The JazzReggae Festival at UCLA is celebrating its 27th year this weekend. This year’s performances include Santigold, Common, Ziggy Marley, Barrington Levy, and Mr. Vegas. Plus the festival hosts a diverse array of thirty food vendors and vendors hawking apparel, jewelry, and beyond. We’ve got two pairs of tickets (each ticket is good for both days) to give away. Email contest(at)waxpoetics.com with the subject line “JazzReggae Festival,” and you could be the winner of Thursday’s random drawing.

Shot at Artform Studio, L.A. Photo by Nabil Elderkin with Warren Fu.

From Wax Poetics Issue 55.

A stolen French robot equipped with phonograph and gold records sank to the bottom of the Atlantic in the late nineteenth century. Her name was Hadaly, imagined by lovelorn occultist and writer Auguste Villiers de L’Isle-Adam in his 1886 novel L’Eve Future. Hadaly’s surrogate voice was generated by an in-house system built inside her chest. A male ideation, she was a fantasy trapped in a fiction. If only she could’ve set aside a few records for her own enjoyment, some much-needed downtime after being forced to hang out with megalomanic poets, inventors, and cads.

I’d recommend the Breakwater LP Splashdown. (Down to earth! Get real!) The album cover finds the Philly octet at a sauna, wearing puffy lunar boots, canary yellow and quilted in tile. On the back is the Apollo command module, hitting the ocean in a jellyfish parachute. Breakwater’s sea horse logo could be the ultimate hood ornament. Though I’ve always been a “Say You Love Me Girl” kind of guy, it took seeing Daft Punk under a space pyramid at a baseball stadium in Coney Island for me to fully appreciate the beastliness of “Release the Beast.” (Could’ve had something to do with Breakwater’s Steve Green, credited on “sea bass.”) Upon the initial blasts of “Robot Rock,” I received an important text from a friend on the other side of the stadium. Au revoir face!

Until then, my favorite Daft Punk song barely had a voice—an instrumental that appeared with the tide and dematerialized into beach wash. As for the other songs, I didn’t even think they were using a vocoder, because it seemed too upbeat. Sometimes, it was a talk box. Other times, it was closer to human. This would be one of their objectives, it turns out, in hopes the world would follow along. Beneath those Boba Fett visors was something real, and what’s more real than wanting to be something else? At the time, I’d read something that Nixon’s science advisor Ed David had published in an ITT journal during the ’60s. The vocoder will bring us closer to the robot. To say nothing of each other. According to Italo-spirit animal Giorgio Moroder, Daft Punk spent months getting their desired vocoder settings, ever fooling with the speech mechanism, and our ears. I can sort of relate, having spent nearly a decade writing a book on the device and still having this conversation with myself.

Even De La Soul would get into it, engaging their first vocoder on “Return of DST,” a tribute to a man known to shred Tubular Bells in a space helmet while DJing parties in the Bronx. On a just planet, De La would enjoy their own pyramid plus tour. On a just planet, the presence of Nile Rodgers’s guitar on Daft Punk’s first single would send kids to Sister Sledge: “I’m a Good Girl,” “Thinking of You,” &c. Or maybe Carly Simon’s “Why.” Most likely, it’ll just send them into steam-bath paroxysms. And there’s Nile, Pharrell, and the boys, standing in the blood-orange sun that dwarfed Robert Duval at the end of THX 1138, after being literally chased out of the earth by polite highway patrolmen made of chrome.

After that Daft Punk show in Coney Island, I walked down the boardwalk towards the parachute jump, near the former stomping grounds of The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms. This is where I first heard Cloud One’s “Atmosphere Strut” upon moving to New York. (Girls dancing in a twilight breeze to synthesizers seemed as good a reason as any to be introduced to the P&P sound and suddenly “get disco.”)The memory, and the ocean itself, filtered through ears decimated by the French robots. Somewhere at the bottom of it all was Hadaly, with her gold records and coppertone adenoids. A Wall-E trash probe followed me, crunching glass in dune tread, a soggy twelve-pack of Icehouse in its pincers, rattling empties.

Daft Punk at Artform Studio, L.A. Photo by Nabil Elderkin with Warren Fu.

From Wax Poetics Issue 55.

Five years ago when Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo of Daft Punk went into the studio to begin recording a new album, it wasn’t a traditional move for the duo. Though they had already turned out three very influential records in the decade prior (1997’s Homework, 2001’s Discovery, and 2005’s Human After All), up until that point, they, like many other electronic music producers, had been making music in their home studio. In the case of Daft Punk’s first two albums, in Thomas’s own childhood bedroom. But unlike many electronic dance-music producers, their ten years in the game had garnered success few others had achieved. When they found themselves discontent with the limitations of not only drum machines, samplers, laptops, and home studios, but with the state of electronic music in general, they knew it was time for a change. Instead of plugging away as usual, they re-imagined their process and thought big—Quincy Jones big, an idol whose recording process they had only dreamed about attempting.

