Potent and assured enough for political protests and
filled with enough bright energy to soundtrack double-dutch
competitions, the music of Georgia Anne Muldrow erases the boundaries
between progressive soul, organic hip-hop, and avant-garde jazz. Part of
a richly musical bloodline, Muldrow made her recorded debut in 2004 and
became the first woman signed to the revered Stones Throw label,
releasing her expansive first album, Olesi: Fragments of an Earth,
two years later. By then, she was an integral player in Los Angeles'
thriving underground scene of beatmakers, instrumentalists, singers,
rappers, songwriters, and label operators. She has filled all of those
roles with varied solo albums such as Umsindo (2009), Seeds (2012), and the Grammy-nominated Overload
(2018), as well as the Vweto series (2011 to 2021). A keen
collaborator, Muldrow has recorded a large volume of output with husband
Dudley Perkins, including releases on their independent outlet SomeOthaShip, and has been featured on recordings by the likes of Sa-Ra, Erykah Badu, and Robert Glasper.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, California, Georgia
Anne Muldrow grew up immersed in music, most prominently avant-garde
jazz. Her mother, vocalist and spiritual teacher Rickie Byars-Beckwith, has performed with musicians such as Pharoah Sanders and Roland Hanna, and co-founded the long-running Sound of Agape. Father Ronald Muldrow was a guitarist and composer who worked closely with Eddie Harris
and released a handful of his own albums, including two for the Enja
label. After high school, Georgia studied music at The New School in New
York, where she crossed paths with the likes of Robert Glasper and Bilal,
though she returned to the West Coast after the September 11, 2001
attacks during which she was riding the N.Y.C. subway beneath the World
Trade Center.
Muldrow was barely out of her teens when she became
an integral player in L.A.'s thriving underground scene of beatmakers,
instrumentalists, singers, rappers, songwriters, and label operators.
Within a few years, she was filling each one of those roles. Muldrow
made herself known in 2004, the year she self-produced and self-released
her debut, the Worthnothings EP, and co-wrote and fronted Platinum Pied Pipers' "Your Day Is Done." Her first of many productions for other artists came through Dwight Trible & the Life Force Trio's "Rise," a 2005 track she also wrote. Soon thereafter, she became the first woman signed to Peanut Butter Wolf's Stones Throw label. In April 2006, the label reissued Worthnothings and featured Muldrow on Expressions (2012 A.U.) by Dudley Perkins, with whom their new signee formed a lasting artistic and personal bond. This was also the same month Muldrow appeared on Sa-Ra's version of Radiohead's "In Limbo." Four months later, Muldrow made her proper Stones Throw debut with her first full-length, Olesi: Fragments of an Earth,
an off-center fusion of hip-hop, soul, funk, and jazz with very few of
its 21 tracks traditionally structured. Another recording featuring
Muldrow and Perkins that year was an EP by Eric Lau.
Due to a prolific rate of output and a multitude of
outlets, tracking Muldrow's moves since then has not been easy. In 2007,
Muldrow was behind Pattie Blingh & the Akebulan 5's Sagala (Ramp Recordings), which featured Perkins and another close associate, Eagle Nebula. Billed as Dudley & Georgia, she and Perkins split duties for the mixtape Beautiful Mindz (Eclectic Breaks), and as G&D released The Message Uni Versa (Look Records). Featured appearances across 2007 and 2008 were made on her mother's Supreme Inspiration and Erykah Badu's landmark New Amerykah, Pt. 1: 4th World War. The latter contained "Master Teacher," co-written and co-produced by Muldrow and Sa-Ra's Shafiq Husayn
with both also featured as vocalists. The song helped popularize the
African-American Vernacular English phrase "Stay woke." Muldrow and Perkins closed out the decade by producing and releasing Eagle Nebula's Cosmic Headphones
and establishing another independent label, SomeOthaShip, introduced
with the Connect Game compilation EP with help from Mello Music Group
and a contribution by Flying Lotus. Muldrow handled the entirety of the production on three of SomeOthaShip's first albums, all released in 2009: the compilation Ms. One (a showcase for the likes of Perkins, Eagle Nebula, Jimetta Rose, Stacy Epps, and Black Milk), second proper solo album Umsindo, and Perkins' Holy Smokes. Featuring a solo version of "Roses," heard first on Mos Def's The Ecstatic, Umsindo
presented an indivisible mix of progressive soul, experimental jazz,
and organic hip-hop. At the tail end of the year, Animated Cartunes
assembled some previously unreleased Muldrow material for Early.
