Soulman Marvin Sease died yesterday in Vicksburg, Mississippi. He was sixty-four.
Cause of death is still unknown, but the song says it all. Rest in Peace.

Reprinted from Wax Poetics Issue 3, Fall 2002:

“Man, patience is a virtue!” Harry Whitaker is reflecting on the long-awaited release of his first album as a leader, recorded when he was thirty-four years old. Now a well-seasoned fifty-nine (“I’m older, not more mature,” he clarifies), he is savoring the fruits of a philosophy that guided him throughout a rich career spent supporting a galaxy of headliners. An archetypal behind-the-scenes accompanist and arranger best known through his association with Roberta Flack, he was a cornerstone of Roy Ayers’s landmark ensemble Ubiquity. When looking beyond the marquee and delving into key players in R&B, jazz, and that area where they intersect, his name quickly becomes, well, ubiquitous. A piano player who was in the thick of the New York City independent jazz milieu of the ’70s, yet concurrently contributed to countless commercial and “pop” sessions, his arrangements are instantly recognizable (“We Live in Brooklyn,” “Feel Like Makin’ Love”) but his name remains obscure to most. With the rerelease of his only album as a leader, a soul-jazz gem of heart-palpitating rarity, this may soon change. I spoke to Whitaker at a recent gig and found his tastefulness and gift for hip understatement in clear evidence in both his piano playing and personality.

Born in Pensacola, Florida, in 1942, Whitaker was raised in the musically fertile soil of Detroit. His first professional gig was with rhythm-and-blues sensation Lloyd “Mr. Personality” Price. “It was a great band, very hip,” Whitaker recalls, listing members Slide Hampton, Kenny Dorham, Calvin Newborn, and Pat Martino. After graduating from high school he moved to New York City, where he paid his dues working the “chitlin circuit” with a Fort Greene, Brooklyn-based band called the Eddy Jacobs Exchange. Typically, the band played an assortment of Top 40 tunes, and Whitaker cites this experience as his training in writing and arranging. “None of the guys could read [music], so every week I would take whatever song was hot at the time—Joe Tex or Otis Redding, say—and arrange it.” The band, which also included future heavyweight Leon Pendarvis on bass, released a couple 7-inches on Columbia Records with the support of Al Kooper, whom they had opened for. Now one of the most sought-after major label funk 45s, the first single features Whitaker’s composition “Pull My Coat,” a wicked slice of JB’s-inspired hard funk.

“In 1969 or so we were playing at Wilt Chamberlain’s club in Harlem,” Whitaker recalls. “[Drummer] Al Mouzon came in and asked me if I could make a rehearsal with Roy Ayers,” who had recently arrived from California. The band turned out to be the fledgling Ubiquity, and with Whitaker’s presence the group gelled solidly. The first LP Ayers’s new lineup recorded was 1970’s He’s Coming, a bellwether of the era’s impending melding of jazz, soul, and funk. “‘We Live in Brooklyn’ was my song,” Whitaker notes. “I was living in Brooklyn at the time, so I came up with this little thing, very simple really, and Roy wanted to record it.” With a bemused grin, he adds, “A lot of people remember that one.” Unfortunately but not unexpectedly, some of those who remembered the song forgot to credit its creator, and it is here that we come to the familiar refrain of uncleared samples, record company subterfuge, and so on. Sampled prominently in Mos Def’s 1999 Rawkus LP Black on Both Sides, the label did not clear the usage. “With Warner Brothers [taking over Rawkus] I am just now getting something from it. I got a lot of catching up to do!” Whitaker is far from a bitter old-timer however, more a playful spirit delighted at seeing how the ripples of his music have spread.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pZEvkh8JAA

“Roy and I did the score for the Coffy movie with Pam Grier. It was 1972, the company was trying to get the group War to do it but they wanted more money so we got the job. In 1997 Quentin Tarantino ended up using one of our arrangements [from Coffy] in Jackie Brown. I knew nothing about it until I went to the movies, heard it, and was like, ‘Whoa! That’s my song!’” He has since retained the services of a lawyer he describes as “a pirahna.”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9X1Jkv48po

