles Peterson hails her as the Nina Simone of our time, I think to myself, hey, I too am an aficionado of Sun-Ra and believe that the creator has a master plan, but which Nina Simone is he refering to? Does he mean the outsized musical talent or is he alluding to the late era eccentricity and mannered diva stylings? When Sly Stone is invoked, is it apropos her recent funk excursions or... well, let's leave the Sly comparison alone.

Erykah Badu is self referential in the extreme and takes these kinds of cultural perceptions in her stride; she's all about multiple identities and musical schizophrenia. From Lowdown Loretta Brown to her other personas, she's a Kool Keith of sorts, presenting a hyperlinked conundrum asking you to stare at the performance while grooving with her. She demands attention and makes clear she will only do what she wants. It's the kind of creative freedom that few other artists have. It's also part of her mystique. In concert, she sheds skins, and is continually reincarnated. Costumes morph repeatedly as if to underlie that you can't pin her down, you shouldn't even try. To harken to the cautionary lyric that opened this note, I'll only add that there's a fine line between being elusive and being unapproachable. I was minded to call in Stevie Wonder and ask him to sing Have A Talk With God to her.

Let's not go too far and damn her with faint praise, Erykah Badu after all is a student of the great performers, and will jab and feint with the best of them. She remains very successful commercially even though the singles that are released now bear little relation to what you get when you buy the album. In the last album, Honey and The Healer, her tribute to J Dilla, were just about the only songs that moved the crowd and that were heard on the radio. Fair enough you may say, 'radio suckers never play me' is a refrain from Public Enemy on. She always makes sure to throw in a club banger, a unique video and moves units as the say. Who's to argue, right?

The earlier overt homages were to songsmiths: Roy Ayers, Chaka Khan, Midnight Star. These days however it appears that songs don't interest her, rather it is grooves, riffs, beats in short. She takes scraps of rhythm, drum and bass and forms sonic collages. The last two albums have been full of dense polyrhythms, loop backs, staccato effects, overlays and, crucially, very little concessions to the song form or indeed her audience.

I'm no musicologist but as an African I know all too well about polyrhythmic conceptions. The Congolese with their sebene (and the Ivoriens of late) have long prospered on these changes in their music but their inclinations are rather ecstatic. It's about the dance, the audience is constantly in mind, not so with our analog girl in a digital world. The closest analog to Erykah Badu's current game is the vodoun effect of T.P Orchestre Poly-Rhythmo de Cotonou. Think Benin. Think musical voodoo. It's the same aesthetic: funk underneath, musical mysticism, dense polyrhythms, polyphony and frequent changes. It's meant to be hypnotic at its best, I can only hope she reaches these heights as she continues to experiment. And if not, someone should hip her to Poly-Rhythmo.

A typical concert moment will have her holding up her hand, stopping the band just as they've built up a groove. "Hold up. Wait a minute." It's a tic if overused and you sometimes wonder if she can give it to you straight.

When performing I Want You, it is almost a dissolve into liquid incorporality but then she pulls back and gets it together as if she has returned from a spell. There are commercial repercussions to how she handles these polyrhythmic temptations. Erykah Badu is by most measures the most popular soul singer of her generation (I'll skip her elder Sade in this comparison and ignore Amy Winehouse and Alicia Keys - call them pop). The soul crowd simply appreciates the voice and the songcraft. The hip hop crowd love her because she has genuine love for that aesthetic. She also happens to make rappers lose their minds such is her aural and sonic seduction. The bohemian are drawn to her mystical stick. All should be good if she holds it together.

I can recall fondly a joint tour with Jill Scott and Queen Latifah in 2005 when they appeared all-conquering in friendly competition. It is instructive to see how her contemporaries have dealt with fame. Jill crossed over into acting where her evident warmth is welcomed - her music hasn't been as strong since, but there are mutterings that she's hungry to get back on top - viz the forthcoming album and tour with Maxwell. Latifah? Well she's escaped music entirely - I was given the hard sell over Christmas about a Queen Latifah perfume.

I know I shouldn't, but I'm going to compare her to Amel Larrieux if only to contrast their live performances. Amel will joke that she is 'the queen of long endings' and I believe that this is an interesting way of dealing with having to sing the crowd favourites. She'll sing most of the song straight up and then go an excursion at the end and no one can tell where the song will wind up. This strategy allows the song to be different every time, depending on the mood of the band, the vibe of the crowd and so forth. Erykah's heart doesn't seem into her back catalog, she's experimental from the get go, the song doesn't interest her, it's more a mood that she's searching for and she'll add layers and rhythms. The result is that the audience doesn't get even the benefit of being moored to familiar ground.

The new album, Return of the Ankh, is about to be released in few days. I suspect that the first singles won't sound anything like the rest of the album much in keeping with her modus operandi. Erykah Badu continues to be tempted by polyrhythms, this is not a temporary flirtation. Let's hope that she manages to navigate the tension between her muse's direction and the commercial imperative.

Erykah Badu at the Fox Theater Oakland, Friday 19 February 2010

Opening Act: Goapele

Goapele opened the show with a short set mostly of old favourites. She also introduced a slow and moody new blues: Tears on my pillow, capped off with a lovely organ solo. Oakland gave her love.

Here's my illicit footage of Goapele performing Closer.

Dave Chappelle showed up, drawing a great cheer, to introduce the main event.

Setlist

• 20 feet tall (from the new album, psychadelia itself)
• The Healer
• Me
• My People
• On and On
• & On
• Appletree - done as an electronic boogie joint
• Michael Jackson medley finishing with Off the Wall
• I Want You
• Didn't you know
• Love of my life
• Hip-hop interlude:
  • Friends by Whodini
  • Lodi dodi by Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh
• Large Professor interlude showcase for the dj
• Bump it
• Back in the Day (Puff)
• Muddy Waters sounding joint
• Other Side Of The Game
• Soldier
• Next Lifetime
• Orange moon (snippet)
• Tyrone
• Bag Lady

Obligatory blurry photos: Erykah Badu Live

File under: music, Erykah Badu, review, soul, funk, appreciation, polyrhythm, performance, creative process, culture, perception, diva, toli

Meshell's Moods

Anger can be a great musical catalyst. The story is told about Miles Davis's historic 1964 concert at Lincoln Center, that the band was angry that Miles had preemptively waived their fees for charity. The performance, duly celebrated in two albums, My Funny Valentine and Four and more, can be said to have that urgent yet sinuous edge that make it one of the essential live musical performances. The young rhythm section is especially on fire; you can almost hear the added accents in Tony Williams's percussion, Ron Carter does all the right things as a low end theoretician on the bass, and Herbie Hancock solves differential equations on his piano. And then there's the horns of course, Miles is lyricism itself - the ballads are simply wonderful, and George Coleman blows throughout as if it's a cutting contest. The son of man claimed that man cannot live on bread alone, these hungry musicians tried to come up with a corollary to that notion over the course of the concert. Suffice to say that it was an important occasion for all concerned and the potency of the music endures.

