Why Didn't You Tell Me? (Part Ten)

 

You know, recently, out of the blue, I received a Bandcamp notification to let me know there was a new release from Stacy Epps, her first full-length recording since The Awakening in 2008, a record which was a pivotal and I guess totemic set from the very early days of YHO. Thinking about that record seemed to whisk me back in time to the formative days here, which perhaps with the benefit of rose-coloured glasses did feel like a time of awakening, of opening up, perhaps a period of relative enlightenment, with Obama headed for the White House amid a sudden glut of young cosmic soul adventurers sharing often abstract, spiritual, fiercely independent music. Ha. All the way from ‘Yes We Can’ to ‘Oh No You Can’t’. What was it the man sang? “Once there was confidence but now there is fear / Once there was laughter but now only tears / Once there were reasons for our optimism / But now we're all drowning in a sea of cynicism.”

Anyway, those first bumbling, fumbling, stumbling steps of YHO were a lot of fun, very much a case of making it up as you go along, shaped by exploring YouTube and the world of rare-music-sharing mp3 blogs, which revealed whole unimagined areas of sounds, both old and new, “sharing horizons that are new to us, watching the signs along the way.” And then there was the incredible importance of MySpace in its heyday and what now seem like innocent social media activities where it was suddenly possible to make instant worldwide connections, bypassing the stranglehold of established print media. That whole thing of getting wrapped up in a frenzy of beat tapes, mixtapes, works in progress, sketches, downloads and CDRs, basically all of those ‘unofficial channels’, to borrow a term used in The Wire. Aptly, as I am sure I have said before, we were often hearing what was essentially fragmented music in a fragmented way.

So, yeah, good times, in a way a happy time inside my mind, with a lot of high hopes and false dawns. Georgia Anne Muldrow, I guess, was central to a lot of the activity for me, and a lot of the thinking and writing in the early days of YHO was shaped by the remarkable music Georgia was creating in a variety of guises. But beyond her there were other young incredibly talented composers, producers and performers, like Stacy Epps and Muhsinah who I maybe rashly claimed were “the young disciples of Dilla and Alice Coltrane, who have looked at Lauryn and Erykah and know things can never be straight forward again. The ones defying lots of things, including categorisation.”

In the odd way that these things happen, the rapping and singing Stacy of The Awakening really connected with me. Released on her own Japanubia label, on the LP the track I kept coming back to was her ‘Floatin’’ which seemed to capture perfectly the gauzy, ethereal nature of her singing and the contrastingly fierce articulate approach to her rapping. I loved the spirituality of her outlook on life and her creativity. I would also return regularly to the woozy orientalism of the track ‘OM’ where Stacy works with Muhsinah (Abdul-Karim), another young talent I was incredibly excited about circa 2009.

I can still recall the excitement of tracking down Stacy’s musical footprints. Discovering, for example, the Sol Uprising CD which is Stacy with John Robinson (aka Lil Sci, who like Stacy was based in Atlanta, Georgia). They are also on Shape of Broad Minds’ 2007 masterpiece Craft of the Lost Art, on which Stacy steals the show rapping on ‘They Don’t Know’.  Shape of Broad Minds were Jneiro Jarel with Jawwaad, and this LP is one of the great experimental hip-hop creations, part of that wave of hip-hop which was at the time Wire-friendly, and I am pretty sure I found out about Craft etc. via that magazine. Their archive mentions they featured in the October 2007 edition which also had a memorable David Toop interview with cover star Robert Wyatt and an article by Pete Webb (once of the excellent Statik Sound System) on Bristol blues & roots, as the cover put it, using a phrase I would go on to borrow many times. I probably still have my copy packed away somewhere.

Somehow along the way I picked up on the work of Jneiro Jarel’s alter-ego Dr Who Dat? And I remember his Beyond 2morrow set from 2009 was a huge favourite in the early days of YHO. I don’t think this had a physical release, so it would have been downloaded (still a novelty back then) and copied to a CDR which I still have and dig out every now and then.

