Wax Poetics - Issue 59

OWN ITEMS DIRECTLY FROM THE WORLD’S LEADING ARTISTS, CREATIVES, LABELS AND COLLECTORS.

Dropping monthly at WaxPoetics.com

The Bootsy Collins Collection, Cincinnati, Ohio November 2024

Wax Poetics Issue 59

08 13 15 16 20 24 28 30 34 42 50 64 74 80 86 96

Audio Index Editor’s Letter

Wax Poetics, Inc. info@waxpoetics.com

Advertise advertise@waxpoetics.com 718.644.2244 Subscribe waxpoetics.com/subscribe subscribe@waxpoetics.com 818-701-0721

Kaytranada Com Truise BadBadNotGood Chromeo Doug Shorts Blu Edwin Birdsong Kelela Aaliyah Rinder & Lewis Terry Reid Continental Baths Jimmy Jam Outro

Retail/Distribution

Newsstand Melanie Raucci Disticor Magazine Distribution Services mraucci@disticor.com 631.587.1160

Record Store/Boutique Tyler McWilliams Fat Beats Distribution tyler@fatbeats.com 818-701-0721

Contribute editorial@waxpoetics.com

Published by Wax Poetics, Inc.

Printed by Fry Communications, Inc.

Distributed by Disticor Magazine Distribution Services

SUMMER 2014

ISSN 1537-8241

Aaliyah by Jonathan Mannion

Kelela by Yev Kazannik

Audio Index

Editor-in-Chief Andre Torres

A Wax Poetics guide to music featured in this issue.

Editor Brian DiGenti

Marketing Director Dennis Coxen

Creative Director Freddy Anzures

Associate Editor Tom McClure

Com Truise Wave 1 (Ghostly International)

Kaytranada “At All”/ “Hilarity Duff” (HW&W)

BadBadNotGood III (Innovative Leisure)

Account EXECUTIVE Paul Alexander

Contributing Editors T. P. Carter Michael A. Gonzales

Andrew Mason Ronnie Reese

Contributing Writers T. P. Carter

David Ma Jeff D. Min

Doug Shorts “Don’t Sleep On My Love” (Cherries)

Chromeo White Women (Atlantic)

Blu Good to Be Home (Nature Sounds)

Eddie Fleisher Warren Fu Dan Gentile John M. Gómez Michael A. Gonzales

Ronnie Reese Andy Thomas Dan Ubick Rico Washington

Chris Williams

Contributing Photographers Freddy Anzures Gustav Images Yev Kazannik Jonathan Mannion

Edwin Birdsong Edwin Birdsong (Philadelphia International)

Kelela Cut 4 Me (Fade to Mind)

Aaliyah Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number (Jive)

Connor Olthuis Martin Pariseau Timothy Saccenti Danny Scales

Janet Jackson Janet (Virgin)

Rinder & Lewis Seven Deadly Sins (AVI)

Terry Reid Seed of Memory (ABC)

Which is why Kelela’s on the back cover. Because when I look at the young sistas in the R&B game, it’s clear that Kelela is in her own lane. Hearing her futuristic new-school approach to the music makes me think back to Aaliyah, Janet, and the long line of female vocalists whose footsteps she’s following in. Looking for the perfect complement to Aaliyah, it wasn’t long before Kelela rose to the top of our list. Still, some will argue that it’s all hype. Their misguided view of the media has them still thinking hype sells records. But it’s the artists’ fans that do that; we just tell their story. And we want to keep telling them, but doing it the same way we did a decade ago no longer works. The biggest magazine distributor in the U.S. just went out of business.They delivered everyone from Time and Vanity Fair to Wax Poetics and countless other indie mags.Their demise isn’t simply a WP problem, but a print magazine problem. At the rate the game is going, we’re looking at complete fallout within the next five years. If we’re still printing at all, it’ll be in very limited numbers sold directly to a dedicated fan base. By then, all of the newsstand distributors and physical retailers will be out of business, and the cost of manufacturing and distributing print magazines really won’t make sense. It already doesn’t. So like it or not, it’s all about digital.And as much as we love holding this magazine, we love telling stories even more. But we can’t make that move to digital alone; we need your help. The web game ain’t like the print game; online is all about numbers. Advertisers don’t care how smart and cool your readers are; they just want lots of them. It’s going to take your support to get us where we need to be, so be sure to hit waxpoetics.com and get your daily click on. While we play the game, we’ve got to do it our way. So we’ll continue to provide compelling content that challenges us and keeps you guessing, in print and online. Because it’s a natural part of our growth, as individuals, as well as a brand. It’s what this journey has always been about—growth, openness, and an undying hunger for fresh sounds, both old and new.

integrity in other forms like jazz. But it’s not so simple, because anything can become popular. At one point, jazz was all the rage, and the musicians were selling gold. But they lost that connection to popular culture once they started playing above their audience instead of for them. It’s where hip-hop may have gone had we stayed so focused on keeping it real rather than keeping it moving. One of the most unfortunate phenomena of the last few years has been golden-era cats shutting themselves off from anything new. It happens to every generation, so it’s our mission to keep pushing ourselves and our fans out of our respective comfort zones. Digging for beats was always about discovery, exploration, and openness—finding the surprise gem on an otherwise unsurprising record. Whether it was Christian rock or Andean flute music, everything was up for grabs. It’s the spirit that Bambaataa embedded in our culture’s DNA. Over the years, the game became about scarcity instead of quality, about the records instead of the music. But it’s always been music first for us. Many of the records we were talking about when we started weren’t even available on CD, much less iTunes. Today, most of them are just a click away on Spotify. For music lovers, that should be a good thing.Yet, we still hear old heads whining about streaming music. We love records too, but we love the music more. We want to keep knocking down the walls we all build around ourselves over time, shutting ourselves off from new music and experiences we may otherwise love if we only gave them a chance. I had to learn it firsthand from someone almost twice my age. It was the legendary founder of Sire Records, Seymour Stein, who unknowingly helped me see the error of my ways. Here’s a man responsible for the careers of everyone from Madonna and the Ramones to the Talking Heads and the Smiths, and he shows up to one of our SXSW events, cane in hand and decades older than everyone there. But Seymour was just doing what he’s always done—stay on the hunt for fresh new sounds. While we broke bread a few months later—and he regaled us with tales of his first gig at King Records and discovering multitudes of bands in NYC’s downtown glory days—I saw my future. Not as a bitter old-timer who longed for the “good old days,” but one who appreciated them while staying a step ahead and always knowing where the tide is turning.

