From left to right: Al Jieh, DaVinci, and Ammbush. Photo by Ken Taylor.

In San Francisco’s Fillmore neighborhood, the projects go up and the projects come down, but rapper DaVinci’s family has owned property there since the ’50s, part of a wave of African-Americans that left the South in search of better job opportunities. On DaVinci’s debut, The Day the Turf Stood Still, hard-boiled raps are underscored by soulful, sample-heavy beats, courtesy of his Sweetbreads Creative Collective collaborators Al Jieh and Ammbush.

“What You Finna Do?” deals with the gentrification of the Fillmore neighborhood. What did you see there in the ’90s?

DaVinci: Fillmore started off as a family-oriented community that was thriving with music. One thing I remember when I was growing up in the Fillmore was kids everywhere. I was one of those kids. Of course, crack hit hard. The projects were basically just stranded. Only half of the people from Fillmore were in Fillmore. Everybody else was dead or in jail or just strung out on drugs really bad. So that’s when they tore down the projects. That’s when the people who still did own houses decided to sell.

Your grandma’s been a Fillmore homeowner since the ’50s.

DaVinci: The ’50s, yeah. She passed away in ’96, but she left the house to all seven kids, which is a mess, but my family at least still owns the house. [My mom’s] been here since the ’50s. [She’s] one of the biggest hustlers I’ve ever seen in my life. Still to this day. Now, her hustle is she has clothes, vintage wicker chairs—shit that I call junk—from the ’60s and ’70s, which just fills up the house.

Al Jieh: This guy’s house is a time capsule.

DaVinci: Every Sunday, she push it outside and sell it and be making a killing.

Tell me about the Fillmore legacy, the rap music that came before you.

DaVinci: Man, I could start from the ’60s, but I’ll start where hip-hop started in the Fillmore, which was like Hugh-EMC, KPOO radio station. [Hugh-EMC] kind of inspired the Rappin’ 4-Tays, the San Quinns, all the old posses. [He’s been] helping out the younger talent in the Fillmore since the late ’80s. We all started off making tapes, on eight-tracks, just for fun. It would always be one anthem in the Fillmore like that, that the young cats would ride on all the busses with the radios playing it. It would get so big amongst the youth that the JT the Bigga Figgas or the Quinns would be like, “Yo, I’m gonna put this on my compilation that I’m putting out next summer.” We’d be local celebrities. We’d get to brag about it at school.

Is KPOO still there?

DaVinci: Still there. The first mixtape I ever came out with [Urban Royalty], I went there and they played it—immediately.

Ammbush: They played it all the way through?

DaVinci: The whole thing! If they see a young, up-and-coming talent in the community, then they always willing to help. And they still do it to this day.

Could you tell me about producing the album and where you recorded it?

Al Jieh: We recorded it at [Ammbush’s] studio, the Nest. In terms of production, he comes from that era you were just talking about.

Ammbush: It’s funny, ’cause [DaVinci’s] like, “The Hugh-EMCs.” “The JTs.” That’s really my era. We all had the same distributor: me, JT, RBL Posse. We would all go to the same place so they could disperse [the tapes] amongst the stores. I think it helps being from that old school generation. [Now] we have a new generation, and when we can all listen to each other and respect each other’s opinion, that’s when you’re gonna have the best music.

Al Jieh: A lot of times today, [producers] make a beat, send it off to the rapper. We actually sat in the same room, recording, bouncing ideas off each other, and arguing, like, “Nah it shouldn’t be like this…”

What were some arguments that came up?

Ammbush: I remember one.

Al Jieh: I know the one: on “Ben.”

Ammbush: Oh, that’s not even the one I was talking about.

Al Jieh: “Ben” is our single. [DaVinci] wanted more scratching.

DaVinci: Yea, more scratching in the hook. And there was another one.

Ammbush: “Guys Wanna.”

DaVinci: Yeah, [Al] put a breakdown in it that I didn’t want in there.

Al Jieh: He said that fucks up the groove.

DaVinci: Yeah, I lost that one, too.

Al Jieh: No, you won that one! We took it out.

Ammbush: Not on the album. It’s in there.

DaVinci: You took the one out at the beginning.

Ammbush: We split the difference. We had those moments, but I think that’s what it takes to make something solid.

Photo by Alex Rapada

Gonjasufi is the name the dreadlocked, dark-eyed, Mojave Desert-dwelling Sumach Ecks assumes for his current musical incarnation. It’s more accurate to describe him as a vocalist than a singer, as the sounds that he disgorges on his debut album, A Sufi and a Killer, travel rapidly from warbling notes to gravelly wails and dry-throated cackles.