Whitaker has a connection to yet another rare-groove treasure. Though later in his career he would become well known as an arranger, his first official gig in that capacity was a 1970 session for his friend Gene McDaniels. Entitled Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse, the much-sampled and sought-after result gained some of its distinctive sound from a clever arrangement Whitaker worked out: “They didn’t have enough money for horns so I used two bass players to do the lines.” The interplay of Miroslav Vitous (acoustic bass) and Gary King (electric bass) on the cut “Headless Heroes” showcases the unexpectedly powerful result. “Jagger the Dagger”’s eerie and immediately distinctive groove, conspicuously sampled by A Tribe Called Quest and the Gravediggaz, is largely derived from Whitaker’s arrangement of electric piano and bass.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJrmUtUosyM

Also present at the session was a close friend of McDaniels, a young singer by the name of Roberta Flack. Taken by Whitaker’s skills, she asked him to join her group. “I had just gotten with Roy so I told her that I wasn’t interested at that time,” Whitaker recalls. Four years later, the time was right. Beginning with the blockbuster Feel Like Makin’ Love in 1975, (the title track written by Gene McDaniels and reprised on Ubiquity’s Change Up the Groove LP) Whitaker worked with Flack through 1981 as musical director, playing on hits like “The Closer I Get to You,” “And the Feeling’s Good,” and “Back Together Again.” Though the money and exposure was great, Whitaker wasn’t wholly satisfied, and felt he was losing depth and subtlety in his playing. “I was starting to sound like a jingle. I had to make a decision whether I wanted the money or my creativity. Working with Roberta was taking up all of my time. So I chose to be creative and be poor for a while.”

In spite of his commitments to Flack, Whitaker had always kept bands together, gigging in New York City when he was not on tour. After several years with Flack’s band, “I was making good bread so I booked some time and went in and did my own project,” he remembers. Black Renaissance was recorded on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, January 15th, 1976, at Sound Ideas Studio on West 46th Street in New York City. The same locale had already given birth to Weldon Irvine’s first solo recordings, Stanley Cowell’s Illusion Suite, and Shamek Farrah’s First Impressions. Whitaker’s project was to live up to these high standards, both in musical terms and ultimately as an elusive rare groove treasure.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpozN-_STlo

“It was never put out over here. I tried to get a deal with it but couldn’t,” Whitaker remembers. “It’s really not a commercial record.” He spoke to a representative of a Japanese label, Baystate. “I didn’t trust them, so I gave them a tape, not the masters.” Baystate ended up issuing the album in 1977, neglecting to notify (or pay) Whitaker, and misprinting the auspicious recording date as June 15th. “It was a handshake agreement with somebody who did not turn out to be trustworthy,” he summarizes. Fortunately for those who have an interest in soul-jazz and haven’t been able to track down this extremely rare pressing, the serendipitously named U.S. label Ubiquity has reissued it, though they did not have the luxury of working from the original tapes: “I had the masters with a friend and the building burnt down about eighteen years ago.” He shakes his head and shrugs. “What Baystate had was a rough mix; I never had the money to finish it and get it mixed properly—but it sounds pretty good!” The currently available pressing was mastered from the Baystate issue, and he’s right, it sounds great.

Catchily described as a free-jazz What’s Going On, the album has some of the same Afrocentric, free-flowing soulfulness, encouraged by the large crowd of friends and family present at the session. Whereas Gaye’s album was carefully orchestrated however, both tunes that comprise Black Renaissance were unrehearsed. “It was spontaneous, moment to moment,” Whitaker states. “The piano vamp ties it together and Buster brings it in with the bass.” Without question, Buster Williams’s rich-toned acoustic figures are prominent, hooky and ripe for the creative samplist. As the pulse of the twenty-three-minute A-side ebbs and flows, the listener is treated to three long solo sections (Azar Lawrence, Woody Shaw, and David Schnitter), each anchored by Buster Williams’s slinky bass and Whitaker and Billy Hart’s solid accompaniment. Especially vivid is Shaw’s solo, which builds from sparse ragged statements to a blistering, almost distorted rampage, and the dubby echoed interplay of the multi-lingual poets and vocalists. “Two of my ex-wives are on there, saying poetry,” Whitaker proclaims straight-faced. Obviously the man must know something about harmony! The cool rhythmic bed remains solid throughout, and the song ends with a coda where everyone gets loose, aptly illustrating Whitaker’s description of the piece as “Dixieland, circa 1976.”

