Saturday, July 16, 2011
Legends live forever.
Gil Scott-Heron 1949-2011
Gil Scott-Heron was born in Chicago, Illinois. His mother, Bobbie Scott-Heron, sang with the New York Oratorio Society. Scott-Heron's Jamaican father,Gil Heron, nicknamed "The Black Arrow", was a soccer player who, in the 1950s, became the first black athlete to play for Glasgow Celtic Football Club in Scotland. Gil's parents separated when he was two and Gil was sent to live with his maternal grandmother, Lillie Scott, in Jackson, Tennessee. When Scott-Heron was 12 years old, his grandmother died and he went to live with his mother in The Bronx in New York City, where he enrolled in DeWitt Clinton High School. He later transferred to The Fieldston School after one of his teachers, a Fieldston graduate, showed one of his writings to the head of the English department at Fieldston and he was granted a full scholarship.
Scott-Heron attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, as it was the college chosen by his biggest influence Langston Hughes. It was here that Scott-Heron met Brian Jackson with whom he formed the band Black & Blues. After about two years at Lincoln, Scott-Heron took a year off to write the novels The Vulture and The Nigger Factory. The Last Poets performed at Lincoln in 1969 and Abiodun Oyewole of that Harlem group said Scott-Heron asked him after the performance, "Listen, can I start a group like you guys?" Scott-Heron returned to New York City, settling in Chelsea, Manhattan. The Vulture was published in 1970 and well received. Although Scott-Heron never received his undergraduate degree, he received a Master's degree in Creative Writing in 1972 from Johns Hopkins University. His 1972 masters thesis was titled Circle of Stone.
Scott-Heron began his recording career in 1970 with the LP Small Talk at 125th and Lenox. Bob Thiele of Flying Dutchman Records produced the album, and Scott-Heron was accompanied by Eddie Knowles and Charlie Saunders on conga and David Barnes on percussion and vocals. The album's 15 tracks dealt with themes such as the superficiality of television and mass consumerism, the hypocrisy of some would-be Black revolutionaries, and white middle-class ignorance of the difficulties faced by inner-city residents. In the liner notes, Scott-Heron acknowledged as influences Richie Havens, John Coltrane, Otis Redding, Jose Feliciano, Billie Holiday, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, Huey Newton, Nina Simone, and the pianist who would become his long-time collaborator, Brian Jackson.
Scott-Heron's 1971 album Pieces of a Man used more conventional song structures than the loose, spoken-word feel of Small Talk. He was joined by Johnny Pate (conductor), Brian Jackson on keyboards, piano, Ron Carter on bass and bass guitar, drummer Bernard "Pretty" Purdie, Burt Jones playing electric guitar, and Hubert Laws on flute and saxophone, with Thiele producing again. Scott-Heron's third album, Free Will, was released in 1972. Jackson, Purdie, Laws, Knowles, and Saunders all returned to play on Free Will and were joined by Jerry Jemmott playing bass, David Spinozza on guitar, and Horace Ott (arranger and conductor). Carter later said about Scott-Heron's voice, "He wasn’t a great singer, but, with that voice, if he had whispered it would have been dynamic. It was a voice like you would have for Shakespeare.”
1974 saw another LP collaboration with Brian Jackson, the critically acclaimed opus Winter in America, with Bob Adams on drums and Danny Bowens on bass. The album contained Scott-Heron's most cohesive material and featured more of Jackson's creative input than his previous albums had. Winter in America has been regarded by many critics as the two musicians' most artistic effort. The following year, Scott-Heron and Jackson also released Midnight Band: The First Minute of a New Day. A live album, It's Your World, followed in 1976 and a recording of spoken poetry, The Mind of Gil Scott-Heron, was released in 1979. In the July 1976 Bicentennial issue of Playboy Scott-Heron was profiled; the accompanying artwork shows Scott-Heron singing or speaking into a microphone as it melts from the heat of his words. Another hit success followed with the hit single "Angel Dust", which he recorded as a single with producer Malcolm Cecil. "Angel Dust" peaked at No.15 on the R&B charts in 1978.
In 1979, Scott-Heron played at the No Nukes concerts at Madison Square Garden. The concerts were organized by Musicians United for Safe Energy to protest the use of nuclear energy following the Three Mile Island accident. Scott-Heron's song "We Almost Lost Detroit", written about a previous accident at a nuclear power plant, was included in the No Nukes album of concert highlights. (We Almost Lost Detroit is the title of a book about the accident by John G. Fuller.) Scott-Heron was a frequent critic of President Ronald Reagan and his conservative policies.
