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Posts from the ‘Hip-hop’ Category

Aug 12

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‘The Black Chord’

David Corio is a fine British photographer whose book The Black Chord, with text by the writer Vivien Goldman, first appeared in the UK 25 years ago. A new edition, published by Hat & Beard, a Los Angeles-based imprint, presents his images of black musicians via a much more elegant design.

Corio was born in London in 1960 and had his first work published when he was 18. Where he differs from Roy DeCarava and Val Wilmer, two other great photographers of black music, is that most of his subjects are caught in performance, on or off stage. DeCarava and Wilmer both sought particular kinds of intimacy, spiritual or domestic. Corio’s images tend to look outward, making a direct address to the viewer, which means they work well in magazine features and on album covers, and the 200-odd photographs here, beautifully reproduced, combine to make an exhilarating book.

The subjects range from the drummers of Burundi and a Santeria ceremony in Cuba through John Lee Hooker, Fats Domino, Bobby Bland, Aretha Franklin, Art Blakey, Celia Cruz, Fela Kuti, Abbey Lincoln, Ray Charles, Barry White, Millie Jackson, Lee Perry, Ornette Coleman, Al Green, Toots Hibbert, Salif Keita, De La Soul, August Darnell, Sade, the Last Poets, Alton Ellis, PM Dawn, Miles Davis, Foday Musa Susa, Nile Rodgers, Don Cherry, Missy Elliott, and of course Bunny, Tosh and Bob. And many, many others. Goldman’s love of this music, from blues to jazz via R&B, soul, reggae, salsa, afrobeat and hip-hop, originally on view in her work in the 1970s for Sounds, the Melody Maker and the NME, infuses the lively essays that intersperse the groupings of photographs.

One of the pictures I like best contains no performers: over a double-page spread, half a dozen boys perch together around a sound system in London in 1978, shot from below, exuding life and possibilities despite the implicit challenge of the world around them. It has poetry in it. As, more obviously, does the portrait of Nina Simone seen above and also on the book’s cover, taken during a performance at Ronnie Scott’s in 1984, a photograph to make you think a lot about troubled genius. That, too, is Corio at his best.

* The Black Chord by David Corio with text by Vivien Goldman is published by Hat & Beard (hatandbeard.com), price $60.

Sep 16

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Complain to the frog

On a fine but chilly day in January 2016, I took the train from Christopher Street in the West Village to Hoboken for a cup of coffee with Steve Lehman, the alto saxophonist and composer whose octet I was hoping to present at JazzFest Berlin later in the year. I’d seen them in Amsterdam and they’d confirmed the impression created by their albums that here was a band with a rare ability to use highly sophisticated compositional techniques as a vehicle for a group of superlative improvisers.

Lehman did indeed appear with the octet in the formal surroundings of the Haus der Berliner Festspiele that November, but something he said during our conversation on the western shore of the Hudson River led to a second gig the following year. When I asked what else he was up to, this tall, thin, bespectacled, generally studious-looking man, who studied the “spectral music” of Olivier Messaien in France, has lectured at the Royal Academy of Music in London and was about to head west to take up a post as a professor of music at the California Institute of the Arts, mentioned that he was working with a couple of MCs, one of whom rapped in English, the other in Wolof, the language of Senegal and the Gambia.

That project turned into a band called Sélébéyone, whose first album came out in 2017, shortly before Lehman brought them to Berlin to appear at the old Lido cinema in Kreuzberg as part of a two-night prelude to the main festival which also featured Amirtha Kidambi’s Elder Ones, Shabaka and the Ancestors, and Heroes Are Gang Leaders. They were brilliant. And now their second album — Xaybu: The Unseen — continues their remarkable exploration of ancient and modern.

Sélébéyone are the MCs Gaston Bandimic and HPrizm, who write and rap in Wolof and English respectively, the drummer Damion Reid and the soprano saxophonist Maciek Lasserre, who shares the compositional duties and the instrumental solos with Lehman. The 15 tracks of Xaybu are as carefully constructed, intricately detailed and richly textured as the music of the octet, making extensive use of electronics to modify and layer the source sounds. Lehman’s alto improvisations, always bearing the thoughtfully metabolised influence of his teacher and mentor Jackie McLean, fit beautifully between the spoken words and Reid’s endlessly creative beat-making, as do Lasserre’s citrus-flavoured soprano solos.

The words you catch strike home, and it’s worth reading the translation on the record label’s website to find something like this: “Kou dakoroul sin Ou yalla ndogale clamel god / Kou goki gokk tere nelaw goudi blamel mboot (If you don’t agree with God’s decisions, complain to God / If the frog’s sound keeps you up at night, complain to the frog).” Not your usual hip-hop message. Not your usual hip-hop music, either, or even your usual jazz/hip-hop fusion, but something deep, distinctive, urgent and often exhilarating.

* The photograph of Steve Lehman performing with Sélébéyone in Berlin in 2017 is by Camille Blake. Xaybu: The Unseen is on the Pi Recordings label. Lyrics: https://pirecordings.com/selebeyonelyrics/