Betty's Story (Tribute to Funky Femme Ms. Davis)

Although Brooklyn based singer Nucomme was first turned on to the wild child sounds of funk mama Betty Davis a year ago, the impact the now-retired singer had on her life was staggering. "There was just so much power in her songs," says the Corpus Christi native. "While she was a country girl at heart, there was a rawness about her as a songwriter and performer that just grabbed me from the first note."



Indeed, Nucomme was so impressed she began studying-up on the moves and grooves of the divine Ms. Davis, jamming her recently reissued self-titled 1973 debut as well as They Say I'm Different (1974), Nasty Gal (1975) and Is It Love or Desire (1976). "As a songwriter myself, I marveled at the pure simplicity she bought to her craft," explains Numomme. "The way she breaks down her passion, it's easy to see why men ran to her as well as away from her."

Yet, while many artists fell under musical spell of Betty Davis, from ex-husband Miles Davis to good friend Jimi Hendrix, Prince to Joi, she is still considered a cult artist. It is for this reason that Nucomme has put together a tribute about the femme-funkateer. "Her story is one that needs to be told," she explains. The first show will be on Sunday, January 24 @ Little Field.

In addition to completely absorbing Davis' music, Nucomme also had the opportunity to interview biographer John Ballon, whose essay "Liberated Soul" (Wax Poetics #22) is a definitive piece on Betty. Featuring a full band and a dj, this multimedia showcase promises to be one of the coolest events of the month.

Sunday, Jan. 24, 2010
8pm sharp
@Little Field
622 Degraw Street between 3rd & 4th Avenue
Brooklyn

Nucomme on Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/nucommetoejam

Nucomme on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/#/nucomme?ref=ts



Betty Davis reissues: http://www.lightintheattic.net/releases/bettydavis

Her Life: Mary J. Blige @ Soul Summer

In years past, when Mary J. Blige’s primary claim to fame was being known as the Queen of Hip-Hop Soul signed to Uptown Records, she wasn’t above cursing out writers, sniffing coke in nightclub bathrooms, or stumbling drunk through music industry parties. Yet, in the eighteen years since the release of her triple-platinum debut What’s the 411 in 1992, the former wild child who came of age in Yonkers during the 1980s golden years of crack and rap, has transformed.

Though she grew up to win nine Grammy Awards, to write (and co-write) countless hit songs, and to make duets with Jay-Z, Bono, George Michael Elton John and Trey Songz, she still struggles with abuse issues from her childhood and the self-inflicted sorrow she put herself through as an adult. From drink to drugs to abusive men, she’s been down that rock ‘n’ soul road. However, as can be heard on Stronger With Each Tear, her ninth studio album, Mary J. Blige is still striving for strength in her music as well as her life.

Reflecting back, 2009 was a very good year for Mary. Beginning with her televised performance covering Bill Wither’s classic “Lean on Me” at We Are One: The Obama Inaugural Celebration in February, she also co-starred in director Tyler Perry’s I Can Do Bad All By Myself alongside Academy Award nominee Taraji P. Henson, launched her charity Foundation for the Advancement of Women Now (FFAWN), and contributed “I Can See in Color” to the controversial film Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire.

“You can feel Mary creatively turning herself inside out on that song,” says Precious executive producer Lisa Cortes. “Her contribution to the film is a heartfelt song that elevates the emotion of the scene. It was obvious to me that Mary took her own pain and put it into her art.”

Recently Soul Summer lunched with Mary J. Blige over steak and potatoes as she talked about past accomplishments, future projects, and the soul of Nina Simone.

For the rest of this interview, go to:
http://www.soulsummer.com/mjb-live-and-in-color

The Love We Lost: On Teddy Pendergrass

When I was a child, my mom had never been into music that was too funky. While other parents were bopping their heads to James Brown and showing their kids how to dance as Kool & the Gang blared from the speakers, my bougie mother was content listening to Frank Sinatra singles on WNEW-AM, going to Lena Horne concerts on Broadway and being as square as the last big Johnny Mathis hit sometime in 1950s.