After some of the crazy reactions to the last letter, I feel like I still have some explaining to do. From crazy props to cries of our demise, the fans spoke loud and clear.While “real talk” was exactly what some needed, it was too much for others. My apologies to anyone offended; we really do hate peeling back the curtain of the industry to reveal its seedy underbelly. But it’s important for us to give a clear perspective on why we do what we do, even though it may leave some scratching their heads. Take our cover stories, for instance. If you had asked us a decade ago, even we couldn’t have predicted Aaliyah on the cover. It was too soon at that point, but the time is now and it feels so right. From day one, we wanted to tell the stories of our culture’s musical heroes. Some were funk bands who only put out a few local 45s, others were icons who sold millions of records and profoundly influenced popular culture. So it shouldn’t be a surprise to see Aaliyah on the cover.Though she may have come from another era, to a generation of young people like our other cover artist Kelela, Aaliyah was their Aretha, their Billie Holiday. Her groundbreaking work with Timbaland and Missy signaled a new future for R&B, a future we’re living in right now. Looking at the current state of music, one could argue that it’s Aaliyah’s influence that’s reverberating the most. From Beyoncé to Rihanna, there’s no escaping the singer’s lasting cultural impact at the twentieth anniversary of her debut. But there will be those who argue otherwise. Aaliyah was a pop star, and to some, they’re not to be taken seriously.They think pop is easy, that there’s more artistic

Expect the unexpected,

Andre Torres

KAY TRA NA DA Montreal beat producer perked ears with his reworking of famous tracks, but now sets his sights beyond the remix.

With a sparse production style that synthesizes a mélange of funk, house, hip- hop, and electronica, Kaytranada has deftly tapped into the DNA of the groove. Nile Rodgers calls it “Deep Hidden Meaning.” Whatever it is, Kaytranada’s unique layering of syncopated drum rhythms and rump- shaking synth bass lines has hypnotized revelers on dance floors from Paris to Los Angeles.Yet, at one time, his biggest goal was simply occupying a slot in Canadian beat- scene collective Artbeat Montreal’s quarterly live showcase. With this goal in mind, he went from a novice eighth grader crafting beats on Virtual DJ to one of Canada’s most in-demand beatsmiths. While he’s been releasing original material in the form of beat tapes and EPs since 2010, recognition would come two years later when a slew of his SoundCloud remixes began echoing throughout the Internet.Following a tidal wave of posts,likes, tweets, and retweets of his reworks of Janet Jackson’s 1993 hit “If” and Teedra Moses’s 2004 single “Be Your Girl,” Kaytranada quickly became the vaunted prince of the international beat scene. Praise from the likes of beat-scene high priest Flying Lotus and offers to spin his brand-new funk at

various festivals and sold-out club dates in the U.S. came pouring in. Before long, London was calling. Last August, influential tastemaker and BBC Radio 1 host Benji B even invited him to sit in as a guest on his weekly radio show. The newfound attention has definitely yielded some preliminary rewards. In addition to producing tracks for buzzworthy Chicago MC Vic Mensa and the Mobb Deep reunion album, he’s also working on his new EP for XL Recordings. The EP’s focus? Traversing the curse of the remix. “I do the remixes for fun, but people think I’m just a remixer,” he says.“So the EP will have guest features and instrumentals.” Though Kaytranada has amassed an impressive following seemingly overnight, he’s well aware that he’s only just begun. And he’s more than willing to go the distance and jump every hurdle in his path. But at present, his only hurdle is trying to convince his manager, William Robillard Cole, of his latest purchase. “Yo, Kay! Are you buying all that?” asks Cole, looking disapprovingly at the pile of salvaged vinyl on the counter. Kaytranada grins and shrugs. “I might as well. It’s going to be a struggle, but I don’t care.” .

by Rico Washington photography by Martin Pariseau

“Damn! I said I wasn’t going to buy records!” Twenty-one-year-old wunderkind producer Kaytranada ponders the bins of New York City’s premier crate-digging spot A-1 Records with a mixture of excitement and hesitation. “I don’t have space in my bags,” he frets. But the gleam in his eyes says it’s obvious he’s not leaving without at least a few pieces of vinyl to satiate his digger’s appetite. On the heels of an international whirlwind tour over the past year, including three sets at this year’s SXSW festival, Haitian-born, Montreal-raised Kevin Celestin has been operating at breakneck speed. And after a late set at 88 Palace, an NYC dim sum dancerie, Kaytranada (formerly known as Kaytradamus) deserves at least a few dusty treats.

T O P GEAR A long way from his humble beginnings of department-store keyboards, Com Truise now packs an arsenal of vintage synths.