Before that, in 2006, there was Beat Journey by Dr Who Dat? Like the Shape of Broad Minds set, this was put out by the Lex label and has a suitably splendid psychedelic cover designed by the ehquestionmark collective. Some editions (sadly, not mine) feature Stacy Epps on ‘Rhyme Cycle (Ageless Daisy Mix)’ which as the song says is “old school with the new rules.” One standout track, appropriately called ‘Braziliant Thought’, adds beats and more to Arthur Verocai's ‘Pela Sombras’, which actually works really well. I guess given his adopted stage name, it is no surprise Jneiro should have a special interest in Brazilian music. What I hadn’t realised was that he released an LP on Far Out in 2020 called After A Thousand Years, which is pretty special.

I must confess I lost track of what Jneiro did after the Dr Who Dat? recordings, though I think I was vaguely aware of his collaboration with MF DOOM. I certainly was not aware of an earlier Brazilian-inspired set called Fauna in 2010 and a complementary EP called Flora in 2014, both of which are among my favourite belated discoveries of recent times. Flora is a wonderful mix of ideas, with some lovely jazzy guitar work from Scott Burton on one track amid some mad electronic compositions which will appeal to anyone who still loves the hip-hop influence in the recordings of Autechre, The Black Dog, Plaid and so on.

Speaking of the electronica / hip-hop interface, one of the highlights of Stacy Epps’ The Awakening, a track called ‘Cosmik Dust’, was produced by Flying Lotus who around that time was just about the coolest person on the planet and about to release his Los Angeles set on Warp. Coincidentally or not, one other reason I have found myself thinking about that period when YHO was starting out was a recent rather excellent NTS special on the LA Beat Scene of the early 2000s, with some new names to me, but also some familiar ones from that time, like Ras G. and Afta-1, Flying Lotus and Daedelus, producers working at the more abstract, glitchy electronica-inspired end of hip-hop production.

The accompanying blurb mentions the Low End Theory clubnight, which I (characteristically) wasn’t aware of until recently, but rather neatly there is a piece in issue 3 of Tracing The Lines, the International Anthem magazine (which, aptly, I was also late to), where Ryan Julio explains what led to him and his partners starting up the ETA bar in LA which achieved immortality as the spiritual home of Jeff Parker’s quartet. In this piece Ryan talks about how his life was changed by going to Low End Theory sessions and getting involved in the city’s Beat Scene (nothing to do with Jack Kerouac, I hasten to add, who I seem to recall was never very fond of LA).

I also came across an excellent oral history of Low End Theory on Jeff Weiss’ Passion of the Weiss site, a piece “originally published at LA Weekly in 2011 before the crypto-fascists took over”. In it, there is a quote from the producer Daedalus which says, “I’m not sure who did it first, but someone figured out how to connect Madlib and J Dilla and the more authentic hip-hop production style to a more grounded experimental form of IDM [Intelligent Dance Music], in a way that both made sense and got a wider swath of people to move.”

Digging around, as one does, I came across some footage of Georgia Anne Muldrow & her Mother Rickie Byars-Beckwith performing at Low End Theory, which is a total joy. Thinking about Georgia recently I happened to dig out her 2008 compilation Georgia Anne Muldrow Presents Ms. One and the Gang, which brings together a whole host of tracks featuring the trademark G.A.M. shuddering, juddering beats, the loping and lurching rhythms and the squelchy funk flavours (or ‘fonk’ as Georgia would have it), including Stacy Epps’ ‘Motivation’. There are also a couple of Jimetta Rose tracks, which is a name I am at least familiar with in the present tense.

I vividly recall a few years back listening to a Tim Parker show on NTS while sorting out old clutter and being stopped in my tracks by a Jimetta Rose recording from a forthcoming record, which I assume must have been her The Gift: Around The Way Queen, which apparently was many years in the making and came with a cover channelling Reid Miles’ design for Kenny Burrell’s Midnight Blue. It got kind of confusing around that time as Jimetta also had a new EP out with her Voices of Creation project, a joyously funky community choir affair produced by Mario Caldato Jr., which features covers of The Sons and Daughters of Lite’s spiritual jazz classics ‘Let The Sunshine In’ and ‘Operation Feed Yourself’.

I cannot resist mentioning that when I wrote about Stacy Epps for the second edition of YHO I ended the piece by mentioning ‘Let The Sunshine In’: “One for the jazz dancefloors, sure, but imagine the effect it would have if played on the radio in the morning. Maybe next to Stacy Epps’ ‘Floatin’’. That would put a spring in your step.” This is the kind of thing that gets the blood rushing for us addicts of connectivity.