But, all of that cornball make-believe ballroom stuff came to a screeching halt in the summer of 1973 (my 10th birthday) when some kind of way Moms got turned-on to the power of Philadelphia International Records and turned-out by the roar of Harold Melvin & the Bluenotes’ lead singer Teddy Pendergrass.

I’m not sure who schooled Momduke to the then-new soul supremacy taking over the airwaves, though I suspect it was her best friend Bubba—or possibly the girls at the hairdresser. All I know is whenever “The Love I Lost” came on the radio, the swoon of old favorites (Billy Eckstine, Arthur Prysock) became a distant memory.

Although Teddy had started making a little noise the year before with “I Miss You” and “If You Don’t Know Me By Now” from Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes’ self-titled debut disc, it was the pulsing heartbreak o “The Love I Lost,” with its “bittersweet, downward-bending melody over an exhilarating, string-laden romp” (as Don & Jeff Breithautt’s book Precious and Few so vividly described it), that became an anthem in our house.

While the song would come to be known as one of the first American disco records, it also was a precursor of the sophisticated Philly International soul sound that would take over 1970s radio. Teddy Pendergrass not only snatched my momma into the present, he also helped change the sound of R&B and became one of the biggest stars of the decade in the process.

for the rest of this post, go to: http://www.soulsummer.com/the-love-we-lost-on-teddy-pendergrass

Curtis Mayfield and the Black Rock Connection

While Curtis Mayfield was always been considered one of the greatest soul voices to come out of Chicago, his guitar playing was often so understated that rock fans used to the dramatics of Jimmy Page, Prince or Carlos Santana might be weary to cite him as an influence. Yet, since the days when he was still strumming an acoustic while singing churchy sounding songs “It’s All Right” and “Amen” with the Impressions, his playing was an influence on dudes like Clapton, Beck and Steve Winwood.

Another fan of the Impressions (and of Curtis’ guitar playing) was Jimi Hendrix. According to Jimi Hendrix: In His Own Words (Omnibus Press, 1994), the voodoo chile rocker once said, “I like the Impressions…they’re some people that need to be really, really respected. See, these are classical composers. I don’t care what their music sounds like today, because today, as things are happening at that particular time, the people that’s in that particular time don’t really know the value of it until it dies off. But now people really have to start learning the value of things as they’re living today.”



Almost makes you wish brother Jimi could’ve lived long enough to see Curtis throwing down with wah-wah, feedback, fuzz and other electro-gadgets that caused strange music to erupt from the speakers. Tracks like “Billy Jack,” Kung Fu,” “Future Shock” and “Freddy’s Dead” captured a whole new level of racial angst and musical distortion in his grooves and licks.

FOR THE REST OF THIS POST, GO TO:

http://www.boldaslove.us/2010/01/curtis-mayfield-and-the-black-rock-connection.html#more

Remembering Curtis Mayfield on the 10th Anniversary of his Death

Unlike the deaths of musical icons like Elvis Presley, John Lennon or Michael Jackson, there was not much fanfare when soul brother Curtis Mayfield died—ten years ago on December 26, 1999 —at the North Fulton Regional Hospital in Roswell, Georgia. At the age of fifty-seven, after more than four decades of songwriting, production and performance, the man whose friends nicknamed “the gentle genius” was gone.

Outside of old soul radio stations, not many seemed to care that the Mayfield was gone. Where were the distraught fans clutching photos of the bespectacled brown-skinned man while candles blew in the winter wind? Where were the urban troubadours strumming songs like “People Get Ready” or “Choice of Colors” on acoustic guitar? Where were the VH1 specials featuring neo-soulsters Lenny Kravitz, D’Angelo, John Legend, Joss Stone, Jill Scott and Maxwell talking how Mayfield’s musical magic and angelic voice had inspired their own creative spirits?

While Mayfield’s death and subsequent cremation a few days later became nothing more than a footnote in the national consciousness, I sat on the couch in my mom’s Baltimore living room and shed a few tears for the fallen artist. As memories of Mayfield rushed to my head, I was transported back to the Harlem hood of my youth where I first bought the Super Fly soundtrack album at Mr. Freddy’s Soul Shack in 1972, when I was nine.