The fifteen-minute B-side “Magic Ritual” has a loping, heavier percussive 6/8 feel to it, reminiscent of some Ghanian rhythms. Whitaker’s block chords again guide the assembled cast through the sinuous and trancelike progression. This time the horns trade thirty-two-bar solos before vocalists take turns riffing over a modal plateau. Samplists and DJs alike will certainly enjoy the mid-song breakdown introduced by the chant “Beat the drum for today and tomorrow… Beat the drum for the start of the magic ritual.” The heavy percussion obeys the command, stomping and shaking with a fury before Buster Williams finally gets a chance to let loose over light clave and shaker accompaniment.

“Everybody told me it’s ahead of its time,” Whitaker laughs. “With the poets on there, it’s really a rap record if you think about it!” Aficionados may get a chance to hear another intriguing session, heretofore unearthed, that Whitaker put together in 1981. Featuring Gary Bartz and Terumasa Hino, the sound is “much different than Black Renaissance.” Intriguingly, Sybil Thomas is the featured vocalist. The daughter of Stax legend Rufus, her much-loved releases on West End Records include the Garage anthem “Do It to the Music,” recorded under the Raw Silk moniker. “It’s heavy,” Whitaker promises.

The consummate accompanist, Whitaker has never lacked for work. When asked for notable sessions he’s contributed to, the surprises keep coming. “Gary Bartz, Norman Connors, the Spinners, Stephanie Mills, Bobbi Humphrey, Gwen Guthrie,” He pauses. “Oh yeah, Madonna.” Madonna? “Yeah, I remember she was real shy, had black hair then. I played on a tune called ‘Starlight’ or something…” A quick check of the album notes doesn’t turn up his name on “Lucky Star,” but credited or not, his generous contribution to the jazz and R&B canon is indisputable.

Whitaker currently holds down a trio gig at a neighborhood tavern in Greenwich Village, polishing off standards and cheerfully accompanying vocalists, all the while throwing in witty musical allusions (such as the chords to Zawinul’s “In a Silent Way” rising over the clatter of pizza trays in one beautifully surreal instance). “I’m having fun, this is the best time of my life. I love music and I’m passionate about it. It took me a long time to realize this is what I want to do, I just need to keep working on it. Money is no problem, it’s about how do you want to make the money.” Whitaker laughs, warming to his subject. “I’m a runaway slave. I ain’t in the kitchen, I ain’t in the fields picking cotton, I ran away and they have to come and get me! I’m doing what I want to do.” Patience is indeed a virtue.

Fujita worked at Columbia Records from 1954 to 1960 (with a break from ’57 to ’58) and designed album covers for Charles Mingus, Dave Brubeck, Art Blakey, and Miles Davis, among others.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqH_KlRlOe8

Reggae superstar Gregory Isaacs, who was just featured on the cover of our Reggae Issue, has passed away at his London home after battling lung cancer. “Jamaica was a really nice place to grow up in, not like how some depict it to be,” he told Wax Poetics writer David Ma of his island home. “One of my all-time favorite [singers] was an American, Sam Cooke. I loved his voice and would try to imitate him all the time. [laughs] As far as I know, music always grabbed my attention.”

In 1978, Isaacs released two of his best and most-respected LPs to date, Cool Ruler and Mr. Isaacs, the latter including the classic “Slave Driver” (see clip above from Rockers). After 1979′s stellar Soon Forward, Isaacs was incarcerated for cocaine possession, but made a huge comeback with 1992′s “Night Nurse.” “I was actually incarcerated while it played on the radio,” Isaacs said.