What I had no idea about was a Jimetta Rose record called The Light Bearer which was released in 2016 and was produced in her inimitable fashion by Georgia Anne Muldrow. It maybe is speculating a little too much to suggest that the unbelievable lightness of this Jimetta Rose record maybe helped shape Georgia’s own Overload set which would be released on Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder label and very much should have been her big pop moment.

When YHO had only just begun, one of the big tunes of the time was ‘RobertaFlack’ by Flying Lotus from his Los Angeles set on Warp (with a special mention for the Martyn remix), featuring on vocals Dolly or rather Ahu Kelesoglu, a DJ, producer, singer, songwriter, and apparently astrologer, TV scriptwriter and yoga instructor among many other things, no doubt. In yho4 Ahu was covered as part of a thriving creative scene that was in a way the UK response or equivalent to the LA Beat one, with Paul White, Bullion, Floating Points among the participants, and the DJ Alexander Nut whose Saturday lunchtime show on Rinse FM and (with Alex Chase) his One-Handed Music (or OHM) label were very much a part of what was happening.

One essential OHM release, in late 2010, was I think what would be the first official Ahu single, ‘To: Love’, recorded with Paul White. Another unofficial recording circulating at that time which remains one of my very favourite things is the Ahu vs J. Dilla version of David’s ‘Rock On’. After that I sort of lost track of Ahu. I know she went back home to Istanbul and that her career is a prime example of the non-linear way things can unfold. There were occasional glimpses of her activities, but it wasn’t until a Bandcamp notification came through recently, advising a new release was available of an acoustic version of Ahu’s ‘Same Sky’, that I really sat up and took notice.

Some people may understand why a track with that title would catch my eye, or maybe more appropriately why it might seize the imagination. A long time ago there was a fanzine called The Same Sky, a title I seem to recall inspired by a long-lost (to me and probably the world in general) novel by George Mandel called The Breakwater. Coincidentally or not, I have just been rereading Patti Smith’s Just Kids where she mentions a short piece by George Mandel, ‘The Beckoning Sea’, which appears in the anthology Protest: The Beat Generation and the Angry Young Men, a book that immediately takes me back to my teenage years when it was a charity shop staple, though it is many, many years since I have seen a copy and my own is predictably long-gone. I bet Mick Jones still has his, though.

That passage in Patti’s book is rather lovely: “I picked up the Beat anthology and found ‘The Beckoning Sea’ by George Mandel. I read him softly, and then at the top of my voice, to get the sea he embedded in the words and the accelerating rhythm of the waves. I kept going, spitting out Corso and Mayakovsky and back to the sea, to be pushed off the edge by George.”

I really don’t know much about George Mandel, which is intriguing in itself, but it is easy to imagine Patti, thinking she’s alone, reeling off the litany of what’s forcing a troubled soul into the sea. I wonder now if that piece fed into ‘Redondo Beach’? I don’t know. Maybe. Anyway, I have only just found out there was a short film made of ‘The Beckoning Sea’ in 1963 by Stephen Kobak, with music by Ian Freebairn-Smith who is revered around here for his arrangements or orchestrations on Pleasures of the Harbor by Phil Ochs, the Same Sky back-cover pin-up, appropriately enough.

Looking at Ahu’s Bandcamp page, I saw that I missed her recent collaboration with producer / composer Zeynep Erbay (she is also from Istanbul), on the excellent tropical disco track ‘Hungry Beast’, a title that I initially misread, making me do a double-take in time-honoured cartoon fashion. On Ahu’s Bandcamp page there was also mention of an LP Stellar, released at the end of 2023, which I assume I would have or should have had a notification about, but have no recollection of doing so. I strongly suspect at that time my mind was very much on other things.

And it is such an uplifting record, very pop, very light on its feet, and Ahu is in wonderful form throughout, and I adore her odd occasional Cockney inflections. It is mainly produced by Baker Aaron (aka Harun Iyicil) who leans towards the R&B / neo-soul sides of the pop spectrum. The exception happens to be my favourite track on the record, ‘Walk’, a percussive delight with something of the Bristol blues & roots about it, which was produced by Jungle Drums, about whom I know nothing, but it seems it is a track that dates back to 2009 and was released in a very limited edition by the short-lived German label We Aint Music.