by Eddie Fleisher photography by Danny Scales

Seth Haley is known for crafting rich, multi-textured soundscapes as Com Truise. His ’80s-inspired songs ooze with the warm sounds of vintage synths. But, it didn’t start with an expensive piece of analog gear.“Oh, man, I don’t know, a department-store keyboard,” Haley says when asked what he used to make his first tunes. He laughs, adding:“ I can’t remember the name of it. Some crappy Casio keyboard and a computer.” Before Haley started making his own tracks, he spun drum and bass. He got hooked on the genre when he first heard AK1200 on a digital music channel on his cousin’s TV.“I was just baffled. I’d never heard anything like it,” he recalls.“I went home and did some research and found he had put out a bunch of mix CDs.That’s where I started to learn about mixes and mixing.”That Christmas, Seth got a pair of turntables and some records, and became a DJ. Eventually, he outgrew it, yearning to create his own productions.This stemmed from the simple fact that there were things he wanted to hear that he wasn’t hearing anyone else doing. “I guess it was like,‘I can’t really find it, I’m gonna do it myself,’ ” he says. Ironically, he hated ’80s music when he was growing up.“I wanted nothing to do with the music,” he says.“But, I had this buddy I used to DJ drum and bass with. He was a big ’80s guy. He’d always be like,‘You gotta check this out’ or ‘Listen to this,’ and I was like,‘Blah, blah, blah.’ But, then one day I did, and I was like,‘Wow, I totally missed out on all this wonderful music.’ ” These days, his main studio setup consists of Eurorack synths (“the modular stuff”), a Rhodes Chroma, the Akai AX80, Elektron Machinedrum, the Roland Juno-106, and the Sequential Circuits Six-Trak.“I’m really trying to limit myself at the moment,” he says. In all, Haley has over twenty pieces of classic gear, and he’s still on the hunt for more (particularly an Elka Synthex). However, he’s currently taking a break from obsessive eBay searches, joking that the process is “somewhat of a money pit.” When I asked him which piece was his most treasured, he took a long pause. “That’s a tough one,” he replied. He settled on the Crumar Bit One, which he got refurbished from online synth retailer Tone Tweakers. “It looked like it had just rolled off a conveyor belt out of the factory. I was blown away when I unpackaged it. I plugged it in and started scrolling through the patches and was like, ‘Holy shit, nothing else sounds like this.’ I can’t even replicate this with analog or virtual stuff,” he says.“It’s a crazy synthesizer.” Speaking of virtual stuff, Haley admits that contrary to popular belief, he’s not completely a hardware guy. “I like both,” he says, noting that he’s especially fond of software when it comes to “stabby bass sounds.” “With hardware, I can’t control it the way I want. Or, maybe I haven’t figured it out,” he says. “Depends on the day. Sometimes, I don’t wanna goof around too much. I just want to sit there and work.” In the heated debate on software versus hardware, Haley doesn’t take sides. “I skate in the middle. Who cares what you use? If you’re comfortable with it, if it makes you happy, if you get what you want, use it. Whatever you want.”

Understandably, Haley is weary of taking his pricey vintage hardware out on the road. “I don’t know, it makes me nervous,” he says. “It’s kind of a cautionary measure to use the newer stuff, because you never know. If one of those breaks, you can pretty much get one fairly easy, shipped to wherever you want.” The newer stuff he’s referencing includes the Akai APC20 and MPD32 controllers, a Livid Base, a basic Mopho and a Mopho x4. As he talked about his live setup, the conversation turned to Moogfest, the annual five-day Asheville, North Carolina, festival that Haley played in April. Even though he describes festivals as “hot, dirty, crazy, and stressful,” he was excited to be on the bill. “They draw a huge crowd; that’s the trade- off,” he says.“I like the venue kind of shows. They’re a bit more intimate. You can hang out.” Another trade-off, though, is getting to be a part of an event presented by a company that’s very dear to his heart.“I’m a

big fan of Moog,” he says with enthusiasm. “The first real synthesizer I ever bought was theVoyager Rack Mount Edition.Then I used the Slim Phatty. I’ve always wanted to get to the pedals and stuff, but I haven’t really pulled the trigger on it,” he explains.“I hope they come out with polyphonic stuff some day!” Haley comes from a background in advertising, where he was an art director. In fact, he still applies the principles from that position to his job as a working musician.“I have multiple projects, and I kind of think of them as companies and I’m branding them. I’m the brand manager, so to speak,” he says. “I do my own artwork and all that. Who knows what the sound looks like better than I do? I’m a very visual person.” To him, art and music go hand in hand, each helping to fuel more creativity.“Sometimes, I’ll just open up [Adobe] Illustrator and I’ll just design shapes, whatever. Just some weird stuff. And that will inspire me to write a

song. I’ll design the artwork to the music. It can work both ways.” His knack for connecting visuals with music will definitely come in handy as he explores new territory: film scoring. “I’m trying to dabble in that world. It looks good. Stuff is happening,” he reveals. “We’ll see where it goes.”With the cinematic feel of his songs and the impressive success his career has had so far, it’s pretty likely you’ll soon be seeing his name when the credits roll. For now, the Ghostly International star is wrapping up a tour—he spoke to me from the road in Louisiana—and planning a move to NewYork City. It’s then, he jokes, that the convenience of virtual instruments looks a lot more enticing. “I’m trying to figure out studio space,” he says, in reference to storing his sizable synth collection. “Or do I keep them in my apartment? What the hell do I do, you know?” he says, laughing. Either way, there’s definitely no room left for any cheap department-store keyboards. .

“Transports you to the non-stop cosmic beach party in Harvey’s head” (Uncut Magazine)

“Music for your road and acid trip” (Mojo Magazine)

www.smalltownsupersound.com

DI AB OL IC AL BEATS

Canadian jazz-prodigy trio BadBadNotGood brings a fresh new-school hip-hop sensibility to the classic artform.

by Ronnie Reese photography by Connor Olthuis

There’s a lot more good than bad when it comes to writing about BadBadNotGood (BBNG). The only “bad,” actually, is the Canadian trio’s relative professional music inexperience. From their 2010 meeting in jazz college to the present day is a scant four years in which they’ve accomplished a lot, but hardly provides enough for a thousand- plus words of prose. The good—the really good, in fact—is that each member of the group is extremely bright, energetic, and loves to talk about music. That is, until, I ask them what they like to do when they aren’t playing music. “I don’t know,” says bassist Chester Hansen, twenty-two. Hansen seems to be the quietest of the three, much like George Harrison was the “quiet” Beatle, which is stellar company for Hansen. Drummer Alex Sowinski, twenty-two, who at one point during our four-man Skype session flat- out admits, “I talk a lot,” unexpectedly goes dead silent. Keyboardist Matt Tavares, twenty- three, son of two accountants, finally offers a response to the “What do you like to do when not playing music?” question, an answer that is fundamentally the BBNG motto: “Play more music.” Not a surprise. They’re musicians, and music fans, but most important, they’re fans of each other as musicians. All are prodigies, and all are multi-instrumentalists. In addition to keys, Tavares plays saxophone—and he claims Hansen plays piano better than he does. Hansen also plays guitar. In addition to drums, Sowinski plays piano and guitar; but in comparison to his bandmates, he

