Jazzanine

June is Black Music Month. I first heard this tagline during my years as editor of black music at "music industry bible" Billboard in the late 1980s; heretofore I was unaware of any such celebration. I was raised in New York City and blessed or cursed with the cynicism of natives of the metropolis; after a few years in the music biz I was quickly learning the warp and woof of the rather slick fabric undergirding the frothy array of the music industry. So I quickly attributed the proclamation of black music ascendancy for the month of June as an invention of the record industry itself – much as Valentine’s Day, Secretary’s Day, Mother’s Day and other heart and hearth holidays were inventions of the greeting card biz. I thought, Hey -- the kiddies were out of school for a glorious stretch of "hot fun in the summertime," and the season offered endless opportunities for music-infused vacation activities of all kinds. The record labels and their distribution com...

I am devastated to learn of the passing of the brilliant Donna Summer, whose music was such an integral part to my maturation. "Love To Love You" was mindblowing, with its driving synth and daring vocals. I thought Donna was gorgeous. When her second album, A Love Trilogy , was quickly released in March 1976, just eight months after Love To Love You , I went to DiscoMat on Lexington to buy the album. Reminiscing about dancing to Donna's music, I listened to her 70s output on YouTube one day back in 2008, and it reminded me how much I loved these tracks. I even incorporated Donna into the current novel I am writing, in which the main character is obsessed with her (Lady Lady or Personal Summer). In tribute to Donna, here is what I wrote back in 2008: Writing while jamming to music on YouTube. Why does “Try Me (I Know We Can Make It)” by Donna Summer give me such a delicious thrill? Because it’s 1976, lost in time. Donna’s voice is operatically, candy-coat...

Whitney Houston: An Alternate View From the beginning she was the embodiment of duality: Sweet yet sensual, young yet old, pop yet R&B, gritty yet sophisticated. Who could successfully balance these opposites without verging on schizophrenia? The world is bidding farewell to songbird Whitney Houston, who left us much too soon. Her passing at the age of 48 is so tragic, ironic, and awful that even these words can’t encompass it. Her voice was a gift to the world, a force so powerful that whole generations of singers owe a debt to her shimmering mix of gospel feeling and pop precision. She had seen the pinnacle of success through adulation, awards, applause, and admiration. She had also endured the deepest recesses of hell due to addiction, abuses, failed expectations, troubled relationships, and public ridicule. I mourn for her passing, and pray for her family, friends, and fans – all of those who loved her. I first became aware of Whitney Houston in the mid ‘80s via ...

I’m not sure when I first became aware of Soul Train . I probably heard my friends talking about it, or perhaps it appeared in psychedelic splendor before our startled eyes as my younger sister and I battled for control of our living room television set, flipping channels between cartoons and reruns on a South Bronx Saturday morning. Our attention was galvanized by a seldom-seen-on-TV-in-the-70s glimpse of hip young black folks (hey – they look like us!) in their Afros and bell bottoms dancing in a yellow and orange stage set to the latest soul tunes. I was instantly hooked. I don’t know what I liked more: watching the live or semi-live performances by the flesh and blood R&B artists whom I only knew by name from the Top 45s list at the Korvette’s record shop, or watching the funky dance moves executed with such abandon by the studio dancers. Soul Train was THE show, hands down. You were socially required to study and report back on the dances, the clothes, the performances, the ...

Within every new decade, pop culture looks back 20 years. As we get closer to 2010, ‘80s nostalgia has reached its apotheosis. Look around. Lady Gaga is channeling not just Madonna, but the theatricality of Grace Jones with the spirit and hooks of Debbie Harry from Blondie. Atlanta’s Janelle Monae fashioned a robot persona to explain her music and stagecraft, a blend of techno, soul, and rock that seems like a foward-looking black spin on Talking Heads and David Bowie, who in the ‘80s was coming out of the elegant iciness of the Thin White Duke. Edgy artist Santigold wears the day-glo colors and polka dots of ‘80s fashion with the door knocker earrings and asymmetrical hairstyles of early hip-hop circa Salt N Pepa, while her 2007 tune “Lights Out” is new age proto-punk surf pop, like the Go-Gos on acid. Rihanna and Keri Hilson are rocking asymmetrical ‘dos right out of the ‘80s fashion playbook, while Dorothy Hamill wedge cuts and shredded T-shirt, straight-legged jeans and wide belts ...