So began the steps of calling in a few music legends (Nile Rodgers, Giorgio Moroder, Paul Williams), session musicians (keyboardist Chris Caswell, drummer Omar Hakim, bassist Nathan East), and a bevy of contemporaries (Pharrell Williams of the Neptunes, Panda Bear of Animal Collective, house producer Todd Edwards, and Julian Casablancas of the Strokes) to create the kind of record that hasn’t been made in over three decades. Rather than taking a retro-futurist approach to recreate the past, they went the Marty McFly approach to utilize all the knowledge gained over the last three decades of dance music, both good and bad. The result, Random Access Memories, is a modern classic recorded on analog tape in the spirit of albums of a bygone era at the height of audio fidelity. In one of the most revealing interviews of their career, the loquacious Thomas and reserved Guy-Man open up about their love of dance music, musical heroes, Los Angeles, and why they had to go back in order to bring dance music forward.

Purchase Issue 55.

Issue 55 celebrates exploration.

French duo Daft Punk are redefining modern dance music by bringing the musicians back.

Hip-hop legends De La Soul keep the team together even after twenty years in the game.

Contents:

Daft Punk
De La Soul
Nile Rodgers
Teddy Riley
Slum Village
Gino Soccio
Me’Shell Ndegéocello
Waajeed
Jack Bruce
Lady
Ava Luna
BLKKATHY

World War II may have given us the atom bomb, but it also contributed what Ray Charles would call “an atom bomb on the musical landscape.”

Predating synths like the Moog, the Rhodes piano was the great keyboard instrument innovation of the twentieth century. Its history is intertwined with the history of jazz, and while jazz keyboard began on a borrowed European invention, the Rhodes was the first keyboard instrument jazz could call its own.

Harold Rhodes got his start as one of the first jazz theorists and teachers, instructing the likes of Lana Turner and Harpo Marx and hosting his own nationwide instructional radio show. But the basic idea for the Rhodes piano was born when an Army doctor asked Rhodes to soothe bedridden wounded soldiers by teaching them piano. Recycling airplane parts from B-17 bombers into handmade, laptop keyboards, Rhodes first employed the xylophone keys that would later ring inside his signature piano.

After the war, Rhodes worked on mass-manufacturing his pianos, and added the elements that give the Rhodes—and countless jazz records—their sound. The basic innovation was to solve the problem of tuning by turning the entire sound-making mechanism into a tuning fork. As with a conventional piano, the Rhodes has strings struck by hammers. In the Rhodes, these strings are steel wires called “tines,” tuned by coil spring. Harold Rhodes added a resonating tone bar behind each string. The combination of the string and bar acts like the two bars of a tuning fork. As with the electric guitar, the electronic amplification of the Rhodes piano gave it the gift of loudness and the timbre-shaping power of effects, changing music forever.

Ironically, it was jazz’s great trumpet player Miles Davis who may have had the deepest impact on the instrument. He insisted his musicians adopt the Rhodes and leave behind the history of the acoustic piano. Miles got Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea playing electric piano on his sessions. On the 1969 recording sessions for Bitches Brew, as many as three Rhodes pianos blend into new and distorted timbres, helmed by Chick Corea, Larry Young, and “Pharaoh’s Dance” composer and Rhodes innovator Joe Zawinul. The same year, the Beatles got an aggressive Rhodes injection from soul musician Billy Preston as they recorded “Get Back.” By 1973, the sound of the Rhodes found its way into the pages of Down Beat magazine, quite literally, on a four-song demo album by Herbie Hancock included with the magazine. From Stevie Wonder to Radiohead, countless artists have become Rhodes players.

Harold Rhodes died before he could finish his successor to the Rhodes, but he did rescue the trademark from Roland, clearing the way for a new, more modern Rhodes (rhodespiano.com). Software synth renditions face the challenge of an organic, electro-acoustic instrument. Some use recorded samples (Native Instruments’ Elektrik Piano), some physical models (Ableton’s Electric); Digidesign’s Velvet uses a combination of the two. But perhaps Harold Rhodes’s spirit is most alive in the renewed interest in the DIY instrument building he first tried to teach.

For more info on the Rhodes piano and its emulators, visit these links:

For background on Rhodes history.

The Harold B. Rhodes Music Foundation continues to support musiceducation in the U.S.

Native Instruments Elektrik Piano is typical of the sampled approach.

Applied Acoustics – Lounge Lizard uses physical modeling.

A Lounge Lizard-based instrument called Electric is part of Ableton Live Suite.

The Rhodes piano was re-released at Winter NAMM 2007, in a modeldescended from the Mark V.

Digidesign’s Velvet is a hybrid of sampling and physical modeling.

OTR-88 is a new physically modeled electric piano from Devine Machine with per-key adjustment.

© James Fortune

Ray Manzarek, founding member of the Doors, has passed away at age seventy-four on May 20, 2013. Known for his Fender Rhodes on “Riders of the Storm,” and more often for his brilliant use of the combo organ (originally the Vox Continental and then, more importantly, the Gibson G-101 Kalamazoo), often playing bass lines himself, Manzarek was an extremely influential player.

His publicist released the following statement:

Ray Manzarek, keyboardist and founding member of The Doors, passed away today at 12:31PM PT at the RoMed Clinic in Rosenheim, Germany after a lengthy battle with bile duct cancer. He was 74. At the time of his passing, he was surrounded by his wife Dorothy Manzarek, and his brothers Rick and James Manczarek.