The haggardly psychedelic and Eastern-influenced feel of Gonjasufi is layered and complex. Produced by the Gaslamp Killer, Mainframe, and Gonjasufi’s Warp Records label mate Flying Lotus, A Sufi and a Killer is an involved listen. Ten rotations of the album may not bring you any closer to Gonjasufi than the first, but when an artist is shrouded in mysticism, sometimes what you don’t know about them is just as intriguing as what you do know.

While from the outside coming to understand Gonjasufi is as simple as carrying water in your hands, he is acutely attuned to his own sense of self. Gonjasufi speaks to Wax Poetics on his inner reflections, the role that yoga plays in his life, and what brought him to the sound that he shares with us now.

You’re originally from San Diego. What was it like growing up as someone different from the norm?

When the whole underground rap movement was going on, like ’90 through to ’93, there was a lot of artists in the Gaslamp District, so it was actually a pretty good spot to be in. Then from ’94, it just became a very military-type environment. Very conservative. So it was difficult [and I was] getting stopped by cops everywhere I went. I’m known throughout the city—the whole police department knows about me just ’cause of the way I look. So San Diego is a very racist town, [or] it was in the ’90s and early 2000s. Right now it’s not as much, but I struggled.

My father, he’s a judge out there. So I had to balance not speaking out as much as I really wanted to for the sake of his work environment. I almost feel like I was targeted more because he was one of the only Black judges in San Diego. So then the police would want to come and make an example out of me. So it was tough, man. I had to drop off the radar. I remember driving through a certain part of town, and I was like fifty [minutes], an hour out of San Diego out to Alpine, and they knew who I was—the police knew who I was out there. They asked me if I was still rolling through the same streets, so I sold my car, man, ’cause I felt like I was marked. The FBI was following me—some crazy shit, showing up to my father’s house—and I had to get off the grid. So I sold everything I had, my transportation, and I just started sleeping on the streets, and sleeping in friend’s houses and couches. Just trying to get out of the grid, and out of the spotlight, ’cause I was being watched. Like, for no reason; I wasn’t doing anything. So it was hard from ’97 to 2002. It was pretty rough for me out there.

It must have been extremely hard feeling like you were a target at all times.

Yeah, it was frustrating. It strengthened me, but I had to master the art of non-reaction. People would do stuff just to get me to react, so I had to just focus on going inside more and controlling my emotions. A lot of my anger got pent up and I didn’t know what to do with it. But when I found yoga, it helped me basically channel it, and release it, and let go of all this hatred that I had.

It’s interesting that the release came through both yoga and music.

Yeah. Well, you know, during that time that I was going through it, I was into drugs and that was my release, but that was basically just masking it. I’ve always been into music but I’ve never been able to really fully express myself the way I wanted to until I got into yoga. Once I started practicing yoga, I was able to soften up and realize that being soft was actually being harder than I ever was. Like going into those places that people are afraid to go into—like the darkest place in me and just sit in there until I could make it light—that’s what yoga’s taught me. It’s taught me how to go into all those dark spaces in myself and turn it into light. And that’s enlightenment. Self-realization.

Do you think that yoga has helped you to focus on the physical and mental connect?

Yeah. It’s definitely a marriage between them. What it’s done is help me to focus on my breath and my breathing, which is the bridge between the visible and invisible—my mind and my body. And the more I focus on breath and my breathing technique, the more present I am, [and] the more control I have over my emotions and my reactions. It’s different forms of yoga: Asana, and the Hatha practice of putting my body in these certain positions. Putting my head lower than my heart, and opening up my chest, and creating space between my heart and my lungs so that they can work in union. Inside my chest, they fight for space, and if I can create more space in there, and they can fall back in love with themselves, that has an effect on everything else. So it’s not only physical, but metaphysical, and it’s quantum physics, too. When I’m in this body, every element is inside me. And if I can master the art inside, then the outside world becomes a reflection of what’s inside of me.

Photo by Mario Luiz Thompson/Arquivo

Arnolpho Lima Jr., aka Liminha, is one of the multi-talented individuals responsible for shaping Brazilian music over the last forty years. Everyone in Brazil knows Liminha for his production work with Gilberto Gil—it spans about thirty years—but Mr. Lima is a versatile and influential musician in his own right. When I reach Nas Nuvens, the esteemed studio he and Gil established in the 1980s, I find that there are so many gold and platinum discs saluting Liminha’s talents that the walls of his office are not able to hold them all. And in addition to the array of instruments that seem to lurk in every corner, I was pleased to find the analog reel-to-reel that remains Liminha’s preferred method of capturing his magical productions. It is this old school sensibility, coupled with an open-mindedness and willingness to try new things, that has resulted in hits for everyone from João Gilberto and Jorge Ben to younger innovators like Ed Motta and Nação Zumbi.