idea of trying to be expressive on a smaller, harmonic medium.” The love that BBNG didn’t get from their instructors they eventually found on YouTube after posting “The Odd Future Sessions Part 1.” This three-year-old video of the medley performed for their Humber assignment has earned close to 550,000 views to date, and comments ranging from lavish praise (“This is brilliant”) to freak- outs (“pulling buckies to this song. oh fuck”) to favorable snark (“This shit sucks... says the person who has never played an instrument”). Disappointment became elation as the trio collectively decided to leave school and embark on a career in professional music, which meant rehearsing and practicing daily, learning and recording new music, and playing as many live shows as possible. “Everything has been super enjoyable,” Tavares says.“There’s definitely been a large grind, but it’s the best job in the world, because we’re three friends who get to express ourselves with our instruments.” Much of the initial BBNG allure came though their use of cover songs, a staple of jazz tradition and to the group, akin to 1960s rock artists covering the blues and Bob Dylan. Their first two albums, BBNG and BBNGLIVE , both released on Bandcamp in 2011, feature overlapping live and studio versions of tracks from Odd Future, Nas, Slum Village, A Tribe Called Quest, and Waka Flocka Flame. On their third LP, 2012’s BBNG2 , the group mixes genre- blurring original pieces with reworkings of songs by Kanye West, Feist, James Blake, and My BloodyValentine.

says,“I play the least amount of instruments competently besides drums.” The three met at Toronto’s Humber College School of Creative and Performing Arts, jazz students who bonded over their love of hip-hop. “The music that we were listening to at the time was a bit different than a lot of people in jazz school,” Sowinski says of their classmates, who were more in tune to modern jazz and the NewYork club scene. Their teachers, many of whom were folk musicians and session players from the 1980s and ’90s, cared even less about hip- hop, or at best, knew very little of the genre past Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. “Which is a shame,” Tavares says, “because [hip-hop] is an incredible genre of music, and I feel like especially in this weird academic bubble that jazz education lives in, it just totally gets neglected.” The disconnect didn’t stop BBNG from reworking Odd Future’s “Bastard,” “Orange Juice” (which is the beat to Gucci Mane’s “Lemonade”), and “AssMilk” into a medley for an end-of-year performance at Humber, which was grossly misunderstood by the school’s music cognoscenti. The claim was the piece had “no musical value,” Tavares says. The group says this happened for two reasons: unfamiliarity with the source material, and the simplicity of what they were playing. Lost in transmission was the realization that the minimalism of the BBNG approach was influenced by the same basic, modal jazz—“serious” jazz—that their instructors and classmates revered. “A hip-hop song that’s one or two chords is really no different than a lot of traditional jazz,” Sowinski says.“It’s the same

For their latest, 2014’s III —“the first real record,” Tavares says—producer Frank Dukes was enlisted to help craft an odyssey of all-original material that presents BBNG as more than just a cover band, and definitely more than just jazz. The album is the expression of a personal and honestly crafted language the group has developed in just four years,and one that will only grow richer in vocabulary. If cover songs are what built their following, the original compositions on III make them not a novelty but a force. At twenty-two and twenty-three, they’re already influencing younger musicians. And they’re only going to get better. “You could tell their level of musicianship was something special,” says Innovative Leisure (IL) cofounder Jamie Strong of first hearing the BBNG demos. The group signed to IL in 2013 after Strong and label partner Nate Nelson

flew to Toronto and saw just their second live performance, but one “which had all of these young kids—eighteen to twenty- one—moshing to essentially jazz music.” There are times to mosh to BBNG, but there are also times where the group will ask itself, “What if we played this quietly?” just for the exercise.They’ve been praised by RZA for their contributions to The Man with the Iron Fists soundtrack, performed behind Frank Ocean at Coachella, and played in front of an audience of one for Bootsy Collins, but they’re not swayed by anything but music. As the YouTube commenter said of their work, “This is brilliant.” BBNG is brilliant, and constantly striving for some combination of perfection and imperfect excellence. If they were a basketball team, they’d be the one that always made the extra pass. “Some of our songs, we honestly have,

like, fifty iPhone versions of the basic structure of the song and fifty different ways of jamming on it,” Tavares says. “Because you never know if this one little change will make something way cooler.” Sowinski says that what BBNG is doing right now is cool, but based on the amount they’ve learned in the past two years, they have no idea what the future holds. When asked what they’d still like to accomplish, Hansen says, “Everything.” They don’t consider themselves a jazz band, but they have a jazz ethic and understand that it takes a lifetime to develop a craft. It’s not about solos but working as a unit and functioning as one band moving forward. Keep the ideas fresh and make sure the sound in twenty years is nothing like the sound today. Either that or be awesome all the time. “Mingus never really changed,” Tavares says.“He was just always amazing.” .

DOU B L E DOWN After a decade of fine-tuning their craft,electro-pop duo Chromeo open up their process to collaborators and double down on their commitment to ’80s R&B.

