Stream: Peter Holsapple and Chris Stamey “Here And Now”

(from hERE aND nOW out now on Bar/None)

Chris Stamey and Peter Holsapple were (legendarily) the only people in North Carolina who bought Big Star albums the very first time around, and they’d team up most famously for the power-pop band the dB’s. (Stamey would also release Chris Bell’s ‘I Am The Cosmos’ 45 and Holsapple would go on to play with R.E.M. and Hootie and the Blowfish!) They are now teamed up and touring as a band with no official name. This interview by Dan Collins.

Peter, you joined a band when you were eight?
Peter Holsapple (guitar/vocals): What?
Admittedly, this is from Wikipedia. But it says you were born in ’56 and joined a band in 1964.
Peter: That is true. I played in combos. But they weren’t professional. The first professional band I played in was when I was 12—when I earned money. We lived in a city with a lot of very active places for young people to play. They were the assembly halls for churches. On the weekends they’d get a PA and bands would play. That was kind of fun.
Did you ever cut a single?
Peter: No. Chris and Mitch [Easter] and I had a band that had an album in 1973 called Rittenhouse Square. It was not very good! It was what you’d expect out of 14- or 15-year-olds. We certainly listened to a lot of Yes, a lot of the Move. Things were funny and grind-y, but in retrospect it’s pretty naïve stuff.
Sounds like you met each other early in life.
Peter: Chris and Mitch were ahead of me in school. I do remember him standing in the parking lot of the school with an instrument case waiting for his parents to pick him up. His dad was a pediatrician in town—a lot of people went to Dr. Stamey! I saw him as a sort of inroads in a lot of ways. When I met him, he wasn’t playing music at all. He was learning to record, which I thought was very cool.
Yeah! And Chris, you produced Peter’s band Little Diesel in ’74.
Chris Stamey (guitar/vocals): We made it in an afternoon in my bedroom at my parents’ house. I’d moved the bed a little bit, and I had little tweed Fender amps nailed up to the wall and we made it on a four-track tape recorder. At the time I think they made 10 copies. They recorded it on an eight-track recorder, and by that I mean a little recorder that made 8-track cartridges. There were only literally a few copies made.
Do you have an 8-track you can send to me in the mail?
Peter: No! But a vinyl edition did come out a few years ago. It came out on Telstar records.
Chris: I was talking to Mitch about how we should find that, and he was like, ‘Oh, I’ve got the master tape still!’ So we dug it out and I mixed it up a little better than I had back then, and it’s a really cool energetic record! Anybody who’s heard it loves it.
Peter: There were a breadth of covers that we were trying to tackle. We were doing Free and Spirit and Status Quo. We didn’t really ascribe to the Allman Brothers/Marshall Tucker stuff that was popular there at the time. We sort of rooted for the underdog. That’s probably why we were such huge Move fans. That’s probably why the first song off our new album is by a band called ‘Family,’ who we love very dearly. That’s a band that had really meant an awful lot to us.
Chris: The MC5 had just come to town and just really transformed the Winston rock scene.
Peter: I was in school in New Hampshire at prep school for a year, during which time I did get to play in bands with Bob Tench, who went on to be Tom Petty’s keyboard player. He was one of those guys who was very deeply into the MC5 and the Stooges. The first Mott the Hoople album came out, and we really absorbed that.
Did you see the revival tour the MC5 did a few years ago? Evan Dando and Mark Arm from Mudhoney were singing with them.
Chris: And Marshall Crenshaw playing with them too—I have to say, the night I saw them in Chapel Hill, it was not a huge success, but it was only one night on a tour. It was kind of dark, I guess you’d say—the energy. The singers were reading all the lyrics—it wasn’t totally all together.
Well, enough about the past—tell me about the sound on your new album.
Chris: Well, what’s refreshing about talking with you is that it does remind me of a sixties interview. It’s not the usual questions. But Peter and I think about this as a band that we have together that has its own identity, and we just don’t have a band name for it. We recorded Mavericks in 1992, and in some ways we see this as a continuation of that.
Why is that?
Chris: It makes a connection to I guess what used to be called ‘good guy’ radio, almost like sixties AM radio. My experience with Big Star, for example, was hearing them—they were a hit band in Winston/Salem, and they were on the radio with bands like the Grass Roots and the Seeds. It’s just that they weren’t anywhere else but my hometown. It just isn’t a Porsche—more of a Woody! A family station wagon.