Manzarek is best known for his work with The Doors who formed in 1965 when Manzarek had a chance encounter on Venice Beach with poet Jim Morrison. The Doors went on to become one of the most controversial rock acts of the 1960s, selling more than 100-million albums worldwide, and receiving 19 Gold, 14 Platinum and five multi-Platinum albums in the U.S. alone. “L.A.Woman,” “Break On Through to the Other Side,” “The End,” “Hello, I Love You,” and “Light My Fire” were just some of the band’s iconic and ground-breaking songs. After Morrison’s death in 1971, Manzarek went on to become a best-selling author, and a Grammy-nominated recording artist in his own right. In 2002, he revitalized his touring career with Doors’ guitarist and long-time collaborator, Robby Krieger.

“I was deeply saddened to hear about the passing of my friend and bandmate Ray Manzarek today,” said Krieger. “I’m just glad to have been able to have played Doors songs with him for the last decade. Ray was a huge part of my life and I will always miss him.”

Manzarek is survived by his wife Dorothy, brothers Rick and James Manczarek, son Pablo Manzarek, Pablo’s wife Sharmin and their three children Noah, Apollo and Camille. Funeral arrangements are pending. The family asks that their privacy be respected at this difficult time. In lieu of flowers, please make a memoriam donation in Ray Manzarek’s name at www.standup2cancer.org

Cover photo by Nabil Elderkin

E.Z. Mike, circa 1989. Photo courtesy of Mario Caldato Jr.

Originally published in Wax Poetics Issue 35.

Upon my first occasion to visit the Dust Brothers’ legendary studio, PCP Labs, in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles, I stepped to Michael “E.Z. Mike” Simpson like De La Soul: “Please listen to my demo.” Mike, speaking in earnest, said, “I have that demo! Hang on a second,” and proceeded to fish said demo from the garbage, recounting how he received it months earlier and enjoyed the cover art. He then gave me back my cigarette-burned, Kinko’s-made production with genuine concern. E.Z. was encouraging, though he’d clearly spent most of his career knee-high in Caucasian MCs, and, rapwise, it had taken its toll. Starting in the late 1980s, E.Z. Mike and his partner John King produced completely thorough slabs of funk—from big hits on Delicious Vinyl, and the Beastie’s classic Paul’s Boutique, to Beck’s Odelay—becoming characters of pop lore along the way. As a selfless creator, Mike’s always chosen to speak through his music, though not for lack of wisdom to share about the business of music. It’s my absolute pleasure to relay this meander through the mind of a genre-defying sonic bard.

What’s really going on, E.Z.? Are we in agreement that E.Z. Mike Simpson is basically a funk producer?

Yeah, it’s the foundation of everything I do. My first concert was the Jackson 5 and the Hues Corporation—they had the song “Rock the Boat.” That was at Radio City Music Hall, and that was pretty incredible. I was eight years old. My next concert was Kool and the Gang and the Jimmy Castor Bunch.

Talk about that. How was Kool and the Gang?

It was the Open Sesame Tour, so they were kind of getting out of the underground. That seemed like a more commercial record. But we were big fans of the Jimmy Castor Bunch too, so that was just as exciting. They sounded sick, just a sick concert. Jimmy Castor Bunch at that point was much funkier than Kool and the Gang. But Kool and the Gang are among the funkiest ever, especially the earlier stuff. Another early amazing show was Parliament-Funkadelic at Madison Square Garden, 1977, the Mothership Tour.

Amazing, I assume?

It was pretty crazy, actually. There was a lot of mayhem at that concert. Some people had rushed a door, broken down a door, and were just rushing in off the streets in Madison Square Garden. They had the mounted police on horseback inside Madison Square Garden. A couple friends of mine got beat up and got their tickets taken away from them. They were standing right next to us, and someone just punched them in the face and ripped the tickets out of their hands. I got to stay and check it out!

Were you digging on the performance aspect like the costumes and concepts at the time? 

Oh yeah, it was crazy. It was total performance art at the same time as being the most incredible music. I kind of started out listening to the Jackson 5 and Stevie Wonder and then quickly discovered the Ohio Players, B.T. Express, Con Funk Shun, EWF, Brothers Johnson. The Commodores, Madison Square Garden, the Machine Gun Tour—crazy!

My friends and I would pool our lunch money and after school go straight to the record store. Back then, it was really cool, because they had racks of all the latest current 45s, and you could just go in there and ask them to play stuff for you. They would pop on the 45, and we would make the careful choice of what new single to buy. It was better than listening stations. They would play you anything, like getting a free sample at the ice cream store.

How about the Godfather, Mr. James Brown?

I guess when I was eleven, my mom was dating this guy who was a huge James Brown fan, and he had every record. This was 1975, but he had every record he’d made to that point, and photographs all over his apartment—James Brown black-light posters. [laughs]

You moved to Los Angeles in 1978. Did that change your musical tastes? Was the radio different, any edges of hip-hop on the radio yet?

No one had even heard “Rapper’s Delight” yet; it was way earlier. I came to L.A. with my cassettes of the Treacherous Three, Spoonie Gee, Kurtis Blow, Fatback Band, who had the first rap song on vinyl with King Tim the III. My whole life was about music then.

