ALL POSTS TAGGED “james-poyser“

The first official track from Derrick Hodge’s Live Today—his Blue Note Records debut as a bandleader—is officially here! The bassist, bandleader, and composer has become in-demand through his work with the Robert Glasper Experiment in addition to artists like Maxwell, Common, Floetry, Terence Blanchard, Q-Tip, Jill Scott, and many more. Live Today finds Hodge crafting original compositions with a cohort of collaborators spanning from Experiment members Robert Glasper, Chris Dave, Casey Benjamin, and Mark Colenburg to the legendary rapper Common, keyboardists James Poyser and Aaron Parks, saxophonist Marcus Strickland, trumpeter Keyon Harrold, and even the American String Quartet.

What you hear in her voice is ancient and inexplicable. She channels grandmothers and griots to bring audiences to the precipice of tears as easily as she incites eruption. Erykah Badu takes stage as both installation art and high wire act. While she has not made a career of being boastful, it is very clear that the queen bee knows who she is. A combination of Abbey Lincoln, Billie Holiday, Chaka Khan, Parliament’s mother ship, and a Hendrix solo, Erykah Badu is the direct byproduct of a lineage preserved and most effectively expressed through song. A sociologist with a rolodex of great producers and an equally impressive catalog of hits, Badu sings a world based very closely upon the one she inhabits, but clearly thinks and aspires to a plane none of us will reach in this life. A voice as joyful as it is pained, her sound does less to rely on the ridiculous range that carries most vocalists, leaning instead on an awesome amount of versatility, unpredictability, and depth.

As the great voices of jazz and soul music are silenced, Erykah Badu – arguably the first successful mutation of both movements — could very well be the last of a dying breed. In an interview with music superstore, Amoeba, trumpeter Christian Scott may have said it best, “I always applaud her for her conviction because she’s such a great artist and really on a lot of levels I feel like she could be the last great jazz singer, which is kind of disheartening a little bit. But just her sensibilities – her ideas about music, how she approaches her music, the notes that she sings, her inflections; I think she’s really a huge light for us right now. Hopefully there will be someone that’ll come and grab the torch from her, but I don’t really hear it yet, so she’s the one right now.”

Congrats to all of the winners from this past weekend’s Grammy Awards. There were many musicians involved with many of the winning projects that didn’t get as much shine. Big shout outs to Chris Dave, Pino Palladino, James Poyser, and Matt Sweeney for their work on Adele’s 21.

It was the era that produced Bilal Sayeed Oliver; a man who grew from progeny of the church to prodigy of the jazz circuit well before getting a good grip on life as a freshman at the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts; a factory of local talent that boasts Boyz II Men and The Roots amongst notable alumni. Philadelphia is a strange town, amongst few others across the nation, including Washington D.C. and New Orleans, where children still learn to play instruments despite the non-existent budget for arts and culture in schools.