In 1988, Gregory Isaacs made another big splash in the reggae world with his release of “Rumours.” After that, his popularity never really waned, as he continued performing live up until his death and gained a universal respect for being a reggae heavyweight. Isaacs had recently performed at London’s Big Chill Festival. He passed away at 4 AM on October 25, 2010. He was sixty years old, according to his manager, Copeland Forbes.

Brown played on John Coltrane’s Ascension and Archie Shepp’s Attica Blues, and recorded his own albums for labels like ESP, Impulse!, and ECM.

Check out Guy Kopelowicz’s photos of Brown in Issue 15 (if you can find it!).

General Johnson, lead singer for Chairmen of the Board, died on October 13 due to complications of lung cancer. He was sixty-nine.

Best known for the 1970 Chairmen of the Board hit “Give Me Just a Little More Time,” Johnson also won a Grammy in ’71 for penning the Clarence Carter hit “Patches.”

Johnson is survived by his wife, two sons, a daughter, and his music.

Clayton brought Uncle Jamm’s Army, his collective of fatigues-clad hip-hop DJs, to various auditoriums around L.A. in the early ’80s. When L.A. club Radio faded, Uncle Jamm’s Army threw parties for the underage crowd where one could hear the likes of Bobcat, Egyptian Lover, and Clayton spinning early hip-hop records. Clayton also brought acts like Run-DMC and Whodini to the West Coast during this time.

“They were the biggest thing going,” says Ice-T in Issue 41. “In L.A., you had the clubs, which the adults could go to, but if you were under twenty-one years old or on that scene, you would want to go to Uncle Jamm’s Army.”

Out of Solomon Burke’s seventy years, I only knew him for the duration of a forty-minute phone call. But, they are hard minutes to forget. He came on with his deep baritone: “Well, good morning, good afternoon, good evening. They had me going crazy all morning talking to Japan, Germany, Beirut—I decided, I don’t know where I’m talking now, so I better cover it all.” He let out a deep, long laugh after that, something he did often during the interview. Then, he asked how the weather was by me and how my family was doing. I have interviewed more than 150 artists from every genre and generation, and he is the only one who ever asked about my family.

Burke was literally and figuratively bigger than life, weighing more than three hundred pounds with an almost endless supply of tall tales to tell. When I interviewed him for Wax Poetics just four months ago, he was fresh off a tour of Japan and his voice literally boomed out of the phone. It was obvious that the man had a gift. He could easily strike you spellbound telling any one of the stories of his uncommon life, speaking with the sonorous cadence of a preacher, leaving you almost swaying along. The man had charisma in the literal sense, meaning a special magnetism conferred by God. Perhaps it is even stranger, then, that his work never found a mainstream audience in the way that contemporaries like Otis Redding and Sam Cooke did.

Burke was born in his grandmother’s house in Pennsylvania while a church service thundered downstairs. When he was young, she had a vision of his life. “My grandmother told me of the things I would do in life,” he told me. “That I would travel the world and see things I had never seen before; that I would be able to perform for millions of people and not see them; that I would be able to go places that I had never been and may never go again; that I would have a large family.” She was right.

He was a preacher by age seven, had his own radio ministry by age twelve, and recorded his first single at age fourteen. He was a mortician, worked at an insane asylum, was homeless, and bounced around record labels before signing a contract with Atlantic Records in the 1960s. However, he never had that big hit. He came close with “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love” in 1964, but most of his life’s work went under the radar. Late in his career, his albums began garnering more critical acclaim, but the opportunity for superstardom had already passed. His last album, Hold on Tight, is set for release this month.

His death at age seventy in an Amsterdam airport, apparently of natural causes, is more than just a passing of one artist. In a way, it is a passing of a generation of artists who came from the church to radically change popular music, the music business, and in the process, race relations in America. It is the loss of an entire library’s worth of information about soul music in its heyday. It is the loss of a man who was with Sam Cooke the night he died, a man who knew Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, a man who felt the sting of segregation and fought back with music, a man who had the balls to play a full set at a Ku Klux Klan rally one night and then perform for an all-Black audience the next, a man who worked at a meat market with Chubby Checker, a man who fathered twenty-one children—the stories go on and on. Sadly, there will be no new ones.

