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Surely a new album by The Last Poets is the most significant release of the week! On Africanism, Abiodun Oyewole and Umar Bin Hassan each revisit four of their songs from the first two Last Poets albums, backed by Tony Allen (drum tracks recorded in 2019), Akinola Adio Oyebola and Kunle Justice from Fela Kuti's Egypt 80, Joe Armon-Jones, Kaidi Tatham, and Courtney Pine.
Click through to Bandcamp for John Masouri's liner notes.
Scared of Revolution
“Umar Bin Hassan is a member of the revolutionary African-American art collective The Last Poets who rose to fame in the late 1960s. Music pioneers, seen as the founding fathers of rap. Umar himself, is a legend that captures the spirit of an era, and of a community. He takes us back to his past, where he was raised in an environment poisoned by racism, poverty and self-hate. With an absent father unable to forge lasting emotional ties. Yet Umar chose to be a poet. He made his personal message political, shocking both the white and black audiences; “Niggers are scared of revolution!”
Umar’s visionary poetry proved to be more powerful than himself, who fell prey to drugs and self-hate, and turned into an absent father and husband himself. Today, 50 years later, Umar has a second chance; to be the father he could never be before. This film, dealing with the self-image of this legendary man; the personal story of a black man’s redemption, is the hopeful bridge to this generation.”
via TheLastPoetsFilm.com
According to founding guitarist Vernon Reid, Living Colour's new album was officially born onstage at the Apollo Theater one night back in early 2012. Reid and his bandmates – vocalist Corey Glover, bassist Doug Wimbish and drummer Will Calhoun – had been invited to take part in a show celebrating the life and legacy of blues giant Robert Johnson, and they responded with a roof-raising performance of "Preachin' Blues," a brooding dark horse in Johnson's famously sparse catalog.
"It wasn't an over-rehearsed thing," Reid recalls. "We just hit it, and right then and there I felt we connected very strongly to a part of that blues flow, in our own way. And just in that spontaneous moment, that's when I thought, 'Man, this feeling, or these stories, or this sense of things is a thread we can work with.' But we didn't set out to do a blues omnibus or a blues travelogue. I mean, we're urban people. But I think the blues is overlooked in its complexity. We see it so much that we don't even see it anymore, because the familiarity breeds a kind of conceptual contempt, you know? You stop hearing 'hellhound on my trail ...,' and what that means. So we really wanted to try to reconnect with the existential aspect of what the blues is talking about." [Read More]
The Last Poets - Understand What Black Is - new album! Backed by Nostalgia 77 & Prince Fatty this time; click here for full liner notes, including group history.
A Nostalgia 77 & Prince Fatty Production. All tracks Produced by Benedic Lamdin & Mike Pelanconi. All tracks written by Umar Bin Hassan, Abiodun Oyowele, Benedic Lamdin, Mike Pelanconi, Dub Judah, Winston "Horseman" Williams & Riaan Vosloo. Mike Pelanconi Published by Because Music. Umar Bin Hassan, Abiodun Oyowele, Benedic Lamdin, Dub Judah, Winston "Horseman" Williams & Riaan Vosloo Published by Copyright Control. Rhythms recorded at The Ironworks, Brighton. Horns Recorded at the Fish Factory, London. All arrangements by Riaan Vosloo. Horns conducted by Riaan Vosloo. Vocals recorded in NYC at Moon Studios & at 68 Jay St. Engineers: Eber Pinheiro & Sean Amery. Mixed at Evergreen Studios, London. A&R'd by Tony Thorpe. Mastered by Frank Merritt at The Carvery, Leyton, London. Artwork by New Analog Design (www.new-analog.net). Layout by Rich Elson. Liner notes by John Masouri. Thanks to Lisa Mead at Apples And Snakes for helping out. Umar Bin Hassan would like to thank: I want to thank the Creator of all the Worlds and my ancestors for allowing me to stay around to get this done. Abiodun Oyowele would like to thank: Thank you to my mother - Mattie Mae Dawson, my niece Juanita, my sister Anita and my children Pharoah, Obadele, Aina, Ebon, Sowande, Donjiman and Ademola. I would also like to thank all the mother's of my children – Biji, Ayisha, Pepsi, Nayo and Kathy - they did the work. Thanks also to Donn Babatunde, the heartbeat of the group.