Nas Nuvens is housed in a secluded spot, tucked into a hillside in one of Rio’s better neighborhoods. In its relaxed environs on a Sunday afternoon, I find that the only things to worry about are the mangoes occasionally dropping off the roof, and the toxic sand flies that seek the fine wine my host is kind enough to share with me. Over the course of the evening, Liminha regales me with tales of making music since the late 1960s. What follows are some of the highlights, focusing on his early years as the bassist for Os Mutantes, one of the most notorious Tropicália acts.

How did you become involved in music?

My mother was a piano teacher, and my father was a pharmacist who played violin, guitar, and mandolin. He wasn’t able to read music, so he improv-ed a lot. I started on acoustic guitar—a sort of dobro guitar—when I was ten. I remember I went to a college park with my sister for a party for the end of the year, and I said, “Man, I have to go to this college, because I want to step on that stage.” So the next year, I was at the college, and we put a band together with five acoustic guitars. Then, when I was thirteen years old, my father gave me a bass—just a piece of wood with no frets—but electric bass at that time was a very professional thing, so I felt I had taken another step. My mother used to lock my bass up, and I was only allowed to play on the weekends, because I started doing pretty bad in school. It was just music, music, music, music. Then I started to play in many garage bands, and eventually I had a covers band called Baobás. We used to play songs by Merseybeat groups like the Dave Clark Five, a little Beatles, the Turtles, Paul Revere, plus the Kinks, the Doors—in fact, I remember the first time I went to the studio, I recorded a cover of “Light My Fire.”

When did things reach another level?

Caetano Veloso was searching for a band to support him, and I don’t remember how, but he showed up at the place where we used to rehearse, and then he contracted us to be his support band. So that was my first professional work as a musician, when I was around seventeen, in 1967 or ’68. And that was the beginning of the movement that he was creating together with Gilberto Gil, called Tropicália. We were the second band that played with him on song festivals, which were competitions shown on TV.

You joined Os Mutantes shortly thereafter. How did it happen?

I met Sérgio Dias before, when I was sixteen, and we played together. I was very impressed, because he was a really brilliant guitarist, years ahead of his time. So we became friends, and when I started playing with Caetano, we played on TV shows, and we started to share the bill on programs like [O Cassino do] Chacrinha, a TV show hosted by a crazy clown. After I left Baobás, I was invited to play on a song festival with Gilberto Gil. Gil went to one of our rehearsals with Caetano, and I remember we were rehearsing his song, “Bat Macumba,” and he was watching me playing, and we exchanged smiles. So for this song festival, we put together a duo called Gil and Gilá: Gilberto Gil was playing accordion, and I was playing my father’s acoustic ten-string guitar, and Os Mutantes were there, playing their songs. So that was the first time that I played with them. Then they invited me for another song festival, to play the same acoustic guitar.

Photo courtesy of Paddy Corea

Stylistically, Demon Fuzz’s single album, 1970’s Afreaka!, is hard to pin down. But then, I guess that’s the point. Demon Fuzz went out of their way to keep people guessing; at gigs, they’d let people assume they were a reggae band, only to launch into some African-influenced jazz/rock number. Jaws hit the floor and feet started tapping. “We were different, totally different,” says Demon Fuzz trombonist Clarance Crosdale.

Demon Fuzz was a group of seven young musicians who came together after emigrating to London in the early 1960s. Since 1948, the British government had been encouraging people in the Commonwealth to settle in England, in hopes of replenishing that country’s war-depleted work population; a happy by-product was that before long, many a West Indian riddim could be heard emanating from the clubs and street corners in big cities like Birmingham and London. British kids soon had a different beat to shuffle to. Of course, these times weren’t without their problems: in 1958, just three years before Demon Fuzz members (and brothers) Winston Joseph and Blue Rivers arrived in England, London’s Notting Hill neighborhood had erupted in race riots.

But back to the music.

Paddy Corea arrived in London in 1963, and soon took up playing the tenor saxophone—his weapon of choice for irking neighbors. One day, he answered a want ad Winston had placed in NME, the British music magazine that many budding musicians bought in order to scour the classifieds. Corea auditioned, and Winston and Rivers recruited the saxophonist for their band. Organist Ray Rhoden joined up shortly after, and he brought in his good friend Clarance, a Jamaican musician who had studied trombone with Rico Rodriguez. A second saxophonist came on-board, and they began performing as Blue Rivers and the Maroons.

“[We] didn’t play only ska, we were a raw soul band,” explains Corea in an interview with Koldo Barroso for themarqueeclub.net. “Not the Motown soft string soul that BBC peddled. We did a lot of material from the small labels of the South. The kids from out of town were a bit confused. They were looking for the stuff they heard on BBC radio, and we didn’t play that. Rivers prided himself in trying not to be like the rest. At that time in London, every Black man who had a voice wanted to be a ‘soul’ singer, and very few of them could cut it.”