If somebody was a dB’s fan who had never heard this album, what differences would they see between this album and your old stuff?
Peter: dB’s records and the duet records are such that they both have as their main contributors myself and Chris. But if they’re dB’s records, they’ve got Will on drums and Gene on bass and it’s a harder rocking and slightly more frenzied thing.
Chris: The way the dB’s bass player and drummer play together is kind of like you drop an electric blender in a bathtub, and yet it keeps running. It’s a very explosive combustible combination. And we use really good players and we have more drums on this record than we thought we would, but this is more about our guitars and our voices.
Peter: It is two different voices! Even though Chris and I are the main guys writing for both groups. You know, there’s only been one saxophone on a dB’s record—on a single maybe. And here we’ve got Branford Marsalis who played on a couple cuts on this album.
That’s a score!
Peter: Yeah, Bran is a great guy. For years I was the keyboard guy and utility guy for Hootie and the Blowfish, and Branford always came down for their charity golf tournament every year and played. A couple years ago I said, ‘Well, I’ve got these songs that would be really well served if you could find some time to come and play on it. It’s about New Orleans.’ He was like, ‘I’m busy, but let me know! We’ll make it happen.’ Both tracks were lifted incredibly by his presence.
Lou Reed, before he was in the Velvet Underground, cut a single with King Curtis as the session horn guy! But I think you just beat that. Do you want to gloat at Lou Reed for besting him?
Peter: Lou’s contribution is sacred! Even his bad records aren’t that bad. I have no opportunity to diss him, frankly.
A few years back you recorded an album called A Question of Temperature.
Chris: Peter and I just came up with that title, I recall. On a record with a lot of covers, to name it after a cover that we weren’t doing seemed, you know… it was originally called Vote, and it was done as an EP. We did too many things… it became the world’s longest EP! We put it out right before the election that John Kerry lost to try to encourage people to vote. It seems crazy in retrospect. It was then released as a regular record in January. It was never intended to be an album-album.
What songs did you cover?
Chris: We covered a song of mine called ‘Summer Sun.’ The Yardbirds, we did. We covered ‘Venus’ by Television.
Can I get a statement from you about the death of Sky Saxon?
Chris: He was a friend of Chilton’s. I never really met him. When I played with Alex, we used to do ‘I Can’t Seem to Make You Mine’ almost every night. Alex was a really big fan.
How did you meet Alex Chilton?
Chris: I was making a record with Terry Ork. He’d put out the first Television 45, and I’d just moved to New York. And he said that they were putting out a record by Alex Chilton, and he needed a band because he was going to come up for one day—to play Valentine’s Day in New York. And Alex called me up, and we talked, and he asked me what my sign was, and everything seemed to be okay. I was playing bass—I think Tina Weymouth almost got the call, but I ended up getting it. And Alex stayed for over a year, and we kept playing. He’d stay on my couch a lot, and we went up and recorded a lot, most of which never came out.
There was another celebrity death this month as well. You guys once had a song called ‘Neverland.’ Do you think Michael Jackson named his ranch after you?
Chris: I think that would be a stretch.
The dance music movement that came along in the mid-early eighties, with Michael and Prince and Sheila E.—did that eclipse the fame that bands like the dB’s might have earned?
Peter: It certainly didn’t help it get on the radio! But… the music was great. All the music was great. We felt that we weren’t particularly in competition with that.
Chris: I think that for most bands, the whole idea of making it big wasn’t around. Once MTV came along, and it went out into the world, people got the idea, ‘Yeah, let’s make it big!’ But that wasn’t why we were making music. We weren’t trying to win the lottery.
Peter: Even as well known as we are for our contributions to sort of ‘new wave’ with the dB’s, we had already been writing and recording well before that. We just happened to come along at the time. The dB’s didn’t even have an American label for many years.
Of the people who were your contemporaries, who would you say sounded like you?
Chris: I think the Soft Boys! I clearly thought Television had the right idea, but I think the Soft Boys would be the closest.
