For a good 15 years, that’s how long she has been in the music business, Georgia Anne Muldrow has represented a few favorite theses, sentences that her parents may have already adopted during the optimistic mood of the late sixties, and those since the advent of esotericists like rapper Kendrick Lamar or the funk-jazz priest Kamasi Washington into the orbits of pop are booming again. First, we need to learn to love ourselves first. Second, political change can only be achieved through personal honesty. And thirdly: Art is a means to enable people to develop their potential.
Yes, of course, what could Trump’s America, what could the whole world use better than a little introspection? Except that the young black woman from Los Angeles is far from wanting to proselytize anyone. Self-awareness, okay. Muldrow, however, is primarily concerned with a musical promise. About what happens in the more emotional right hemisphere when flow and consciousness meet.
Obviously Georgia Anne Muldrow feels attached to the original, limitless spirit of hip-hop. But: Can you find better, more interesting beats by working on yourself beyond mental balance? Muldrow’s new instrumental album “Vweto II” (Mello Music Group) gives the answer. Vweto means gravity, in Ki-Congo. And sounds like a single euphoric, avant-garde to African-weird high-five to the universe!
The hip-hop producer, who likes to pose in a tie-dye shirt and afro look, doesn’t even have to rap or sing to create the short circuit between the pelvic floor and the brain. She works with synthesizers and samples, disharmonies and minimal shifts. Keeps slipping himself into the groove. And knows exactly how to chase Alice Coltrane’s free jazz and George Clinton’s funk through the future filter, which, while dancing, explores the limits of music laws: “It’s better to make terrible music than mediocre.”
She chases Alice Coltrane’s free jazz and George Clinton’s funk through the future filter
Regarding “Vweto II”, however, you can lean back. There is no nervous beat rubble, as recently produced by her colleague and soul mate, the hip-hop tinkerer Flying Lotus on “Flamagra”. Muldrow loves the relaxed G-Funk too much, the open jeeps and late-night sessions with headphones and a joint.
In other words: She lets herself be pushed by fat bass lines, looking for trance-like loops like on “Almost Trendy”. A dry boom-bap, lashed by spherical dub effects, opens a good hour-long odyssey with heavenly carillon and sloping bass-piano riffs. You can also hear the abstract electro boogie of “Bronx Skates”. Or “Mary Lou’s Motherboard,” which sounds like Muldrow shot a bunch of old Casio computer games into Sun Ra’s orbits. And then between all the eerie gurgling synthesizers and science fiction burps there is the saving physicality, the funk. Or “fOnk”, as Muldrow calls her dream wanderings between Africa, America and the vastness of space.
The accompanying album cover could also decorate a cosmic jazz opus from the 1970s: A figure with a flower head holds Africa in his arms, the sun, moon and planets provide the backdrop for a couple of drummers and dancers, while a serious black woman’s face in the Distant looks.
“I would like to thank the silence, the womb of all vibrations”
“I would like to thank the silence, the womb of all vibrations”; where others pay tribute to God, their mother and their pals, Georgia Anne Muldrow bows to the “wind for its kindness, the blues and the sweet smell of rain”. Yes, it is like that. An advocate of female principles, a passionate mother and together with her constant partner, the rapper Dudley Perkins alias Declaime, a couple in private.
Their family history already proves that spiritual warfare and musical avant-garde draw from the same spirit. Her father, the jazz guitarist Ronald Muldrow, who died in 2007, played with Eddie Harris, among others, her mother Rickie Byars Beckwith accompanied Pharoah Sanders as a singer and leads the choir of the Agape Spiritual Center in Los Angeles, in which God is no longer with prayer, meditation and vision training , Allah or Jachveh but an all-transcendent “Spirit” is worshiped. Georgia Anne Muldrow collected the remaining ingredients of her philosophy while studying at The New School of Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York. With her fellow students – including such influential figures as rhythm’n’blues singer Bilal and fusion jazz musician Robert Glasper – she spent all night discussing “about black emancipation movements”. And what jazz could contribute to it.
In 2006 she released her debut: “Olesi – Fragments of an Earth”. A sonically sprawling mix of seventies funk, jazz and hip-hop beats, in which Muldrow sang, accompanied himself and thought up the beats – and which hit the hip-hop landscape like a meteorite made of completely different rock. “Olesi”, like the good dozen of his successors, demanded a lot from the listener. Muldrow likes to ignore traditional song structures. She tinkers together up to 30 song parts and sound fragments. And with their criticism of “Mc Donald’s freedom in America” and the belief in redemption through inner wealth, even for the standards of conscious hip-hop, it sidelined. For now.
A defiant refrain from “Master Teacher” stuck: “I stay woke!”
Because she will soon be in demand as a “Musicians’ Musician”, as a musician who is especially adored by other musicians. A duet written and co-produced by Muldrow with Erykah Badu on her album “New Amerykah Part One (4th World War)” started in 2008. A defiant refrain from “Master Teacher” stuck in America’s collective memory: “I stay woke!”
At that time, explains Muldrow, it was intended as a self-admonition: Don’t let yourself be lulled! Stay alert! A decade later, the term “stay woke” is an integral part of the vocabulary of African American colloquial language, used by rappers, jazz esotericists and environmentalists such as the Black Lives Matter activists. “Woke” can mean anything from socially critical to generally progressive.
Muldrow’s music, however, remains something for the initiated. And that even after her last, almost straightforward R’n’B album “Overload” from 2018, her guest appearance on “Runnin ‘”, one of the highlights of the celebrated Blood-Orange-Albums “Negro Swan”, and musical fuel that she regularly supplies jazz and hip-hop colleagues from Dwight Trible to Madlib to Mos Def (“Georgia Ann Muldrow can you feel it’s like religion”).
So a slogan as the biggest mainstream success of a hip-hop producer to date? Georgia Anne Muldrow can live with it quite well. “We black people,” she said in an interview with pop magazine The Fader, “take the energy, the inspiration of the unknown as thread and operate us as sewing needles. Then we release our work into the world – and everyone can interpret it.”
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