How did you become one of the first, if not the first, cats to have a big show on the West Coast featuring hip-hop? 

I’d been DJing in high school, so when I got to college, I started throwing parties and renting out room, setting up my PA system, and just spinning. These people from the college radio station heard me and approached me and said, “Hey, you should come do a show. You’re playing some crazy shit!” So in 1983, they gave me a show, and at that point, I didn’t have enough hip-hop records to fill a whole show week after week, so I was also playing funk, Parliament-Funkadelic, and even sort of current funk like Prince or Zapp. Mixing it up with the old-school Kool and the Gang.

What year did you officially become “Fresh DJ” in the state of California, and how fresh were you?

I had the custom license plates FRESH DJ in 1980. And, yes, I was among the freshest. [laughs]

So how’d you meet Tone-Loc and bust a move to the next level?

I had guest rappers come down to the show, local rappers, and somebody brought Loc down to the station, and he had a single out at the time, “Cheeba Cheeba.” We hit it off, and he heard some of my music I’d use for promotional spots where I’d read public announcements, and he liked that and asked about the music. Next thing you know, we’re working together. The way the process worked was very much like the old Motown studios where the house band would cut a track and then all the Motown artists would come in and try to rock over it. Whoever did the best job got to keep the track.

Break down the lineup.

The first person they signed was Fab 5 Freddy. The concept for “Wild Thing” came from the movie She’s Gotta Have It where Fab 5 Freddy says the line, “Let’s go back to my house, and we can do the wild thing.” So that was the genesis of the song and term “Wild Thing.” Initially, the song was written, and I think he tried to write a song about doing the wild thing… Actually, I can’t remember if Marvin [Young MC] wrote it. Young MC might have written it for Freddy.

So it was real Motown style where cats were writing a lot for each other?

Oh, it was absolutely going on like that. Freddy couldn’t really rap well enough to pull it off, and thank goodness. So we cut that track with Loc, and it was just genius. It was Tone-Loc, Young MC, Def Jef, these two girls Body and Soul. That was Dee Barnes who hosted a classic rap show. Oh, we also had Sheila B, the gigolo lover! [laughs]

You have a son and a daughter?

Yeah, and they love to listen to music. My son’s favorite song is [Midnight Star’s] “No Parking (On the Dance Floor).” [mutual laughter] I just made another copy of the Wild Tchoupitoulas for Ozzy, ’cause he scratched his other copy. Yeah…he knows what’s up! [laughs]

I’m not sure people know how much DJing you did on all those records and, later, Paul’s Boutique.

I was definitely influenced by the other DJs of that time, but I kind of felt like I put my own spin on it as well. I don’t claim to have invented any new style of scratching. That’s my favorite shit, early and still. When I hear a good scratch, I just get excited.

Did you ever grip the mic back in the day?

Oh yeah. I started out making pause tapes at home. I remember sitting in my room in California extending the break in Lakeside’s jam, “It’s All the Way Live.” I made an extended break, and I’d taken rhymes from various other MCs and put together a little rap of other’s people rhymes that I would do. There was an AM radio station, KJFJ, and they had a rap contest in 1981. So I sent in a little tape for the rap contest, and the top five people got to perform live on the air at this disco roller rink. I went down there, the only White dude in the whole place… Hundreds of people were in the place.

I got up there onstage and did my thing, and I came in second. I gotta give it up, the girl that beat me was great, but because it was live on the air, you couldn’t do anything sort of lewd. Her whole thing was completely lewd, so she really got the crowd going. I have a cassette of that performance no one’s ever heard, and I’m gonna post it on my website at some point. In college, when I’d throw these jams, at a certain point, I just jump up and bust out raps, because I found it went real well with the ladies.

One of our favorite young MCs, King Mez, has dropped a new single “Exordium” from his upcoming mixtape Long Live The King II. The North Carolina native should be on your radar by now, but if not be sure to peep last year’s excellent My Everlasting Zeal here.

Dam dropped a new track “There’s Nothing Better” by Leon Sylvers IV over the weekend. Leon is the son of legendary soul family The Sylvers’ member Leon Sylvers III, who Dam was mentored by in his earlier years.

Wu dropped this unreleased Frank Dukes-produced joint featuring Deck, RZA, Rae, and U-God on Friday to tie us over until the new album, A Better Tomorrow, hits later this fall.

Kanye’s back. After launching a sixty-six building video premiere around the world on Friday night, Ye hit SNL to perform two new tracks “Black Skinhead” and “New Slaves” and dropped the cover for the new album Yeezus hitting streets June 18. If these two tracks are any indication, sounds like he’s got a lot on his mind.

Los Angeles soul duo Myron & E tapped the Chicano soul scene for the video to their new single “If I Gave You My Love.” Shot and directed by Eric Coleman (Mochilla), the video features Ruben Molina, George Miller, and Soulera 5150 from our Issue 49 ”Lowrider Oldies” article showing love to the new breed of soulists. The album Broadway, which is pure fire, is out July 7 on Stones Throw.