Peter: Without meaning to be left of center, it appears that we were left of center. My dear friend Mark Brian from Hootie & the Blowfish says things to me like, ‘You’re my favorite eccentric weird songwriter.’ And I listen to my songs, and I don’t think they’re all that eccentric and weird. They’re simple, they’re rock ‘n’ roll, they have verses, they have choruses and bridges. What’s so different? Same thing with a Michael Jackson record. They’re still set up approximately the same way. Yet there’s a world of difference between them. The thing that we’ve all had to learn over the years is that this is not about huge success. That would be wonderful! I’d love it if a song got used in a commercial that would take the load off of being an unemployed musician. If I could ever get my publishing straightened out, maybe I could do something! The great thing is that I’ve got a job that I love. I love to be a musician. I love the reaction of people when they like my songs. Maybe I’m just a ham, but I really do dig it a lot. It feels really good. I’m not really comfortable in the rest of the world. I am on stage, though. Music was just about the most important thing to me until my kids came along.
Can you get your kids involved in music?
Peter: I play at my son’s school. I was the kids’ entertainer at Borders in New Orleans for about five years. I started working on a kids record, but then I realized that practically every old semi-failed new waver had done a kids record! I don’t want to be in that number until I can do something really good. Dan Zanes does a great job! Robert Warren is great! Disney’s got the Imagination Movers—that’s just the shit! I love it! The kids love it! You want to make kids music so that parents don’t jump out the window.
Chris, you haven’t released any kids albums to my knowledge—but you released Chris Bell’s first single on your label, right?
Chris: Right! Again, that was through Alex. Alex told me about it. I was very proud to have done that, but it wasn’t anything very creative except to the extent that A&R is creative. He’d made it a while back. He’d done in a guy’s garage, in a shoe box in Memphis, and then moved to London and mixed it with Geoff Emerick at George Martin’s Air studios.
In the last couple decades, we haven’t heard a whole lot from you! Have you been recording and producing bands or selling crystal meth, or what?
Chris: I do an album or two a month—some mixing, some producing. I probably work on about fifteen records a year. I just did a band called Megafaun. I did Rosebuds, on Merge. The Old Ceremony. Luego, which hasn’t come out yet…
How about some L.A. bands?
Chris: I did a whole bunch of recordings with Patrick Park! I don’t think he qualifies as a ‘band,’ but if anybody qualifies as a one-man band, he can really do it. That would be the most recent thing. I lived there, working there with Scott Litt on a Flat Duo Jets record for a while at Ocean Way, which became Cello. I definitely put in time in California. In a lot of ways, I consider the span I spent with Peter Holsapple to be a California band. We really started in L.A. We live in North Carolina, but the spirit of our birth was really in the Santa Monica kind of thing.
I have the Sharp Cuts compilation you came out on in 1980 on Planet Records with ‘Soul Kiss.’ You’re on there with a lot of other L.A. bands. Did that record come about because of your association with people out here?
Chris: No, I think that would be prior to it. I think we just got a call about it. I do remember they accidentally put the wrong tape on there, which always bugged me. That was a joke mix! It never was supposed to be out like that.
If it makes you feel better, on the album sticker, they list Suburban Lawns twice and forgot to list the Alleycats.
Chris: It figures.
Besides just songs, did people constantly misspell the ‘dB’s’ name on albums and flyers and such?
Chris: I think we knew we were in for trouble. It was interesting to see how things change in translation. I kind of liked that it did change all the time, but I guess it was an uphill struggle.
Did people ever spell it ‘D-e-e-B-e-e-s’ like the Bee Gees?
Chris: I think we’ve had every kind of possible ramification. The embarrassing thing is that we never should have put the apostrophe in there to begin with. It was archaic even then. It’s pretty incorrect.
I was listening to your early discography, Chris, and I feel like you were playing a brand of power-pop that even now sounds a bit more youthful. I feel like other power-pop sounded a bit mannish, and yours sounds more teenaged—even maybe had a bit of a bubblegum feel.
Peter:We listened to everything—depending on what you feel is bubblegum. I was married to Susan Cowsill of the Cowsills, so I love the Partridge Family. I love the stuff that was on Buddah, the Kasenetz-Katz Orchestra and things like that. But I don’t love it anymore than I love Otis Redding or the Dave Clark Five or Big Star. I will admit to having listened to more than the lion’s share of AM radio. Anything that goes from about 1964-1974.
Did you have a hard time convincing your peers to appreciate something more gentle and delicate?
