Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 423

Director Steve McQueen on "Widows," A Thriller Tailor-Made for 2018

'The story seems simple: four male criminals die, four women step in to finish the job. Widows, a new movie starring Viola Davis, is a heist film, complete with shootouts and car chases. But it also digs deeper. Set in Chicago, the film revolves around race, gender, wealth, and even local politics. In other words, it’s not your typical action movie, and that has a lot to do with the man behind the camera: director Steve McQueen, best known for Best Picture winner 12 Years a Slave. The Takeaway sat down with McQueen to learn more about how he got from 12 Years a Slave to Widows.' -- The Takeaway

Kara Walker & Jason Moran: Sending Out A Signal

'In a candid one-on-one conversation, Kara Walker and composer/musician Jason Moran discuss their collaboration for the Prospect.4 triennial in New Orleans, "Katastwóf Karavan" (2018). Installed at Algiers Point on the bank of the Mississippi River and activated daily across three days in February 2018, the work featured a thirty-two-note steam calliope performed by Moran and housed in a wagon developed by Walker. The artists share how performing “Katastwóf Karavan" at Algiers Point pays tribute to Africans who were brought there to be sold into slavery in the 1700s. The calliope will honor “millions of ancestors, in a way that we aren’t sure about what we’re about to touch,” says Moran. Not intended to live in one place, Walker hopes to tour the monument to other locations similar to Algiers, noting “there are many places like that in the America’s and I think that it’s worthwhile to explore.”' -- Art21

Betraying the Spectacle: Black Muslim Women in the American South

'Rashida James-Saadiya shares her narrative photographic work "Betraying the Spectacle" which highlights the intersections of blackness, spirituality and creative resistance in the lives of Black Muslim women living and working in the American South. Rashida James-Saadiya is a visual artist, writer, and cultural educator invested in transforming social perceptions through creative literature. This presentation was sponsored by the John Hope Franklin Center, the Duke Islamic Studies Center, and the Duke University Center for International and Global Studies.' --
John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University

Michelle Obama Shines Light on Infertility Struggles of Black Women

'In her new memoir, Michelle Obama opens up about her experience dealing with a miscarriage and her decision to use IVF. The conversation has placed a new focus on the issues that women of color deal with when it comes to fertility. Black women are more than twice as likely to have infertility problems than white women, according to the latest data from the CDC. We talk about some of the challenges specific to women of color in this area and what’s been done to address them. Dr. Desiree McCarthy-Keith is one of very few black female reproductive endocrinologists in the country.' -- The Takeaway

Black Future Manifest[o]: Understanding Whiteness for the Sake of Black Liberation w/ Ronda Taylor Bullock

'Black Future Manifest[o] sits down with Ronda Taylor-Bullock, who has dedicated her life work to decolonizing the minds of white people. We discuss whiteness, its impact on us as Black people, and how and when to call out white people on their bullsh!t.'

Kimberly Drew On Making Art Radically Accessible For All

'Writer, art activist and cultural curator Kimberly Drew joins Stretch & Bobbito to discuss her earliest art memories, how she found inspiration in Kehinde Wiley's paintings and why working for The Metropolitan Museum of Art was great, but "exhausting." -- What's Good with Stretch & Bobbito

Why I Won’t Teach My Son ‘Black Codes’

'Debra’s son is just 1 year old, but she knows that soon he will be perceived as a “big black boy.” Can she overcome the “systems” she feels are in place to oppress him?' -- New York Times Video

Hollywood Walk of Fame Covered with Names of Blacks Killed by Police

'Anonymous members of an anarchist group covered the Hollywood Walk of Fame stars with names of African Americans who have been killed by police.' --   

Book Trailer: 'Shelter in a Time of Storm: How Black Colleges Fostered Generations of Leadership and Activism' -- by Jelani M. Favors.

'For generations, historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have been essential institutions for the African American community. Their nurturing environments not only provided educational advancement but also catalyzed the Black freedom struggle, forever altering the political destiny of the United States. In Shelter in a Time of Storm: How Black Colleges Fostered Generations of Leadership and Activism, Jelani M. Favors offers a history of HBCUs from the 1837 founding of Cheyney State University to the present, told through the lens of how they fostered student activism.'
Available April 2019 from The University of North Carolina Press