by Jeff D. Min photography by Timothy Saccenti

It’s Cinco de Mayo, and Chromeo is gearing up for their set at Lincoln Hall. It’s uncharacteristically cool for May, but business as usual for a place like Chicago.The sun is playing hide-and-seek, periodically jutting through clouds in unpredictable spurts—the wind vicious and ripe. Chromeo is in town for the Come Alive Tour promoting their newest album, White Women . Their set is exactly what you’d expect from the Canadian electro-funk, synth- pop duo: large, opulent sounds, a disco inferno of lights, and a thick lacquer of Soul Glo covering everything within earshot.They are bold and charismatic, and drive forward doggedly like a dry-slab avalanche. At one juncture, guitarist and vocalist Dave 1 pauses and says something to the effect of how intimate a show this is and how they haven’t performed like this since they were rocking the stage with guys like Flosstradamus and the Cool Kids. But before nostalgia could settle in and anchor the experience, he and synth man P-Thugg exploded back into their set like a supersonic jet at takeoff. For as fantastic as Chromeo is onstage, their formula is actually pretty simple: commitment, a commitment to friendship, a commitment to craft, and a commitment to artistic integrity. It’s a marriage that goes beyond the allure of fame and into the past when Dave 1 and P-Thugg were just David Macklovitch and Patrick Gemayel. Friendship and an obsessive love for music formed their cornerstone, and for ten years, it’s given them a stable foundation to build upon. Musicians like Hall & Oates, Rick James, and Phil Collins inspired them every step of the way. “Our friendship is the bedrock of this band,” explains Macklovitch. “We became friends by discovering funk music together when we were fifteen.Twenty years later, the bond is still intact: total trust, devotion to one another, and solidarity. And a shared admiration for this kind of music.” Chromeo is something of a family affair—by blood and by proxy. David’s brother A-Trak (Fool’s Gold), along with early supporter Tiga (Turbo Recordings), offered trusted counsel, steeped in credibility and experience. Their guidance helped Chromeo coagulate their sound and build something that could be translated onstage. When asked about those early shows, Gemayel offers a telling response,“Years of empty rooms and uncomfortable sound checks full of microphone feedbacks. But [those] early years had the merit of letting us build a solid fan base and cred. They probably even forced us to get our presentation tightened up and extremely aware of how we could be viewed and interpreted.” The easy thing to do would have been to label them a throwback, and when you’re wrangling with such an iconic sound, it’s bound to happen. But it’s clear that it’s much more than that.It’s a profound respect and admiration for what came before. “The Black ’80s were completely overlooked in the 2000s’electro revival of artists like New Order, Joy Division, and the Smiths,” says Gemayel.“They were regarded as high-brow music, but Mtume, Cameo, Midnight Star, and Rick James were ridiculed and considered a farce, which to us was shocking. It was borderline racist.”

fall into place. And it has, but only because they were willing to put in the work. Chromeo is always bending and stretching, looking for ways to improve and build. They understand that treading in stagnant, tepid water is the quickest way to dilute your potential. At this point—four albums deep—the ’80s-era novelty factor has worn off, and their vision is as clear and lucid as ever. “Our whole thing from the onset was to do electronic music,” says Dave, “but from a traditional songwriting standpoint: verse, chorus, bridge, solo. We love solos. We talked about the leap on Fancy Footwork . Business Casual was a leap too: we went for sophistication, darker textures, and different ambiances. But we really wanted to take it up a notch on White Women .” Their newest album is a roller coaster with “key changes, major/minor shifts, [and] lifts in choruses,” according to Dave. They were finally together in one place for the making of it, “both in New York, in the same room, on a daily basis,” says Gemayel, and tweaked things down to the very last minute as to deliver it as fresh as possible. They break out of the restricting three- minute format and into a place where they can stretch their legs and get comfortable. Collaborations with Solange, former LCD Soundsystem drummer Pat Mahoney,Toro y Moi, Mtume singer Tawatha Agee (“Juicy”), andVampire Weekend’s Ezra Koening add to the bombast. “It’s the first time we opened the doors to the studio and let people give their opinions on our music at the very early stages of demos and ideas,” says Gemayel. “We had rarely taken any outside suggestions in the past.” Chromeo’s hospitality has only enhanced their sound. It’s made White Women —a title inspired by the work of photographer Helmut Newton—something of a crown jewel, a culmination that combines all the elements in their periodic table. Now, after nearly a decade of chromatic jams, they’re ready to take off again, pushing further and further into the far reaches of outer space where their emblem can shine brightest. “Personally, I’m driven by this obsession, and our sense of humor is what smooths out the long hours of practice, crafting, learning, trying, failing, succeeding, dissecting, composing,” says Gemayel. “All you need is one idea—stick to it.” .

“The main reason why She’s in Control and [its follow-up] Fancy Footwork sound so different is because we started to understand a bit more what our sound was going to be and what we were doing musically and technically,” adds Gemayel. “We were also just starting to grasp what this new world of analog synths and ’80s drum machines could offer to us and how to incorporate them into our ideas and songs.” Album two brought about big changes, one-half facilitated by engineering guru Philippe Zdar and the other by an influence from a motley crew of like-minded artists including MSTRKRFT, Cut Copy, and the Ed Banger collective. The bigger sound fit their ambition, and they ran with it, landing gigs at powerhouse festivals like Lollapalooza, SXSW, and Pitchfork. Those festivals are a breeding ground for hybrid sounds, and while ambiguity is half the fun, Chromeo stuck to their guns believing that if they stayed committed, everything would

“It is racist. The same way the ‘Disco Sucks’ movement was racist,” Macklovitch quickly adds. Understanding the nuances of such a misunderstood genre tunes Chromeo in to a more hushed narrative, a conversation that allows them to use yesterday’s tools for today’s sensibilities. But to saddle them with the title of ambassadors would be to undermine other notable things they do, specifically the way they balance influence and initiative, humor and integrity, the obscure and the universal. With their compass fine-tuned, they’ve been able to make well-calculated steps— from greenhorns to emerging superstars. “Let’s be honest: we didn’t really know what we were doing on the first album,” explains Macklovitch. “They were our first attempts at songwriting—my first attempts at singing, certainly.” Released in 2004, She’s in Control was a litmus test for Chromeo, the all-important first draft that would lay the groundwork for future endeavors.

Subscribe to the best music magazine

on the planet.

waxpoetics.com/subscribe

Doug Shorts finds a new home at boogie-inspired Cherries Records. Storied Chicago funk and soul singer SE COND ACT