Chris: I always played with good musicians, and we just talk about how to play music. You know on iTunes, they have a little pull-down things for genre when you want to make an MP3? I actually think I do more ‘folk rock’ over ‘power pop.’
What folk rock bands inspired you?
Chris: I would say the Byrds would be the biggest.
Speaking of 8-tracks, you guys did a lot of cassette releases as the dB’s. You did one that came in an actual can! Wasn’t that expensive?
Chris: We didn’t get the bill, but I don’t think it was that expensive. Probably a big waste of chow mein noodles or something! Cans can’t really cost that much—otherwise, they wouldn’t put cheap food in them.
Did the people who bought them actually have to use a can opener to get the tape out?
Chris: Oh yeah!
Why did things end? Why did you shelve the dB’s?
Chris: I think it’s more of a mystery why things continue. I look at bands I like like Blind Faith where they last for five months and a few gigs. It seemed like it went on a long time.
And you guys are still working together as a duo, so it’s like this working relationship that was in the dB’s is still going.
Chris: It had started 11 years before that, really. It’s just that the dB’s got more press because there were press agents involved.
Peter, you had a huge bunch of press when you played with R.E.M.
Peter: I did play with R.E.M. We did a tour for Green, the first album they did on Warner Brothers, and we recorded Out of Time—I played the acoustic guitar on ‘Losing My Religion.’ And then we went to England, and we reached a point where it was ‘untenable’ to work together. Much as I love those guys and respect what they’ve done, it was time for me to move on. I joined the Continental Drifters for ten years, and was serving in the same capacity I had with R.E.M. in Hootie & the Blowfish, which was a great gig I had for thirteen years.
You were saying that the dude from the Blowfish thinks you write weird songs. For our readership the weirdest thing you’ve EVER done is play in Hootie & the Blowfish!
Peter: The guys in the band are remarkable people. They truly are! They worked very, very hard for their success. They did some things that were probably ill-advised—they rushed out a second record out because they were afraid their fans were sick of the first record! They were thinking of their fans, which I thought was really cool.
Yeah, but… Hootie and the Blowfish! Chris, were ever moments where you were like, ‘Peter is killing the brand?’
Chris: I can’t even think in that way! He had been doing flower deliveries in New Orleans before that happened. I can’t think of how many times he went to Vietnam with them. I think it was kind of fun!
Peter: I would certainly rather do this than not work! That’s probably the best job I ever had. I enjoyed playing the music—it was really comfortable music, and really comforting music. It was not like playing with Yes. But to get to back up a world-class singer like Darius Rucker for 13 years was a serious honor. I was able to rope him into a tribute to Sandy Denny—I was the music director for a show that was celebrating the work of Sandy Denny, in Brooklyn, and I asked him to sing ‘Black Waterside,’ and he just tore it up! We got him on the R.E.M. tribute show at Carnegie Hall, and he did ‘I Believe’ with Calexico. People are more inclined to hate Hootie & the Blowfish because they think they’ve heard Hootie & the Blowfish. But Hootie did five really good studio records. Every one of those records had songs that could have been hits on them. The shape of radio changed, and the band stuck with their style. It was tough to go from being nobody, to being a huge hit, to being a punch line. People just think it’s ‘Hold My Hand’ and Darius in a cowboy hat hawking Burger King.
What’s the weirdest place you’ve ever played?
Chris: They all seem so normal! With the Golden Palominos, we played the Montrose Jazz Festival. We were playing after the Herbie Hancock Quartet, with Ron Carter, Herbie Hancock. I think we played after Miles Davis, too.
Have you had any crazy stories recently where you two put out an album or did a show, and some rabid fans did something… rabid?
Chris: I usually hide after shows! You seem to be looking for fun, tabloid stuff, and you’re probably looking in the wrong direction. We come from a very Southern, polite tradition.
I was actually at the 99 Cent Store on York in Highland Park, and ran across the Chris Stamey and Friends’ Christmas album— for a buck! It wasn’t bad! Can you tell me how that came about?
Peter: I did ‘O Holy Night’ on the very first version of the Christmas album years ago. I love that stuff! I grew up in the Episcopal Church, singing in the choir. I love the popular stuff! The Beach Boys’ Christmas record, the Ventures Christmas record, the Phil Spector Christmas Gift for You, the Beatles 45. Love ‘em, love ‘em, love ‘em! And the best part of Christmas albums is that they sell every year.
