Uptown Radio

Listen to the full piece: 

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

INTRO: We’re all used to hearing stories with words. But commentator Matthew Vann found you don’t always need words to tell them.

Listen to the full piece: 

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

HOST: And now to a totally different kind of music — punk rock and hard rock. In the midst of their popularity in the 1980s came the Black Rock Coalition. African American musicians and artists in New York founded the group in 1985. For a while it really helped some Black bands make it big. But Lance Dixon reports that changes in the music industry have made it harder for Black musicians to be seen beyond their skin color.

NARR: When the Black Rock Coalition began in 1985, its flagship band was Living Colour. They stormed onto the scene with their hit song, “Cult of Personality.”

[Fade in “Cult of Personality” to a bed that fades out until first WILLIAMS ACT]

It hit #13 on the Billboard charts and won the group a Grammy in 1990. Living Colour’s Vernon Reid was one of the founders of the coalition and Gene Williams is currently the artistic director of the New York chapter. He watched a recent Living Colour performance on YouTube and was shocked that some commenters on the video didn’t identify them as a Black group.

GENE WILLIAMS: They didn’t even know Living Colour was black. They see Corey up there and they’re like, oh my God he’s black!?

He says the fact that people are shocked, decades later, is a part of why the Black Rock Coalition or BRC was founded in 1985. Their goals were to seek chances for Black artists to perform, record and be paid fairly.

WILLIAMS: When we started we needed an outlet for musicians to have venues that weren’t really provided for us at the time.

Eventually they were able to find places to play. And building off the fame of Living Colour, the BRC gained momentum and allowed for other bands to follow suit. BRC co-founder Greg Tate says it also allowed them to assert their Blackness.

GREG TATE: We chose the name Black Rock Coalition because we knew if you put Black in front of anything it immediately becomes kind of terrifying to certain folks.

Jimi Hazel is the lead guitarist of another BRC band–24-7 Spyz and he says that given the history of rock and roll, the idea of Black people playing it shouldn’t be so surprising.

HAZEL: Black people don’t rock. Hello? We’ve been rocking since the fifties, we invented it.

Of course, rock and roll came out of blues music. Black artists like Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters and Jimi Hendrix rocked in the 50s and 60s. Guitarists that followed them moved into funk bands like Sly and the Family Stone and Funkadelic with large Black followings. But, once disco arrived, Hazel says it became more about dance tracks and not live shows.

HAZEL: That’s really when the disconnect happens between Black people and rock music. Because now rock it just went back to being predominantly a white thing, except for a handful of black bands. But, they weren’t being supported by their own people.

Gene Williams says today there are even fewer places for bands to play in New York.

WILLIAMS: We lost a lot of great venues, we don’t have CBGB’s anymore, we don’t have Danceteria, we don’t have the places that we started at.

Greg Tate who, along with his BRC work, is a long-time music journalist says the real problem is what he calls “progressive racism” in the music industry.

TATE: There’s still a desire to keep Black musicians in their place.

Tate says this racism means corporate executives still tell Black musicians that they can’t sell them as artists.

TATE: You know, they were telling people that in 1985 when we started, and they’re kind of still telling people that 30 years later.

The Black Rock Coalition’s membership today is mainly built on the older acts who are still rocking, but mainly at the occasional benefit concert. Still, there are younger supporters of the movement.

[Fade in Earl Greyhound song “Shotgun” to a bed and fade out before THOMAS ACT]

Earl Greyhound was a rock trio that debuted in the largely-white alternative rock scene seven years ago.Bassist and vocalist Kamara Thomas and drummer Ricc Sheridan were the black members of the group. Thomas says when the band was looking for a new deal, label executives weren’t sure of what to do with them.

KAMARA THOMAS: Labels still had this kind of idea about how you market music and how it’s gotta be divided into all these categories. And you market r&b to black people and rock to white people.

There have been some noteworthy crossover exceptions since Living Colour. Black rock artists like Lenny Kravitz in the nineties and bands like TV on the Radio more recently. But, Darrell McNeil, operations director for the New York BRC, thinks it’s not enough.

MCNEIL: We can have a black president, but we can’t have a black superstar rock and roller outside of say like a Lenny Kravitz. He’s the guy who kind of gets the pass. But, he’s the only guy who’s getting the pass.

But maybe Kravitz is starting to be joined in the mainstream by some good company.

[Fade in Gary Clark Jr. song “Numb” to a bed until MCNEIL ACT]

Gary Clark Jr. is a rising star in the industry, Tate says he’s been able to find success due to his look, charisma and the popularity of blues-rock bands like The Black Keys. His debut album Blak and Blu peaked at #6 on the Billboard charts last year. McNeil says Clark is embodying  the Black Rock Coalition’s mission.

MCNEIL: In a lot of respects I look at him as kind of an ambassador as to the different things that can happen for a black artist if you put together your audience the right way. 

[“Numb” fades in as a bed through SOC and end of piece.]

And with another potential crossover Black rocker on the rise, the BRC can continue to fight for a fair shot.

Lance Dixon, Columbia Radio News.

Listen to the full piece: 

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

HOST INTRO:

Jazz almost seems like a prehistoric form of music, especially for twenty-somethings. But Commentator Lance Dixon discovered he had been a fan since childhood. He just didn’t realize it.

Willie Green. Photo by Candace Camuglia.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

BY RACHEL ROGERS

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

In an airy fifth floor gallery in Soho, music and photography fans are leaning close to the wall to get a good look at Autumn de Wilde’s images.

They’re individual instant Polaroids, not much bigger than post-it notes. For de Wilde, shooting on film is important to her process.

“I wouldn’t have done this digitally, it would look like everyone else’s photos,” de Wilde said. “The Polaroid gives a distinct imperfection to each moment, it’s unpredictable. It changes depending on the heat and the light and the way I decide to spontaneously expose it.”

De Wilde took the photos of the Decemberists as they recorded their latest album, “The King is Dead.”  Each of the original polaroid prints are for sale: one will be included in all 2500 limited edition box sets of the album.

Since instant film has no negatives, this means that every person who buys a Decemberists box set will own the only copy of the image.

De Wilde spent a day with each band member, shooting photos in and around Portland, Oregon and Los Angeles. Her photos have a sepia tone to them. They are carefully composed, but playful.

The Decemberists were in the midst of three nights of sold-out New York concerts when de Wilde’s photos went up, and dropped by the opening.

Guitarist Chris Funk says he likes the element of unpredictability in the Polaroids.

“I always compare everything to music, you know, so maybe it’s more like free jazz as opposed to classical,” Funk said. “You gotta let go.”

“It’s about serendipity, and magic, and the weird things that happen in chemical reactions, said David Bias of the Impossible Project.

The Impossible Project is a group of instant film enthusiasts who began producing their own instant film a couple of years ago—after the Polaroid company stopped making it. The Impossible project gave de Wilde the film she used.

The unique feel of analog photography is quickly becoming popular in the digital realm as well.  For a few dollars, iPhone users can even take digital pictures that don’t look digital using the “Hipstamatic” app.  Its filters and effects to make their snaps look imperfect, like old film.

But it’s still not the same as what artists like de Wilde are doing, says Robert Hirsch, a photographer who has written about the social history of the medium.

“You can do things digitally with an image that would be extremely difficult to do in an analog process,” he said. “But you don’t have that physical attachment to it, and for a lot of artists, that’s really a critical aspect of what they do and it shouldn’t be something that is lightly dismissed.”

The Decemberists value this aspect of de Wilde’s work. And she appreciates how visual the band is— she says it’s not hard to see pictures in your head when you’re listening to their music.

And her photos make those pictures visible to everyone else.