The odd word first surfaced on a 1973 French novelty record by the Peppers, and seems to have initially been a pen name for drummer Pierre-Alain Dahan and keyboardist Mathias Camison, who made up the core of the group. The two were key session musicians in the French scene, backing up pop stars like Nino Ferrer, while churning out countless hours of instrumental music intended for movie and television use. Telemusic was the label founded to administer these background sounds, and, by the mid-’70s, it had coalesced around the talents of Dahan and an assortment of musicians who would, under their own names and a handful of pseudonyms, release some of the most rhythmically progressive and unabashedly funky music to come from the hexagonal nation. (Fans of the arcane avenue of industrial audio will be familiar with Telemusic’s Rhythmiques, a stunning source of angular funk.)

Throughout the ’70s, Dahan and Camison seemed to inevitably balance their fluffier pop sessions with heavy groove-oriented releases, sometimes combining yin-yang-like on the same piece of vinyl. A good example is Camison’s single “OK Chicago,” a minor pop sensation in Europe, which was backed by “Yellow Train,” an atmospheric track that David Mancuso immediately picked up on at the Loft. Similarly, V.I.P. Connection’s only release backed a bright up-tempo vocal (“Please Love Me Again”) with “West Coast Drive,” a chugging, wordless groove with a dark electric piano solo.

The dichotomy continued as Dahan found great success in 1977 with the group Voyage, whose “From East to West” reverberated in discos worldwide. The same year saw Telemusic release a magnificently funky instrumental disco session led by Dahan, entitled Arpadys.

VIPs don’t hang out too much on the west coast of France, preferring the south—the weather’s nicer. Dahan and Co. might’ve never left the studio long enough for a trip to California, but with this laid-back track they created the perfect Pacific Coast Highway, top-down accompaniment.

Via Strut Records.

Detroit, Michigan, is a region defined by soul, passion and music. It was the launching pad for Motown and its subsidiary labels, has helped introduce music listeners to artists like Diana Ross, Marvin Gaye, Mary Wells, the Four Tops and more. Today, Detroit is known for more than just Motown, the region also has a foot in the evolution of hip-hop music today with artists like the late and great J.Dilla, Elzhi, Guilty Simpson, and more calling the region home.

One consistent theme shown through the music of Detroit is a passion that comes across with the sound, which can be heard in the music of Detroit-bred producer, Lorenzo Ferguson, simply known by music heads as Zo!

“I’m a very passionate musician, so anything that I’m feeling is going to come out through music and I think that’s very important when you create,” says Zo!

Zo!’s passion was felt in everything from his MLB baseball dreams, which he focused on earning a scholarship to University of Kentucky, all the way to him transitioning in his calling of music. Zo! has become more than a triple threat. He’s a multi-instrumentalist (keyboard/piano, bass guitar, drums, and guitar), producer and a musical director for the Foreign Exchange. He is also a solo artist with fourteen projects under his belt notably, his debut Ablyss, …Just Visiting trilogy, and his latest full-length project, SunStorm, which was released in 2010.

With SunStorm, Zo! created a project that since has become synonymous with great and timeless music. With features from his FE counterparts, as well as other artists the project showed Zo! as not only a great producer, but also, an accomplished musician. With his forthcoming project ManMade, out May 21 on FE Music, the musician has hooked up with a great roster of artists from Jeanne Jolly, Choklate, Phonte to 1-O.A.K. With the project, Zo! is hoping to change up his sound a little—yet, still allowing people to know exactly who he is.

And how do you feel like you’ve progressed as an artist since releasing your first project Ablyss, until now?

I think it’s grown up tremendously even to the point that I can’t even really listen to my old stuff. I don’t really even listen to SunStorm anymore. I couldn’t take it the last time I listened to it. When you’re working on being an artist and working on being a musician, getting better and improving and stuff like that, it’s almost like listening to that stuff you kind of feel like you’re either starting to plateau or take a step back in your progress. You want to continuously look forward and I think that my music has done that and that’s one reason why I’m so proud of this upcoming project because it really accomplished growth and expansion even from the body of work I did with Sunstorm. I am really happy with how things are progressing and nothing sounding the same. I’m not going down the same path and when I come out it’s not like people really know what to expect from me so I am really proud of that fact.

Okay so speaking of your new album, it’s called Manmade, so is the title of the album saying something? My mind automatically went to the cliché when people say they did it all by themselves.

Yeah, yeah. That’s definitely where it comes from. As an independent artist, we are really working this thing from the ground up—we are very much hands on with everything. Whether it be if orders come in, I’m the one who fills them, I’m the one who ships them out. When shows are being booked, I’m the one who is talking to the promoter. Everything is very much hands on. So Manmade, is kind of a description of I guess the workload as an independent artist. You know the fact that we’re pretty much doing everything. It’s funny because I have a lot of people who will contact me and be like how can I contact you, and I’m like you’re contacting me right now. I’m the one. It’s very much speaking to the blue collar work ethic you have to have in independent music to kind of stay afloat.

What will this album sound like? I know that it’s not going to sound like Sunstorm, and your other projects, but what can people expect from the project from the production standpoint?