For the rest of this story, go to:

http://www.soulsummer.com/memories-of-mayfield

Bill Withers

Contrary to popular belief, Singer/songwriter Bill Withers is not dead. So take heart, fans who never stopped bumping his laidback 70s soul classics “Ain’t No Sunshine” and “Lean On Me”—the man is still alive and writing music. “Jesse Jackson recently called me to find out if I was still alive,” Withers told a reporter in 2006. “He said his wife was walking around the house upset because she heard that I had died. We get a lot of those calls from foreign countries and everything. I’m used to it by now.”

In their lovingly enlightening documentary Still Bill, filmmakers Damani Baker and Alex Vlack have constructed a brilliant portrait of a musician who’s currently more in tune with his family than with show business and the endless demands of stardom. As Withers admits candidly, “The fame game was kicking my ass.”

Like many of us who grew up in the 1970s, Living Colour vocalist Corey Glover, who performed a riveting version of Withers’ jealous guy anthem “Who is He (And What is He to You?)” at a tribute concert in Brooklyn last year, was raised under the spell of Bill.

“When I was a kid, we played that tape in my fathers Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme,” remembers Glover, whose performance was captured in the documentary. “Those are some of my earliest memories of Bill Withers. Driving with my family to cookouts and picnics while everyone sang along to ‘Lean on Me’. His music is literally therapeutic for him and us. To me, he is what Bob Dylan wants to be.”

for the rest of this story, go to: http://www.soulsummer.com/bill-withers-lives

Afro Punk Erotica Story

On "Autumn Rain," fiction by Michael A. Gonzales

illustrations copyright (C) 2009 Jamie Reid

Straight from the U.K. comes the third issue of the hot erotica magazine Bunnie. This issue features my Black punk rock nasty jam "Autumn Rain." For years, my best friend and muse Sheila has been encouraging to write about my other hometown, Baltimore. Moving there from Harlem in 1978, a few years before drugs destroyed much of the inner-city, I tried to hate the depressing metropolis like the television inspired sullen teen I'd long to be. Still, no matter how badly I wanted to go home to Manhattan, I soon fell in love with the cobbled-stoned streets and grand architecture of Baltimore's enchanting Mount Vernon section. To this day, the beautiful Peabody Conservatory, Mount Vernon Methodist Church and the Washington Monument are three of my favorite structures in the country. Whenever I'm in Baltimore visiting my mom or easy riding through the streets with my play brother Frank, I always wind-up taking time to visit the area.

From the beginning of my other career as an erotica writer, which was launched by my friend Carol Taylor who edited the successful "Brown Sugar" series (watch for her debut novel The Ex Chronicles coming in 2010: http://www.brownsugarbooks.com), all of my stories have taken place in New York. In fact, like some kind of textual Woody Allen/Sidney Lumet/Spike Lee, I never even thought of setting my stories anywhere else.



Yet, having started writing a series of short erotica stories last year about freaky Blur magazine photo editor M. (whose S&M adventures "Brooklyn Bound" and "Across the Way," were published in the pages of the newly launched Bunnie; I insist these tales are not based on yours truly), I thought for the third issue I might try something different. Yes, "Autumn Rain" is still a narrative about my main man M., but like Tyrone Davis and R. Kelly, I decided to turn back hands of time. Indeed, I thought this was the perfect opportunity to make M. a miserable first year college student living in the city of Poe.

The pretty punk Lisa in "Autumn Rain," who helps push the young protagonist towards new artistic heroes including artist Jamie Reid, Love & Rockets comic books and The Sex Pistols, is based on a strange young poetess I fell in love in 1979, who introduced me to that section of the city. We dated for a few months and then she disappeared without a word.



Although I think "Autumn Rain" is poetic in parts, it's also nasty in other parts. So, if you're easily offended by sexuality in the "old" Prince sense of the word, than I advice you to turn away. But, if you're down with flying your freak flag, well...let the rain come down.

To download, go here:
http://www.facebook.com/l/3d249;www.redrabbitbooks.com/bunnie3/RRB_V3_The_Great_Outdoors.pdf