I am sitting in front of my TV, watching Michael Jackson’s golden coffin, bedecked with crimson flowers, as it is loaded into the hearse at the Forest Lawn Cemetery, just a few miles down the road from where I sit. It’s hitting me anew that this talented, conflicted entertainer will no longer be walking the earth in his velveteen loafers and military style jackets. I am both weary of the barrage of news coverage – Jackson doctors being investigated! Debbie Rowe decides not to attend public memorial! Battle over children to heat up! Estate wrested from Katherine Jackson! – and wholly riveted. The Staples Center memorial is getting underway half an hour later than anticipated. The golden-ticketed chosen gathering downtown are of all ages, all races, some dressed as for a funeral, others as for a concert. Roland Martin on CNN is saying that you can go to any club in America, and anyone young or old, white or black -- even the toughest gangbanger -- cannot stand still in the face of “You ...

Oh, Michael. What a sad way to go. When I heard the news I was shocked, but not surprised. There’s something about your untimely passing that I understand. Over the past month, as I reported on your upcoming series of 50 shows in London next month, I told people around me: “Michael will never perform a single date of that engagement.” It was evident to me that you were not well. If you weren’t physically ill, I thought, you were ill inside. You wouldn’t withstand the pressure, the expectations of the madding crowd. I knew it wasn’t to be, but I never imagined your death. I simply thought that the Michael Jackson who speaks in a whisper and wears surgical masks and told the world that the most loving thing you could do was to share a bed with a child – the Michael Jackson who had crooned a tender “Ben” to a rat -- I knew that that Michael Jackson was being consumed in the conflagration of the world’s desire, a desire to both love you and see you utterly destroyed. There would be nothi...

Greetings, it has been more than a year since my last confessional. In December 2007, soon after posting up the sad novel excerpt posted below, I began a two-year MFA creative writing program at Antioch University L.A. Challenging, and obviously much needed in terms of my own craft. Still, the current state of the economy means that the publishing world is not what it once was, and my two-year graduate education may boil down to an expensive self-improvement project, like elocution lessons. I hold out the hope that with Obama now in the White House and placing a renewed emphasis on higher education, I might be a little ahead of the curve, and a warm and cozy teaching post awaits me at some fab university when the stampede to academia really gets going. I'm optimistic that I will get over the humps of my final manuscript and a teaching seminar to graduate this December. A propos of nothing, I was just on the street in West LA and saw a crowd of red-bereted dudes: black pants, army b...

Seems impossible, but I participated in the annual NaNoWriMo.org writing frenzy in November and actually crossed the 50,000-word finish line. It's not the best thing I ever wrote, but it's actually finished. Below, a sample of Guayabera , which is set in my fantasy of 1957 NYC: ---------------------------- Nadia sat back on her stool, satisfied, her broad face with their hard eyes now trained on him. “So you come with me, eh?” This is what Ray had feared. She was a streetwalker, a little old and hard and stocky, but it took all kinds. He chuckled a little and waved his hand. “Oh, no. No, I’m sorry.” Nadia never took her eyes from his face. “Yes, yes, you come. What have you got to do?” Her eyes moved over his uniform, correctly assessing his status as a sailor on leave. “You come and see, you’ll have a good time. Come, Billy Reyes.” She was sliding off the stool, and her sharp patent leather shoes hit the floor with a clunk. She was now pulling at his arm. Ray was surprised by ...

Chaka Khan is back. Not that she ever left. Like many of the artists that I grew up on, she had her youthful heyday with a seminal band, Rufus, and hit another level of greatness as a mature woman and solo artist. But as time marched on and the music industry changed in the '90s, producers and songwriters seemed not to know what to do with her. And I'm sure that Chaka didn't know what to do with herself for long stretches, musically, when she gave a lot of concerts and seemed ready to turn into a bad parody of herself. Now she's on a creative roll, and it's all about her glorious instrument, her voice. In late 2005 she released ClassiKhan , a collection of her favorite pop tunes recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra. That album has not been much discussed in the press, but it's a personal favorite of mine. Chaka poured her heart into reinterpretations of two Shirley Bassey hits, "Diamonds Are Forever" and "Goldfinger," as well as Peggy ...

[ I had just been informed by doctors at the Jules Stein Eye Clinic that I needed emergency surgery immediately. ] As Chic put it so eloquently in 1978: Freak Out ! It was now 7 at night. I had left my work half done at the office. I hadn't eaten. There was no one to come pick me up or get my car out of the hospital parking lot. My company had just switched medical insurance carriers and I didn't even have an ID card yet. I didn't know if it would cover something like this. I had been expecting the clinic to simply dole out a future appointment with a laser and a prescription for eye drops. But there was a possibility I could be BLIND, at least in one eye, where if a retinal detachment involves the central macula, eyesight in that eye is irretrievable. I was shocked by what they were proposing. The operation involved knocking me out, extracting my eyeball, clamping it into a plastic belt called a scleral buckle that would keep my raggedy eye tissue together, then reinsertin...