You know, I can’t really even describe it. I think if I try to describe it too much, it will be giving too much of it away. It’s definitely new for me, but you can tell it’s me, I guess that would be the best description. You can still tell it’s my production, but it’s doing things that I haven’t done before. Like creating songs with different song counts, rather just a 4/4 I may do an off count like a 5 or a 7. You know it’s a little bit experimental, but it’s still me.

You’re apart of the Foreign Exchange Music camp, and you guys just released The Reworks, project.  I know that you guys have another album coming out this year perhaps, maybe, so what made you guys decide to do a reworks project?

It was kind of the set up we as a collective. We know a lot of talented cats. We know a lot of folks that people are familiar with and a lot of people that folks aren’t so familiar with. I think to start the year off, we wanted to reach out to folks and have them do their spin off on our stuff like the catalogue that the FE camp has is really deep. It was really a lot of just wanting to reach out to folks that you respect in music and letting them put on a spin on some of our stuff.  I think it came out really well. I remember hearing the stuff that people did with my music because I was interested to see how they would interpreted it and people really went off especially that 4hero remix of “Flight of Blackbyrd” that was pretty dope. I was happy to put my spin on Phonte’s joint “Gonna Be A Beautiful Night.” It was something to kind of kick the year collectively before my stuff comes out and before The Foreign Exchange comes back out in the Fall. You know, we wanted to start 2013 off properly before we all got out on the road.

Yeah, it seems like you guys are always on the road. I had another question that I forgot to ask earlier. You’re from Detroit, and you live in DC both places with huge musical backgrounds, Detroit with hip-hop and Motown, and DC with like Marvin Gaye. How do you feeling like being and living in each of these areas has helped influence your music if at all?

I think so. I think more then anything just the house I grew up influenced my music. My parents were always listening to something, there was always a record spinning in the house. My mom was more of the Motown, Earth, Wind & Fire and the Isley Brothers—more of the R&B side, while my father was the jazz, funk—the James Brown whatever guitarist, Wes Montgomery so I got introduced to a lot of different stuff at and early, early age. I guess taking that and interpreting the music as I heard it even as a child I think that played a huge part in my musical influences even when I wasn’t a serious musician. I was still listening to what they were playing and I still got Goosebumps off of certain records, I just didn’t know why. I think just my upbringing and the fact that my parents were so into music played a huge part in how I interpret music even today.

Speaking of classic music, you’re like the king of Unsung commentary every Wednesday.  Do you have a favorite episode like one where you didn’t know much about the artists or something?

I think my favorite was the one on Zapp and Roger. Simply because I knew all about the music but I didn’t know too much about the background. I didn’t know that Roger was such a studio rat. He was a fanatic. He didn’t smoke and he didn’t drink where when you listen to you’re like word you didn’t smoke or drink or anything, word. But he was always working, always, always working. It also talked about the fact that he was such a great guitarist which I don’t think a lot of people didn’t know. People know him from playing the keys, and the talk box and stuff like that but the fact that he was killing cats on the guitar that was something else.

I really wanted to get the background into how he was killed that was just a crazy story even when it happened, I remember it happening and getting vague details like what really happened. With that and even before that, him and his brother started a ton of businesses in Cincinnati and they were the first blacks to do A, B, and C on a business level, that was if anything, inspiring because who that was and the weight that their name held and they ended up using it to kind of build and uplift their community, that was crazy. I never knew any of that. When I think of my favorite one, that’s the one that sticks out in my mind because they were not only great and legendary for what they did but they going back to their home time and trying to help rebuild it and get people a chance for where they were from that was kind of dope to me.

In an age in which robotic vocals have become cliche, the most important thing to know about the talk box is that it’s not a vocoder. That’s not to say the ideas aren’t related. The vocoder models human speech as the combination of a carrier and a formant—the sound of your vocal cords, and the way in which the physical shape of your throat, nose, and mouth filter that sound. In vocoders, these are reproduced entirely via electronic means. The talk box uses the formant you already have: your mouth. A speaker attached to a tube directs the sound of an instrument into the performer’s mouth, then amplifies the sound by way of a mic and output. Move your mouth as you would when speaking, and your mouth becomes a low-tech, real-time filter for the sound.

The beauty of this system is that it is immediate and physical, a kind of cyborg technology, capable of modulating any sound. Whereas artists like Daft Punk are most closely associated today with talk boxes, its origins lie in the era before computers or robots, in artificial speech research and the explosion of experimentation with the sound of the guitar.

Bell Labs perhaps deserves credit for the first talk-box-style invention, the 1929 artificial larynx, which used a metallic vibrating reed as a stand-in for vocal cords. The artificial larynx was, of course, a medical remedy, so it required an opening called the stoma in the speaker’s throat—not a terribly convenient solution for a musician.

Musicians found they could simply get a speaker near the mouth, then mic the results so they could be amplified. By the 1930s, swing musician Alvino Rey was already changing the sound of guitars with a modified pedal steel guitar; Rey even worked with Gibson to produce their first electric guitar. As early as 1939, he wired a talk-box-style mic effect to create a “singing guitar”—a guitar sound with formants shaped by the mouth. To play up the novelty on variety shows, he even created a guitar puppet as a character to represent the anthropomorphic instrument and hid his wife behind a curtain to perform the modulation.