Scott-Heron was dropped by Arista Records in 1985 and quit recording, though he continued to tour. The same year he helped compose and sang "Let Me See Your I.D." on the Artists United Against Apartheid album Sun City, containing the famous line, "The first time I heard there was trouble in the Middle East, I thought they were talking about Pittsburgh." The song compares racial tensions in the US with those in apartheid-era South Africa, implying that the US was not too far ahead in race relations. In 1993, he signed to TVT Records and released Spirits, an album that included the seminal track "'Message to the Messengers". The first track on the album criticized the rap artists of the day. Scott-Heron is known in many circles as "the Godfather of rap" and is widely considered to be one of the genre's founding fathers. Given the political consciousness that lies at the foundation of his work, he can also be called a founder of political rap. Message to the Messengers was a plea for the new generation of rappers to speak for change rather than perpetuate the current social situation, and to be more articulate and artistic. Regarding hip hop music in the 1990s, he said in an interview:
They need to study music. I played in several bands before I began my career as a poet. There’s a big difference between putting words over some music, and blending those same words into the music. There’s not a lot of humor. They use a lot of slang and colloquialisms, and you don’t really see inside the person. Instead, you just get a lot of posturing.
—Gil Scott-Heron
In 2001, Scott-Heron was sentenced to one to three years' imprisonment in New York State for possession of cocaine. While out of jail in 2002, he appeared on the Blazing Arrow album by Blackalicious. He was released on parole in 2003. On July 5, 2006, Scott-Heron was sentenced to two to four years in a New York State prison for violating a plea deal on a drug-possession charge by leaving adrug rehabilitation center. Scott-Heron's sentence was to run until July 13, 2009. He was paroled on May 23, 2007. The reason given for the violation of his plea deal was that the clinic refused to supply Scott-Heron with HIV medication. This story led to the presumption that the artist was HIV positive, subsequently confirmed in a 2008 interview.
After his release, Scott-Heron began performing live again, starting with a show at "SOB's" restaurant and nightclub in New York on September 13, 2007. On stage, he stated that he and his musicians were working on a new album and that he had resumed writing a book titled The Last Holiday, previously on long-term hiatus, about Stevie Wonder and his successful attempt to have the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. declared a federally recognized holiday in the United States.
Mark T. Watson, a student of Scott-Heron's work, dedicated a collection of poetry to Scott-Heron titled Ordinary Guy that contained a foreword by Jalal Mansur Nuriddin of The Last Poets. The book was published in the UK in 2004 by Fore-Word Press Ltd. Scott-Heron recorded one of the poems in Watson's book Black & Blue due for release in 2008 as part of the album Rhythms of the Diaspora by Malik & the OG's on the record label CPR Recordings. In April 2009 on BBC Radio Four, poet Lemn Sissay presented a half-hour documentary on Gil Scott-Heron entitled Pieces of a Man. Having interviewed Gil Scott-Heron in New York a month earlier, Pieces of a Man was the first UK announcement from Gil of his forthcoming album and return to form. In November 2009, the BBC's Newsnight interviewed Gil Scott-Heron for a feature titled The Legendary Godfather of Rap Returns. In 2009, a new Gil Scott-Heron website, gilscottheron.net, was launched with a brand new track "Where Did The Night Go" made available as a free download from the site. Scott-Heron released his new album I'm New Here on independent label XL Recordings on February 9, 2010. Produced by XL label owner Richard Russell, I'm New Here is Scott-Heron's first studio album in sixteen years. The pair started recording the album in 2007, with the majority of the record being recorded over the last twelve months with engineer Lawson White at Clinton Studios in New York. The album attracted substantial critical acclaim with The Guardian newspaper's Jude Rogers declaring it one of the next decade's best records.
The first single from the album was "Me And The Devil", which was released on February 22, 2010. It was debuted by BBC Radio 1's Zane Lowe as his "Hottest Record In The World", along with other specialist DJs such as Gilles Peterson and Benji B. The album's remix, We're New Here, was released in 2011, featuring reworking by English music producer Jamie xx of material from the original album. It was also very well-received by music critics.
Thursday, July 7, 2011
the common denominator...
Chicago
Humanities
Festival
Last winter, an email arrived from the Seminary Co-op Bookstore with a suggestion for an event featuring the rap artist Common and Professor Adam Bradley, the co-editor of The Anthology of Rap. Published by Yale University Press in October of 2010, The Anthology of Rap is the first book to bring together the greatest rap lyrics of all time, giving them the respect they deserve as poetry. In the afterword to the book, Common writes, “What you hold in your hands is more than a book. This is a culture. This is a testament to the fact that rap is a tradition told in many voices. We have created a living language through rap... For anyone with the curiosity to see beyond the stereotype, this book offers a view of rap in full, from the root to the fruit.”
