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 5/10 Good --- feeds.villagevoice.com http://feeds.villagevoice.com/blogs/music
| All the music that's fit to hear, see, download, dis, or jump around to ... |
Tuesday, July 01, 2008 --- 68 days ago http://feeds.villagevoice.com/~r/blogs/music/~3/324227570/mos_def_and_gil.php
 THE EVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED Gil Scott-Heron at S.O.B.'s this past MLK Day; photo by Michael Clancy Gil Scott-Heron Mos Def JVC Jazz Festival Carnegie Hall Saturday, June 28 Gil Scott-Heron, the now 59 year-old “Godfather of Hip-Hop,” wrote and sang this in the early 1980s: “I take pride in what's mine—is that really a crime—When you know I ain't got nothing else? / Only millions of sounds picks me up when I'm down, let me salvage a piece of myself / What it has will surely last, but is that Jazz?” Jazz, that most benighted of African American genres and my late Mother’s favorite, still powered many dimensions of my world then with the music fighting off its coming moribund era characterized by pop-rock artists such as Sting seeking longevity and legitimacy in the bosom of Mama Afrika and the aural wallpaper of smooth radio formats. When Scott-Heron sang that lyric in Robert Mugge’s 1982 tribute film to his genius, Black Wax , jazz was still a totality, a feeling, a culture which far exceeded its Afropean origins in New Orleans—and sometimes saved sensitive, mostly African-descended folk from themselves. It made sense for this ascendant apprentice bluesician and Lincoln-educated public intellectual to invoke the spirits of jazz masters past and present—Count Basie, Lady Day, Sir Duke Ellington, Lester “Prez” Young, Stevie Wonder, Bob Marley, his sometime collaborator Ron Carter—whose struggles and innovations he benefitted ... |
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