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Saturday morning cartoon

Happy Fourth of July!

Happy birthday, Fred Wesley.

I’m jumping the gun with this. But tomorrow, on July 4th, trombonist extraordinaire Fred Wesley turns 66.

There are three phases to Mr. Wesley’s wonderful career in music. In the early ’70s, he was James Brown’s bandleader and arranger. Mid to late ’70s, he led the horn section for Parliament and Bootsy’s Rubber Band.

For the past 20 years or so, he has been a prolific solo artist, coming mainly out of a jazz bag.

Naturally, I got plenty of Fred streaming on my Vox blog. Click here to hear “Breakin’ Bread,” off the 1974 J.B.’s album of the same name.

Click here for Parliament’s “Getten’ to Know You” (1976). Wesley provided the explosive horn charts.

And click here to hear a Latinized version of the jazz standard “On Green Dolphin Street,” from Fred’s 1991 CD “Comme Ci Comme Ça.”

Below is a recent 10-minute interview with Fred Wesley. This is a promotional clip for the upcoming music documentary “Soul Power.” (I'll have more to say about that later.)

Filipinos are the funkiest Asians.

Want proof? Meet Sigrid and Lee... born in the Philippine Islands, now living in Australia. (Hat-tip: Submariner.)

Random hipness

A free BLK JKS download

BLK JKS – South Africa’s answer to Bad Brains – have been touring the U.S.A. in recent months... gigging with the likes of Spearhead, Santigold and Femi Kuti.

On July 5 (this coming Sunday) the band will be at Brooklyn’s Weeksville Heritage Center.

I would love to see these cats live. But since I missed them in L.A. back in May, I’ll settle for a FREE MP3.

Click here to hear “Molalatladi” on my Vox blog.

To download the track, follow this link to RCRD LBL.

Vibe magazine shuts down

Vibe, the music magazine founded by Quincy Jones and Time Inc., has gone out of business, effective immediately. (The New York Times story is here.) Times are tough for all print media.

I wasn’t a Vibe reader, but I have vivid memories of that magazine’s launch in 1992. Matter fact, I wrote about it for the Washington Post.

The big controversy back then involved the fact that top editor Jonathan Van Meter was white and gay... while Vibe was supposed to be a magazine grounded in the rap culture.

Russell Simmons, who conceived the idea of a “Rolling Stone for the hip-hop generation” along with Quincy, backed away from the project before it launched.

Part of the reason, Simmons told me, was that “they didn’t hire one straight black man to work on that magazine. I didn’t meet one straight black man.”

Below is some of my reporting on the birth of Vibe from the summer of ’92.

DAVID MILLS: To tell the story of Vibe is to waltz through the minefield of rap music’s politicized aesthetics. It’s about cultural authenticity. Street credibility. Race and power.

At the center of the story is Vibe’s editor in chief, 29-year-old Jonathan Van Meter, most recently a senior editor at Vogue.

New York Newsday’s pop music writer pointed out last January that Van Meter is “white and openly gay, hardly a combination that will endear him to hip-hop politicos.”

In conversation, Van Meter proves to be more comfortable dealing with the white thing than the gay thing.

“I understand the [racial] sensitivity, and it doesn’t make me angry... because I understand it completely,” he says with a relaxed sincerity, blondish hair combed back off his gentle face.

“My color will probably always be an issue, but what can I do? ... I could trot out my credentials to convince people that, as a white man, I’m qualified to do this. But there’s such a danger – it could sound really awful and really like, ‘some of my best friends are black’ kind of thing.”

For example, Van Meter says he played in his high school band, which was largely black, “so whenever we traveled anywhere, I was always in a bus full of black kids listening to hip-hop, and it just really affected the way I listened to music.”

Of the five top editors Van Meter assembled for the prototype, four are black. “And hiring black people was not something that I felt like I had to do, or nobody ever said I had to,” he says. “It was just a natural extension of who I am to hire a mostly black staff.”

On the gay thing, Van Meter turns chilly. “My staff’s sexuality is really none of my business,” he says. “I’ve heard the rumors, ‘Oh, everybody at [Vibe] is gay,’ which is just absolutely not true. It’s ridiculous. ...

“Will the 200,000 readers in America give a shit about me or what I am? Will they know I’m white or gay? Will they care? They’re going to read the magazine because it’s good or bad.”

But isn’t his gayness as relevant a political/aesthetic issue as his whiteness?

“Absolutely not,” Van Meter says. “I think it’s absolutely homophobic and ridiculous.”

When Quincy Jones, Russell Simmons and Time Warner began talking about a rap magazine, they had their eyes on the Source.

The Source calls itself “the magazine of hip-hop music, culture & politics” and prides itself on its dedication to “hard-core” hip-hop, and is widely respected for that. Even though (and this is going to get complicated) it was founded by two white Harvard students.

Jon Shecter, the 24-year-old editor in chief, says he and Source publisher David Mays turned down the chance to be hired by Time Inc. because they felt the corporation wanted a more “mainstream” product.

Shecter has seen the first issue of Vibe. “To be honest, I don’t think it’s going to have any impact on us at all,” he says. “I think it has a sense of coming from the outside.

