jonathandruy – We Love DC http://www.welovedc.com Your Life Beyond The Capitol Thu, 23 Aug 2012 15:46:42 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.9.9 Q&A with JosaFeen Wells of E.D. Sedgwick and N’Digo Rose & the Nekkid UndastandN http://www.welovedc.com/2012/08/23/qa-with-josafeen-wells-of-e-d-sedgwick-and-ndigo-rose-the-nekkid-undastandn/ Thu, 23 Aug 2012 15:00:51 +0000 http://www.welovedc.com/?p=87023

photo courtesy of E.D. Sedgwick

This Saturday sees the convergence of two types of DC music in one place – longtime DC dance-punk favorite E.D. Sedgwick is playing with longtime DC soul favorites N’Digo Rose & the Nekkid UndastandN, at Ras Restaurant & Lounge on Georgia Avenue.

What seems like two groups from divergent genres actually have something in common.  JosaFeen Wells sings for both, and will be performing with both bands Saturday night.  She is also the one who put together the show, through her company Elliott Entertainment and Consulting Group, LLC, in what she hopes will be the first of many affordable showcases for local music.  She calls this go-around “Enter the Artmosphere Vol. I”.

E.D. Sedgwick is a four-piece band led by Dischord and Touch & Go records veteran Justin Moyer, whose previous band Supersystem helped put DC on the dance-punk map back in the Oughts when that music was a big thing in indie-rock-land, alongside acts like the Rapture, !!! and  LCD Soundsystem.   While Moyer has been performing under the E.D. Sedgwick name for many years now, with several CDs under his belt, his sound only in the last few years has taken its current shape, evolving from Moyer alone in the studio and on-stage (in drag with an iPod), to a four-piece, with jagged guitar bursts, rhythmic percussion rounded out by his unique speak/singing vocals and lyrics, interacting tightly with Wells’ up-front gospel/r&b inflected singing.  The E.D. Sedgwick live show is one of the funnest shows you might see in this city.  And it works on their recordings too, as Moyer is a master engineer – the last one, Love Gets Lovelier Every Day is a fine example of the current sound, and the next one, which is coming out in November on Dischord, should be even better.

N’Digo Rose & the Nekkid UndastandN is led by keyboardist/crooner Tony Hicks, whose 70s-influenced soul/R&B was a mainstay in U Street clubs, back when there were more clubs featuring local soul music, like Kaffa House, State of the Union and Metro Cafe.  Hicks’ vocals invoke a classic 70s style – think Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions – but his production is one of headphone-worthy atmospherics and texture.  Throw in a live show that has three backup singers, including Wells, and the house may come down Saturday with something as heart-felt and authentic as you would want from your local soul.

Hicks is reuniting with JoseFeen Wells and his two other singers from that period, Ginger Bleu and Deborah Bond, who is a well-known soloist in her own right.  Bond will be DJ-ing as well on Saturday.

As the organizer and nexus for a show that should be as diverse at it is funky, JosaFeen Wells is proud of her roster for this Saturday’s show, and proud to be singing in both.  Her roots are in the gospel church-singing of her childhood.  She is also a veteran of DC’s Go-Go scene, having performed with Lil Benny and the Go-Go All-Stars, Potential Groovers and Untouch.  She was also in a three-girl singing group that made it to Showtime at the Apollo, and, as Carla Elliott, she recorded vocals for some dance tracks for Rich Morel‘s “Pink Noise” project, that were unreleased.  While she was working as a singer for N’Digo Rose & Nekkid UndastandN, she met Justin Moyer, who was doing work with them as an engineer, and later joined E.D. Sedgwick.

photo by Cal Watkins

Jonathan Druy: You sang with N’Digo Rose & Nekkid UndastandN for quite some time, but they haven’t played out in ahwile.  How is this show special?

JosaFeen Wells: This show is actually a reintroduction to Tony’s music.  He hasn’t played since December,  2010.  The crazy thing is it’s the original band: myself, Ginger Bleu, who’s flying in for this show, and Deborah Bond, who has her own thing. She has a video on VH1, on current rotation.  This show is going to be a very special experience.  I don’t think that this could come together any better, not only for being the first representation of Elliott Entertainment, but for just a blend of soul music.  E.D. Sedgwick is one of the funkiest motherfuckers I know!

And Tony’s a genius to me.  He plays the keyboard, and he sings as well.  He knows how the guitar is supposed to be, how the bass-line is supposed to be.  Tony is a product of his whole life – a 70s baby, an 80s baby,  a 90s baby.  He has the roots of Stevie.  He has the “umph” of Tribe Called Quest.   Jodeci.  He knows all of that.  You can’t even put a label on it.

