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Classical Music’s Latest Bloomer
The 42-year-old, modern classical composer Joseph C. Phillips Jr. is a self-described “late-bloomer.” Now one of the brightest new lights on the modern classical scene, he studied music at the University of Maryland and began his career as an award-winning high school director near Seattle. He honed his gifts as a composer while he was…
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To Be Nina
Fifty years after recording her first hit, a rendering of George and Ira Gershwin’s “I Loves You, Porgy,” and five years after her death from complications of breast cancer, Nina Simone continues to fascinate. She left a benchmark that was, as sung in the opening verse of Funkadelic’s 1978 anthem, “One Nation Under a Groove”:…
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All Aboard the 'Love Train'
Nov. 17, 2008—A grimy, crime-ridden, early 1970s-era Philadelphia, governed by the bullish Frank Rizzo, a former police commissioner turned mayor was the gritty backdrop for what later became a genre of music known as “Philadelphia soul.” When Philadelphia International Records (PIR) emerged in 1971, it was a pivotal moment in America, as the aftermath of…
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Still Need the Funk
For funk fans, there was no greater spectacle than the landing of the Mothership during Parliament-Funkadelic’s legendary 1976 P-Funk Earth Tour. Its outlandish amalgamation of sci-fi fantasy, Blaxploitation grit, glam rock, gospel furor and sweat-inducing funk helped propel Parliament-Funkadelic to the furthest reaches of creativity. The P-Funk Earth Tour became a new artistic bench mark…
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Motown 2.0
R&B albums rarely combine the multiple musical legacies of one given city and catch the zeitgeist of its time as masterfully as PPP’s sophomore disc, Abundance (Ubiquity). As the title suggests, producer Waajeed and multi-instrumentalist Saadiq—the group’s two brainiacs—pack so much historical reference, so much modern perspective, so much deft musicality, so much lyrical ingenuity,…
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Shemekia's Blues
Call the blues passé if you like, but there’s no denying that it is a fitting soundtrack for today’s scary economy. America is singing the blues about foreclosure and job loss, a broken health care system and dwindling retirement funds. Blues superstar Shemekia Copeland rolls all that anxiety into her latest disc, Never Going Back…
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Why Wynton Marsalis Should Never Do Spoken Word
The marriage of jazz and spoken word is an iffy one—the seemingly promising union is often better on paper than in practice. Such is the case with Wynton Marsalis’ newest disc, He and She (Blue Note), a clumsy endeavor that finds the celebrated trumpeter and composer in dual roles as bandleader and narrator of a…
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M. Nahadr's Eclectic Artistry
With her alabastrine skin and magnificent mane of dreadlocks, the performance artist M. Nahadr has a presence on stage that is hard to ignore and even harder to forget. Recently featured in Elle and Maxim magazines, the Maryland native combines music, poetry and theatre to create stage pieces such as MADWOMAN: A Contemporary Opera or…
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Welcome Back, Maxwell!
Two weeks after the untimely death of Michael Jackson and the embarrassing coonery that became the 2009 BET Awards, which in part gave a cringe-inducing tribute to the King of Pop, and, to a lesser degree, the demise of Vibe magazine—all of which occurred eerily during Black Music Month—the R&B world is in great need…
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Remembering Billie Holiday
Born Eleanora Fagan, the illegitimate child of Sadie Fagan and Clarence Holiday, in Philadelphia. Both of her parents were still their teens when she was born. Soon after her birth, Sadie Fagan returned to Baltimore’s Fells Point to raise her child alone. Captions by John D. Murph Billie’s childhood in Baltimore was rough. She was…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