In the end, I keep thinking back to something he said to me in our interview: “I have no talent. Everything I have is on loan to me by the grace of God.”

He made good use of that loan. But they all get called back sometime.

Editor’s note: Look out for Travis’ feature on Burke in an upcoming issue of Wax Poetics.

Los Angeles jazz legend Buddy Collette (sax, flute, clarinet) left for that great gig in the sky on September 19. He was eighty-nine.

Collette worked with Herbie Mann, Chico Hamilton, Buddy Rich, Frank Sinatra, and Ella Fitzgerald, among many, many others. His students included Charles Lloyd, Eric Dolphy, Sonny Criss, and Frank Morgan.

Famously, Collette encouraged a young Charles Mingus to trade his cello in for a bass. “You can’t slap a cello,” Collette told Mingus in Mingus’s 1971 autobiography, Beneath the Underdog, “so you gotta learn to slap that bass, Charlie!”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8hIEKr54vI

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDGpeW4sUUs

We’ve lost another one of the great ones, folks. Cincinnati guitarist Phelps “Catfish” Collins, of James Brown and P-Funk fame, died on August 6. The cause was cancer. He was sixty-six.

Catfish was with JB from 1969-1971 and Parliament/Funkadelic from 1971-1983. Alongside his brother, Bootsy, he can be heard on classics like “Super Bad,” “Sex Machine,” and “Soul Power.” In 2007, he and Bootsy appeared on the Superbad soundtrack.

Above, watch Catfish tear it up with the Godfather.

Just a couple months after we finished working on the reissue of his funky Latin jazz masterpiece, Bobby Vince Paunetto passed away on Tuesday, August 10, 2010. As Los Angeles DJ and music historian Miles Perlich wrote in the liner notes:

Bobby Vince Paunetto was born June 22, 1944, into a family of Italian and Catalonian descent. Originally from Brooklyn, the Paunettos soon settled into a middle-class home in the Bronx where Bobby Vince and his two older brothers, Raymond and William (later honored in Paunetto’s composition “Brother Will”) would soon come of age. The boys’ mother, Rosemarie, loved to sing tangos and dance the Lindy and occasionally performed at social gatherings. In 1949, Rosemarie took Bobby Vince (at the tender age of five) to audition as a dancer at the famed Roxy Theatre, a place that also bore witness to the genius of Mr. Fred Astaire. And though the family spoke English at home, Rosemarie was able to speak Spanish well enough to later compose beautiful lyrics to her son’s music (on the Seeco 45s).

Though Paunetto was exposed to a wide variety of music at home, he got his first real taste of jazz listening to radio eccentric Douglas “Jocko” Henderson (“Mr. Oo-Papa-Doo, How Do You Do!”), often credited as being one of the very first rappers. “When I heard Charlie Parker,” Paunetto remembers, “with that saxophone that was faster than the speed of light, I really flipped.” And as far as his exquisite taste in Latin music, Bobby Vince has his older brother Raymond to thank. “Ray would go dancing at the Palladium and see all the great Latin bands, like Tito Puente, and I learned a lot about the music from him.”

One of the rarest Fania-owned Latin records of the late 1960s, El Sonido Moderno is a funky breakbeat treat of vibes and Latin rhythms that has been whispered about by collectors for decades.

Also included as a bonus on this reissue is the 1965 Seeco Records sessions, dug up with the guidance of Perlich. The incredible collection of soulful guajiras and jazz jams were recorded with the help of Latin luminaries like Bobby Rodríguez on bass, Dandy Rodríguez on timbales, Sonny Bravo on piano, and the dream team of vocalists Willie Torres, Santos Colón, and Chivirico Dávila.

Purchase El Sonido Moderno / The Seeco Sessions from iTunes.

Over the years, I’ve met many older, bitter singers and musicians who have had their work sampled throughout the world, and though they may be grateful that their art has been re-utilized and (just maybe) recognized by later generations, they would have always been happier to have cashed a check here and there. Melvin Bliss was not one of the bitter ones. Though for someone whose song—“Synthetic Substitution”—literally created the backbone for a mind-blowing bevy of hip-hop classics and hits throughout the ’80s and ’90s, he had every right to be. Sure, it was the intro breakbeat of the song that everyone bit and flipped, but one can’t forget that it was a Melvin Bliss record: a B-side to a 45 that at the time, in 1973, was a near afterthought at best. Hell, Melvin wasn’t even at the studio when the band, including the drummer (Bernard Purdie he thinks, but didn’t know for sure), laid down the funky beat. “Reward” was the A-side and was what he hoped it would bring.