JD : When did you start singing with Go-Go Bands?

JW : Go-Go has always been an outlet for me to actually show my vocal ability – I grew up in the church, my mother is an evangelist.  My mom used to have us sing and my mother sang and my father sang as well.  My father had an Eddie Kendricks type of sound and my mother sounded like Mahalia Jackson.  So we would sing, sing, sing, and so after the whole church part of my life, it’s just in me.  I used to just lock myself up for hours and I just would sing.  Singing was always an outlet for me.  I could express myself – I really really do consider my voice an instrument.

I actually did not go to an actual Go-Go show until I was about 19 years old, but I sang with Go-Go bands before then!  I used to sing a lot in my high school, Richard Montgomery, and people would hear my voice, and it was just word of mouth. Also, I ended up being on the Showtime at the Apollo, and if you can find this tape, I love you, because I can’t get it.  I sang on the Apollo when I was about 16 or 17, I would say mid-90s, with a four-girl group, around the time Destiny’s Child was blowing up.

photo by Jonathan Druy

JD : How did you join up with E.D. Sedgwick?

JW : What attracted me to Justin was the fact that when I split from this girl-group I met a gentleman named Rich Morel.  I recorded some things with him.  He’s awesome.  You see, I’m a bass person.  To me, this is my own philosophy.  Bass-lines connect everything.  To me if it has a fat bass-line it can cross over to many different ears.  If a song sounds good, you don’t even have to know the language.  If you like it you’re gonna sing whatever you think they’re saying.  So bass-lines to me are like a foundation.  So I hooked up with Rich Morel because he had so many wonderful dance tracks, then when I was recording an album for Tony and Justin let me hear his own stuff, I was like “wow”.  I know this, I like this, it’s all music.  If I feel as though you are giving your heart, I can tell.

JD: What kind of experience did you have, touring with E.D. Sedgwick, both in Europe and through American to the South By Southwest festival in Austin?

JW: I loved it.  I loooove Texas, now.  If I have to move somewhere, I’ll go there.  There’s still those secret places, secret pocket places where people come to hear the underground.  I think there’s a movement going on with the underground.

What I felt when I was there is that everybody just wanted to do what they want to do, especially the artists that weren’t known, every artist is hungry.  That’s the overall vibe that I got, that people were excited to be there.  It’s not a particular type of people, it’s all age spectrums.  It’s just people that just love music! The only thing you have to do is have an open mind.

JD: What do you, as a singer with a soul/R&B background, bring to the dance-punk style of E.D. Sedgwick?

JW: We get classified as punk.  And we probably are.  E.D.’s been doing this for years.  But if you hear it, it’s a combination of punk and other elements, so if anybody takes the time to have an open mind – if you sit back and play from the soul you strike a chord and it’s universal.

I listen to the music and I connect with it.  I try to go beyond whatever lines.  I call everything soul music that I feel has a pulse to it.  Because I don’t throw it into a category, I bring what I feel is my best representation that goes with what it is Justin already has.  So what happens is it’s just a mixture of something you can’t put a label on, but you like it.

 

Enter the Artmosphere, Vol I, featuring

N’Digo Rose & the Nekkid UndastandN

E.D. Sedgwick

Saturday, August 25

Ras Restaurant and Lounge

4809 Georgia Ave. NW

Doors at 8:30pm. $10

 

 

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We Love Music: Millie Jackson @ Howard Theatre, 8/3/12. http://www.welovedc.com/2012/08/09/we-love-music-millie-jackson-at-the-howard-8312/ Thu, 09 Aug 2012 17:00:32 +0000 http://www.welovedc.com/?p=86623

all photos by Jason Coile

There couldn’t have been a better venue than the Howard Theatre to experience a Millie Jackson show, circa 2012. The renewed and revitalized room, shiny and clean, big and bright with lights and giant screens, was abuzz last Friday evening as the mostly middle-aged patrons took their tables and finished their drinks and meals. When the curtain came up to reveal a ten-piece band, I know I was relieved, since the opener had sung solo to a music track. And when Millie made her entrance as the band went into “Breakin’ Up Somebody Else’s Home” I was also relieved, as I could tell she was fierce and ready for her first DC show in many years.

Millie Jackson is a 68-year-old R&B legend, whose biggest hits were in the 70s, but who never really disappeared, releasing recordings herself when no one else would. She is known as a comedienne as well as a singer – her albums and shows are filled with hilarious monologues about gender wars and politics, as on 1979’s Live and Uncensored, that round out her expressive vocals. Friday night’s show was no exception. Her banter and rapport with the audience was pointed and personal, by turns dirty and sharp. She has figured out how to undergird her comedy and great singing with an occasional seriousness which lends a layer of integrity to the whole shebang.