“I feel like Doug’s story is the story of a whole lot of people,” says producer Andrew Brearley by phone from his Queens home. Brearley and his wife, Sheila Hernando, run Cherries Records. The “story” he speaks of is the life of their flagship artist, Frederick Douglass Shorts. “Creating new music with him showed us the potential and possibility of our dream becoming a reality,”Hernando says.It’s a new partnership for an old dog.Visiting the house Shorts shares with his mother on Chicago’s South Side reveals a timber-wolf-gray ’39 Buick with a ’67 Bonneville engine sitting in the middle of the backyard. Next to the car is a jagged, twelve-foot stump, all that’s left of a hundred-year-old tree that recently toppled and nearly crushed everything in its shadow—including the Buick. Inside of Shorts’s five-by-nine-foot brick and wood-paneled basement studio, Funkland, are various pieces of recording gear that are functional, if past their prime— Korg X3, Roland 880 Workstation, Axiom 25 MIDI controller, Boss Dr. Groove. The walls are lined with pictures of “the originators,” which is how he refers to Bird, Dizzy, Billie, and Count Basie. Interspersed among those pics are promo shots of Shorts solo or with his most well-known band, Master Plan Inc. The “Inc.” was added in the mid-’70s when an astrologist read the charts of the Zodiac signs for Shorts and some of his bandmates and said they were in a “business phase” and should capitalize while the stars were aligned.There may have been marijuana involved.They ended up at a free business-management school, earning degrees in less than a year. Doug is “just a cool-ass dude,” Brearley says. “Not everybody is as cool as him, and that’s a huge part of it…just him being good energy, having an open mind about working with younger folks, and doing things.” Bearley is right on all accounts. Shorts, sixty-three, is indeed a cool dude, with a story not that unlike many other performers of his generation. He was born into a musical family near Cabrini–Green, raised in the shadows of his swiftly changing neighborhood and the stars performing at Chicago’s original Regal Theater. He attended singer Jerry Butler’s songwriters’ workshop, joined groups with names like the Visitors and the Mannequins, but his biggest success came with Master Plan Inc., a funk collective with all the talent to make it big. But as these stories go, they didn’t make it at all. Shorts once had to pass

by Ronnie Reese photography by Freddy Anzures

on a tour because a member converted to Jehovah’s Witnesses.“I have many stories like that, where we were right at the cusp,” he says.“Almost there.” Master Plan Inc. slowly stabilized and, in 1975, recorded at Sound80 in Minneapolis with producer David “Z” Rivkin before landing a deal with Brunswick Records. Brunswick, sadly, was mired in scandal and on the decline. In-house producers were meddling with the group’s music so much that Shorts had enough. He knew business because his management training “put us on alert for nonsense,” he says. This situation, however, was headed to the street. It never came to blows, but Shorts realized that, at times, just knowing the business wouldn’t be enough. He enrolled in martial arts classes shortly thereafter and is now a fifth-degree black belt. Shorts chased his music dreams to Los Angeles in 1986, but ended up taking a series of odd jobs, including minor roles in television and film, while continuing to record and produce. He returned to Chicago to care for his mother in 2003 and was later working as a doorman when he befriended rapper Brian “Robust” Kuptzin, who was a labelmate of Brearley’s at indie imprint Galapagos4. Kuptzin and Brearley were hanging out one day when Kuptzin said, “You have to meet my boy Doug Shorts.” When he mentioned Shorts’s name, Bearley remembered the Doug Shorts and the Master Plan Band “How Slick Is Slick” 7-inch he had just bought. “You mean this dude right here?” he asked Kuptzin, pointing to the record. Both of their minds were blown. Brearley and Shorts linked and the Cherries seed was sown. Soon after, Master Plan Inc. recordings began to surface— some submastered by fabled engineer Ed Cody—and found homes at Jazzman and Numero Group. Through Brearley and late DJ Tony Janda, some of Shorts’s music got to Daptone/Dunham Records. Upon hearing it, Dap-Kings drummer Homer Steinweiss flew Shorts into Brooklyn in 2012 to record vocals on the modern-soul collaboration he’d been working on with producer Frank Dukes, an album that is awaiting release as Silver & Gold Featuring Doug Shorts . Also awaiting release are a steppers album and a 12-inch “Doug and Ro” project from Shorts and Kuptzin that’s reminiscent of Blueprint - era soul-sample chops. Except the samples aren’t samples. It’s the old dog Shorts. “I got my tentacles out there,” he says, still hungry after all these years. .

CAN’T STOP, WON’T STOP

Los Angeles storyteller Blu ’s enormous drive has yielded an equally immense amount of work for the young rapper who once considered early retirement.

by David Ma photography by Gustav Images

ask the best, man.That’s a dream come true.” Blu’s also sought and received production from Flying Lotus, Nottz, Daedelus, and Madlib through the years. In 2009—in addition to an already rapidly growing oeuvre—he released two instrumental beat tapes, which were his first foray behind the boards. Also, And IfYou See the E Drop ’Em was released in 2011, his first all-instrumental full-length. He also made beats for three of his albums on the Nature Sounds imprint the same year. This year, he extends his prolific streak with an eighth full-length LP, a very fitting but unsurprising double album, Good to Be Home —an uncomplicated celebration of L.A. music culture. “Cruising down Weston with them colorful hats / Gold and that black, such a lovable match / The rap Huxstable, comfy like bubbles in baths,” raps Blu on “The West,” the lead single. It’s a homecoming of sorts for the 2009 XXL “Freshmen” alum who blew up, toured incessantly, and was dropped by Warner Brothers over an album titled NoYork! “The album is basically a love story between a kid and his city,” he says. That talk of retirement at age thirty never materialized;he recently turned thirty- one.The rapid rate at which his catalog has grown is equaled only by his staggering drive. On the subject of retirement, the young workhorse says,“These last few years, I have gotten so much love and invites to work and create that I can’t stop. [One of the songs] on the new record is coincidentally called ‘Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop.’ We just getting started.” .