It’s perhaps absurd to say you can know someone after only meeting with them for a few hours, even if it’s in their own house. But after hanging out, shooting pics (and the shit) with Melvin Bliss in his modest Jamaica, Queens, home, I truly felt I had a strong sense of the man. At seventy-five, he looked to be in excellent shape, a tall, gracious blue-eyed presence. He was truly excited about his upcoming feature in the magazine, even though he’d never seen a copy of Wax Poetics. In fact, the article would probably be the closest in a long time he’d ever get to seeing a vinyl copy of “Synthetic Substitution,” being that he didn’t own one himself. He was still gigging at local country clubs, churches, and other small joints, and was hopeful that the article and pics would land him something steadier, maybe even take him overseas. Judging from the once-sporty car parked in back with the four flats, he could use the check. For the reality was he lived off of his monthly V.A. stipend, in addition to whatever he made selling essential oils and toys as a street vendor—the well-paying gigs of weddings, bar mitzvahs, and other private celebrations having dried up years ago, when most folk stopped hiring bands for anything fun.

I left with an autographed CD-R of him singing standards not of soul or funk, but the music that he loved—big band jazz—the cuts so distant from what most people knew him for, the disconnect was truly discombobulating. Except for that voice, which, whether singing “Fly Me to the Moon,” “Reward,” or “Synthetic Substitution,” was undoubtedly a one-of-a-kind instrument. I was looking forward to coming back and doing a podcast with Melvin, with him listening to and talking about some of the long list of sonic iconics “Synthetic Substitution” had fed over the years, for he’d said that he hadn’t heard most of them and wouldn’t know where to find them even if he’d wanted. Sadly, his heart unwound before we could do it. To say its beat lives on, however, is an understatement.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=9I56Kkxh_os

www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwtVkoim2zg

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpGFi3Bldwo

Guru, the producer and MC best known for his work with the seminal hip-hop duo Gang Starr, died of cancer on April 19, 2010. He was forty-seven.

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, on July 17, 1962, Guru—whose real name is Keith Elam—first made waves in the late 1980s, when he teamed up with DJ Premier to form Gang Starr. Between 1989 and 2003, the pair of performers released six albums and appeared on the Mo’ Better Blues soundtrack. On his own, Guru was just as prolific and turned out seven proper studio albums under his own name. His four-volume Jazzmatazz series, issued between 1993 and 2007, fused jazz and hip-hop, and featured heavyweights like the trumpeter Donald Byrd, the saxophonist Branford Marsalis, and the vibraphonist Roy Ayers.

In late February, Guru suffered a heart attack and slipped into a temporary coma. At the time of his death, he had been battling with cancer for more than a year.

Update: We mistakenly reported that he was forty-three, as did most other sources.

Photo by Paul Sullivan/Rob Ditcher (Photographik)

“After graduating out of college, I decided to take a trip,” drummer Steve Reid told Wax Poetics writer Paul Sullivan of his trip to Africa. “I had a big Afro, and I wanted to reverse the whole slave experience, you know? I knew Art Blakey and Randy Weston had done it, so it felt like a tradition. I went over on a freighter that carried diesel locomotives. It was only $200, but it took seventeen days to get there. [laughs] There was only room for twelve passengers. When I got off the boat the first time, my drums fell in the water and I thought, ‘Wow, man, this is like a baptism.’ ”

Reid “held down Motown backbeats for Martha and the Vandellas and Marvin Gaye,” wrote Sullivan in Issue 22, “dropped sessions for James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, and Miles Davis, delved into his roots alongside Fela Kuti, Guy Warren, and the Sierra Leone All-Stars, and roamed the peripheries of the avant-garde with Sun Ra, Charlie Tyler, and Albert Ayler. In short, there’s not much he hasn’t done.” Recently, Reid teamed with Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden for a series of recordings for Domino Records.