And it’s her smokey singing that still shows an incredible range.   Her set falls into four kinds of songs: her original 70s hits (“If Loving You is Wrong”, “Hurts So Good”, “Put Something Down on It”), latter day songs culled from her 90s output and 2001’s Not for Church Folk (“The Lies that We Live”, “Leave Me Alone”, “I Wish It Would Rain Down”), and a truly interesting choice of cover songs (Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me”, “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy”, and her opener “Breakin’ Up Somebody Else’s Home”). And then there’s the comedic ones (“Phuck You Symphony”, “Old Bitches Got it Goin On”)

Just based on her encore alone, where the crowd got up from their seats and rushed the stage as she came back on, barefoot, and closed with the torchy and climactic “I Wish It Would Rain Down”, it’s hard not to feel a performer like this, who breathlessly throws such a generous show, needs to be seen by more people. She told me in our interview that it’s getting harder and harder to book shows, since it’s hard to find openers, and her contemporaries have slowed down or stopped. It would be great for her to expand her audience somehow. The whole night, I kept thinking how wonderful it would be for a younger performer, either a hip-hop star or an R&B star, to just hire her as an opener, and take Millie around the country to perform for their younger demographic, so more people can see what this original can still do.

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Q&A with Millie Jackson http://www.welovedc.com/2012/08/02/qa-with-millie-jackson/ Thu, 02 Aug 2012 15:00:18 +0000 http://www.welovedc.com/?p=86512

photo courtesy of Weird Wreckuds

Readers here might not know much about her, but Millie Jackson was a giant in the R&B world in the 70s – a skilled, smokey-voiced singer as famous for her raunchy on-stage monologues as she was for her lush, beautifully produced albums for Spring Records, most of which were recorded in storied Muscle Shoals Sound Studios in Alabama. While 1973’s “It Hurts So Good” was one of her biggest hit songs, appearing on the soundtrack to the blaxploitation hit Cleopatra Jones,  her breakthrough album Caught Up was a rule-breaker –  a soul concept-album with a cohesive gender-war narrative threaded through the covers and self-penned originals.    That and two of her other albums from that period went gold; Feelin’ Bitchy and Get it Out’cha System.  While these came out years before the beginnings of hip-hop, the genre eventually drew on Jackson for influence, as her spoken-word style and fierce, don’t-fuck-with-me energy laid the groundwork for decades worth of female rappers.

Her show Friday night at the Howard Theater is her first ever at the venue, since it had already been shuttered during her heyday.  It should be a good one, since the 68-year-old legend still knows how to throw down in her live set.  She tours with a large band, sings her old-school hits, as well as more recent songs (she never really stopped recording until 2001), and is always ready to break it down with stories or advice in her monologues, which draw her songs out into extended jams, and make her shows as comedic as they are soulful.

I spoke with Ms. Jackson on the phone the other day.  She can be as funny in an interview as she is serious, telling me about the state of R&B music, and laughing at contemporary production technique.  She just recently ended a 13 year run as drive-time host on a Dallas soul station, so messing around with her interviewer is second nature…

Jonathan Druy: Have you spent a lot of time in DC at all?

Millie Jackson: My horn players are from DC.  And Bill Washington used to bring me into Constitution Hall all the time. I played the Warner.  I think I played, what club used to be under the Warner?  Encore?  I can’t believe I remember that.  The name of the club! I had my strawberries today!

JD: How often have you been touring lately?

MJ: Usually I do some weekends with a Summer Soul/Blues Tour, but this year I did four weeks with them, so I’ve worked more this year already than I did all of last year.

JD: Do you like playing more regularly?

MJ: My band does! They like to get paid!

JD: Is it the same band you’ve had the last few years?

MJ: Yes.  Guitar, bass, drums, two keyboards, three, sometimes four horns, and two background singers, sometimes three.

JD: Has your set changed?

MJ: Some things you just gotta do.  If you listened to Millie Jackson on the radio, you ain’t gonna hear nothing but “Back in Love By Monday”, “Hurt So Good”, and “If Loving You is Wrong”.  Like I haven’t made any more songs.  I’ve got thirtysomething albums, only got three songs to be played!

JD: Other R&B singers who were big in the 70s, like Bettye Lavette, Mavis Staples, and Candi Staton have all put out new material in the last few years, do you have any interest in recording anything else?