“He had the jewels for me to create and get out everything I needed to express on that debut.” Exile, whose career started with Aloe Blacc as part of Emanon, has built an immensely thick résumé, helming tracks for everyone from Mobb Deep to Snoop Dogg. Blu’s work ethic took shape when he started as a hype man for local crews after relocating to L.A. from San Pedro, California, where he spent his high school years. Blu was the stepson of a pastor whose household only listened to gospel, and rap was tersely restricted. Blu explains,“It wasn’t until I moved in with my [biological] father in L.A. that I began to buy hip-hop music.” He continues, “For years, I was a freestyle MC. My good friend convinced me to start actually writing and recording songs ...instead of battling every MC just for recognition. I remember he always said,‘Ain’t no money in freestyling, bro; it’s free.’ And then he also hipped me to OutKast’s Aquemini . I thank him to this day . ” After his aforementioned debut with Exile, he hit a stride, an enormous prolific spurt releasing two mixtapes, seven full- lengths, and eleven EPs, casting a wide net for producers as well as beat aesthetics. “Alchemist, man, ha ha , I can’t get out of his studio! His work ethic is actually crazier than mine, not to mention his clientele is one of the best in the game,” he explains. Having internalized healthy doses West Coast rappers like Ice Cube and Tha Alkaholiks as a youth, Blu recently worked with a revered East Coaster, Pete Rock himself. “I just got a beat from Pete , yo! We did a 12-inch. I just

For most rappers—even ones whose careers are in a rapidly decaying orbit—talk of retirement is mostly met with disbelief, perhaps even indifference. Like an aging boxer who can’t hang up his gloves, the tail end of many rap catalogs can be ugly. Meet Johnson Barnes, who goes by Blu, and whose career is in the ascendant— perhaps even at its peak. Not long ago, Barnes began toying with the notion of walking away from music by age thirty, citing industry woes, an emerging interest in film, and a sense that he reached his creative threshold.You can’t blame him for wanting to leave on a high note. Barnes was a breakout presence in the West Coast’s indie rap scene, with his 2007 debut, Below the Heavens , getting numerous nods on “best of” lists, as well as landing on L.A. Weekly’ s “Top 20 Greatest L.A. Rap Albums of All Time.” Independently released on Sound in Color and produced by Exile, the album’s beat palette was heavy on classic soul, mostly sliced into new yet recognizable bits. The familiarity, the touches of jazz, and its mid-tempo pace had both washes of melancholy and joie de vivre. It paird perfectly with Blu’s contemplative, sometimes very personal rhymes. “It was a huge blessing to get Exile to produce the entire record,” Blu says. “I had others in mind when we first started, but after Exile and I did one song together, I knew he was the perfect person.” The pair’s output would later combine for two more efforts, Maybe One Day , an EP out in 2012, and Give Me My Flowers While I Can Smell Them , released the same year.

COS MIC RE VERB Producer, songwriter, and organist Edwin Birdsong is the anonymous genius behind some of jazz- funk’s most cosmic moments. The Los Angeles native reconnected with high school acquaintance Roy Ayers in New York, and the two began work on a series of records that would change the course of jazz and popular music at large.The relationship would give birth to a funky jazz with commercial leanings that worked both live and on the dance floor.Birdsong remained committed to a solo career, releasing a string of records, including two highly influential albums—one on Gamble and Huff’s Philadelphia International and one on Salsoul—whose effects are still reverberating. Influenced by Larry Levan and the NewYork club scene,Birdsong’s left-field boogie anthem“Cola Bottle Baby”would become fodder for both Daft Punk and Kanye West,and his bare funk breakbeat track“Rapper Dapper Snapper” would nod hip-hop heads for years, bringing Birdsong’s grooves to a new global audience.

by Andy Thomas

W hen I first saw the credits on those mid-’70s Roy Ayers Ubiquity LPs like Vibrations and Lifeline , I wondered who Edwin Birdsong was. Here was a left-field keyboardist and songwriter who not only worked as coproducer on those pivotal Ubiquity LPs but also had writing credits on classics like “Running Away” and “Red, Black & Green.” Deeper digging revealed a series of his own experimental cosmic-soul LPs that began in 1971 with the Polydor debut What It Is and ended with his Salsoul outing, Funtaztik , in 1981. Despite his prescient and unique music being heavily sampled (De La Soul, Gang Starr, Daft Punk, Chemical Brothers, et al.), Edwin Birdsong remains a cultish figure whose genius is shrouded by anonymity. Born in Los Angeles in 1951, Edwin Birdsong was raised in a religious household where his pastor father, who sang in a church quartet, instilled a love of the spirituals. “I started playing piano in Sunday school when I was about eight or nine, playing simple things like ‘Jesus Keep Me Near the Cross,’ ” he tells me over the phone from L.A. “So that’s really where I got started at the Solid Rock Baptist Church, although I didn’t realize at the time how influential it was going to be.” Following his father’s path, he also started singing at the church and as a teenager joined the Los Angeles Community Choir, meeting such luminaries as Merry Clayton and Billy Preston. An equally important formative experience for Birdsong came from outside of the church.“I started studying classical music when I was about six years of age through a piano teacher who lived a few doors away,” he recalls. At the same time as he was developing his classical piano techniques, he was also beginning his first attempts at composition: “I would improvise and make things up while I was playing at the church. I always had that urge to try different things on the piano around the songs I was learning.”While the church would provide his foundation, young Edwin’s ears were opened further to secular music through local radio:“I would hear boogie-woogie tunes, and I noticed that they all had that left-hand movement. And because I was left-handed, it was never really difficult for me to play.” At junior high school, he formed his first small band playing piano with a group of friends.“It was a very rough thing,” he says,“just a group of kids getting together and trying to imitate other people.” But through one of those kids, he was soon to discover a new instrument that would change his creative path: “A friend had taught me how to play a twelve-bar blues in the Jimmy Smith style, on an old Hammond. So from there, I learned to play jazz organ.” Birdsong earned his spurs on the organ when he moved to Germany as an army serviceman in his late teens during theVietnam War.“When I got there, I was already playing the blues, so I would sit in with the band and play the popular songs. And the bartenders, who were the guys in those days who would hire the musicians, would ask me if I had a band. So I put together a group, and that group was called Birdsong and the Sounds.” Stationed in Baltimore for his last six months of service, he put together various bands in the clubs down the famous jazz hub of Pennsylvania Avenue.“Most clubs there at the time had a Hammond organ, which was perfect for me,” he says. With his horizons opened by his trips abroad, Edwin moved to NewYork after he left the army in the late ’60s.“I was going to a music store called Manny’s where I could get hold of the ‘fake books’ that had all the popular jazz classics. So it was through going to Manny’s that I really started to want to learn more about serious jazz. I would go to the clubs up in Harlem and say to the guys,‘Hey, how do you play over these changes?’ ” He was soon sitting in on jam sessions around the city and started to make some influential contacts:“George Benson was playing in one of the clubs uptown, so I sat in with that session.There was always a jam session like that in the week, and I would learn a lot from that.” His serious musical intentions were furthered when he attended both Manhattan School of Music and Juilliard.“People at Manhattan School of Music were more hippy-like, but those at Juilliard were much too serious for me, because I was running around smoking marijuana and having fun with all these different musicians,” he says.“But when I left Manhattan School of Music to study at Juilliard, I did become much more serious in my own studies, because they really challenged you.All the students there studied really hard. I didn’t want to be Bach though, and I certainly didn’t want my music to be so stuffy that it couldn’t be commercial at the same time.”