A rap artist at the CHF, you say? Believe it or not, it won’t be the first time we’ve hosted a rap musician. Chuck D, who pioneered the development and popularization of rap through his work with Public Enemy, graced our stages in 2004 to talk about the inequity of access in communications technology.
Music has been a big part of our planning for the tech•knowledgē festival; so far our music programming touches the 20th century, with a program about amplification and singing styles, and the 17th century, with a program on theviola d’amore—a 14-stringed hybrid of the violin and viola da gamba. From here we find ourselves at rap. With its beginnings in the sound system mixing of the 1970s to its cultural dominance via hip hop culture in the last three decades, rap music evolved from a specific technology and was deeply influenced by the communities in which it was first embraced.
Who better to explore this culture at the CHF than Common? Born Lonnie Rashid Lynn, Jr. in Chicago, Common is a gifted lyricist who approaches his work from a positive angle, despite what you may have heard regarding his recent invitation to appear at a White House poetry event. The author of three books, The MIRROR and ME, I Like You But I Love Me, and M.E. (Mixed Emotions), and an upcoming autobiography One Day It’ll All Make Sense,Common is a distinctive voice in a genre that has exploded in a relatively short amount of time. He is the recipient of a Grammy Award, is a successful actor (American Gangster, Date Night), and has started a foundation called Common Ground, an organization dedicated to the empowerment and development of urban youth in the United States.
Many of his lyrics express this theme. From Be (Intro): “I look into my daughter’s eyes, and realize that I’m gonna learn through her/The Messiah, might even return through her/If I'm gonna do it, I gotta change the world through her.”
Talking with Adam Bradley, an associate professor of literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Common will touch on these and other influences and the technological milestones that marked rap’s rapid rise.
Posted by Mary Kate Barley-Jenkins
http://www.chicagohumanities.org
The Anthology Of Rap Yale University Press, 2010Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Monday, July 4, 2011
Dark Girls documentary
Its not often that I hop on a soap box in this electronic world I've made to communicate with you. But every once in a while it feels trite to just post something and let you think of it what you will, independent of my personal notions about the subject matter. For this post, I really wanted to accentuate the significance of exploring such an important aspect of Western culture (and for that matter all colonialized societies or cultures that have been influenced by Western thinking).
In the Americas, the vestiges of slavery still persist. All over the world, for that matter, the disenfranchised seem to be the more dark complected members of society. Authors, social and political figures, artists and activists from Angela Davis to Spike Lee, have long explored the three headed monster that is the systematic degradation of Black people.
I have often been one of very few people of Color, in school, in the workplace and in my own neighborhood. In such an environment, you learn very quickly how skewed the dimensions of the American psyche are. What people outside of Black culture often misunderstand or fail to recognize, is how profoundly we've been taught, throughout our history, to hate ourselves. This is the most complex aspect of discrimination to understand and overcome.
Enter- Dark Girls. The upcoming documentary explores the deep-seated biases and attitudes about skin color that are experienced particularly by dark-skinned women, outside of and within African-American culture.
Here are just a few excerpts from the film, revealing what these courageous women had to say about being dark complected in America:
"I can remember being in the bathtub asking my mom to put bleach in the water so that my skin would be lighter and so that I could escape the feelings I had about not being as beautiful, as acceptable, as lovable."
"She's pretty for a dark-skinned girl ... What is that supposed to mean?"
"They used to say, 'You stayed in the oven too long.' "
"It was so damaging ... it made it seem like we weren't wanted; that we were less than."
"The racism that we have a people amongst ourselves is a direct backlash of slavery."
While the issue certainly isn't brand new, this approach appears to be. Colorism traditionally arises in an adversarial fashion: Someone accuses someone else (a director, a magazine editor, perhaps all of Hollywood) of embracing unfair standards of beauty that exclude many black women.
Dark Girls seems to take a different angle. Rather than vilifying the perpetrators of bias, the preview shows women being allowed to tell their own stories in a manner that sends an undeniable message about how nonsensical, painful and historically fraught our stubborn views of skin color and beauty can be.
The film is being produced by Bill Duke for Duke Media and D. Channsin Berry for Urban Winter Entertainment, and co-produced by Bradinn French and edited by Bradinn French.
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