MJ: Not until they kill off all the bootleggers.  It doesn’t make sense for me to spend my money to put out a CD, then base that around selling it for free.  They make all the money!

JD: If someone came up to you and offered to pay for the whole thing, whatever budget you want, what kind of album would you make?

MJ: I have no idea.  Because like I said I’m not doing another one.  Music now – I heard that the Grammies removed some R&B awards?  I mean come on! Robin Thicke, the king of R&B?  Give me a break.  And you’ve got all of these singers that are supposed to be R&B/Soul, they all sound the same, can’t tell one from the other one, because the producer went in his basement and made this nice record, and hyped it up and put them in “tune”, and said “now you have a hit record, and you need to go out and sing it.”  Now they gotta learn it.  Plus you gotta learn how to sing out of both sides of your mouth at the same time.

JD: What is the state of R&B music?  Where do you think it is going?

MJ: R&B really doesn’t exist anymore.  It’s not going, it’s gone.  I spoke to someone about wanting to bring me to the Apollo.  Couldn’t find anybody to go with me.  Because everybody that I used to play with, they’re dead. And if they’re not dead, they’re old and ill.  So it makes things complicated, because even though I’m known as the “mother of hip hop”, and had the first female hip hop record (1980’s I Had to Say It), they’re not going to put me on the show with another hip hop artist, because my fans are not gonna come and see me, and have to hang out with their children.  They don’t mix!

JD:  How do you feel about a lot of artists today that might have a Millie Jackson influence?  Is there anyone you like?

MJ: Yeah, Rihanna has a distinguished voice, but everybody else wants to sound like Beyonce.

JD: Do you like Beyonce?

MJ: I love her.  She’s fabulous.  The first time I saw Destiny’s Child, I said “Why is she with them?” She was the one that stood out!  I think it was a show at the Apollo, and there was no comparison between her and the rest of them.  She looks good, she can dance, she can sing.  Case closed.

JD: How do you feel about contemporary R&B production?

MJ: The other day, somebody asked me in person the other day, I was talking about how the producer produces records now, and he’ll do a track and he plays everything on the keyboards, and the girl will come in and sing “I went to the store”.  And he’ll put it in key: “I went to the store.”  Maybe extend it: “IIIIII, went to the store”.  And then he’ll double it up: “I went to the store, went to the store, went to the store, went to the store”, then he’ll put it in background, “the store, the store, the store,  I went I went I went I went I went I went to the store the store the store the store”  Case closed! There!

That’s the way it is now.  The other thing is.  I love horns, live horns.  And it just aggravates the daylights out of me to hear phony horns on a record.  I call them the “deebeedeebeedees”.  I was at this blues conference last year, and this girl comes up to me and says “Millie Jackson, would you play my new record, play number 8.” And I said “Didn’t you just say the single was number 2?” And she said “Yes, but I also heard you say you don’t play the deebeedeebeedees, and number 8 is the only one that don’t have the deebeedeebeedees.”

Because that’s what you call them, no matter what you say, if you’re singing, “And it hurts so good. Deebeedeebeedee!”

JD: Isaac Hayes and Marvin Gaye did some talking on their albums in the 70s, and on Caught Up you started doing it –

MJ: Yes, but they weren’t telling the stories like mine were.  They were doing songs with talking.  The songs related to each other through the talking as they went into the next song, but as far as the stories themselves go, I don’t know anybody else who did that.

JD: Was there a moment where you started to realize people were getting more into the spoken word elements of your music?

MJ: I never had voice lessons, I did on the job training, so they always would rather hear me talk then sing.  In fact I started talking because I couldn’t sing.

I went on the road with L.C. Cooke, Sam Cooke’s brother, when Sam died, for three years, and never had a record.  I was touring all across the country without a record.  So by the time I got around to recording, I had pretty much learned how to sing, how to stay in key anyway.

So many people used to hear me say things when i’m talking, mainly because other people didn’t have the nerve to say what I was saying.  They were thinking it but didn’t have the nerve to come out with it.  So they respected me for the fact that I would say it, but the other thing was, every now and then you would get some that were serious, and thought that I actually meant what I was saying, and it was as a joke to me, in fact that’s how I ended up being a semi-comedienne, because you can’t really take me seriously with all the stuff that I was saying on these records.

JD:  In 2000, you sang on some songs for a French movie soundtrack called Comme un Aimant, a collaboration with French rapper Akheneton?  How did that come about?

MJ: They just asked me to do it, they gave me the songs, I listened to the songs, I liked them and I did it.

JD: If someone approached you to do that today, would you?