“Everyone we have working as an editor at the Source eats and breathes and shits hip-hop every day,” Shecter declares. “That’s all we do.”

Van Meter says: “I don’t need street credibility to be the editor of a magazine. ... What I bring to it is a journalistic perspective. And the Source comes out of a fan’s perspective.”

Regarding Shecter, “who went to Harvard and grew up privileged,” Van Meter says sharply: “I feel that I take more shit for being gay than he does for being a wannabe. ...

“I think I am closer to the aesthetic of rap than he is, because I’m lower-middle-class, big family, grew up on the edge of a black neighborhood, went to a shitty high school, you know. ... I mean, I feel, in some fundamental way, more qualified as a white man – if we’re going to talk about that – than Jon Shecter is.”

“He gets the bozack!” Shecter rejoins. “While he was voguing or listening to the Village People, I was listening to UTFO. ... I never claimed that I was a product of the ghetto. But I’m definitely a product of this music.”

(Told you it’d get complicated.)

Tuesday 12-inch Flashback: ‘Let’s Dance’

A free Maktub album download

Maktub, the soulful Seattle rock band fronted by Reggie Watts, is giving away its brand new album as a FREE digital download.

Best news I’ve heard in days.

I’m streaming one of the tracks on my Vox blog. Click here to hear “It’s Never Enough.”

The album is called “Five.” Follow this link and follow instructions to download the nine tracks as a ZIP file. (Mac users: When you get to the download link, CTRL-click then “Save Link As.”)

Betty Allen (1927-2009)

In the same week that Earth’s most famous singer died, a pioneering African- American opera star passed away at age 82.

Mezzo-soprano Betty Allen had performed with the San Francisco Opera, the New York City Opera, the Santa Fe Opera and others. As a soloist, Ms. Allen sang with symphony orchestras under such conductors as Leonard Bernstein, Georg Solti and Pablo Casals.

I’d never heard of her.

Betty Allen had also served as president of the Harlem School of the Arts, where she taught master classes in voice. She also taught at the Manhattan School of Music and the Curtis Institute of Music.

The New York Times obituary is here. The Washington Post obit is here.

A wake will be held tomorrow from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. at Benta’s Funeral Home in Harlem.

I’m streaming a Betty Allen recording on my Vox blog. Click here to hear her rendition of the old Negro spiritual “Deep River.”

Bootsy remembers Michael

You might be all Michaeled out by now... but here’s a talk-radio artifact I must pass along. Because I’m still that much of a P-Funk freak.

Friday afternoon, Bootsy Collins appeared on Bill Cunningham’s radio show in Cincinnati to reminisce about Michael Jackson.

Cunningham, if you don’t know, is a right- wing talker with a national reputation. (Hannity stole his line “You’re a great American” from Bill Cunningham.)

Now dig: Tonight on Cunningham’s nationally syndicated weekly broadcast – “Live on Sunday Night, It’s Bill Cunningham” – the host dumped all over Michael, repeatedly calling him a “drug addict” and saying his death was getting too much media coverage. As opposed to those “tea party” protests. (I swear to God, he brought up the tea parties!)

Cunningham wasn’t popping that shit when Bootsy was in the studio on Friday. Click here to hear a 13-minute excerpt on my Vox blog.

That conversation reminds me to mention, proudly, that I was in Cleveland in 1997 to witness the induction of Parliament-Funkadelic and the Jackson 5 into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. (I got within a few feet of Tito.)

Anyway, follow this link if you want to stream or download all of Bootsy’s appearance on the Bill Cunningham show.

‘Where were you when you heard the news?’

There’s a generation of African-American culture writers – journalists, critics, authors – who owe their professional success to hip-hop. They documented that cultural revolution in real time.

But those writers, now in their 40s, grew up on ’70s soul music. And they kept an ear on the larger world of pop.

For that generation, the passing of Michael Jackson has an impact greater than the loss of James Brown, Richard Pryor... any other entertainment icon you can think of.

These black writers have childhood memories of Motown 45s and LPs. Jackson 5 records were probably among the first they bought with their own money. Maybe they unwrapped one or two under the family Christmas tree.

Their high school and college years coincided with the nuclear blasts of “Off the Wall” and “Thriller.” They rode along on Michael’s entire journey as contemporaries. And so Michael belonged to them.

Two such writers – Harry Allen and Michael Gonzales (pictured above) – shared their thoughts and feelings about Michael Jackson on the radio last Friday. This happened on Harry Allen’s weekly program, “Nonfiction,” on New York’s WBAI.

I’m streaming an 8-minute excerpt on my Vox blog. Click here to listen.

If you want to stream or download the entire hourlong show, follow this link to the WBAI archives and look for the June 26 episode of “Nonfiction.”

A free Africa Hitech download

Searching teh internetz for cool FREE MP3s is fun fun fun! Click here to hear one I just found – “Too Late” by Africa Hitech.

Africa Hitech is a side project of British-born beat artistes Steve Spacek and Mark Pritchard (both now based in Australia).

To cop the download, follow this link to Red Bull Music Academy. (Mac users: When you get to the download link, CTRL-click then “Save Link As.”)

Saturday morning cartoon