Steve Reid passed away after battling cancer. He was sixty-six.

Stuart Nicol/Evening Standard/Getty Images

Malcolm McLaren, the British musician, fashion designer, and art school dropout best known as the manager of the Sex Pistols, died of cancer on April 8. He was 64.

Between the early 1970s and early 1980s, McLaren managed influential rock bands like the New York Dolls and Adam and the Ants, and helped to create others, like Bow Wow Wow and the Sex Pistols. Under the direction of McLaren, the Pistols released a pair of legendary singles (“Anarchy in the U.K.,” “God Save the Queen”) and a number one album (Never Mind the Bollocks: Here’s the Sex Pistols) before breaking up in January 1978.

Legendary Cuban singer Graciela Pérez-Gutierrez passed away this morning. She was 94. She shared the stage with her foster brother, Machito, for over three decades.

Photo courtesy of Sony Music Entertainment Archives

“A whole hell of a lot more,” answered Teddy Pendergrass in Issue 33 when Wax Poetics writer Ronnie Reese asked him what else he was besides his music. Despite being confined to a wheelchair since his auto accident in 1982, Theodore Pendergrass was a fiery persona, as Reese found out that day in a fairly contentious interview. Pendergrass didn’t take no junk. That’s why he left his successful gig with Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes after leading them to new vocal heights as front man. Pendergrass’s solo career, launched in 1976 on Gamble and Huff’s Philadelphia International label, brought the singer into the realm of superstardom. Until it came crashing to a relative halt one cold night in March of 1982. But the controversial wreck that left the star a quadriplegic couldn’t even stop this powerhouse baritone, as he continued to record in the ’80s, scoring a number one hit with “If You Don’t Know Me By Now,” and even recently performed while battling colon cancer. Teddy Pendergrass died at the young age of fifty-nine on January 13, 2010.

Courtesy of Mississippi Valley Collection, University of Memphis Libraries

One of the greatest record producers ever, Poppa Willie Mitchell ruled the soul charts with hits on Hi Records for O. V. Wright, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Otis Clay, Ann Peebles, and Syl Johnson. But everything changed the day a young soul crooner named Al Green arrived at his doorstep in South Memphis.

They had previously met in Texas at one of Green’s gigs. Mitchell offered to bring him back to Memphis, but Green wasn’t quite ready to commit. “He wanted to know how long it would take to make him a star,” Mitchell told Andria Lisle in Wax Poetics Issue 9. “I told him eighteen months, and you know what he said? ‘I really can’t wait that long!’” Poppa Willie, with a heart of gold, loaned the young Al $1500 to pay off some debts, but without a contract, Al Green disappeared into the night. “About six months later,” Mitchell remembered, “the doorbell rang at six o’clock in the morning. I thought it was a man coming to paint my kitchen, but the guy said, ‘Don’t you remember me? I’m Al Green.’”

Willie Mitchell died on Tuesday, January 5, 2010. He was eighty-one.

Check out Willie’s cover of the Young Rascals’ “Groovin’” from his solo album Solid Soul.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nf50swcp2_w

Busta Rhymes (in hat) and John Carraro (at the turntable)

We were saddened to hear last week that our friend John Carraro passed away. He was a well-known record dealer who made a big impact with New York hip-hop producers at the Roosevelt Hotel record show during the 1990s. Our condolences go out to his wife, Jacqui, who would often be found at his side at the Roosevelt. In John’s honor, we’ll be republishing his essay on working the Roosevelt, meeting hip-hop’s heroes, and learning the secret history of the breakbeat, originally published in Issue 9.

Best known for his licentious lead role as the nominal pimp in 1975′s Dolemite, Moore starred in more than a dozen films and became a prominent cult and Blaxploitation personality. Early records like Let’s Come Together and Eat Out More Often captured the Arkansas native’s unapologetically profane routines, which boldly introduced a national audience to four-letter words on record. In addition, Moore would fuse soul music into his comedic craft, making him equally influential on humorists like Richard Pryor as it would on peer smut peddlers like Clarence “Blowfly” Reid.