If I told you all that happened to me since January, you wouldn't believe it. OK, maybe you would -- it was ME having trouble believing, since I still have problems adapting to any sort of glitches in the life program. I had spent most of January in New York, riding the subway and working out of the main office. It was .... not horrible, but definitely less comfortable than my LA routine. So I returned to the West Coast. My life is just easier to manage on the West Coast, despite it being far from my kith and kin, offering a shallow wading pool for dating, and growing ever more expensive. So there I was in February, still living with friends in Cali after four months with most of my belongings in storage, trying to adjust to the stunning revelation that no, I was not going to be moving in glory and triumph to the East Coast after announcing this intention to all and sundry. I was looking desperately for a new LA apartment to get out of my friends' hair and re-establish my life ...

I wanted to make big changes. For six months, for a year, I've been talking about it. The the opportunity actually came to make the leap from one coast to another, and do it lightning quick. I wanted to close the book on one portion of my life and start a brand new book in a different locale. I had come from the East, after all, how hard would it be to return? Waaaay harder than I ever anticipated, as it turns out. Too much time has gone by. I had a good plan, to move back East, and it all seemed very noble and right and progressive. But I just can't make myself do it. I WANT to be there, I want to be with my sisters and my parents and spend warm and fuzzy time with my peeps and everybody, but I just spent six weeks on the East Coast, and every moment there just felt like a trial. I kept telling myself to get with it, get with the swim, try to enjoy, and I was compromising. Maybe it was about being in the cold, which I never could stand, but I think it was more about my being i...

--OK, stress is a mother. I have never handled stress well. I'm a person who likes to focus on one project at a time. I can go beginning to end, wrap that up, and then on to the next. But life is rarely like that. When I have to juggle three or four or six different projects or situations all at once, I start to feel like I have a 100-pound pack on my back, like Sisyphus rolling the rock up the hill on the daily, I feel like I will never see the light at the end of the tunnel. My eyes get a little wild, my breathing gets a little on the hyper side, and the timbre of my voice starts to rise into Minnie Mouse territory, squeezed by my escalating anxiety. (People can always tell my mood when I answer the phone by the level of my voice). Oh -- and my back goes out. I have a nasty crick in my neck right now. Of course, having a crick in the neck or kink in the back goes a long way toward easing the already troublesome flow -- NOT! I'm not going to get into all that has me taking sh...

Hollywood's got nerve. We knew this, but still. Ripoffs abound. Bad enough theaters show you a half hour of bad commercials and charge you a grip to get in, then the big studios fail to deliver half the time. Now they serve leftovers. On Saturday night, the Man wanted to go to the movies, which was fine. It was hot as all heck in the San Fernando Valley, a theater was the best spot to literally chill in. The Man also wanted to check out Superman Returns . Fine with me. I'm not a comic book fan by any stretch of the imagination (I had to be restrained from getting my money back within the first five minutes of Unbreakable , when that overrated Shyamalan character posted some superhero mythology gobbledygook onscreen at the top of the flick), but the first two X-Men movies were cool, and I dug Spiderman . OK. Again, within the first five minutes of Superman Returns I smelled a rat. Starting with the opening credit sequence. Uh, that music sounds darned familiar. And the swoopin...

Welcome to the blog. Why does this phrase make me think of Blue Magic's "Welcome To The Club"? For two reasons: I just got back from Philadelphia, City of Brotherly Love (true true) "and Sisterly Affection," as one of my girlfriends is known to say. Philly is where Blue Magic got its start, blah blah bah. Philly is a happening spot these days... more on that later. Second reason: I'm a product of the early disco years in New York, when "Welcome To The Club" was a dancefloor "hustle" record. Guess I'm giving away my age. But believe me when I say that I was a mere slip of a girl when I was sneaking into Nell Gwynne's, the Loft, the Buttermilk Bottom, and later going to Impanema's, Pegasus, the Colli Bron, Leviticus, Justine's, and the mecca of the Paradise Garage, among others. As a South Bronx chica, I wanted to be slick and worldly, hip and happening at 15 and 16, and I just wanted to dance. Nobody I knew talked about g...