Muldrow started 2010 with an album for Ubiquity, Kings Ballad, a relatively direct set with the title track a tribute to Michael Jackson. Within weeks, an album-length version of the SomeOthaShip compilation was out on Mello Music Group. A few months later, Muldrow debuted her electronic avant-jazz alias Jyoti -- a name given to her by family friend Alice Coltrane -- with Ocotea, via SomeOthaShip. In 2011, she released the instrumental set Vweto on Mello and the Bilal-enhanced Owed to Mama Rickie on Animated Cartunes, and with Perkins worked on Suzi Analogue's "The Program." The tables turned briefly with Muldrow's 2012 album Seeds, its high-viscosity beats provided exclusively by former Stones Throw labelmate Madlib. Muldrow also connected in 2012 with the Lootpack's DJ Romes for a self-titled old-school/electro hybrid session as the Blackhouse, and remixed Robert Glasper's "The Consequences of Jealousy" for the Black Radio Recovered EP. A second Jyoti album, Denderah, and another Muldrow/Perkins collaboration, Lighthouse, arrived in 2013. After the SomeOthaShip beat tape Oligarchy Sucks and a Tall Black Guy/Black Opera summit in 2014, Muldrow returned to Mello Music Group with the 2015 LP A Thoughtiverse Unmarred, classified by the artist as her first rap LP, produced by Chris Keys.
Between full-length solo projects, Muldrow appeared on recordings by the likes Glasper, Nosizwe, Blood Orange, and Dabrye, and continued to co-pilot SomeOthaShip all the while. Overload, recorded for Flying Lotus'
Brainfeeder label, landed in 2018 with a varied and generous set of
R&B songs promoting gratitude, divine love, and self-defense. The
next year, Muldrow issued Vweto II (another instrumentals set for Mello Music Group), teamed with Perkins for Black Love & War (the third G&D LP), and earned a Grammy nomination for Overload, which was up for Best Urban Contemporary Album. Muldrow remained prolific in 2020 and 2021. Third Jyoti LP Mama, You Can Bet! was trailed by the predominantly instrumental Vweto III,
issued through her Epistrophik Peach label and Foreseen Entertainment.
Among the many artists who benefited from Muldrow's featured appearances
during the late 2010s and early 2020s were Adrian Younge, Joe Armon-Jones, and Sons of the James.
Georgia Anne Muldrow (born 1983)[3] is an American musician from Los Angeles, California.[4] In 2008, she co-founded the SomeOthaShip Connect record label with fellow artist and former husband Dudley Perkins.[5]
Georgia Anne Muldrow grew up in a musical environment of her session musician parents, the jazz guitarist Ronald Muldrow and a singer, now Rickie Byars-Beckwith.[6][7][8]
In 2006, Muldrow released the debut EP, Worthnothings, on Stones Throw Records.[9] Her first album, Olesi: Fragments of an Earth, was released on the label in that year.[10][11]
In 2012, she released Seeds, an album entirely produced by Madlib, on SomeOthaShip Connect.[12]
Georgia Anne Muldrow not
only creates jazz music - she’s lived it since birth. Her father,
Ronald Muldrow, played alongside Eddie Harris while her mother, Rickie
Byars, performed as lead singer of Roland Hanna’s New York Jazz Quartet
and Pharoah Sanders Ensemble. Following in her parents’ footsteps, she
has collaborated with famed musicians including Robert Glasper, Adrian
Younge, Ambrose Akinmursire, Justin Brown's Nyeusi, and Keyon Harrold.
Jyoti is a name bestowed upon her by the late great Alice Coltrane. The
newest Jyoti music arrives after many monumental years for Muldrow. Her
most recent solo album Overload - released on Flying Lotus’ label
Brainfeeder - earned her a 2020 Grammy nomination and landed on year-end
lists for Pitchfork, Bandcamp, and The A.V. Club. 2019 saw Georgia
perform at numerous Jazz Festivals around the globe: Nublu Jazz Festival
(Brazil), Portland Jazz Festival (Portland, US), Bric Festival
(Brooklyn, US), Blue Note Tokyo (Japan), New York Winter Jazz Festival
and the DC Jazz Festival to name a few.
Georgia Anne Muldrow demonstrates some of the techniques she has for mixing beats with Geri Allen's composition "The Gathering." Muldrow was a Berklee Jazz and Gender Justice visiting artist in Fall 2019.