Memories on corners with the fo's and the mo's, Walk to the store for the rose, talkin' straightforward to hoes. Got uncles that smoke, and some put blow up they nose To cope with the lows; the wind is cold and it blows.
Common feat The Last Poets - The Corner
Umar Bin Hassan - Love
Valentine L O V E . ❤
Rewind: Toubab Krewe - Live at the Orange Peel (2008)
As enjoyable as their studio records are - without stumbling across the group’s 2005 debut on Pandora, Sound Bites would never have known of them - Toubab Krewe is first and foremost a live band.
And while it’s impossible to fully capture the joyous, groovelicious atmosphere of a tiny, sweaty Toubab Krewe club show, Live at the Orange Peel comes close. Released in 2008 and capturing the Krewe in front of an enthusiastic, hometown crowd, Live... presents more than an hour’s worth of Malian-infused, psychedelic-colored instrumentals that, while composed, leave plenty of room for improvisation and exoticism - kora and kamelngoni are part of the musical swirl - such as on “Lamine’s Song.”
Combining these African instruments from the lute and harp families with various percussion and more-traditional guitar, drum kit and bass, Toubab Krewe mix reggae backbeats, polyrhythms, unexpected tempo shifts and even surf rock (“Buncombe to Badala”) to create something unique but accessible to an audience of Dead Heads, Rastafarians, Malians, jazz aficionados and musical misfits of all types to ensure their fan base is as colorful as the music they come to hear.
Toubab’s most recent studio release is 2018’s Stylo. But Live at the Orange Peel - whose torrent of groove is interrupted only by a couple of appearances by spoken-word poet Umar Bin Hassan - is a better way of making an introduction.
Grade card: Toubab Krewe - Live at the Orange Peel - A-
5/23/21
Join us this Thursday in a tribute to the prolific poet, playwright, and educator Ntozake Shange. This program was originally titled “Brooklyn Talks: Let the world be a Black Poem,” with Shange headlining the evening. With her recent passing, poets Staceyann Chin, Simone White, and performers Umar Bin Hassan, Baba Donn Babatunde, and Abiodun Oyewole will honor her legacy. This program is hosted by poet, educator, and activist Mahogany L. Browne and is presented in conjunction with our special exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power.
While I never had the privilege of formally studying or encountering Shange’s work prior to learning about the program, after a dive into her work, I now see the reason for mourning and celebration. Ntozake Shange (née Paulette Williams), her name meaning “she who comes with her own things” and she “who walks like a lion”, investigated themes of race, gender, and Black Power through her work. She is perhaps best known for her Obie Award-winning play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf (1975), which “took the theatre world by storm” in 1975, reviewed as “…an electrifying Broadway hit… provoked heated exchanges about the relationships between black men and women. ... Its form—seven women on the stage dramatizing poetry—was a refreshing slap at the traditional, one-two-three-act structures.”
The breadth of her literary interests and talent led her to write the following plays and productions: A Photograph: A Study of Cruelty (1977), Boogie Woogie Landscapes (1977), Spell No. 7 (1979), which also received an Obie Award, and Black and White Two Dimensional Planes (1979). Her poetry collections include: Wild Beauty: New and Selected Poems (2017), I Live in Music (1994), Three Pieces (1992), A Daughter's Geography (1983), Some Men (1981), and several others.
I look forward to hearing the words of poets Staceyann Chin, Simone White, and performers Umar Bin Hassan, Baba Donn Babatunde, and Abiodun Oyewole who will read original works in celebration of her memory.
Posted by Brian Orozco