Every weekend, the Maroons would perform to dapper-looking crowds at clubs like the Roaring Twenties, and the Q Club, owned by Count Suckle, the West Indian DJ who possessed the deadliest sound system outside of Kingston. “We used to get a lot of write-ups in the West Indian press,” says Crosdale proudly. “We were sort of the best band around really.”

“Ziggy [Jackson, the band’s manager] had some contacts, and he booked just about every town hall in London,” remembers Winston. In 1968, Ziggy acquired some time at Regent Sound, a room on Denmark Street that had been the studio of choice for the Rolling Stones to record their first record in 1964. The session resulted in the LP Blue Beat in My Soul.

But barely two years after recording Blue Beat, the Maroons would part company with Rivers, and take a left turn in style and attitude. Paddy Corea reflects on what prompted the decision to move away from their ska and soul roots.

“It was while in Morocco that my idea for a different kind of band and a different kind of music was born,” says Corea. “I was at this time exposed to a new kind of music that didn’t have a Western European scale. I learnt the Sufi Arabic scale and the pentatonic scale there. I heard all these tribal musicians from the interior playing various drums, reed instruments, and a kora, which is a stringed instrument with a calabash as a resonator. These chaps would play the hell out of this thing, as good as a Yehudi Menuhin. All this synthesized into what influenced me to try a different approach to my music. Some of the members of the Maroons understood and appreciated my ideas, and were thinking of similar things, so we formed Demon Fuzz on our return to the UK.”

“I remember the last gig we did as the Maroons was in Huddersfield,” recalls Crosdale. “We decided we didn’t want to just keep playing people’s music. In fact, we had a job to go to the Star-Club in Hamburg. That’s where everybody went. But when they said you had to do seven half hour sessions, I was… [smiles and shakes head] So we decided we’d just break ways. [Rivers] and the [second] sax player stayed together, we went as Demon Fuzz. We spent about two or three months rehearsing. We didn’t play [live] for that time.” During this period, the group looked for a vocalist to replace Rivers and happened upon Smokey Adams, who was “playing in a second-rate R&B band in Shepherd’s Bush,” according to Corea.

One of the true survivors of Jamaica’s notoriously cutthroat music scene, Winston Riley has been a consistently forceful element of that island’s music production sphere for more than forty years. Although he was one of the producers who helped give birth to reggae in the late 1960s, he remained untroubled by the dramatic changes that swept Jamaican music during the computerization phase of the mid-1980s, and continued to be an important production force in the years that followed. He has remained involved in Kingston’s general musical landscape and although his record shop and recording studio were recently destroyed by fire, Riley is rebuilding the premises and expanding the space to include an on-site music museum.

Riley is an amiable person whose natural love for the music and keen business instincts form the overriding aspects of his personality. He says that music was something he became involved with early, not only through an obsession with vocal harmony but as a means to escape the poverty of the ghetto. “I grow up in West Kingston,” says Riley. “That is in the ghetto here between Milk Lane and North Street, and in Tivoli Gardens and them place there. I used to sing in singing contests with Vere Johns’s Opportunity Hour and sing on many school concerts at Kingston Senior School. Then we have a concert in the street in our area. Sing on the street and all type of things.”

Riley says the first turning point in his career came around 1964, when he joined a band based out of a youth club opened by future Prime Minister Edward Seaga. “Edward Seaga come to West Kingston and form a club named the Victors, and I come and join the band,” says Riley. “That was based on Wellington Street in West Kingston, nearby Tivoli Gardens. I was in that band as a singer and a bass player, with Slim Smith, Frederick Waite, Franklyn White, and the Richards Brothers. Through the youth club I get to know Alton Ellis, Marcia Griffiths, Stranger Cole, Ken Boothe, and many other singers because we always go on concerts and back them up.”

The Victors band spent time at Chocomo Lawn, the important sound system venue located in the heart of West Kingston. During the late ’50s and early ’60s, it was a focal point for musical activity in the surrounding districts, and Seaga bought the property because he realized its strategic importance; after taking over the building, he used it as a place where his constituents could air grievances to him during the day. In addition to the singers noted above, a number of other vocalists got their start with the Victors, including Jimmy Cliff, Prince Buster, and Toots Hibbert.

After the departure of the Richards Brothers, the Victors evolved into the Techniques, one of the most important harmony groups in the history of Jamaican popular music. The group formed just in time to be recorded by soul singer Major Lance, who was visiting Jamaica in an attempt to capitalize on the U.S. ska craze. “Our first recording was at Federal Records with Major Lance, and that song was called ‘No One,’” recalls Riley. “Major Lance record the whole group. We get the musicians together but we were just the singers.”

“No One” was included on The Real Jamaica Ska album and released in the U.S. on Epic, but the LP was not particularly successful stateside, despite being endorsed by Curtis Mayfield. “No One” seems to have never been issued in Jamaica, though it may have spun on select sound systems for a time. To achieve greater recognition at home, the group needed to try something new. “Ken Boothe and Stranger Cole carry we to Duke Reid,” remembers Riley. “Then the first recording we did for Duke Reid was ‘Little Did You Know,’ and that was a number one hit.”

