SELECTED WORKS #017
A Bassline interview, a new mix, various bits + pieces
Hi there. How are you? At the start of the week, I slipped down a tiled staircase in the rain. No breaks, but I’ve been pretty stiff and sore, which well, doesn’t encourage one to do much writing; or anything really. Anyway, I’ve somewhat recovered, life goes on, blah blah. Here’s a few recent updates/thoughts.
WHAT I’VE BEEN DOING:
I interviewed Tony Henry from Bassline for Test Pressing. Not to be confused with Tony Henry from Manchester jazz-funk/R&B band 52nd Street, Tony is a South east London raised musician who grew up on British pop in the ‘70s. When the ‘80s arrived, Tony discovered a second love, sound system culture. He taught himself how to play bass, started a reggae band called Chakwanza and rubbed shoulders with Aswad, Dennis Brown, Maxi Priest producer Barry Boom, and Barry’s family band One Blood. In the late 80s, Tony set-up a home studio, teamed up with a singer named Lorraine Chambers and recorded ‘You’ve Gone’, one of crowning jewels of the UK street soul scene. In our wide ranging conversation, Tony discusses all of this and more (Read here).
No recent radio news, but on a spur of the moment whim, I put together a new street soul (and street soul adjacent) mix and uploaded it on Mixcloud. Where Has The Love Gone: A Street Soul Story - just under 60 minutes of tunes from Ashaye, Bassline, Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Hiroshi Satoh & Wendy Matthews, Fuemana, Special Touch, Maureen Mason, etc (Listen here)
WHAT I’VE BEEN READING:
Jace Clayton on That Singing Crowd for e-flux
“One doesn’t need context to realize that this massive, nearly all-white choir arranged so neatly in front of an even more massive neoclassical building should not be howling. The initial gag is something a toddler could enjoy. Yet behind the slapstick incongruity lies a pitch-perfect evocation of American political discourse in this era of filter bubbles and muddied disinfo whose resonance has only grown in light of the insurrectionist storming of the Capitol nearly four years later.”
If you’re familiar with Jace Clayton aka DJ/rupture’s writing, you know that Jace does not miss. Every essay is essential. I ain’t even got to explain what it’s about (read here).
Corky Lee’s Photographs Helped Generations of Asian-Americans See Themselves, by Hua Hsu (The New Yorker)
Hua Hsu traces the life and times of the recently departed Corky Lee, a Chinese American journalistic photographer of some note. Corky often described his life’s work as “photographing Asian Pacific Americans.” It was that simple, but nothing that simple is ever really simple. Every one of Corky’s photos are worth a thousand words, and some of them might very well be the only document left New York’s Chinatown in the later decades of the 20th Century (Read here).
THAT’S ALL FOLKS!!!