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(I've said this in the past but I don't want artists dying to be only time I actually write new content. I guess I don't spend enough time giving flowers to the living; I really need to work on that. --O.W.)

I always feel awkward paying tribute to an artist that I initially discovered through sampling because I'd never want to reduce an artist down to "they recorded some cool samples." I mean, there are many artists I only know because of samples but I think it's safe to say that pianist Ahmad Jamal, who passed away this weekend at the age of 92, profoundly transcends any kind of reductive label (except for "one of the greatest of all time").

All this said: yeah, I discovered Jamal through sampling (shout out Pete Rock and No I.D. especially). By the time I began to go sample hunting in the mid-'90s (s/o to the Sample FAQ!), the Ahmad Jamal Trio's The Awakening was absolutely essential to track down. It wasn't just that that it was bountiful with samples — I may be wrong but I feel like no other jazz LP gave us so many different loops — but it was such a sublime album from beginning to end.

"Give the flowers to the living" (or, in this case, daisies I suppose).

I'm appreciative to URB Magazine for many reasons, not the least of which is that they gave me the opportunity to interview and profile some of my heroes, including De La Soul. I wrote a profile on the group as they were preparing to release "Art Official Intelligence: Mosaic Thump" in 2000 (issue #76 with Armand Van Helder on the cover. Should have been a De La cover story if you ask me!)

My wife Sharon, an accomplished art critic in her own right, has always been self-conscious about potential conflicts of interest in her relationships with her subjects. I admire that about her but let's be real: those of us who cut our teeth writing about hip-hop rarely maintained the same kind of impartial/critical distance. We fanned out because being fans is what lead us to write to begin with.

I recently published my first freelance piece for 2023, a Los Angeles Times profile of Thes One and how he put together, Farewell, My Friend, a beautiful elegy for his PUTS partner, Double K, who passed away two years ago.

(Listen // Buy)

It's been a long while since I've worked on a reported piece like this: four+ rounds of interviews with Thes — which he described as "therapy sessions", ha! — plus secondaries with keyboardist Kat O1O, mixing engineer Michael Brauer, and bugging Rhettmatic and Myka 9 for testimonials. All that plus several rounds of edits with my Times' editor, Craig Marks, who I thought did a great job of helping trim the fat off the piece without losing the heart of it.

There's

Al Hirt: Harlem Hendoo (Soul In The Horn, RCA Victor, 1967)

"Harlem Hendoo" is nothing short of a miracle of a song.

When most of us first heard it looped on De La Soul's "Ego Trippin' Part 2," I feel like our collective reaction was "what the hell is this?" and I'm sure many assumed it came off some obscure spiritual jazz record or the like. Instead, we began to discover, it came from an LP by Al Hirt, a giant in the "easy listening" genre but not exactly the first person to come to mind for a "mystical soul-jazz masterpiece." In fact, I'm not sure anything off the rest of his entire catalog — which is massive — comes anywhere close to this, not even songs off the same LP. It's a one-of-one in that respect…and more.

Consider this: there were five principals on the song: Hirt, producer Paul Robinson, arranger/conductor Teacho Wiltshire,  and songwriters Paul Griffin and Yolanda Paterno. 

Griffin was a prolific, multi-decade talent but hey only worked with Hirt on this album. He and Paterno wrote most of the songs together but most of Paterno’s output was from the ’50s; her credits are much sparser in the ‘60s and moreover, she and Griffin seemed to have only worked together on this album, same goes with her and Hirt. Same goes with Wiltshire, another veteran in the industry, but he only ever arranged for Hirt on this LP.  (Interesting enough but Wilitshire and Paterno share credits on a bunch of recordings from the ‘50s through ‘60s). 

Rusty Bryant: Fire Eater (7", Prestige, 1971)

7" single edits of album songs were a necessary concession to the technological limits of record-making. Back in the '60s and '70s, the average 7" could only hold ~four minutes of music, give or take, depending on the pressing technique and whether you'd be willing to trade off things like loudness or fidelity in order to cram in a few extra seconds. That's fine for most pop songs — the three-to-four minute song format had already become the norm decades back (itself a product of the limitations of the 78 format) — but not so much for other genres known for longer recordings, least of all jazz.

Cannonball Adderley: Virgo: For Pam (Love, Sex, and the Zodiac, Fantasy, 1974)

KMD: Black Bastards! (Black Bastards, Readyrock, 2000)

Last week, I had the privilege of being in conversation with Dan Charnas about his new book, detailing the life, career, and afterlife of James "J Dilla" Yancey: Dilla Time. The event was held on April 21, 2022, at Artform Studio in Highland Park (Los Angeles) and it was me, Dan and Peanut Butter Wolf, discussing Dilla's musical and personal journeys, complete with an annotated playlist. You can listen to the conversation part of the event here.