Chris: Gene Holder, who plays bass in the dB’s, always wanted to make a Christmas record, always thought that would be a fun thing to do. We were so impressed that even after I was no longer playing with the band, I wrote a song called ‘Christmas Time’ kinda with him in mind and got the other guys who had been in the dB’s to record it with me. And we put together other tracks based around that one song.
Who sings ‘Silver Bells?’ That was my favorite tune off the album.
That was Kirsten Lambert. She’s a friend of ours who lives here. That may be her only recorded effort, as far as I know.
That’s a tragedy! Tell her! If she ever goes on tour, I’ll give her an interview.
Chris: Okay—haha!

PETER HOLSAPPLE AND CHRIS STAMEY ON FRI., JULY 17, AT McCABE’S GUITAR SHOP, 3101 PICO BLVD., SANTA MONICA. 8 PM / $20 / ALL AGES. MCCABES.COM PETER HOLSAPPLE AND CHRIS STAMEY’S hEAR aND nOW IS OUT NOW ON BAR/NONE. VISIT PETER HOLSAPPLE AND CHRIS STAMEY AT HOLSAPPLESTAMEY.COM OR MYSPACE.COM/HEREANDNOWPETERANDCHRIS.

(from Suite For Ma Dukes on Mochilla)

Suite For Ma Dukes is an original orchestral work inspired by the music of J Dilla, written by Miguel Atwood-Ferguson with conceptual contributions and guidance by Carlos Niño. It will be performed in full for the first time with a 40-piece orchestra as part of ArtDontSleep/Mochilla/VTech’s Timeless series on Sunday, Feb. 22, and the Suite for Ma Dukes EP will be released on the same day. This interview by Chris Ziegler.

Do the orchestral players you work with know who Dilla is?
Miguel Atwood-Ferguson: In my experience, I’ve met three people out of maybe three hundred that actually know Dilla’s music. Probably more have heard it without knowing it’s Dilla. But my main point is saying that Dilla is transcending hip-hop music. The people I hired for February 22 I have a long history with. I sent them emails with links to Dilla. The main point is Dilla conjures up a lot of Debussy and Ravel—two famous impressionist composers. I had a great conversation with Karriem Riggins about this concert—did he have any general suggestions? And he said something really profound to me. Not verbatim, but—‘Just make sure not to feel you have to recreate what Dilla did. Dilla was all about the feeling.’ Besides the impressionism—the really colorful creative thing he had through his music, even the rough-edged beats he did—there is this feeling through most of his music. And to me it’s love. He talks about women in a kind of misogynistic way I don’t admire—there’s that lower side of love, but the other thing I feel is more transcending and it’s what people connect to. It’s very universal. It feels good but it’s more than something just meant to feel good.
What’s it like writing music to Dilla this way? A conversation? A continuation?
Carlos Niño: I’m not writing, so I can’t answer from writing anything. But in spirit, I’d say the philosophy is best described by Miguel when he said he felt like we were continuing a conversation. Rather than covering the ground Dilla already covered, we’re sort of recognizing his spirit and trying to progress further. We’re gonna take all of this wonderful inspiration and energy he put out there and continue talking to him and all the people in the music community and the whole world that are listening that might have the ability to hear this—to really feel this!
M: In a jazz context, a lot of people admire someone like Charlie Parker or John Coltrane. When Charlie Parker was creating the music later called be-bop, he was just being really honest. In his enthusiasm of life, he was creating that music. That’s what we try and do—not recreate, but celebrate. It’s definitely something that happened in the past. But we’re in the moment now—looking toward the future. We have our own thing to say. We’re not trying to hide behind Dilla. We’re actually infusing this with courage and spiritual qualities that are not necessarily easy. But it’s a joy. And people respond to joy. And love. That’s what we’re doing.
What does an orchestral arrangement draw out of Dilla’s music?
M: Life is infinite—infinite spheres within each other—and an orchestra can get into all these spheres. All these pockets of different dynamic and color and texture. And some of the productions Dilla did really invoke a lot of infinite feelings. They’re not just one-dimensional. There’s a lot there. Something subtle can really intimate something else. With an orchestra, we can really get into different worlds within worlds. You think of all the people in the world—it’s so rich and so diverse, and nature is so diverse. That’s what we’re trying to do. I wanna just imitate nature—in infinite wonder—but celebrate it.