Bobby Carter -- Georgia Anne Muldrow is all about showing and spreading
love. That fact became clear as we discussed the set list for her Tiny
Desk performance. She and the band were floating the possibility of
swapping the duet with her partner in music and life, Dudley Perkins
with another song. But she decided it was more important to showcase
their shared love on the song "Flowers," originally from Perkins' 2003
album A Lil' Light.
The first song I ever heard from Georgia Anne Muldrow, back in the early
2000s, was called "Break You Down." The opening line spoke directly to
my experience as a twentysomething coming into my own:
"Don't let them make you forget who you are
Don't let them break you down"
I later found that she wrote, produced and performed that song when she
was only 17-years old. She possessed talent and perspective beyond her
years and I became a fan.
Some time would pass before she eventually released her debut album,
Olesi: Fragments of an Earth, in 2006. Since then, she's released well
over a dozen, mostly self-produced projects. While much of her music's
focus has been on the healing, preservation and education of African
American people, the themes are universal: family, struggle and of
course, love. The beats are a combination of J Dilla and Battlecat while
her voice carries soul that sounds like it was groomed in the backwoods
of Jackson, Miss. She's also made a name for herself as a collaborator
with artists that include Madlib, Mos Def and Erykah Badu, with whom she
introduced the notion of "staying woke" to the world, years before it
was appropriated as a hashtag.
During her set, Muldrow performed, reworked and animated versions of the
song "Flowers," along with two selections from her latest album,
Overload, including an extended and jazzy version of "Ciao."
SET LIST
"Overload"
"Flowers"
"Ciao"
MUSICIANS:
Georgia Anne Muldrow: lead vocals, bongo drum; Dudley Perkins: vocals;
Bronson Garza: bass; Renaldo Elliott: drums; Mokichi: keys
Georgia Anne Muldrow Doesn’t Want You to Burn Out | Receiver
Georgia Anne Muldrow has made music explicitly about the Black experience for almost two decades, leading audiences into conversations about liberation and injustice whether they were ready or not. And now, at a time when Black Lives Matter protests are similarly forcing greater society to pay attention to things she’s been singing about for years, she is taking time to rest, and to listen. “It's really just about a person who has devoted their lives to making their creativity a place of resistance,” Muldrow says about her song “This Walk.” “It's like trying to figure out a way to not burn out when you feel like you said everything that you could have possibly said.”
The Critics Speak:
“No one sings a heavy love song like Georgia Anne Muldrow” - Pitchfork “Over
the years, this gifted Los Angeles
singer-producer-multi-instrumentalist has collaborated with Erykah Badu,
Sa-Ra Creative Partners and Madlib, so it’s no surprise that her latest
full-length is packed full of unflappable funk.” - Rolling Stone “After years of being near the spotlight, it seems the world is finally ready for Muldrow’s music.” - The FADER
Concert Formats:
-In The Moment Quartet -Georgia Anne Muldrow presents JYOTI
Select Discography:
JYOTI: Mama You Can Bet (2020)
Overload (2019)
Oligarchy Sucks! (2014)
Kings Ballad (2010)
Olesi: Fragments of an Earth (2006)
For additional information contact: Maurice Montoya/M M Music Agency
Georgia Anne Muldrow Builds a Musical World of Her Own
The
prolific and proudly woke musician has made 21 albums in 15 years. Her
latest, “Vweto III,” is a largely instrumental LP that Muldrow composed,
performed, recorded, produced and mixed.
PHOTO: Georgia Anne Muldrow’s music encompasses R&B, jazz, hip-hop, funk, rock and a broader Pan-African diaspora. Credit: Erik Carter for The New York Times by Jon Pareles
May 21, 2021
New York Times
Georgia Anne Muldrow still had her mask on when she sat down at Blackout Studios in Los Angeles for a video interview this month. It was a black cloth mask covered in glittery studs: protection with flair. “That’s kind of my way since I was a kid,” Muldrow said, settling in and unmasking behind the studio’s professional vocal mic. “Whatever difficulty there is, to try to bring something sparkly to it.”
As a songwriter, singer, rapper, musician and producer, Muldrow has addressed serious ideas with drive, hooks and sonic creativity throughout an extraordinarily prolific career. Her music encompasses R&B, jazz, hip-hop, funk, rock and a broader Pan-African diaspora; it can be lean and earthy, harmonically labyrinthine or richly disorienting, swirling with reverb. Like Prince, Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney, she makes many of her tracks entirely on her own, using instruments and computers to turn herself into a one-woman studio band.