First off: Dilla Time is a fantastic book, easily one of the best musical biographies I can remember reading and certainly amongst the very best ever devoted to a hip-hop artist. As good as the stories therein are — and trust me, they're good even when they're also low-key depressing — it's Dan's multi-pronged approach to telling "the Dilla story" that I especially appreciated: this isn't just biological, it's also socio-historical as well as (accessibly) musicological. And that latter point — which is reflected in the book's very title — is where I, personally, gained some of the greatest insight into understanding just what it is about Dilla's music that was so affecting.

Betty Davis passed away the other week at age 77 and as many of my readers likely know, I have spent many years in awe of her and her music and had the privilege to interview her for the liner notes that accompanied three of her Light in the Attic reissues (you can read the liners for the first of those reissues, Betty Davis, here). It'll be one of the great honors of my writing career to have had that opportunity and play a small role in her re-discovery.

NPR Music was gracious enough to let me write an appreciation essay for her: "Game was her middle name." Just a quick excerpt from that:

Betty Mabry Davis, who passed away early Wednesday morning in Pittsburgh at the age of 77, was an intensely enigmatic artist, having spent the first 30 years of her life on a remarkable ascent into the spotlight only to utterly vanish from public view for the next 30 years. Up until 2007, when the first legitimate reissues of her music began to roll out, the primary way you would have discovered her at all was by randomly finding one of her three studio albums in a record store bin. Once you did though, it was like being let in on a secret that you instantly wanted to share with others.

Her songs were filled with gritty yet sultry style of electrified funk — dirtier than James with more blues than Sly. Likewise, as a vocalist, she shared little in common with her gospel-trained contemporaries with their perfect pitch and vocal control; she took her cues from growling blues singers like Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker. Moreover, she was doing all this as an unapologetically outspoken, sexually empowered performer who shocked the Black cultural establishment of her time. Both musically and professionally, she was an artist without much precedent nor peer and because of that, she's been the object of constant fascination and inspiration for decades. I always think of how Joi, the accomplished neo-soul singer/songwriter, once told me that when she was first introduced to Betty's music almost 30 years ago, it was a "revelation that I was not alone."

Joe Cruz and the Cruzettes:

Derrick Lara: (Masai, 1982?)

Admin: Step Into Light (white label, 2021)

I moved up to the Bay Area in the early '90s when the acid jazz scene was popping off there but alas, I never took advantage to go to the central parties at Nickie's BBQ in the Upper Haight and other venues where folks like DJ Greyboy or Mark Farina would spin when they were in town. That said, the sound of acid jazz was there in the background when I was learning to become a DJ and even if I didn't spin a ton of it, I was more than aware of its influence in the worlds of hip-hop and dance music.

Maybe that's why when I heard "Step Into Light" as an Instagram post from Friends of Sound founder David Haffner I was all "gimme that beat, fool" about it. I had never heard of Bristol's Admin before that but no matter, I was instantly into the whole sound/feel of his latest single.

Skye: Ain't No Need (Unity Edit) (Anada, 1976)

This is a revisit of sorts though I haven't written about the Skye single since 2008. It's a disco 45 where I'm continually surprised that dancers don't seem to adore it as much as I do. In my more active DJing days, I was convinced it would be a floor-filler and while it wasn't quite a floor-killer, it just never produced the kind of reaction I assumed/hoped for. People just treated it like...whatever and it made me want to grab a mic and shout "you fools, this is amazing! What's wrong with the lot of you?!"

But c'est la vie. Maybe I've had the wrong crowds. Or maybe I'm just alone on this hill (I don't think so though).

First off, welcome to The Soul Sides Stray, a test run for creating a Soul-Sides.com newsletter. My old email subscription service (Feedburner) recently went dark so it made some sense to transfer my blog subscribers to this newsletter format. We'll see if it works and as always, if you don't want to be subscribed to it, just use the links on his page to bounce. If you do want to hang around, here's some fresh content for you:

The Nairobi Sisters: Promised Land (Gay Feet, 1974)

"Funky reggae" is a thing but I'm not one who needs my riddims to be laced with breakbeats. That said...when I first heard "Promised Land" in late 2016, I did think "damn, this is pretty good as a riddim with a back beat."