The Techniques soon emerged as one of the defining vocal harmony groups of the rocksteady era, but not before significant changes to its membership that saw Riley become the group’s manager and producer. Part of the problem was that Slim Smith had a tendency towards emotional instability, and after he gravitated towards the Rastafari faith he began smoking copious amounts of marijuana. Franklyn White also left, along with Frederick Waite, the latter later migrating to Britain. But during the mid-1960s, despite its ever-changing roster, the Techniques could do no wrong, as each new member to join the group brought significant hits. “Slim and Franklyn White leave the group, then we bring in different persons, like me and Junior Menz sing ‘My Girl’ and a couple more tunes,” says Riley. “Then when Junior Menz leave, we bring in Pat Kelly. So Pat Kelly sing ‘In the Mood for Love,’ ‘You Don’t Care,’ ‘It’s You I Love,’ and a couple other tunes.”

Call Lou Bond the Houdini of soul music. Following the release of his only album to date—1974’s Lou Bond—the then-Memphis-based singer and guitarist simply vanished. His music—a curious mix of folk, funk, and strings—grew similarly hard to find.

But folks were hip to Bond. OutKast sampled him in 1996; Prodigy, Brother Ali, and Mary J. Blige followed suit. But who is he?

Bond was born in Chicago in 1945, a fact he learned from his aunt at the age of thirteen. Before getting to know his biological family, he bounced around a number of foster homes. He learned how to appreciate music in church, and learned to play guitar by age nine. He enlisted in the Navy in 1963, only to be discharged within a year. He returned to Chicago to live with his father around this time, and started playing guitar with a group called the Thrillers.

In 1966, Bond released his first 45, “Ooh You Cheater” b/w “What Have I Done,” and in ’67 he released “You Shake Me Up” b/w “Don’t Start Me Crying.” Though neither single charted, Bond found work as a writer at Chess Records until the label was sold in 1969.

Fatefully, Bond’s next move was to Memphis. There, he landed at the Stax imprint We Produce and recorded his first and only album with drummers Willie Hall and Steve Holt, pianist Lester Snell, organist Sidney Kirk, guitarist Al McKay, bassist William Murphy, the Memphis Symphony Orchestra, and the Horns of South Memphis. For the first time since it’s 1974 release, Lou Bond has been reissued, on Light in the Attic Records.

How does it feel to have your music available again?

Listen, I am truly grateful. On my bended knees, thanking the Creator. It’s beautiful, man. Stuff like this kind of happens, though. An astrologist, a lady-friend of mine, [she] said it would be like this years ago, and it’s coming to fruition now. She read my horoscope and said that I would have a strange existence before this period now where I’m experiencing recognition and all this stuff. And it’s true. It’s amazing. I’m just grateful. Thank God.

How did you come to work with Light in the Attic?

I found out that my album, or myself, was popular overseas and all this stuff, in November of last year. [A friend of mine] came by my house and left a note in my apartment that I was on the Internet. [Light in the Attic] got in touch with me through the Internet, [and my friend] helped me out because I’m not computer literate.

You’ve had a cult following over the years.

Now, the first time I heard that—that I have such a following and all this stuff—is now. I heard it mentioned a couple of weeks ago in another magazine. Since I’m just finding out about this appreciation, I think it’s great, and I’m grateful for it. Lets me know that the Creator exists and miracles happen. It’s good to know that people like my music.

Did writing your own songs free you up to change your vocal style? There’s quite a difference between singles like “Ooh You Cheater” and how you sang on “To the Establishment.”

Yeah, because on “Ooh You Cheater,” that was Bobby Miller [who was] the writer. He’s a nice guy. But yeah, the album freed me up, like you said. Bobby Miller got me [to Chess Records]. I was a staff writer. I miss Chess, there was a nice atmosphere up in there.

What kind of material were you writing at Chess?

Well, one of my songs was chosen by Mighty Clouds of Joy. A tune called “To Chase the Wind.” [sings] “I hear some sounds of laughter/Cry for peace/Oh, there’s souls of darkness seekin’ release/Who has the answer to make things right?/It’s got to be the one who rules day and night/To chase the wind.” I don’t know, went sort of like that. When they chose that tune, right after that, Chess went through the same thing that Stax did. They had some kind of legal problems, and Chess closed down. So I heard no more about that tune. I don’t know what ever happened to it or nothing.

How did you end up at Stax?