Nineteen thirty-nine also happens to be the year fiction writer and former radio operator Gilbert Wright invented his Sonovox. The Sonovox used speakers pressed into the throat to produce mechanical talking sounds, including the singing train in the Disney movie Dumbo, and stories like Sparky’s Magic Piano. With the mouth as filter, any sound could be made to “talk.”

The talk box caught on as a guitar effect in the ’70s, in songs like Joe Walsh’s “Rocky Mountain Way.” Bob Heil had the foresight to add amplification to the effect, and made the Heil Talk Box the first commercial product—and the name stuck. You can still buy the Heil piece, though other models have come and gone. Because you need only a speaker, a mic, a filter, and some kind of tube or other connection, almost anyone can create a talk box—a recent viral YouTube video uses the Korg DS-10 handheld Nintendo game and a drinking straw. The one thing you can’t do is make a digital model. Real talk boxes require real mouths, though digital effects (including vocoders and vocoder-like effects such as the discontinued DigiTech Talker) have tried. That said, given the relatively predictable results of voice correction, the talk box is proof that ingenious thinking and real-world processing can yield endless variety.

Peter Kirn edits the website createdigitalmusic.com.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMDCjA9_-tM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGUH0C09l70

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36XMf29053I

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EIQxwotn3k

Daft Punk: The Samples mixed by Chris Read by Whosampled on Mixcloud

With the release of Daft Punk’s much hyped new long player Random Access Memories imminent, Who Sampled has thought it a perfect time to revisit the excellent sample material that has provided the backbone to some of the duo’s best loved hits. They have put together a special mixtape comprising some of their favorites: disco, funk, rock and more. DJ mix by Chris Read.

Read the breakdown at Who Sampled.

Originally published in Wax Poetics Issue 31, 2008. 

Shuggie Otis doesn’t care. And I don’t mean “doesn’t care” as in a lack of regard, because Shuggie is one of the most devoted and sincere artists I have ever encountered. In a career that has afforded me the opportunity to sit and share words with inmates, mayors, congressmen, physicians, Grammy Award winners, Christians, and Scientologists, just knowing the man is an honor. This is a sentiment also felt by his longtime friend, George Johnson of the Brothers Johnson, who scored a smash hit with a cover of “Strawberry Letter 23” from Shuggie’s Freedom Flight (Epic; 1971). It was Johnson’s brother Louis who had originally used the song in his wedding.

But to know Shuggie Otis is to occasionally find yourself frustrated at what can only be termed as “Shuggie being Shuggie.” In conversations I’ve had with journalism colleagues and industry contacts since starting this interview, some alluded to his lack of mental stability. Having worked closely with Shuggie over the past year, I can say with conviction that while he will test your nerve, he is hardly unstable. There is a difference.

“I don’t do many interviews,” Johnson says by phone from his home in Altadena, California, “but I’m talking to you because of Shuggie,” who refers to the elder Johnson sibling as his own big brother. “Some of my best times, recently, have been taking my axe and going over to his house and just breaking out in the living room and playing. I will always be there for him—for anything.”

And the respect that Shuggie is given, he reciprocates. He does care—about family, about friends, about his music, and about his newest endeavor as a film buff and budding screenwriter. What he doesn’t care about are the expectations that have been placed on him since his emergence as a guitar prodigy. The son of famed musician, songwriter, bandleader, and R&B impresario Johnny Otis, Shuggie signed to Epic Records as a precocious fifteen-year-old with no idea what the “business” of show business would bring. Shuggie has always been a live-in-the-moment kind of cat, reared for success by his legendary father, which ultimately worked both for and against him throughout his career, giving him some measure of protection, but also making him a bit ill-prepared for creative independence.

“You know, the way I feel, man,” Shuggie explains, “I’m fifty-three. I know that with my stuff, it’s been years since it came out, and a lot of people who weren’t even born when I made the stuff are digging it and sending me emails praising me. But I lost interest, you know, and had some personal problems, so I decided to leave it alone for a while, because I’ve done that before. It wasn’t so bad, actually, being out of the business over the years.”

But it was bad, because we as fans—including George Johnson, Larry Graham, DeWayne “Blackbyrd” McKnight, Mos Def, Raphael Saadiq, Dave Chappelle, and Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson—were left without the gift of Shuggie’s talent for over thirty years. But again, Shuggie doesn’t care. And it isn’t selfishness, but simply a matter of Shuggie doing what feels right to Shuggie for his own spiritual health and personal well-being. He is a man very much about mood, and emotion, with a sensitivity that runs deeper than that of many of his peers. “Just hang in there with me,” he often tells me. So I do. And I sometimes wonder if we fans are the ones who are selfish for wishing we had more of the man than we were given.

“I respect Shuggie like I respect Sly Stone and Jimi Hendrix,” says George Johnson. “But to me, Shuggie was more musical than Hendrix, and Shuggie’s got things that Sly doesn’t have. Even though Sly’s got that pop ability, Shuggie has that Beatles and Bob Dylan kind of pop and R&B songwriting. He was before his time—he was Prince before Prince.”