It was in this vein that I listened to Meshell NdegeOcello's band last Friday at The New Parish in Oakland. It wasn't quite anger that was at work, it was more like irritation that was the catalyst but who am I to quibble about the end result. I'll get to the whys, wherefores and textures of their sound but should get the hyperbole off my chest upfront.

Simply put, Meshell NdegeOcello's band is the coldest band since The Revolution circa 1985.

If you want a slightly more precise description, I'm referring to the sound and attitude that pertained as the Purple Rain continued to fall, you know, before the addition of horns and the looser feel of the Parade and Sign of the Times bands. I'm talking about a well-oiled band that is out to make a point, a band that wants to share an important moment. Meshell and company are forced to be reckoned with in their live performances, moreover they are touring to support a strong new album, Devil's Halo and are fully committed to its rocky soul aesthetic.

The Wife called them sick - her slang is of a different vintage, for me they were stone cold. Their creative energy harnessed as it was, was something to behold. The sonic architecture brought in elements of Sly Stone, Bootsy Collins, Stanley Clarke and Eddie Hazel. And they were versatile in their approach. Meshell can go from Nathalie Merchant primness to Betty Davis fierceness without skipping a beat and she'll throw in some Sly and Robbie dub for good measure. By the time, they got around to freaking Prince's Dirty Mind, rendering it like no one has heard it before, my jaw had already dropped, I was in awe. When someone is in this kind of mood you can only sing along - and admire.

But on to the bit about anger... As we stood in line outside the club, we overheard mutterings about problems. There were scattered phrases that might cause your average concertgoer to raise their eyebrows, things like "No soundcheck", "Equipment came late", "Damn rental company", "Will they even play?" and so forth. The crowd was suitably wary. They were playing at a new venue, a small club and a suitably intimate joint but one where the kinks were still being worked out. And it showed at the outset even as they came out with such energy. For the first three songs, the sound was slightly off. There were sufficient glitches to cause Meshell to basically throw away the small sound machine (synthesizer/sampler thingimijig) that she's started performing with. Her sound technicians were feeling the pressure as they scrambled to fix things. The underlying tension only heightened the performance. Thus she stuck mostly to singing for the rest of the show and would sing mostly from the more recent parts of her songbook. Call the concert an exercise in aural seduction. Raging songs like Lola, Mass Transit, The Sloganeer - Paradise, and Article 3 were full of urgency. Only occasionally would she pick up the bass when her mood would veer into the ecstatic. Mostly she was orchestrating the shifting soundscapes that now characterize her music; the short outbursts that are the bread and butter of her songcraft only slightly lengthened for the live performance.

There was an element of pride as they paced on stage, as if they all had a point to prove. Oakland may only be a pit stop between the bigger commercial venues - Los Angeles (with the beautiful people) and San Francisco (with the sexy people) where they would play the next night. Oakland however is important for soul singers, functioning as a sort of comfort interlude that restores one's swagger. It's a town that appreciates the ironic mood of a song like White Girl, the audience will laugh in the right places.

Songs like Dead Nigga Blvd - from 2003's Cookie, have extra resonance when sung one block away from Martin Luther King Jnr. Avenue, five minutes away from Mandela Parkway, and 10 minutes away from Malcolm X Elementary School. And she is right to be angry, as expressed in the lyrics and performance of that song, at the disrespect and dysfunctionality of part of the black community in Oakland and elsewhere. People campaigned, marched and sacrificed much labour and even blood to secure the gains of the civil rights struggle, commemorated in those boulevards and yet some would say much is being dissipated. The salty language of the song decries a drive-by mentality accented by the staccato keyboard riffs of the song. The mournful Die Young also struck a chord in that vein. It would figure that only a couple of days later I would read the headline she'd anticipated: Man shot and killed in downtown Oakland. Such is life, or rather such is death in these parts. To die over nothing, a block from the martyr's boulevard...

But back to the considerable songcraft on display. Bitter was her pre-millenium, album length meditation on a mood and we were treated to Fool of Me and Faithful in that key. Fellowship and Forgiveness and Love upped the dub quotient, the reggae tinge of a comfort woman. She took up an acoustic guitar for Crying In Your Beer - lovely balladeering with Chris Bruce her fearless guitarist. Deantoni Parks was ferocious throughout on the drums, sounding like an army platoon. Keefus Ciancia had four or more keyboards and would add ethereal sound effects. She's comfortable having Mark Kelley on bass which is a compliment to his capabilities. All in all this a group with a creative edge. We were treated to a lush musical moment capturing shifting moods.

For the encore, she comes out, picks up her bass and gets into her great remake of Ready for the World's Love you Down. It is spacey, laced with dub stylings, and soulful to the core. It is also flawlessly executed.

Meshell is not one to coddle her audience but she is definitely thankful that we stayed with her on this night. We weren't too demanding for the old favourites and went along with the musical trip of the new songs. Devil's Halo is strong set verging on the rock end of a soul spectrum. You could see the sense of confidence and perhaps a little swagger in the step of all the musicians as they left. In her current thankful mood she is perhaps reaching a sentiment expressed in the title of her second album: Peace beyond Passion.

...

The opening act, Beatropolis, were were a musical puzzle of sorts if only because their feel-good sensibility was hard to pin down. Perhaps we should let them descibe themselves in their own words: "live organic drum and bass... many styles". Indeed there were many styles on display, from an acid jazz start, mix in The Roots circa Organix, a touch of Joycelyn Brown, a smidgen of Roni Size or perhaps Dizzee Rascal and let everything simmer. They would throw in a jungle version of You're All I Need To Get By just because they could, and why ever not, I expect Marvin and Tammi would concur. Perhaps most impressive was Fall Apart. Yeats never would have imagined that a century after writing The Second Coming that we'd have rappers declaiming that "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity" to a fierce drum-n-bass beat, a jungle lament about things falling apart, a topic close to my heart. Needless to say, I approve.

...

The full-length video of Meshell's Seattle concert from the following week finds her and band in a more laidback and relaxed mood. Compare to her previous escapades in jazz from a few years ago.

File under: music, soul, rock, funk, review, concert, live, appreciation, mood, virtuosity, MeShell NdegeOcello, toli

Ecstasy = Ghana 2 - Czech Republic 0

We're not tourists... That's what I'm talking about. And it should have been 4-0 or more.

My uncle, who has never traveled outside Ghana in his life let alone been aboard a plane, managed to get a visa and ticket to attend the World Cup with the rest of the family. When he showed up at the airport for his long trip to Frankfurt, he was dressed in white from head to toe.

I know exactly what he meant.

Hotel Hi-jinks

[Update 2 hours later]: My family have somehow made it to the party at the team hotel. Pandemonium is the only word to describe what is going on there. I could barely hear them over the sounds of jubilation. I can't even imagine what the streets of Ghana are looking and sounding like. We are mindful of previous premature celebrations but for now it is only elation.