How is this different than writing with someone who is right there with you?
M: It’s funny—I work on my Mac and I have all these screensavers. I don’t know how many pictures of Dilla—it changes every fifteen seconds, and I’ll be in some deep moment doing an arrangement, and then his picture comes up! I don’t think there’s such a thing as a coincidence. To me the timing is so profound. It’s like he’s talking to me! No joke whatsoever! And almost every picture he’s smiling and saying something reassuring—it’s amazing.
Carlos, you met Dilla—how does that affect where you feel the music should go?
C: We weren’t close at all. I met him maybe ten times, maybe talked on the phone. In general, I was a big big fan. I wouldn’t say we were close friends or that we hung out a lot. But it was brief and really nice to feel that someone you admired so much musically was a good person. I always got a good vibe from him. Not always in lyrics—that side I don’t always connect with. But a lot of people got into him probably because they related to the content, and then the music. I feel he was very musical as a vocalist and rapper. But for me—I’m a serious instrumentals collector from day one. My radio show is notorious for playing unreleased and hard-to-find instrumental hip-hop alongside music from all over the world.
M: I have a question for you, Carlos—when you spoke to Dilla, was there something unique you noticed in him that touched you?
C: Just a real willingness—he was—in a way—like Madlib is, where he’s a man of few words but very enthusiastic. And his enthusiasm comes out in his gestures and his smile. I definitely appreciate that. Every time we hung out, it was a good vibe. The first time I got him to be at a Build An Ark concert, after I got off the stage, Dilla was like, ‘Yo, man—yo, that was incredible! Anything you need, let’s do something!’ For me, that sort of willingness and openness—some people, no matter how talented, can be caught in their attitude, or their ideas about things makes it hard for them to open up. I felt he was very sweet.
What’s going to be on the eventual Suite for Ma Dukes album?
M: Stevie Wonder and Prince are going to play all the instruments.
C: I’ll remind you that’s where we get in trouble in interviews! Our well-intentioned sense of humor. That’s off the record, or to be mentioned as a very humorous projection! But that is his lineage to me—Stevie Wonder and maybe Herbie Hancock, but Stevie Wonder to me is the quintessential artist in this realm. He did it all—played all the instruments, did the sampling and looping—he was in front and in back of everything. He’s really the guy! The only other person besides I’d say most directly influenced all that was Herbie Hancock. Dude put it down in the ‘60s and ‘70s and ‘80s and continues—his influence is massive in hip-hop, but especially to people like Dilla. So we’re trying to reach out to a lot of wonderful musicians to be part of it. I’d love at least a song or two to be performed by a full orchestra in a live setting—in a real orchestral recording studio, where we do it like a film score. Our vision is vast!
M: One thing that’s important to this is diversity. The music Dilla put into motion is really connected to something profound. We want to celebrate that in as many ways as possible. On the EP—which we’re really happy about!—that’s its own thing. All kind of the same realm. On the full-length, we’re gonna get a lot more diverse. Maybe tracks with some percussionists, maybe some Balkan music to try and re-interpret things—maybe a vocal choir!
How did you decide what songs to start with?
M: Carlos is the one who hipped me to Dilla in the first place. He gave me Dilla mixes and I started massing this library, and I started to understand his language and his vernacular. I don’t know how many hundreds of hours I spent composing! Probably thousands now. Orchestrating this stuff—it’s beautiful but painful also. It’s immense! So it’s me picking tracks I want to spend that much time with. Another influence—on tracks where he takes a sample, I use a lot of those original tracks. On the 22nd, I’m orchestrating some of those original tracks. There’s a Herbie Hancock song—‘Come Running To Me’—that Dilla sampled, and I’m orchestrating Herbie’s version. To give the concert more diversity.
C: I related it the other day to a master chess player who gets to play another master for a year versus a master chess player in the park on a time clock. He’s given a challenge to pull something off on the level he wants in the amount of time it has to be done in! It’s pretty exciting for me to see Miguel wholeheartedly dive into it. It’s a wonderful opportunity but there’s quite a lot of danger there. That’s what I relate to expressing it as a river of creativity—as an ocean! Not only literally about the work or the work he samples—but maybe if we did get Herbie Hancock, we might record something completely brand-new in the spirit of the project that pays tribute to Dilla! In a way, this whole thing can be alive. So often covers are stagnant—why would someone want to redo something that was already done perfect? But it’s because they love it! The reason people cover things is they feel really drawn to it. In the purest sense, we cover songs because they’re great songs. With Dilla, every artist I’ve heard that tried to do what he did did not do it—even the people closest to him. He had his own thing, but he encouraged people to tap into their own thing. That’s really what’s happening here—Miguel is tapping into his own thing! I help with the conceptual and actual facets of it, and the writing is really coming from Miguel’s life.