In Chicago, I met a friend. He was an entertainer, also: Mr. Lee Sain. He moved to Memphis, [and] I moved to Memphis in 1971, back to where I grew up. When I got to Memphis, I ran into Lee Sain, and he told me he was at Stax. He introduced me to the people—Tom Nixon and Josephine Bridges—at Stax. He was there on the [We Produce] label with the Temprees, another great group. I was performing around the city as a matter of fact, at different little coffee houses and nightclubs, and got recognition. That was in 1971. And in ’73/’74, while I was [on the road] with the Temprees, along with Josephine and Tom our managers, my album came out. And I think Stax folded in 1976. It was a trip.

Photo by Nabil Elberkin

It was 1988 when twenty-five year old Queensbridge housing resident Richard Luke choked to death on his own vomit, lying face up in a restraining blanket in police custody. It was only determined that he died from choking after a state investigation refuted the New York City medical examiner’s conclusion of cocaine intoxication and heart failure. There were two days of protests in Queensbridge, culminating in a visit by an irreverently coiffed, jogging-suit-wearing Reverend Al Sharpton. This was a year before the mob death of Yusef Hawkins, four years after the deranged rampage of Bernhard Goetz, who shot four black teens on the subway, and two years after Michael Griffith was hit by a car in Howard Beach after avoiding a confrontation by a mob. But for some reason, Richard Luke’s name doesn’t make the roll call of New York’s infamous string of murderous racial tensions in the ’80s. But a then-fifteen-year-old Queensbridge resident named Nasir bin Olu Dara Jones remembers it well, because he was there at the protests, where two hundred city police officers stopped an equal number of demonstrators from blocking traffic on the Queensboro Bridge. And he was also there for the riots.

“Robocop—that was [the cop’s] nickname,” remembers Nas, sitting with Damian Marley in Quad Studios in midtown Manhattan. “Dude was a nut. We rioted, we tore shit up, we had a standoff with the cops. The neighborhood wasn’t having it. When [Luke] was killed by the cops, that was around the time a lot of race crimes were happening, whether it be police or just being in the wrong neighborhood in New York. Cops were always acquitted. We tore up the neighborhood, ran in the store, grabbed forties. We ran in the rental store and grabbed the movies we wanted. And we acted a fool. We turned some cars over, set some shit on fire. I think even Al Sharpton came to the hood that day.”

Nas and his crew, which included Willie “Ill Will” Graham, had been making plans to get out of the hood for some time. They would regularly travel to Macy’s on Thirty-Fourth Street in Manhattan to record videos with their original lyrics or remake videos like Big Daddy Kane’s “Aint’ No Half Stepping.” Or they’d wait for Willie’s mother to leave for work and practice rhyming over Grandmaster Flash’s “White Lines” in his mother’s apartment. Marley Marl and MC Shan and the Juice Crew were the inspiration.

“I remember listening to WBLS at night when the Rap Attack would come on, and a large part of the stuff being played on the radio was produced in my hood, by this dude on the Forty-First Street side of Vernon,” says Nas. “Dude was making beats, but not only that, he’s like in the forefront of the game right now, and he’s recording those records right there in the neighborhood. I saw Marley [Marl] with the BMW in Queensbridge. I said, ‘He’s not a fly-by-night guy; he’s the real deal.’ MC Shan was the crown prince of rap to me, because he was representing the neighborhood with “The Bridge.” You’d see the whole neighborhood go ape shit for that song, ’cause that’s our anthem.”

The Whitefield Brothers is a somewhat mysterious group featuring members of the German funk band the Poets of Rhythm. Their music includes elements of world, funk, soul, and psych, all of which they plainly refer to as “raw soul.”

Throughout the years, they’ve amassed field recordings, piles of vinyl, and sessions with vagabond musicians in an effort to learn global sounds. And while funk is their foundation, they augment tracks with non-Western scales, gongs, African percussion, and other international flavors. This is all, according to guitarist J. J. Whitefield, “just what happens.”

As heard on their debut album, 2001’s In the Raw, the Brothers explore global music without cheapening it. Their follow-up recording, 2010’s Earthology, features guest spots from several MCs (Percee P, Mr. Lif, Edan) and members of the Dap-Kings, El Michels Affair, and Antibalas. I was curious about these Munich-based funkateers, their origins, and current work. Over two months, I spoke with J.J. on past and present affairs for a rare interview. Meet the Brothers Whitefield.

Introduce yourself and all the instruments that go into your records.

J. J. Whitefield, playing mainly guitar but also bass, keys, and percussion.

What are your studio sessions like? Given all the elements that appear in your work, how long does it generally take to cut a track?

There are actually many different approaches to recording songs. We do it all. From first takes with written, arranged, and rehearsed compositions to recording rhythm tracks and then recording overdubs several years later over several sessions. We really don’t have one method.

You guys mostly cut instrumental tracks. Ever think about adding your own vocals?

We do some singing when we play live, and when Bo Baral, longtime companion and original Poets of Rhythm singer, plays with us. There are more vocals involved at different times actually. For solo vocals, my voice is not trained enough. [laughs] Maybe some day I’ll be ready to record some real vocals.