Wedding Toli

[Update a day later]: This is some toli I can't pass up even if it might cause a continued paternal boycott of this joint...

It was my cousin's wedding yesterday back in Ghana. For some reason, the ceremony had been scheduled at a time, 4:30pm, that overlapped somewhat with the football match. I'm assuming that things were set in place months ago, hence I'll reserve comment about foresight and the like. In any case, she and her groom were standing at the altar and the Reverend was delivering her encomium (in addition to her pastoral duties, the priest was a senior member of the Ghana Educational Service). All of a sudden there was a shout from the congregation. A text message had undoubtedly been delivered: Ghana had scored a goal. I believe it was the second goal, the one that put the result beyond any doubt; most of the guests had watched the great start of the match and had been in good spirits, if a little nervous, throughout the ceremony.

Hallelujahs then poured forth from the church seats and the Reverend began pronouncing all kinds of glories from the altar. There was singing and dancing in the aisles, alarming my father and uncle who are of the more sedate school of establishment propriety. With the priest's encouragement the congregation then went into joyous hymns. As my dad put it "they actually proceeded to sing two full choruses". My dad refused to clarify what praise song it was that was sung, or indeed whether the couple joined in, but you can imagine the commotion. After that celebratory interlude, the ceremony resumed and the couple was duly and quite properly married. As they left the church, the match had ended and the big party that Ghana embarked on last night began. I can't wait to see the video footage of their wedding, these ceremonies are so important in our traditions and we strive to bear witness even if football intrudes. Still, I now know that part of my wedding gift to them will be the DVD of the match that they missed but lived through.

I'm told the ensuing reception was wonderful.

Original Toli

It turns out that my mother has returned to her journalistic roots for the month at hand, and has been writing up her experiences as a Ghanaian fan attending the World Cup for the Ghanaian Times. The first of her dispatches has been posted online and the ones about the Czech game should be up shortly at the Times website. You can get a taste of the original toli monger with her World Cup Diary and see where I get my lines from.

• My World Cup (Part 1: Preparations and Part 2: The Italy Match)

  "GHANA", we shouted, "ITALIA" they shouted back, they were the most good humoured group of fans you had ever met.

• To The Shout Of "Ghana", You Respond "Respect" (Part 3)

  There was a determined Swede who appeared intent on making me strip so he could have my top. Fortunately for everybody and the horses that might have been frightened, I am no longer that brave, so I only gave away bandanas.

• Firmly On The Map (Part Four)

  It is the Czechs who are asking the most questions. Losing to Ghana had not been on their agenda, but now that they have lost, they are very keen to know who we are, and so are their friends.

Pandemonium

As is my custom, I'll offer a soundtrack:

The first track of The Time's great 1990 album Pandemonium is called Dreamland and that is where some 20 million Ghanaians are living right now.

The soulful and funky "Minneapolis Sound" wrought by the Purple One, Jam and Lewis, Morris Day, Jerome Benton and Jellybean Johnson sharply suits our purposes here.

As the former Gold Coast, we are quite partial to things that glitter, thus it is fitting that the Black Stars can rest tonight with a ballad titled Donald Trump (Black Version).

Ghana's greatest export being cocoa, it goes without saying that the first side ends with the aptly-titled Chocolate.

World Cup Croissant, Bacon and Eggs

I'll conclude with a look at how breakfast is served during the World Cup. There's been a slight adjustment to my previous setup after some suggestions from toli readers. A card table was manufactured from the basement and moved to the living room allowing hunger to be assuaged, a more comfortable desk arrangement for any computer activity, the use of my comfy office chair, and most importantly, satisfactory world cup viewing. The Wife seems strangely supportive of this business, bless her.

File under: world cup, football, Ghana, joy, ecstasy, sports, life, Africa, soccer, humour, wedding, soul, funk, The Time, toli

Comfort Food and Rare Groove

I was recently re-reading Food Culture in Sub-Saharan Africa by Fran Osseo-Asare - a book I've been meaning to review since it came out last year. Briefly, it's nothing less than a comprehensive overview of the culture and history of food in Africa. It covers the continent, dipping into all the regional flavours. There's lots of historical insight about the types of ingredients used, the crops, animals, fisheries etc. It's one of those books you can open at any page and find lots of to chew on (pun intended, tongue in cheek etc). Most culinary books concentrate on recipes but this goes beyond that into the cultural and social significance of food (from who prepares it, traditions surrounding it, special meals etc). Anyway I'll return to it at length shortly, shall we say that it deserves a fuller digestion. I'm rather concerned in this note with rare groove.

As normally occurs when matters literary and gastronomical coincide, my salivary glands began to do their thing after barely 5 minutes of reading. Much like that recent article on street food in Ghana, my immediate reaction was to think of smells, sounds and kitchens. Oh the smells! As my mouth started watering, my mind started wandering and I was thinking about Auntie Becky's roadside kelewele (fried ripe plantains) in North Labone which is the first place I head to when I land in Accra. Auntie Becky has been cooking outside a house for thirty odd years and has a devoted and international following. Indeed she married the owner of the house which is one way of romancing I suppose - Like Water For Chocolate as they say. The marriage got her the hookup to household gas replacing the previous charcoal fires... In any case, my lunch companions were 20 minutes away thus to distract the incipient hunger pangs, I dipped into my musical library and compiled the following menu of comfort food and rare groove. Hope you enjoy it.

A Hungry Playlist (Listen here)

Chef's Specials

• Common - The Food
• Herbie Hancock - Cooking Session
• Stephanie Mills - Ain't No Cookin'
• Amadou & Mariam - Sénégal Fast Food
• Omar - Confection (ft Mica Paris)
  (see also Tasty Morsel for bite-sized portions)
• Horace Silver - Cookin' At The Continental
• Charles Wright - Cooking Session
• Goodie Mob - Soul Food
• Miles Davis - Steamin'
  (Note: album sized, you may substitute Miles Davis - Cookin' if you prefer)

Snacks

• Charlie Parker - Salt Peanuts
• James Brown - Mother Popcorn

Main Course

• Charles Mingus - Eat That Chicken
• Anthony Hamilton - Cornbread, Fish & Collard Greens
• Kruder & Dorfmeister - Lamb, Trans Fatty Acid
• Booker T & The MG's - My Sweet Potato
• Jimmy Smith - Pork Chop
• Musical Youth - Pass The Dutchie
• Cannonball Adderley - Afro-Spanish Omlet
• Dwele - Flapjacks
• Freddie Hubbard - Cold Turkey
• Kenny Burrell - Chitlins Con Carne
• Lee Morgan - Cornbread
• Roy Hargrove - Greens At The Chicken Shack
• James Brown - The Chicken
• Soul Runners - Grits 'N' Corn Bread
• Miles Davis - Fishermen, Strawberry and Devil Crab
• King Curtis - Memphis Soul Stew
• Ohio Players - Jive Turkey
• Jimmy Smith - Back At The Chicken Shack
• Prince - Starfish and Coffee
• Main Source - Live at the Barbeque
• MC Serch ft Chubb Rock, Nas - Back To The Grill
• Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong - Crab Man
• Meshell NdegeOcello - Oysters
• Rufus Thomas - Funky Hot Grits
• The Meters - Chicken Strut

