Sublime

Paul Humphrey was a session drummer who worked with everyone from Jimmy Smith and Charles Mingus to Frank Zappa and Marvin Gaye. He was also the drummer for Lawrence Welk’s TV show in the late seventies, and his children would sometimes appear with him on the show. Sound familiar?

Quest Loves Records, Part I “When you live your life through records, the records are a record of your life.”™ 1971: Stevie Wonder, Music of My Mind

It’s been more than half a decade since Dilla passed, and I still don’t really know what to think about it. He had been there at the beginning of neo soul, though we didn’t call it that then, and his music will be around long after people don’t call it that anymore.

He conducts an ongoing interrogation about what it all means. What’s black culture? What’s hip-hop? What are the responsibilities of a society and the people in it? And his inquiry isn’t bloodlessly academic, either; there’s something very consequential about his approach.

The album opened up with a tribute to Dilla, “Dilltastic Vol Won(derful),” which sampled Slum Village.

Because of my touring with D’Angelo, the Roots hadn’t had a chance to truly cash in on the neo-soul movement. We were Moses and the movement was the Promised Land: We had led people to it, helped organize it, ushered people through the first awkward phases, made sure that there was an audience that understood and appreciated the music. And yet we d

Game Theory, the album that grew out of that directive, out of the rubble of Katrina and the confusion of the band’s middle age, was also a pained love letter to Philadelphia, which had become a virtual war zone, with twelve to fourteen murders per week. We were sick to see our home city this way, and hopeful that we could bring attention to the si

Thelonious Monk playing “Honeysuckle Rose”.