The Roy Hargrove Factor by Mark Anthony Neal

Photo: Govert Driessen
The Roy Hargrove Factor by Mark Anthony Neal | @NewBlackMan | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
If the brothers Marsalis were the poster boys for a reemergence of jazz in the mainstream thirty years ago, trumpeter Roy Hargrove was the standard bearer for the flank of “Young Lions” that blew open the door that Wynton and Branford found. Hargrove, who passed away recently at age 49, was the clear star of a group of musicians that included bassist Christian McBride, pianist Benny Green, guitarist Mark Whitfield, fellow trumpeter Marlon Jordan, saxophonist Antonio Hart and Marc Anthony Cary.  Ever the restless spirit, Hargrove found fellow travelers at the other end of the radio dial, among a loose collective of musicians straddling the worlds of hip-hop, R&B and Jazz, including Erykah Badu and D’Angelo. In a career the began when he was 17, Hargrove recorded close to twenty albums as a leader, and earned two Grammy Awards.
"Music has always been at the center of my life," Hargrove told the Los Angeles Times in a 1994 profile. Like many of the post-Soulgeneration, Hargrove was immersed in the sounds of top-Pop 40, telling Bill Kohlhaase that he listened to “everything there was to be heard on the radio: hip-hop, reggae, basically every style that I could relate to, that I liked, that I could feel. It wasn't until I was 15 that I began to hear about people like Clifford Brown, Fats Navarro, Lee Morgan and Freddie Hubbard."
The Dallas raised Hargrove recalled in an interview with Dr. Billy Taylor that he was introduced to improvisation as a 4th grader by a grade school music teacher. By the time he was in arts school as a teenager, there was a buzz about Hargrove.  It was, in part, that buzz that got Hargrove an invitation to sit in with Wynton Marsalis – arguably Jazz brightest star  at the time, and only eight years Hargrove’s senior. Marsalis is reported to have remarked, "Man, I heard this little kid today that's gonna be a bitch. No, that's wrong, that kid's a bitch today."  
Hargrove was already deep in the archive of his instrument, telling New York Times critic Jon Pareles, "I haven't really been the same since I heard Clifford Brown," Mr. Hargrove said. "I found it hard to believe a trumpet player like that, because he had covered so much of the horn technically, but the sound was so warm and not brassy. Then the next trumpet player I heard was Freddie Hubbard, and that really turned my head around." Hargrove spent a year at the Berklee School of Music in Boston, but by 1990 was living in New York City, signed to RCA/Novus, where he released three studio albums Diamond in the Rough (1990), Public Eye (1991), The Vibe (1992), and the live Of Kindred Spirits (1993), before making the move to Verve in 1994 with With the Tenors of Our Time, which surrounded Hargrove with some titans of the instrument  including legends like Joe Henderson, Stanley Turrentine, and Johnny Griffin, and his contemporaries Branford Marsalis and Joshua Redmond.
There is a warmness that you hear on those early Hargrove albums, like his  treatment of James Williams’ classic “Alter Ego” or “Of Kindred Souls.” But what you also heard in Hargrove’s sound, on tracks like his fire and brimstone cover of Miles Davis’ “Milestones” and “Homelife Revisited” is a swagger, befitting a young musician who likely heard Run-DMC’s “Rock Box” or Eric B and Rakim’s “Check Out My Melody” at house parties in Dallas. As David M. Yaffe wrote in his Village Voice profile of Hargrove during a stint at the Village Vanguard in 1996,  “what really distinguishes Roy from earlier trumpeters is his understanding of funk: Originals like ‘Roy Allan’ written for his father-reveal a musical palette not only formed by Dizzy, Fats, and Clifford, but by Parliament, the Ohio Players, and Stevie Wonder. Such distinctions between Roy and his influences are crucial.”
Hargrove’s forays into R&B and Hip-Hop would have to wait; his detour was in the arena of Latin Jazz, where his 1997 album Habana would earn him his first Grammy in the category of Best Latin Jazz Performance (1998). Hargrove would win a second Grammy five years later for a live album, co-led with Herbie Hancock and Michael Brecker.  Moment to Moment (2000), an album of ballads with strings, highlighted Hargrove’s aesthetic range and diverse taste.
But it was Hargrove’s ability to channel the cross-genre sensibilities of fellow trumpeters Quincy Jones, Freddie Hubbard and Donald Byrd that earned his new audiences at the beginning of the new century. Hargrove’s contributions on Erykah Badu’s Mama’s Gun, D’Angelo’s Voodoo, and Common’s Like Water for Chocolate – all released in 2000 – are nuanced, but they had a major impact on the musicality of all three projects. It was in this period Hargrove also contributed, along with the Soulquarian collective and Nile Rodgers, to the Red, Hot & Riot tribute to Fela Kuti.  
As Hargrove told the Daily News in 2003, "People been blasting me in the ear for the longest...They were saying, 'You're the only cat who could do it right.' " Doing it right meant the RH Factor, Hargroves’  jazz-funk collective, which produced two albums and an EP between 2003-2006. Standouts on those RH Factor albums are D’Angelo’s mournful cover of Funkadelic’s “I’ll Stay” and “Kwah/Home”, which featured a then relatively unknown Anthony Hamilton. Famously, Hargrove dropped the RH Factor’s Distractions and his own Nothing Serious on the same day in 2006.
Personal challenges kept Hargrove out of the studio for much of the last decade of his career, though Earfood(2008), and the big band recording Emergence (2009) rate, along with Habana, as his finest moments. Hargrove’s closer on Earfood, Sam Cooke’s “Bring It On Home to Me”, might be the most soulful recording of his career.
Perhaps summing up Roy Hargrove’s career, the late music critic and author Rashod Ollison wrote in the Baltimore Sun in 2006, “No matter what the trumpeter dives into it – pop, hard bop, hip- hop, blues, R&B, Cuban jazz, jazz standards – the native Texan charges the material with soul. It's that essential, transcendental feeling that invigorates and electrifies music, giving it life.”