Dessert

• Sade - Cherry Pie
• Dexter Gordon - Cheese Cake
• Herbie Hancock - Watermelon Man
• Mtume - Juicy Fruit
• Duke Ellington - Arabesque Cookie
  (from the Nutcracker Suite no less)
• Charlie Parker - Scrapple From the Apple
• Charles Mingus - Song With Orange
• Dave Bruebeck - Tangerine
• Hugh Masekela - Strawberries
• The Time - Ice Cream Castles
• Billie Holiday - Strange Fruit
  (also available Cassandra Wilson or Nina Simone style)
• Wendy & Lisa - Fruit At the Bottom
• Erykah Badu - Appletree
• The Brothers Johnson - Strawberry Letter 23
• Prince - Raspberry Beret
• Amel Larrieux - Berries and Cream

Secret Ingredients

• Loose Ends - A Little Spice
• Lizz Wright - Salt
• Booker T & The MG's - Green Onions
• The Time - Chili Sauce
• Lou Donaldson - Nice 'N' Greasy
• Marlena Shaw - Spice of Life
• D'Angelo - Chicken Grease
• Count Basie - Honeysuckle Rose
• Booker T & The MG's - Soul Dressing

Sweets

• D'Angelo - Brown Sugar
• Cassandra Wilson - Tupelo Honey
• Kool & The Gang - Chocolate Butter Milk
• Cameo - Candy
• Nina Simone - I Want A Little Sugar In My Bowl
• Jill Scott - Honey Molasses
• Johnny Hammond - Los Conquistadores Chocolates
• Bob Marley - Guava Jelly
• Lo-Key - Sweet On You
• A Tribe Called Quest - Butter
• Parliament - Chocolate City
• Beres Hammond - Sugar You Want
• Ohio Players - Sweet Sticky Thing

Beverages

• Fela Kuti - Water No Get Enemy
• Jimmy Mcgriff - Blue Juice
• E.T. Mensah & The Tempos - Tea Samba
• The Roots - Water
• Thelonious Monk - Tea For Two
• Kelis - Suga Honey Iced Tea
• Duke Ellington - Chocolate Shake
• The Manhattan Project - Old Wine, New Bottles
• Duke Ellington - Sugar Rum Cherry
• UB40 - Red Red Wine
• Tha Alkaholiks - Only When I'm Drunk
• Tony Rich Project - Red Wine
• Snoop Doggy Dogg - Gin and Juice
• Busta Rhymes - Pass The Courvoisier
• Bennie Maupin - Water Torture
• Lester Young And Oscar Peterson - Tea For Two

Supplements

• Baby Cham - Vitamin S (Fiesta Riddim)
• Booker T & The MG's - 'Mo Onions

Liner Notes

• Do not listen to this playlist on an empty stomach or you may have a case of jazz-funk Water Torture ala Bennie Maupin.
• On matters of etiquette, feel free to use your hands when partaking of toli comfort food, remember though that it is best to use only one hand unless it's chicken or ribs of course. The only other advice you'll need is Musical Youth's, namely "Pass The Dutchie 'Pon The Left Hand Side".
• Surpisingly there isn't much else on food culture and, no, Charles Mingus' The Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife doesn't count. Neither does Scratch's hilarious 3 Barstools Away, might I add.
• From the evidence of this playlist, it is clear that the chicken came before the egg. The earthy music I tend to listen to tends to celebrate our hens more than their eggs, other than the one Afro-Spanish omelette, the chickens rule the roost. (I discarded Disjam's Softboiled for being imprecise. The Time's The Bird, The Roots' Duck Down and Bob Marley's Three Little Birds were disqualified for the same imprecision).
• Prince's Starfish and Coffee comes with "Maple Syrup And Jam, A Butterscotch Cloud, A Tangerine, A Side Order Of Ham", he is a special one. His Sticky Wicked collaboration with Chaka Khan and Miles Davis is only available on the adult menu as is R Kelly's Chocolate Factory, positive id is required. Oscar Peterson's The Honeydripper is discounted for reasons of messiness.
• Of course I've noted before that eating people is wrong thus with a track like Miles Davis's Fishermen, Strawberry and Devil Crab, you don't get the fishermen. Sorry, but I believe in truth in advertising. I omitted The Coup's Fat Cats, Bigger Fish out of similar cultural sensitivity.
• Surprisingly for a playlist heavy on soul food, there aren't too many stews, gumbo or fish on the menu and unfortunately we're out of soup in the toli kitchen; as Troop would have it "I'm Not Soupped". You might also ask, where's the beef, goat or black sheep? The answer is that my musical collection isn't that extensive.
• The artist historically most concerned with food is strangely unrepresented in this food playlist. Jill Scott punctuates almost every song with lyrics about grits, collard greens and the like yet it's only Honey Molasses that I'm highlighting. However her Family Reunion song about barbecues deserves an honorary mention as does Joy and Pain by Maze featuring Frankie Beverly which comes with most backyard grills.
• Memphis's finest band Booker T and the MG.s contribute the most tracks to the menu and no wonder, they live in a melting pot.
• An update: as pointed out in the comments, I completely missed a meal and it is rather Louis Jordan and his Tympany 5 that take the cake. Well that's what happens if you have Five Guys Named Moe, I suppose.

Yesterday, after lunch of course, I listened to this almost 6 hour multi-course meal and it all fits together remarkably well, a balanced diet of soul, jazz and funk (metaphor overload: "a cornucopia of extra-sensory nuggets"). It put me in an anticipatory mood for dinner which I wolfed down voraciously - gusto was written all over my face. There's a lot of humour in all the music since food culture is mostly celebatory - the funniest track being Mingus' Eat that Chicken - what a chorus. I've been told that my musical obsession is far out, or as Eric Dolphy would have put it, I'm Out to Lunch but bear with me and, above all, enjoy your meal. As always menu suggestions are welcome.

See also: "We Eat First With Our Eyes" her take on Ghanaian Cuisine. In my case, I eat first with my ears.

Comfort Food and Rare Groove, a playlist

File under: music, obsession, food, whimsy, culture, soul, jazz, funk, jazz-funk, reggae, Africa, Ghana, memory, chicken, comfort, Comfort Suite, toli

On The Long Tail of Music, Metrics and Recommendations

Responding to Chris Anderson's Bring tha Noise post with some commentary, some metrics from my music collection and pointers to artists who inhabit this Long Tail of music...