How is your music received in Germany? How is funk generally received there?

The soul and funk scene is pretty big in the underground, but it’s mostly a more straight-ahead approach. Our more experimental stuff is better received in France and the U.K. at the moment, but we’re working on it!

You guys had been long active before working with the Now-Again label. How did you guys hook up with the Stones Throw people?

I think I met Egon by chance at Groove Merchant in San Francisco, and he was interested in working with us. That was the first time we met actually. It took us some time, but finally we made it happen.

Explain the connection between the Whitefield Brothers and the Poets of Rhythm.

The Poets of Rhythm is like the mother for all of our projects, led by Max [Whitefield], Bo, and I. When Bo stepped away from playing live, and after extensive touring in the late-’90s, Max and I continued recording and playing as the Whitefield Brothers. That’s pretty much it.

And what’s the connection between the Whitefield Brothers and Karl Hector & the Malcouns?

The Malcouns is actually the project of our longtime keyboard player Thomas Myland. I wrote and produced the record with him and drummer Zdenko Curulija. The musicians that played on the record are mostly guys from the Poets family that also played in the Malcouns, like [saxophonist] Wolfi Schlick and Bo Baral to name a few. We’re all just interconnected, basically.

I heard In the Raw was made quite quickly, in a matter of weeks. Why was that, and how did you think it turned out?

It was recorded over two weeks and then mixed some time later in about ten days. Since I feel responsible for the creative outcome, I’m never satisfied with the results the second after something is finished. [laughs] I’ll always have ideas on how it could have been better. But it is what it is, and that’s the best we could get out of it at that time, which makes it special in its own way, too.

You guys are into psych and funk grooves. I also know that you’re a collector. Through your experiences, what are some records or artists that have seeped into your own work?

All the obscure funk bands that recorded one or two 45s in their careers and put all their energy and emotion into those few recordings inspire our own grooves. Today, I’m more inspired by the great twentieth-century composers that worked within traditions but were also experimental and had special approaches to their compositions. For example, Thelonious Monk, Moondog, and Sun Ra. In general, we’re moved by traditional forms of music that are free of commercial values.
The new album, Earthology, is different from your past recordings in that it has more international elements, drawn from African and Asian music. Why’d you go this route? Was it on purpose or just something that happened?

Like Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx…, Mobb Deep’s The Infamous, and Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt before it, Roc Marciano’s Marcberg plays like a tightly scripted urban crime flick on wax. But where those classic releases were ensemble efforts fortified by blue-chip supporting players, Marcberg, out this week on Fat Beats Records, is truly a solo effort. Produced entirely by Marciano himself, the largely guest-free album—just one verse is divvied out, to the relatively unknown K.A.—blends eerie, scene-setting beats with stream-of-consciousness rhymes and intermittent snippets from Shirley Clarke’s 1964 gang flick The Cool World. The enigmatic Hempstead, Long Island, rapper, formerly of Busta Rhymes’s Flipmode Squad and underground foursome the U.N., broke down the specifics on his long-delayed solo debut during a recent phone interview.

There’s a real cinematic feel to Marcberg. Did you look at it like you’re playing a role here, or were you just being yourself?

It’s not that I was trying to put it together like a movie, but Marcberg represents a phase in my life, so I can understand why you’d think that. The project represents a younger-minded me. It had to sound cohesive like that, being that it represented me at a certain stage.

How long were you working on it for? It’s seems like this album has been in the works since the 2004 U.N. album U.N. or U Out.

It’s not that I was working on it for so long, it just took a lot for it to come out, with label switches and things like that. A lot of stuff I don’t like to do is what took so long. All of the mixing and that stuff, I’m new to that. Getting the new records that you mixed to sound like the quality of the other records was difficult. Not to mention, I was dealing with heads that were doing stuff for me on the strength. You know how that goes. You gotta work on their time.

You said it represents a time in your life. Can you be more specific?

This is about the come-up. A lot of this is my mind frame before I even got into the business. I don’t do a lot of that stuff no more. I don’t hang out on corners and shit like that. Nobody can in New York anymore, it’s a police state. A lot of things have changed since then, but I always wanted to do an album to represent me and brothers that’s like me at a time when we was running around reckless, doing wild shit. That’s what I wanted to accomplish.

What do you do to get into that mindset?

It’s still a real part of my life. I still suffer from the effects of growing up like that. I’m not writing these rhymes from a mansion, you know what I mean? I’m writing these lines from a one-bedroom apartment. [laughs] I’m still on the grind, I’m just not a young, dumb nigga no more. A lot of the things that I used to do, I don’t do now. I move smoother.

You use a lot of dialogue from The Cool World. What was it about that movie that you related to?