M: That’s what Karriem said when he said don’t feel like you have to recreate. Like Charlie Parker—people identify with the magic of celebrating that moment, and looking to the future with optimism and courage. It’s not like, ‘Ok, let’s play those exact notes.’ Then you can be sure the magic won’t be there. On the album and the EP and at the concert are full sections where it’s just my original music. I’m consciously trying to create new music to continue what he did and also magnify a certain vibe or sentence Dilla might have said. Carlos talked about Herbie Hancock as an example of maybe coming in the studio to make something new. I want entire pieces to be original compositions dedicated to Dilla! To the whole community we have—to the future also.
What does it say about Dilla’s work that you’ve made this new project?
C: In a word—how soulful he was. When Miguel says he transcended hip-hop—I don’t consider him a hip-hop producer as much as a soul musician. He was doing what I feel like the Motown cats before him did. People like Quincy Jones. Not in a literal sense soulful—not that he sounded like Motown. But it was just—really soulful!
M: When I think of soul musicians, I think Dilla falls in the that category. But when I think of other soul musicians whose work I’d like to interpret—it’s not as cosmic as Dilla’s. To another degree, that’s what answers your question. It’s not just humanity. Yes, he has this soul—it’s really really heartfelt. But it’s something kind of cosmic. When something is so pure and undeniable that it just transcends time—that’s what I think Dilla was doing. Dilla is a new definition to soul music.

ARTDONTSLEEP, MOCHILLA AND VTECH PRESENT CARLOS NIÑO AND MIGUEL ATWOOD-FERGUSON’S SUITE FOR MA DUKES WITH 40-PIECE ORCHESTRA PLUS DJ HOUSESHOES AND GUESTS ON SUN., FEB. 22, AT THE LUCKMAN FINE ARTS COMPLEX AT CAL STATE LOS ANGELES, 5151 STATE UNIVERSITY DR., LOS ANGELES. 7 PM / $22.50 / ALL AGES. FURTHER INFORMATION AND COMPLETE SCHEDULE AT VTECHPHONES.COM/TIMELESS. THE SUITE FOR MA DUKES EP RELEASES SUN., FEB. 22, ON MOCHILLA. MOCHILLA.COM.

Were there wireless keytar solos, bass slaps, auto-wah drenched guitar scrapes and electronic sounds that harkened back to Burgertime-era arcade games? Yes, and it was worth every minute of it. A week ago I read about a special live performance for, get this: Nissan Live Sets on Yahoo! Music which was to be filmed at Fox Studios in Century City—three massive corporations banding together for an evening of creative expression. You know, business as usual. On this mundane Thursday night the gangrenous heart of Los Angeles gave up its dead and something beautiful bloomed in the afterbirth: the humble genius of Herbie Hancock and the radiance of Joni Mitchell.
The band warmed up on “Chameleon” and, when its third coda came around, were knee-deep in fusion. They played with great skill and personality, but without greater purpose. After a trio of Headhunters-era tunes, unannounced guest Joni Mitchell stood center stage and presided as de facto band leader. After a stirring ovation, she performed the signature Blue-era tune “River” with new wrinkles and vocal phrasings. Shaky and unshakable, Ms. Mitchell reveled in the ability of her all-star band, which included bassist Marcus Miller and Zappa alum Vinnie Colaiuta on drums.
Mr. Hancock’s hole-punched piano scores eliminated common chords and inserted new notes throughout. After three songs with Ms. Mitchell, he settled into a solo piano meditation on his classic “Maiden Voyage.” Soon turntablist C-Minus was invited on stage to replicate Grandmixer DXT’s famous cuts as the band tore into and out of their unlikely encore, “Rockit.” Only then, with subtlety and muscular riffing equally balanced, the scales tipped toward unrestrained jubilation.

— Chris Schlarb