• On The Long Tail of Music, Metrics and Recommendations
• Metrics From My Music Collection
• Full Force in the Long Tail

On The Long Tail of Music, Metrics and Recommendations

Some lunch break ego-surfing prompts this piece. Chris "Long Tail" Anderson tries to use real world data to validate some of his theorizing about music trends. Yours truly is one of the guinea pigs for this exercise in Bringing tha noise as he, and Public Enemy and Anthrax would have it. He's trying to figure out the signal to noise ratio in the fringe.

I seem to be a good source of metrics for this kind of thing because my tastes are not too mainstream and also because I augment my writing with lots of allusions and links to music and books that I champion or lean on to underline the slightest point. "Mining the cultural zeitgeist" is how I have described this tendency of mine when Jon Udell's metrics leaped out to me. I also tend to just use Amazon links which helps those seeking statistics. So then, what to say about the Long Tail of music?

First this: there's a difference between

1. the things that I write about, and quote or link to (i.e. what you'll see if you mined this blog)
2. the things I actually listen to or read
3. the things I've bought - my entire collection of music and books

I recently wrote a piece On Recommendation Systems that is in much the same area as this Long Tail discussion.

On the matter of recommendation systems, a couple of comments are in order.

• Leonard Richardson felt a little guilty that he hadn't spent time enhancing Ultra-Gleeper but that's the way things go, we're all stretched thin. Like he suggests, sometimes it's the idea that is important and not the embodiment in code, we see that all the time in technology. If one manages to give some intern somewhere an itch to scratch, as that paper should do, that is a contribution to knowledge and we are all the better for it.
• Robert Jamison seems to have a made a great contribution in ideas (Searching, Sharing and Stumbling), if not in code (kindakarma.com) to the recommendation systems debate and points to a few others of note. I will be playing with said code and services in coming weeks

But back to Anderson and Udell's search for metrics...

One thing I didn't comment on in Jon's post was that he was looking at statistics of bloggers he reads who most frequently cite books on Amazon.com. The problem was that many of the links from this site are about music rather than books. This may have skewed his statistics a little.

In other words, what was required was some sort of link classifier to figure out what a link refers to (whether book, music cd, dvd etc.). The classifier would be like a regexp pre-processor that would figure out that, for example, a link to IMDB is probably about a movie in much the same way as the LibraryLookup project maps ASINS to APACS. I assume All Consuming uses the Amazon api to figure out what type a given item is (book, music, dvd, other). I continue to wonder if one can have a classifier that will determine when a link points to a person... All Consuming is in flux as they transfer to 43 Things and their old REST apis are orphaned in the transition but that product has an interesting take on link classification and tagging.

Items 2 (what I actually listen to) and 3 (what I've purchased) in the above list are also interesting.

I have a partial pass at item 2, what I actually listen to. You can check out my statistics at Audioscrobbler. I installed Audioscrobbler on my home machine and have been playing with it to figure out if its recommendation engine will prove useful, I'll report back in a couple of months. After a couple of weeks, it has me in quite good company on the basis of the 769 tracks I've played on the home computer.

With a music collection as large as I have, my listening habits tend to be

• One third playlist-driven (I have numerous playlists for every mood as befits someone in the grip of musical obsession - thanks Gardner by the way for your kind comments and Autumn song playlist suggestions)
• One third shuffle serendipity
• The other third typically comes into play during shuffle; I'll hear something which will make me think of some other song and I'll do an ad-hoc thematic playlist, the problem is that I don't tend to save those tangential playlists borne of serendipity to feed back into the first category. I'm too lazy for that.

I'm a bit of an audiophile bigot and "can hear the difference" between original cds and even the 224 kbps VBR mp3 encodings I've done of my collection. Also some things have to be listened to loud (and one has to keep the neighbours on their toes every now and then). My computers haven't been hooked up to the big speakers and gleaming stereo system; the computer speakers are some generic $30 muffled fuzz boxes. Thus I need to get a Squeezebox, Audiotron or something although I'm a late adopter in such things. Thus, what is missing in the Audioscrobbler statistics is the music I listen to on my stereo. Still Audioscrobbler is a good proxy for much of my actual consumption of music.

On the topic of playlists, I'll be sharing some shortly so that others can get a sense of my beat matching juxtaposition insanity.

One problem with dealing with statistics from the blog is that for example, even though I'd estimate that 40 percent of my collection is jazz, I write about jazz only occasionally, like when I was Vibing with Abbey Lincoln or reminiscing about A Soul Jazz Thing with a belated appreciation of the late Jimmy Smith, or say alluding to Kamal (of The Roots) and his Ahmad Jamal keyboard stylings. There has only been one "proper posting" on jazz otherwise the allusions are all incidental say comparing Miles Davis's First Quintet to Rokia Traoré's band.

Jazz is less quotable and difficult to write about so perhaps that is why it wouldn't show up more readily in the statistics from the blog. Still the jazz idiom is a big part of my musical taste and outlook on life.

Metrics From My Music Collection

Anyway here is the data for number 3: I give you my music collection for your forensic analyses.

collection.m3u and collection.pls

My digitized music collection stands at 10,346 songs and amounts to 70.8 GB (about 36 days of continuous music). Note that this is larger than the largest iPod (hence my pause in not adopting that ubiquitous platform). I only ripped things that I liked so presumably one should add a good 50 percent filler for a fuller picture. I've been revisiting that notion since the Best Left Unread piece with a newfound appreciation of the bad things in my collection; disk space is cheap and I've just ordered a 250 GB spare hard drive to mitigate future disasters, that disk could be put to work.

Per contra I actually believe human psyches require a little imperfection.

Of the 1,527 artists therein, there were about 15 that were problematic (e.g. I'm sure there's no musician called Hawaii 5.0 or James Bond 007, to take some of the theme songs I occasionally play to spice things up, and similarly Ghana Highlife 1 to 10 are simply proxies for the unknowns I've picked up). I haven't digitized the 4 crates of records that I have lying about. That's a weekend project for this summer like my photo-digitization project of a few months ago (see Cultural Sensitivity in Technology)

Apparently there are 1,540 albums in the collection. I haven't quite diligent about tagging albums so 2,000 songs don't have album information. Handwaving a 10 song per album ratio that's another 200 albums, so lets say 1,750 albums). I'll fix that and update those files in the next few days.

Generating metadata for albums is difficult: what album would 50 Cent's blistering Jay-Z diss that was the talk of mixtapes in 2002 fall in? And there are also things that come from Greatest Hits, or Live albums as opposed to the original album, and I typically have multiple versions of things. I can't remember which version I actually ripped.

I am actually crazy to have spent cash money on most of these albums instead of downloading so if you assume that's $14,000 to $27982.50 (at $8 per album or $15.99 if I were to pay what record companies would prefer). Luckily I got a lot of these for free when I used to DJ and was on record company mailing lists, also I used Columbia House and BMG music zealously. Still that's a lot of money, I bought my first cd in 1992, previously it was all vinyl and tapes. I can't say that I've downloaded much from file sharing networks (I use Gnucleus). At the higher end of the scale of the cost estimates, $30,000 is a mortgage downpayment (well it was before this insane real-estate bubble that even leads to riots). Music companies should love me. I justify it by saying that my only hobbies are music and books; no drink, fast cars (I'm a public transport prole) or other flash.