The Cool World was parallel with what I was trying to do with the record. [The main character Duke] was trying to get a gun so he could get out in the world and make some money and be respected. That’s the phase of my life I was writing from.

I know you have produced before, but you’re not necessarily known for that. At the same time, you have worked a lot in the past with big-name producers like Pete Rock and Large Professor. Why produce this whole album yourself?

It’s not easy chasing people down for what you want. I wanted it to sound a certain way, and didn’t want somebody to be submitting me one hundred beats and I’m still like, “Nah.” I would rather put myself through that. I knew what I wanted, so I went out and found it. I want the music to feel like parts of my life. I had to listen for that. I couldn’t hold somebody else responsible for my life’s music.

You have a really raw sound. Can you explain your approach to making beats?

It starts with the sample for me. The music’s gotta motivate me in order to even start rhyming. I’m not one of them dudes who’s like, “Okay, let’s just turn on a beat and start rhyming.” I’m not a wind-up monkey. I gotta feel like it’s pushing me.

Photo by Jacob Blickenstaff

Behind two of the most important R&B singers to emerge in the last ten years, there’s a pair of shades and a Fu Manchu mustache. These belong to Gabe Roth, the bassist, engineer, and chief songwriter behind Brooklyn’s Daptone Records; the singers, of course, are Sharon Jones and Amy Winehouse.

Originally from Southern California but based in New York City since the early ’90s, Roth has left a still-evolving mark on the world of soul music. With Daptone—the label responsible for acts like the Budos Band, Naomi Shelton and the Gospel Queens, and Roth’s brainchild, Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings—he’s established himself as a true mover and shaker on the independent music scene. And with 2006’s Back to Black, Winehouse’s multi-platinum, multi-Grammy-winning (Roth scored one himself, for engineering) second album, Roth and the Dap-Kings rose to prominence as a highly sought-after backing band; the Dap-Kings (sans Roth, actually, as he was behind the board on this one) appear on six tracks on that album, including the singles “Rehab” and “You Know I’m No Good.”

From Desco and the Soul Providers to Daptone and the Dap-Kings, Roth has stuck to his guns, only making the music he wants to make, the way he wants to make it. Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings’ fourth album, I Learned the Hard Way, dropped on April 6.

You were never content to be just a bass player. You were always writing the tunes, producing, engineering, mixing. Can you talk a little bit about that? About wanting to do everything?

I was never really that ambitious with the music stuff. We were just trying to make good records for fun. And me and my friend Phillip [Lehman], and my friend Mike Wagner, we were just messing around, man. Just like a lot of people, we were in a basement or in a friend’s studio or something. Just recording, just kind of doing it ourselves. It came out of that. We weren’t really taking anything that seriously. It wasn’t like we were gonna hire engineers or producers or arrangers or anything. We were just jammin’, just making up songs and recording them ourselves and stuff like that.

You weren’t trying to take over the world just yet?

Nah. Not at that point. [laughs]

So your first label, Desco, starts in ’97?

Probably ’96, I think. My partner Phillip had Pure Records with a guy named Aldo [Rosati]. And he’s putting records out from Paris. A lot of compilations and reissues and stuff. And I was a big fan of his label. And when he moved to New York, he wanted to start producing new records, and he didn’t really know a lot about recording and arranging and stuff. But he knew a lot about old funk records and stuff like that. He’s a real heavy collector. Me and Mike Wagner met him one night and kinda hit it off. We couldn’t believe the records he had, and the depth of knowledge he had about music. And also he was really a huge inspiration on me. He had a real rebellious, do-it-yourself attitude. He clearly didn’t care about anything. He just kind of wanted to make whatever record he wanted to make. Partly, it came from coming from a little bit of money, probably, and not having to worry about certain things. But also it just came from his own spirit, man. He’s just a real creative, strong-minded person. So I think he was a big influence on me, just getting started with him, ’cause he didn’t care about anything. You know, one day he’d wake up and say, “Hey, we should do a sitar record and just play a bunch of James Brown songs and Meters songs on sitar.” Everybody else would kinda say, “Oh yeah, that would be cool if we did that.” He would actually do it! That afternoon, he’d go find a sitar and rent it and book some time in a studio, and he would actually make it happen. A lot of his kind of eccentric energy really drove things, kind of kick-started the whole thing for me. I wasn’t some kind of a conservative homebody or something, but I was just kind of contributing in practical ways. He would come up with these strange ideas, and I had to figure out how to play the sitar, or how to record drums. How to make the stuff kind of fit together. That was how it started. When I met up with him, it was probably ’95 or ’96, and we just started doing a few 45s. And then we did that Revenge of Mister Mopoji album, which was like a soundtrack to a movie that never happened. [laughs] And he put it out on his Pure label as a reissue. That was kind of how we got started. I mean, it was real strange. We were just having fun, and he already had this kind of reissue label, so we were using that.