Muldrow has released a torrent of full-length albums since her 2006 debut, “Olesi: Fragments of an Earth.” Titles like “Umsindo” (Zulu for “noise” or “rage”) from 2009, “Oligarchy Sucks!” from 2014 and “Black Love & War” from 2019 make clear her career-long concerns: Black and African diaspora culture, justice, strength, liberation, exploration. Her 21st studio album, “Vweto III” — vweto means “gravity” in the Congolese language Kikongo — is due on Friday.
Muldrow has also produced other performers and made EPs, singles and
numerous guest appearances with, among others, Mos Def (who reworked Muldrow’s song “Roses”), Bilal, Dev Hynes and, most notably, Erykah Badu in their 2008 collaboration, “Master Teacher.” That song popularized the phrase “Stay woke,” which had been Muldrow’s admonition to herself at a low point in her life.
In 2021, Muldrow enjoys seeing right-wing
figures treating “woke” as a toxic epithet. “It makes me have faith
that I’m doing something correctly if these little two-bit politicians
have even got anything I’ve said in their mouth,” she said. “I want to
be a thorn in their side. I want to keep them up at night.”
Badu
offered powerful praise for her collaborator. “She’s the truth,” she
said by phone. “It’s as if she’s from another time somewhere, an ancient
future where it meets and warps together, and she walked out of it
looking like the female Jimi Hendrix, the young Marcus Garvey, swinging
music like Stevie Wonder.”
Badu
added, “Her main focus is on freeing the African mind. It makes us want
to be like her, to be as strong and have as solid a message as she does
in everything. It’s Georgia’s bravery and sincerity, because she does
this thing as fearlessly as she does. She’s not afraid of confrontation
when it comes to what she believes.”
PHOTO: “I
want to promote consciousness — I’m not trying to promote myself per
se,” Muldrow said. “Music gives me a world to walk through.” Credit: Erik Carter for The New York Times
Muldrow, 37, grew
up in a family of jazz musicians in Los Angeles. Her father, Ronald
Muldrow, was a guitarist who worked for decades with the soul-jazz saxophonist Eddie Harris. Her mother, Rickie Byars-Beckwith, sang with the saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and the pianist Roland Hanna.
Alice
Coltrane, a family friend, gave Muldrow the spiritual name Jyoti, which
can mean “light” or “celestial flame”; Muldrow has billed herself as
Jyoti for her most jazz-influenced albums, including last year’s widely
praised “Mama, You Can Bet!,” which included daring remakes of Charles Mingus compositions alongside her own songs.
In
the early 2000s, Muldrow came to New York City to study jazz at the New
School, majoring in voice. But she dropped out, she said, because, “I
didn’t like the boxes they have for people. I feel as though we go out
of the box just to survive emotionally as Black folk. We’re doing this
for our emotional upliftment. The searching for one’s inner power and
one’s inner ownership and one’s language — that’s what brings this music
forward.”
The teenage Muldrow delved
into electronic music, building beats and devising abstract sounds on
drum machines, synthesizers and computers. “The allure of technology
and sound design and sound creation with computers was my experience as
a composer of being listened to,” she said. “Regardless of how I look,
regardless of my gender, regardless of my race, the computer listened to
me.”
One of her mentors and
collaborators was Don Preston, who had played keyboards for Frank
Zappa’s Mothers of Invention in the 1960s and ’70s and was Meredith
Monk’s musical director. He encouraged her to work with the experimental
synthesis that she now considers a “cornerstone” of her music. On “Fifth Shield,” a manifesto from her 2015 album “A Thoughtiverse Unmarred,” she rapped, “I know I’m abstract — it ain’t for everybody.”
For
Muldrow, the parameters that control synthesizer tones — attack, decay,
sustain and release — offer lessons beyond the recording studio. “I’ll
make everything a metaphor,” she said with a laugh. “The way we attack
things shapes our lives, the way we hold on to things shapes our lives,
the way we let go of things shapes our lives. That’s what makes me dig
deeper every time I make music.”
In
Muldrow’s tracks, it’s often impossible to tell what was recorded on
live instruments and what was sampled, looped or programmed. Her first
electronics were drum machines, but from the start, she wanted to defy
the quantization — built into much music software and hardware — that
regularizes pitches and rhythms.