I've tagged songs by genre but here you really want to be able to specify multiple tags just like in any of the new social software.

I suppose I should switch to iTunes to get an xml representation of these playlists. One of the bad versions of Winamp, the bloated one that which caused a backlash, used to export playlists in an xml format. That would have been better than m3u or pls. Still that is nothing that a capable regexp and Unix pipeline wizardry couldn't fix.

I'm still in disaster recovery mode but once I've got Cygwin set up, I'll be sure to download and install PlaylistManager and slice and dice the data with that Linux tool.

Anyway I hope this helps...

Full Force in the Long Tail

The obligatory musical note... While writing this note, I just rediscovered the wonderfully fresh sounds of Adriana Evans whose 1995 album for some reason didn't blow up (stupid record companies). Adriana Evans is the name that you drop when you want to put someone talking up Ashanti or Brandy in their place. Love is all Around and Seein' is Believing are some of the most laidback soul jams of all time.

Speaking of Seein' is Believin', how about Cheryl "Pepsii" Riley's (erstwhile of Thanks for my Child fame) song of the same name from 1988's Me, Myself and I album, produced by Full Force. That song is soul/funk perfection, much like Jerome Prister's sublime Say You'll Be that I recently found after 18 years.

And speaking of Full Force, what about that Hall of Fame production crew and House Party funkers? In recent years have been souping things up for Britney and Christine (you've got to pay bills). Their roots, like Jam and Lewis, are in pure soul and a hip-hop/funk aesthetic. Guess who's coming to the crib? is my favourite album of theirs although others preferred their eponymous debut album

My picks in the Full Force canon

• Your Love Is So Def
  My dad lost all respect for me when I used to sing this because he heard "deaf" in my loud singing rather than the 80s hip-hop notion of def.
• Love Is For Suckers (Like You And Me)
  Shower crooners at school couldn't stop singing this song for weeks on end. Not to mention the lines we all primed to repeat on cue, their irresistible verbal tics:

  "Come on bust a move."
  "Full Force Get Busy One Time"

• Take Care Of Homework

  "Yo homeboy, your girl looking kinda fly lately, know what I'm saying?"
  "No I don't know what you're saying."
  "What I'm saying is that she be like checking me out 'cos you been neglecting. D'you know what I mean?"
  "No I don't know what you mean!"
  "What I mean is that you better take care of homework or a dude like me will push up and take your place!"

  On the basis of the irreversibly funky break beat from Take Care of Homework, these brothers proved they were funky enough to revamp James Brown in his sadly neglected I'm Real album. The title track is a ferocious call to arms by The Godfather.
  
  
  
• I'd also note that their Smoove album is no spring chicken. It contains such gems as Ain't My Type Of Hype, the Smooved out title track and that phenomenal ballad, Kiss Those Lips. These are cases in point about the versatility of the crew
• They gained fame with Alice, I Want You Just For Me with the famous opening.

  Testing, Testing One, Two
  Testing, One Two
  In The Place To Be...
  Girl I Want To Shower You With Diamonds And Pearls
  And When Were All Alone I'll Take You For A Trip Around The World
  Yes Indeed I Like Your Style
  Ooh You're Worth My While
  Baby, I'm Your Carpenter,
  Please Me Lay Your Tile
  I Don't Want To Share You With No Else
  Alice Be My Girl
  Can't You See?
  I Want You Just For Me?
  Full Force Get Busy One Time

• Their repeated collaborations with Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam are also essential Spanish Fly.
  
  
  
  
  
  I Wonder If I Take You Home will still fill a dancefloor to this day.

  "Would You Still Be In Love, Baby?
  Because I Need You Tonight."

• Their work with UTFO especially on Roxanne, Roxanne also gave rise to the legendary The Complete Story of Roxanne, those 103 responses to UTFO's 1985 novelty hit.
  
  The Story of Roxanne is one of the best stories of of the Long Tail of Music (the other great case in point is All Roads Lead to Apache).
  
  Roxanne, Roxanne brought to prominence The Real Roxanne and more importantly Roxanne Shante, possibly the best female MC of all time, Roxanne's Revenge will go down as the best response record of all time. One of my favourite songs of hers is Live on Stage which is Marley Marl's production at its best.
  
  
  
• Full Force consolidated their fame with collaborations with Kid 'N Play in House Party and its two sequels. The movies were the inspired brainchild of the Hudlin Brothers, a decade before Barbershop.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Kid 'N Play were no slouches themselves even if they tended towards the pop side of the hip-hop spectrum. They were fun, their beats and lyrics focused on putting a groove in your step. More to the point, they could dance; at a time when Hip Hop was heading into inaccessible navel-gazing, they reminded everyone about the dance in Kool Herc's dancehall that was in the founding mythology of the music. As historians of Hip-Hop would write, break dancing (the B Boying and B Girling aesthetic) is an essential element - some would even term it the most important of the 4 elements of hip-hop, even more than MCing (rapping), DJing, and that maligned "social nuisance" element, Graffiti. Gittin Funky and Rollin' with Kid 'N Play will cause circles to form and Soul Train breakouts on the dancefloor. Funhouse is their best album and that's the spirit. And those flat tops!

Full Force have since cashed out of the soul side of things except to give some "urban" substance to blue-eyed pop, and who can blame them: "black" audiences are so fickle.

File under: technology, design, architecture, software, web, systems, social software, complexity, services, music, soul, funk, jazz, hip-hop, glue, recommendations, algorithms, heuristics, machine-learning, long tail, Full Force, Adriana Evans, Lisa Lisa, Cheryl "Pepsii" Riley, James Brown, toli

The Roots + Floetry = Virtuosity

The Roots + Floetry = Virtuosity

The Roots and Floetry. Live at The Roxy, Boston. Wednesday May 18 2005

Intro * The Scene * The Vibe Y'All * Outro

Intro

I Shall... Proceed... And Continue... To Rock The Mic
Everybody Is A Star
"Go All Stars, Get Down For Y'all"
The 'Notic, The Hypnotic = Floetry, Floacism
All You Gotta Do Is Say Yes
Illadelph Halflife Meets Ill London Flow
Bring Some Money To Spend And Somebody To Lend And Some Worthwhile Money Not Some 20s And 10s
Adrenaline
Boom!
They're Coming To Break You Off
Duck Down
Don't Say Nuthin'
All Roads Lead To Apache
With Thought At Work, It's The Next Movement
I Don't Care As Long As The Bass Line's Thumping And The Drum Line's Banging Away
Kool Herc Ain't Never Seen A Royalty Check
Hip Hop You're The Love Of My Life
The Legendary Roots Crew Stay Cool In The Melting Pot
We Are The Ultimate (Rock-Rocking It)
That's What's Happening In The Parking Lot. That's What's Happening On Stage.
Din Da Da (Dun Do Do)
Do You Want More?
Somebody's Gotta Do It When The Guns Are Drawn
The Roots Come Alive
The Tipping Point Is Here And That's The Bottom Line
Give The Drummer Some
Keep the Beat Going
Bring The Beat Back. Bring The Beat Back.