For some reason Stellar makes me think of gloriously ultra-pop things like Estelle’s ‘American Boy’ and the most recent Stereolab record, which is not the same as saying Stellar sounds like either. Another favourite from the LP is ‘Nu Day’ which involuntarily makes me connect it to ‘Anew Day’ by the eternally singular Mary Margaret O’Hara who coincidentally or not in that number sings about “looking at the same skies.” Ahu as a fan of Mary Margaret? Why not? It seems a perfect connection to me, and any excuse to dig out Miss America is welcome.

‘Nu Day’ as a song seems also to have been around for a while. As ‘New Day’ Ahu recorded it with emanative (several of whose alumni played on one of our favourite YHO records of last year, MOMO’s Gira) back in 2018. Another of my favourites from Stellar is Ahu’s cover of the Gershwins’ standard ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’ which I discovered got played on a Mr Beatnick show on NTS in 2020 on which Ahu guested during the early days of the first lockdown.

Ahu’s links to Mr Beatnick go way back, and notably she sings on his 2008 hit (well, it’s all relative) ‘I Know All The Bitches’. Which is better in the dark, the Bullion or the Paul White remix? On the show Mr Beatnick reminisces with Ahu about the scene they had going (I was going to say the London Beat Scene but would only end up with ‘Thinking About You’ on repeat in my brain), and I was particularly pleased he mentioned Lukid being around what was happening as I had somehow associated his great LP Foma with that time. And it gives me an excuse to mention his current record Underloop on Death is Not the End which is phenomenal, and I recommend a visit to the label’s Bandcamp page: you can’t go wrong. Trust me.

That 2020 Mr Beatnick show features a slew of rare and unreleased Ahu tracks, including some of her Dolly collaborations with Flying Lotus, which hopefully one day will be released somewhere. Ahu also provides a mix of some of her favourite recent listening, which includes (the new to me) D.R. Hooker’s ‘Forge Your Own Chains’, plus big favourites like Roberta Flack’s ‘Compared To What’, Irene Kral singing ‘Wheelers and Dealers’, Van’s ‘Moondance’, Bill Evans’ ‘I Should Care’, Blossom Dearie’s ‘My Attorney Bernie’ (in 2010 Ahu put together a Blossom mix for One Handed Music’s ‘Dedication Series’ which also included a Adrian Sherwood mix by Optimo), and Marcos Valle’s ‘Os Grillos’, plus plenty of new Brazilian hip-hop and neo-soul sounds, which I think neatly sums up where Ahu’s coming from.

I sometimes feel with artists like Stacy and Ahu and words written in YHO that it is a surprise nobody actually wrote in and said: “Look, I love what you’re doing, but please don’t write and rave about me, because I really don’t want to be damned by your anti-Midas touch!” I would understand. And it is no wonder I have spent more time investigating the dusty corners of music. Actually, it seems Stacy did very well for herself, having been practicing for many years now as an attorney with her own law firm, one “founded on the philosophy of advocating for creatives by protecting the integrity of their art and supporting their business and financial success.”

Her rollcall of clients includes Talib Kweli and Madlib, both of whom rather sweetly appear among the credits on her new record FLOWHEART. Madlib and Stacy go way back, and for many people Stacy’s name will be most familiar from her appearance singing on ‘Eye’ from the Madvillainy LP. The great Talib Kweli puts in a guest appearance on the remix of ‘letthe…’ which is lovely. And that’s the thing really. This new record from Stacy and the one I missed from Ahu are lovely, and I offer no apologies for using the word. They will not change the world, but they do make it a better place, which is something. And it’s music I would love to hear while out and about, walking into the supermarket, passing through the local shopping mall, walking past a waiting car. Is that likely? Well, you never know. One day, maybe.

Anyway, the funny thing is, while checking out FLOWHEART on Stacy’s Bandcamp page I noticed there was also a mini-LP or EP called AURA dating back to 2013 which she recorded with Everett James, and which nobody bothered to tell me about. Harumph! It has the distinctive Stacy sound and uses what is very recognisably Stacy’s beautiful kaleidoscopic artwork. And I think, just about now, albeit rather late in the day, the track ‘God’s Daughter’ from this AURA set is pretty much my favourite thing, even if in my mind it does keep mutating into ‘Muzorewi’s Daughter’. Somehow, I like to imagine, Mark might approve of that.