Moore was an uncompromising disciple of the indecent. His work was unrefined, but not gratuitous, he often claimed. Still, the covers of his comedy records were so sexually explicit they couldn’t be displayed above the counters in shops. As a result, he flourished in the underground, voluntarily evading popular acclaim at every turn.

Decades later, his influence on contemporary comedy and music would be recognized by a new generation of fans. Moore’s trailblazing was not only reflected in the boundary-pushing careers of Pryor and Eddie Murphy, but directly honored with cameos on hip-hop tracks by artists like Busta Rhymes, Big Daddy Kane, Snoop Dogg, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, and 2 Live Crew. Often these cameos were borrowed from his recorded material, but as often, Moore suited up as Dolemite, fabricating fresh fire on record for the new generation of edgy entertainers.

But Moore was not relegated to one bawdy trick. “I don’t want to be referred to as a dirty old man,” he told the Miami Herald more than a decade ago. Instead, he preferred the phrase “ghetto expressionist,” and a trilogy of self-proclaimed titles: “Soul Singer of the 21st Century,” “The Godfather of Rap,” and, of course, “The Original King of the Party Record.”

James Brown was always in the moment. His greatest records, from “Cold Sweat” to “Talkin’ Loud and Sayin’ Nothin’,” were performances; that is, they were recorded as if he and the band were sweating through a live show. The affect left their grooves soaked-through with spontaneity.

Brown was not just the bandleader, the singer, and the focal point, he was a member of the band, his rough voice a rhythmic instrument, his body the lead sheet. Hand gestures shaped the arrangements. A head-nod emphasized a beat or a horn blast. Every few bars held an opportunity to be alive—what the Man called “deep in it.” All the while, tape was rolling.

Brown sets the band’s solos on course. “Maceo, I want you to blow” isn’t just a clever rhyme, but an instruction. Brown’s greatest hits are littered with them: “Give the drummer some,” “Tim, let me hear you walk a little bit,” “I’m gonna let Fred blow about two choruses then I’ll wave y’all in,” “Sharper now!”

A personal favorite is the direction given to guitarist, Phelps “Catfish” Collins, in the rare re-recorded version of “There Was a Time.” About halfway through, Brown, who had been spitting freeform rhymes, is dry. “Hey—hey—hey—hey,” he screams. No other words come until he shouts, “I can’t hold out much longer…I need some help. Phelps, help me!” A screaming guitar solo follows, one unlike anything heard on a James Brown record. Brown is inspired. “I’m gettin’ stronger,” he says three times. “That means I can do my thing…longer.” Brown scats a few more screams. Refreshed, he tells Phelps, in syncopation, “I got it, I don’t need no help.” Phelps lays back, picks up the rhythm guitar lines, and Brown continues his rhymes.

“Cold Sweat Pts. 1 & 2,” in which James Brown tells tenor saxophonist Maceo Parker, then drummer Clyde Stubblefield and bassist Bernard Odum, when and how he wants the groove.

Maceo! Come on now… Brother, put it—put it where it’s at now
Ahhhhh! Let ‘em have it
Uh!
Ohhhhh no!
Unh!
Put it on ‘em!
Uh! Oh! Blow your horn
Uh! Git it! Ah!
Hunh! Looky here
So much soul—unh!
Ha! Funky, funky Broadway, unh
Blow! Play it!
‘Scuse me while I do the boogaloo
Sometimes I clown—back up and do the James Brown
Blow!
Unh!

Let’s give the drummer some—wanna give the drummer some? Give the drummer some? Give the drummer some? Give the drummer some? Give the drummer some?! You got it, drummer!
Unh!
Help him out, Bernard, go on and play with him
Unh! Unh!
Huh! Looky here
Uhn! Funky as you wanna be! Unh!
Hah! Unh ah!
Git it—double up on it
Come on! Come on!
Ah! Unh! I think I’ll count it off right here
1—Unh! —2—Unh! —3—Unh! Ha heh! —4—whooah! Hit it!!

[return to the hook]