The Scene (Combat Zone)

You might sense a little exuberance, a little elation, a little plain joy in these parts and you'd be right. Wednesday night with The Roots and Floetry was even more reason to sport that wide smile that I've been bearing of late. It was a cheer that started in the long lines that stretched out for 2 blocks outside The Roxy. In downtown Boston, the Theatre District is very close to what is lovingly called the Combat Zone. Indeed during my first visit to Chinatown in 1991, there were gunshots and people scrambling as we walked out of the Boylston T Stop (200 metres from The Roxy) to try to get some Dim Sum. Most Harvard students tend to stay in Cambridge which has pretty much everything they need thus each excursion to Boston and its environs is an event. With guns drawn, that outing certainly fitted the bill;it was a great Sunday brunch by the way, baptism by fire as it were.

Now of course the city has cleaned things up since then. There was a concerted effort in this liberal bastion to husband the commons in a kinder, gentler mode than Rudy MussoGiuliani in New York. In the black community at least, the churches got everyone together and knocked heads around. There was one incident that was the last straw the community could bear in 1992 when teenage gang members came guns drawn chasing people into Morning Star Baptist Church and stabbed a kid during a funeral service for a teenager who himself had been killed in a drive-by shooting days earlier. Pastors and Samaritans everywhere started hitting the streets and patiently mentoring youths and forming a Ten Point Coalition that hasn't let ever since. With the Big Dig Irish/Italian/Federal/Mafia money to spread around for the past 15 years, a little dotcom boom and bust, the current biotech splurging, and a set of savvy universities around Boston with their 300,000 students in mind, it appeared that lots of things could go well for the community and economy. The notion was that it would pay for government and even Big Government to actually to manage the cultural and economic zeitgeist so that social ties were woven together and one wouldn't end up like the anomic New Haven, to take an example of what social neglect can do.

So now there are fewer porno emporiums or theaters in the Combat Zone. Whoever had the inspired idea of placing the Registry of Motor Vehicles next to that sordid theatre knew very well the power of shame in human affairs. Thus there has been considerable gentrification throughout the city of Boston and Developers With Vision™ have tried to clean things up. There are lots of gleaming and spiffy new buildings around, including the fancy Loews Theater at Boston Common outside of which the Star Wars tribe had camped out to buy tickets at the stroke of midnight for this Friday's Sith-like Revenge on office productivity everywhere.

However the move up-market was done in typical liberal fashion, with much hand-wringing about gaining community consent and buy-in from those affected. This is why there is the occasional attraction for strong men and fascism, they make the trains run on time. Ghana, like Chile before us, could only be a poster child of the IMF and World Bank in the late 80s because it was ruled by vicious rogues who could run roughshod over the wishes of their populace. Things are not so easy when you have a case of the episodic ballot box. Thus Franklin D. Roosevelt's "He's our sonofabitch" theory of the Realpolitik of "vital interests" and the recurring marriages of convenience with noxious strongmen and Strange Bedfellows are played out in such a grisly fashion in Uzbekistan and other countries even today.

With no dictator in place to press the issue, there is still a significant minority of people around Boston and Cambridge who haven't heard the word about the clean up program. Thus as you head for the opera or some fancy show, dressed in your finest tuxedo or shimmering dresses (Swan Lake was playing at the Boston Ballet which I must see at some point), you'll pass the 7-Eleven at the corner of Tremont and Kneeland and see a few (shockingly young) hookers and their rough but effete pimps, most just a few years older, casting a wary eye and assessing the likelihood of your disbursing cash money for The Game all the while speaking a patois full of puns, coinages and ghetto witticisms. Some of us were harried after long days at work or the minutiae of dissertation completion and were dressed down hence we glossed over these gritty urban fixtures. Our thoughts were all about the Sound of Philly and perhaps Brixton or Deptford.

Others however had seen a late addition on the Ticketmaster web site about a purported dress code, "No Jeans, No SNEAKERS, or Athletic Wear", which I suspect caused much gnashing of teeth and wardrobe deliberation. The notion that a low rent joint like The Roxy was ever going to enforce a dress code on an $18 ticket to a hip-hop show was hilarious to me, but I suppose others took this seriously because I saw a fair number of people dressed up as if this were one of the summer concerts along the waterfront, or the adjacent Boston Ballet for that matter, instead of a hip-hop soul lovefest. People wearing uncomfortable shoes, plus a late start - 10:30pm on a Wednesday night, might cast a shadow on some of the enjoyment.

One thing to note is that this one-off concert was sponsored by a cigarette company and there was a certain dissonance in seeing Surgeon General's warnings on the video screens above the stage right after a stream of "Kool" images (tagline: Be True and A New Jazz Philosophy) floated past repeatedly. Just in the past year, Angie Stone was sipping on Remy Red and Jill Scott's tour was sponsored by Alizé. I suppose the floodgates opened when KRS-One did the Sprite tv commercial to the sound of The Revolution Will Not be Televised. Gil Scott Heron must not own his masters. Ironies abound when companies in the guilty pleasure industries pick up all the "progressive" artists; one wonders a little about artistic integrity but maybe it's a matter of holding your nose and paying the bills (dollar, dollar bill y'all). Who else is going to sponsor the next movement?

Left-of-center artists like The Roots have a very diverse audience, they are musicians' musicians, and hip-hop's favourite jam band thus the crowd was a kind of Rainbow Coalition of neo-soul and hip-hop aficionados, the kind of people portrayed in candy like Brown Sugar. The addition of Floetry brought out a few more older African-American women to the table, intellectual poetry with harmonies, wit and the kind of groove that gave Michael Jackson Butterflies. Everyone looked good and expectant and harassed college students could escape their fears about the courses they had neglected all semester before buckling down for finals. This was the place to be if you weren't a George Lucas addict.

The Vibe Y'all

If you walked in to a joint to the booming sounds of A Tribe Called Quest's Electric Relaxation, you would know that everything was going to be all right. Like Earth Wind and Fire singing Keep Your Head to the Sky and Devotion live, it felt like a revival meeting so "Clap your hands this evening. Say it's all right. Yeah, Yeah, Yeah."

With 'that dude from Living Colour' guesting on guitar (I turns out that it was Vernon Reid and not "The Other Guy"), this was a performance that sometimes verged on the rock side of things. Well as rocked out as a hip-hop sensibility allows and with the good Captain Kirk Douglas also doing a mean Hendrix or more accurately a Kravitz impression, the rock and soul meshed well in the flow of things. The band always pay homage to the greats with snippets of the obscure breaks thrown in every now and then and this time it was Ray Charles' What I'd Say that did the trick.