MJ: Possibly yes, if I like the songs…

 

Millie Jackson w/Al Johnson of the Unifics

Howard Theater

Friday 8/3, 8pm

 

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Q&A With Pilesar http://www.welovedc.com/2012/07/06/qa-with-pilesar/ Fri, 06 Jul 2012 19:32:20 +0000 http://www.welovedc.com/?p=85844 While Jason Mullinax comes to music originally …

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photo by Ashleigh Mullinax

While Jason Mullinax comes to music originally as a percussionist, his current project Pilesar (pie-LEE-zur) explodes into much more than that, and is bringing DC’s music scene a one-man electro-force that blends keys, synth, guitars, vocodor, noise and loops. And he sings too! His free show Sunday evening at H St.’s Sova Espresso & Wine Bar should show off this noise-artist’s sonic prowess.

A veteran of DC’s Sonic Circuits Festival of Experimental Music, Mullinax has been playing around town quite a bit with his new release, “Stereo Space”, which brings to mind a lo-fi 60s/70s techno psychedelic time-warp. His range combines proggy atmospherics with krauty electro-cinematics, and 80s new-wave-hip-hop-samply goodness. On songs like “Absolute Zero”, “Spider Bait”, and “Keith’s Drum Machine”, his playful personality shines over it all, giving the noise a light touch. Throw in a guitarist and all sorts of other sound, and you have something that rewards repeated headphone listens. His extensive back catalog, including his previous release “Radio Friendly”, has less straightforward vocals but the same kind of electronic/noise fun.

A native of Columbia, South Carolina but now living in Takoma Park, Pilesar is another reason to believe that DC music is experiencing some sort of renaissance. I talked to him the other day about what it is he’s doing.

Jonathan Druy: How long did it take you to record “Stereo Space”?

Jason Mullinax: It took over a year, and a lot of that was making the songs, and getting the songs right. I had the thing mastered five times before I signed off on it. I’m really happy with it, and I think this is the first album that is really representative of what I do in this moment.

JD: Have you been adding more vocals to recent projects?

JM: I’ve done a lot of really weird albums in the past, and usually when I do vocals, I put a lot of effects on them, because I don’t really consider myself to be a very strong vocalist, but I think with this album in particular, and even though I’ve delved into super-experimental music, I’ve always had an appreciation for rock and pop music, so with this album I really wanted to challenge myself to do things I normally wouldn’t do. With my limited budget and resources, I wanted to try my best to make a proper pop album, whatever that means…

JD: How do you bring your studio sounds into your live show?

JM: Some songs are studio-only creations. I don’t really have any desire or need to recreate them live, some songs I just let be studio stuff. There are some songs I want to play live, like “Absolute Zero” and “Everywhere is Beauty”.

I typically play with a small drum kit, a keyboard, a drum machine, a sampler, a loop pedal, and that all runs down into a mixer, which then goes into another loop pedal, so essentially I can create a lot of that on the fly, I’ll do something on the drum machine and loop that, play a bass-line on the keyboard and loop that, then I can sing on top of it. There’s a couple songs where i’m actually playing drums, keyboard and singing at the same time, there’s some songs where I just program the drum machine and let it do its thing and I’ll play keyboards and sing, there’s some songs where I just play the drums and let the guitarist do the heavy lifting, so there’s several different methods that I use to recreate the sound live.

My problem is I write songs faster than I can record them, so I always have tons of songs floating in the ether. Once I choose which ones to record, I have to figure out how to reverse-engineer them from their live version, because I do require a lot of looping and technology, and it works well in a live situation, but it might sound a little sterile if you try and reproduce them in a recording situation.

JD: Do you do a lot of looping live?

JM: Looping is pretty prevalent in a lot of different styles of music, it allows people to back themselves up; for instance when I decided I wanted to play live – you know I’m a drummer, and a guitar player can get up on stage and hold someone’s interest with a guitar and a mic and they can do that, but a drummer gets up on stage and plays drums for 30 minutes, not too many people are going to enjoy watching that. I knew if I wanted to play songs, I knew I’m going to have to be a one-man band, and the easiest way I knew how to do that is to invest in drum machines and a loop pedal, so that way I could perform shows by myself if I wanted to.

I’ve recruited a guitarist, and he plays live with me for a lot of this material, and that really opens up the sound.

JD: Were you always a drummer?

JM: Yeah I started playing drums when I was about nine. As a kid, I always wanted to be creative, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I sat down in front of a drum set, and my world came into focus…

Pilesar Stereo Space CD release party
SOVA
1359 H Street NE, Washington DC
with Buck Gooter
Sunday, July 8th @ 7pm

 

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