( previous spread ) From the front cover of Edwin Birdsong’s Super Natural (Polydor; 1973). Original photo by Tack Kojima. ( opposite ) From the back cover of Edwin Birdsong’s Funtaztik (Salsoul; 1981). Original photo by Benno Friedman.

People at Juilliard were much too serious for me. All the students there studied really hard. I didn’t want to be Bach though, and I certainly didn’t want my music to be so stuffy that it couldn’t be commercial at the same time.

Through his wife, Michelle, who was working as a stewardess on American Airlines, Birdsong was introduced to Wes Farrell, cowriter of the hit song “Hang on Sloopy.” “Wes had his own publishing company, and I let him hear some of the songs I had written,” he recalls. “I didn’t know until then I could just get paid as a writer for other people, but that’s what I started to do. I was also playing at a club in the East Village called Pee Wee’s, and Wes came to hear me and invited Jerry Schoenbaum, the President of Polydor. So Jerry heard me play, and it went from there.”

Alongside other socially conscious numbers like “Pretty Brown Skin” (cowritten with Michelle Birdsong and Roy Ayers, who also recorded the track the same year) and “The Uncle Tom Game” was the gospel-influenced “My Father Preaches That God Is the Father.” Despite his new connections with the hip jazz world of New York, this dedication showed the respect Edwin would always have for the church. “Coming from a religious background, I didn’t want to go back to California and be playing in the clubs because of my father being a pastor,” he says. “So that prompted me even more to stay in NewYork.” Perhaps the standout track on the LP and certainly the most progressive was “The Spirit of Do…Do,” which was later slowed down into a woozy jazz-funk cut on the Roy Ayers Ubiquity LP Mystic Voyage .

Roy, and I actually did my first recording session for Herbie at Atlantic Studios.” Birdsong and Ayers soon entered the studio together, beginning a long creative partnership. “I think my main influence on Roy at that time was getting him to move from being a purely jazz musician to become more bluesy and commercial,” he says. “I also took him from just playing jazz into singing more.”

Roy Ayers’s 1970 LP, Ubiquity , would be a milestone recording both for Ayers and Birdsong. “That was the start of our publishing company, Ayer-Bird Music,” says Edwin. The exploratory sound of “Pretty Brown Skin” and “Hummin’ ” (most recently sampled by Kendrick Lamar on “Celebration”) worked like a template for the pair’s future explorations into cosmic jazz-funk. It was a sound founded as much on Birdsong’s complex organ arrangements as the elegant, shifting vibraphone work of Ayers. In 1973, Birdsong furthered his musical partnership with Ayers, penning the classic title track of the Red, Black & Green album. The same year, Edwin returned with his second LP, Super Natural .“How that [album] differed from What It Is was that I wanted to do a more rock-influenced album,” he says. “I had used Eddie Kramer on the first album to mix the LP, and on Super Natural, I brought him in as a producer and engineer. I had a young guitarist by the name of Ronnie Drayton. He was such a great guitarist in that Hendrix tradition that it blew Eddie’s mind.”The LP was recorded at Hendrix’s Electric Lady Studio in New York.“When we were there, Jimi’s stuff was in the hallway—his amps and stuff were scattered about—so his spirit was really all over that album,” says Birdsong. However, Polydor’s lack of promotion for the LP left Birdsong frustrated. “I had

Edwin Birdsong’s debut LP, What It Is , was released on Polydor in 1971.The album was recorded at the Fame Recording Studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, with executive producer Ted Cooper and engineers like Jerry Masters. It would prove to be an LP of great depth and maturity for a young man who had just turned twenty.“It was nothing for me to write those songs, really; it came very easy to me,” he says.“Ted Cooper really knew his way around the studio, and I also became very interested in that. I had studied technical illustration in college, so I always embraced that kind of stuff, because I was something of a nerd. I was very technical in my approach to music.” Drawing heavily on the social and political issues of the time, it sat comfortably next to LPs like Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On and Gil Scott- Heron’s Pieces of a Man . “This was just after the ’60s at the time of the protest songs and stuff like that, and so I came up with numbers like ‘It Ain’t No Fun Being a Welfare Recipient’ and ‘Mr. Money Man.’ ” These were just two of the songs written with his wife, with whom he’d set up the Michelle-Bird publishing company, and who went on to write songs with both Edwin and Roy Ayers.

Edwin’s relationship with Roy Ayers went right back to their high school days in Los Angeles: “Roy went to Jefferson High School, and I went to Freeman High, which were rival schools. At the time, I was a member of this group of guys called the Continental Gents. We would put on parties and stuff, and Roy was in one of the groups that we had hired to play for us out at the beach.” The pair’s friendship would be rekindled when both relocated to New York: “I lived on Eighteenth Street, and he moved just around the corner on Seventh Avenue between Eighteenth and Nineteenth Streets. So he and I became friends.This would have been around 1969.” Roy Ayers was already making his name in the city’s jazz scene as Edwin recalls: “He was playing with Herbie Mann at the time.” Ayers and Mann’s relationship had been cemented on the 1969 heavyweight LP Memphis Underground .“I really liked Herbie’s music but hadn’t realized Roy played in the band. Anyway, I was introduced to him by

Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 76 Page 77 Page 78 Page 79 Page 80 Page 81 Page 82 Page 83 Page 84 Page 85 Page 86 Page 87 Page 88 Page 89 Page 90 Page 91 Page 92 Page 93 Page 94 Page 95 Page 96 Page 97 Page 98 Page 99 Page 100 Page 101 Page 102

www.waxpoetics.com

Made with FlippingBook - PDF hosting