Coincidentally this past weekend I had been in New York and passed by my favourite crate digging place Rock and Soul on 35th and 7th and, if I hadn't had a train to catch, would have spent a good couple of hundred bucks on essential breakbreats.

In any case the musical territory covered was hip-hop, rock, soul (with a very soulful new backing singer who's just joined them and not mere eye candy too, she can sign), lilting reggae to straighten things out. Black Thought is completely in control of things these days and now that he no longer hoards up his charisma or turns his back from the audience, the love is plainly reciprocated. The way he started with the pyrotecnics of Web, that one verse drum-and-bass, old school raw adrenaline was astounding and there was no let up. The humour and verbal dexterity (the breath control) is about about as good as it gets, I'm reminded of Big Daddy Kane or Kool Moe Dee going to work on things but with a millennial flow. Kamal at times introduced jazz and classical keyboard breaks, he's still hip-hop's Ahmad Jamal and towards the end gifted us with an amazing church keyboard solo that hit the spot. Hub's styles himself as a cross between Michael Henderson who made Miles Davis simply Live/Evil when he pushed him to slickaphonics and foot-foolery in the early 70s and Miko Weaver who, along with Eric Leeds, pushed His Royal Badness into the zone.

And the drummers you ask? Frankie Knuckles on percussion, in empathy with ?uestlove's mission, adding great effects especially when they tilted towards reggae, soul and funk.

Questlove on the drums is simply scary and deserves his own paragraph. The frenetic and phonetic Brother Questlove is a perfectionist on his instrument, I now put him ahead of Kariem Riggins who got the nod last year because of his regular jazz moonlighting. Having listened to the Grover Washington-influenced Philadelphia Experiment, and heard the swinging I Am Music from Common's Electric Circus of which he was the executive producer, I knew he could do jazz and now with the kind of live performance that leaves you awestruck, there was simply too much talent to consider.

There was a point when it felt like that moment in the Sign O' The Times concert during It's Gonna be a Beautiful Night, right after the band has worked out on the Detroit Crawl when Prince says "Night Train" and the band switches on the dime and Duke Ellington's chorus blares from the horn section fitting perfectly and dazzling the audience. Or when James Brown was In a Jungle Groove for those magical 4 years starting in 1969, or even the point in Curtis Live during (Don't Worry) If There's Hell Below We're All Gonna Go when Brother Curtis sings

Cat Calling, Love Balling
Fussing And Cussing
Top Billing Now Is Killing
For Peace No One Is Willing
Kind Of Make You Get That Feeling
Everybody Smoke
Use The Pill And The Dope
Educated Fools
From-Uneducated Schools
Pimping People Is The Rule
Polluted Water In The Pool
And Nixon Talking About Don't Worry
He Says Don't Worry
But They Don't Know There Can Be No Show
And If There's A Hell Below We're All Gonna Go

Need I go on? At such moments, the music, audience and performers are in complete consonance. This is what I call virtuosity. This is life in a rarefied zone.

In last year's Toli Music Awards, I wrote

They've certainly hit a groove. It's like Prince circa 1986-7 when the Miles Davis horns came into his arrangements on the Parade. They've done the kiss-off album (Phrenology as Around the World in a Day) to throw off fairweather fans. They are now going for the vituousic and this works perfectly. Could a Sign O' The Times be in the offing next?

That was before hearing them on Giles Peterson and certainly before seeing them take it to the stage in the tradition of Funkadelic. I got my answer I believe.

Suffice to say that the kind of music I heard live last night has blown the band way past The Tipping Point they proclaimed was their due. The Roots are so confident in what they are doing these days that they make it appear effortless. The elated audience felt it too. Floetry who are so versatile were similarly inspired in their performance. They weren't blown off stage as almost anyone else who had to follow The Roots would be, but did their own thing and got a lot of love and plain respect. Their vibe is one of great invention, harmonizing, operatic and sensual with some London Yardie and garage inklings. It's a White Teeth meets a Brick Lane Sense and Sensibility. The thing about such musical intelligence is that at times it can be too dense and overwhelming but both bands kept the Boom Bap factor in mind so they "Rock(Ed) It To The Bang Bang Boogie Say Up Jumped The Boogie To The Rhythm Of The Boogie, The Beat"

The Roots closed out with a their usual 45 minute Hip Hop 101 tribute medley to those who have gone before them. They always choose different heroes to focus on and this time even went into more commercial club-banging territory (snippets of Biggie even turned up) intermixed with the exhilarating instrumental rare groove of Booker T and the MG's Melting Point that I pointed out earlier as the Jazz Funk in a Blanket of Soul.

Outro

Since the DJ who warmed the club up was utter early nineties nostalgia, I'll close with this lyrical zinger from that same era, a golden era in retrospect, Chubb Rock's Yabadabadoo:

From The Rustler
Lyrical Hustler
The Fat Lady Sang
I Crushed Her.
Word Up The Chubbster

As we walked out at 2am to brave those denizens of the night who were still plying their trade in the combat zone, there was a little wistfulness about whether the car would still be there. It was hence highly appropriate that we were handed a couple of fliers for next weekend's Pimps and Hoes party.

Iceberg Slim's hoedown aesthetic is now a commonplace with Don "Magic" Juan, 50 Cent and Snoop literally pimping the cultural (and financial) zeitgeist. Thankfully people like the more reflective Ice-T have stepped off that program (and never would I have dreamt of writing a sentence containing the words reflective and Ice-T but that is a sign of the times). Perhaps one should see this as just a bit of fun, the ascendancy of a culture of irrepressible irreverence and reinvention, a kind of poking your thumb in the eye of those august New York Times types who now write editorials about how hip-hop lost its way. What these grey ladies don't understand is that that hip-hop is vibrant enough that Ludacris and De La Soul can coexist and even feed off each other without dissonance. Even if I were that way inclined, I'm off to London next weekend and anyway what would Malcolm and Martin think? The commercial road is certainly a heavily travelled path for instant gratification. The Roots and Floetry aesthetic simply shrugs of such concerns and tries to win you over with musical dexterity, one performance at a time, and it pays off I think. As the Black Sheep (who were also played during the warm up) put it, The Choice is Yours: "You can get with this or you can get with that". In my book, the tortoise does beat the hare in the end. I might take Richard Pryor over Bill Cosby but I still love both aspects of the culture. Mission: Music.

With a Philly groove still echoing in my ears, this was simply blasé blasé to me. I fell asleep with a smile on my face.

File under: music, virtuosity, elation, exuberance, soul, hip-hop, jazz, funk, poetry, rock, Philly, The Roots, Floetry, culture, vibe, lyricism, dexterity, musicians, Living Colour, Miles Davis, Prince, Curtis Mayfield, Chubb Rock, Vernon Reid, Boston, urban, life, development, black, history, sociology, Broken Windows, concert, review, roots, Ghana, Chile, Uzbekistan, toli