Before Prince and after Hendrix, working in a decade that saw the rise of Stevie Wonder and the descent of Sly Stone, both of whom shared a DIY ethic that Shuggie sought to emulate with his singular vision on 1974’s Inspiration Information. But he was neither Wonder nor Stewart, and while Inspiration Information is held in tremendous regard today, at the time of its release, it wasn’t marketed as strongly as projects from some of Shuggie’s labelmates, and both he and his father were dropped from Epic Records.

“After my father told me we had been dropped from the label, he was looking depressed, and I said, ‘We’ll get a deal in two weeks—next week, we’ll get a deal,’” Shuggie recalls. “That’s been thirtysomething years!

“But you know what? It was a blessing in disguise, because I had some of the best times of my life after that time, and I’m starting to come up again. I’ve had some downers in my life, and not just because of the music business. But am I going to let this get me all the way? No. My life is worth more, and I’m going to get back into it.”

Just hang in there with him.

The article you read here came about by mistake. In “12 x 12” in Wax Poetics Issue 4, Louie Vega chose twelve of his favorite dance classics. One record was T.W. Funk Masters’ “Love Money,” acknowledged to be the work of one Tony Williams. In my research for the article, I encountered a widespread belief that the record was a side project of the famous Miles Davis sideman of that name, a notion strengthened by seminal New York club fixture Francois Kevorkian having studied with the master drummer shortly before the enigmatic 12-inch was released in the early ’80s. In the article, I duly noted that assumption, one that I was to discover (too late) was entirely incorrect. Though the jazz drummer passed away in 1997, the creator of “Love Money” is alive and well.

Doing tremendous work to help excavate this long-buried story was veteran DJ Greg Wilson. A fixture on the British jazz-funk scene (where the record would first gain cult status in 1980/’81) and a key figure in the birth of hip-hop and house in the U.K., Greg brought to my attention the true origins of “Love Money” and was able to track down many of the missing pieces in this story, including Mr. Williams himself.

As it transpires, the Tony Williams we are concerned with is a South London producer who began DJing three decades ago, spinning soul and funk during the ’70s in various London clubs. Best known as the reggae presenter with BBC Radio London from 1978 until the station closed a decade later, he was never a prolific composer, scoring his only chart success in 1983 with a tune called “It’s Over.” “Love Money” was his very first project.

The record is a fascinating mixture of rap, funk, and dub reggae mixing techniques. Its dub mix uncannily predates and predicts developments in house music, while its vocal version is probably the very first rap record in the U.K. “Love Money” went on to heavily influence the New York City dance underground, with homages coming in the form of subtle tributes (Mateo & Matos’s “Love Style”) to a virtual remake from Larry Levan (Man Friday’s “Love Honey, Love Heartache”) to untold records that have sampled or been influenced by the unique spacey dub sound crossed with a heavy funk groove.

Below is the story of this groundbreaking record, one that is placed among the top classics of dance music by a wide range of influential and veteran DJs, from Vega to Levan to David Mancuso, but one whose origins even these gurus know next to nothing about.

When Mel Cheren passed away in December 2007, reports of his death understandably referenced the pivotal role he played in the disco and nightlife scene of NewYork in its heyday of the late ’70s and ’80s. His label,West End, as well as his roles as financial backer to the Paradise Garage and mentor to DJ Larry Levan, is well known. Cheren also unwittingly provided hip-hop with two primal b-boy classics—a couple of records that were staples of any early jam and whose breaks provided many a current veteran with their introduction to cutting doubles.

One of these was “Sesso Matto,” a re-pressing of a 1973 Italian soundtrack whose title track happened to have a good beat (and a chorus a lot like “Soul Makossa”). The other record had Cheren’s more direct input, and was West End Records’ first bona fide hit.

“Karen Young was a white soul singer from Philadelphia who had once dated Wilson Pickett,” writes Cheren in his autobiography. “She was frumpy, knew nothing about makeup and clothes, loved her Quaaludes and was afraid of heights.” But Cheren heard something he liked in an unreleased song she’d recorded called “Hot Shot.” He decided to release an extended disco mix, which included a long percussion break preceded by a Young vocal riff on the title. It was this bit that reportedly inspired Grandmaster Flash to experiment with back-spinning (in other words, using two copies of a record to run the same phrase in quick succession as a prelude to letting the full break drop).

The song itself, while regarded as a disco classic, may be a little camp for most. But it underscores the lesser-acknowledged symbiotic relationship that dance music had with early hip-hop, and birthed one the most popular early breakbeats.

Jack Bruce, born May 14, 1943, appears in the upcoming Issue 55 where he talks about his brief gig with drummer Tony Williams’s Lifetime.

“He turned it all around,” says Bruce on Williams’s drumming. “He wouldn’t necessarily play the bass drum part on the bass drum. He might do the snare drum part on the bass drum. He didn’t do the conventional thing. Although he’s still part of the tradition.”

The pair—along with organist Larry Young and guitarist John McLaughlin—recorded Turn It Over in 1970, a fusion record well ahead of its time.

“People weren’t really ready for that kind of technical playing at that level,” says Bruce of the album. “And that volume, I must say, we suffered from that. I mean, there’s some good things on the record. But we were only scratching at the surface.”

Read the full story in Wax Poetics Issue 55.