“I
wanted to find a way to get off the grid,” she said. “I didn’t like that
I was playing something a certain way, and then it’s telling it back to
me in a ‘corrected’ way. Time doesn’t work that way. When you talk
about grief or healing or heartache, it doesn’t happen on a grid. It’s
an upward spiral, it’s a roller coaster — it’s all these different
things.”
She added, “If everything is
perfectly done, then where is the undifferentiated chaos that made
everything? Where is the creativity?”
PHOTO: “Regardless
of how I look, regardless of my gender, regardless of my race, the
computer listened to me,” Muldrow said of early explorations in
electronic music. Credit: Erik Carter for The New York Times
Muldrow
was the first woman signed to the hip-hop label Stones Throw Records,
for her debut album. Brainfeeder, the label founded by the producer
Flying Lotus, released her aptly titled 2018 album “Overload,”
which was nominated for a Grammy as best urban contemporary album. Most
of her other output has been released on her own labels: SomeOthaShip
Connect, which she started with her husband, Dudley Perkins (they are
now separated); and her own Epistrophik Peach Sound.
“It’s
a lot of music,” Muldrow said. “I never expect anyone, even if they’re
my dearest friends, to know all my work. That comes with a downside,
though. I’ve faced burnout, I’ve worked through it, I’ve beat it.
Workaholism is a very real thing. But the expectation for someone that
looks like me is so high, even from the people in my own community and
beyond, that I have got to be a six-armed goddess in order to make a
proper living. And I thank God that I have morphed into the six-armed
goddess.”
“Vweto
III” is a largely instrumental album. Muldrow composed, performed,
recorded, arranged, produced, mixed and mastered it with just two brief
guest vocal appearances. It’s a producer’s showcase: 17 tracks that
wander from lurching funk (“Old Jack Swing”) to foreboding ballad (“Unforgettable”) to neo-psychedelia (“Mufaro’s Garden”) to drone and noise-rock (“Grungepiece”) to blipping electronica (“Afro AF”), with Muldrow only singing an occasional refrain.
After
making “Mama, You Can Bet!,” Muldrow said, “I was at this place where
I’m like, ‘I have literally said it all.’ This allows me the space to
just feel and simply speak my piece and be off of it.”
She
intends the album as an open invitation. “I can have fun on hooks,” she
said, “and then they’re like D.I.Y. songs that people can have for
themselves. I want to see the sisters rapping up a storm.”
The
album’s cover art — an illustration by the South African artist Breeze
Yoko with a mountain lion and a leopard peering from Muldrow’s shoulders
— will be auctioned as a nonfungible token; half of the proceeds will go to Critical Resistance, an organization seeking to abolish what it calls the prison industrial complex.
“I
want to promote consciousness — I’m not trying to promote myself per
se,” Muldrow said. “Music gives me a world to walk through. And I hope
for other people, that I can help them to do this — to remember that
their minds are powerful. There’s a lot that you can do in there.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jon
Pareles has been The Times’s chief pop music critic since 1988. A
musician, he has played in rock bands, jazz groups and classical
ensembles. He majored in music at Yale University. @JonPareles
A version of this article appears in print on May 21, 2021, Section C, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: A Musical World Of Her Very Own. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper
Often sought as musical collaborator and producer
by the likes of Dev Hynes, Erykah Badu, Bilal, and Mos Def, a singular
descriptive word does not fit for vocalist, songwriter, and
multi-instrumentalist Georgia Anne Muldrow. Last seen at Kennedy Center
in spring 2017 with Jason Moran in “Muldrow Meets Mingus,” the Grammy
nominee returns to perform her multi-genre blend of jazz, R&B, Hip
Hop, electronica, rock, and funk in the intimate setting of the Club at
Studio K.
Thu. Mar. 17, 2022
7:30p.m.
Thu. Mar. 17, 2022
9:30p.m.
Program
Often sought as musical collaborator and producer by the
likes of Dev Hynes, Erykah Badu, Bilal, and Mos Def, a singular
descriptive word does not fit for vocalist, songwriter, and
multi-instrumentalist Georgia Anne Muldrow. Last seen
at Kennedy Center in spring 2017 with Jason Moran in “Muldrow Meets
Mingus,” the Grammy nominee returns to perform her multi-genre blend of
jazz, R&B, Hip Hop, electronica, rock, and funk in the intimate
setting of the Club at Studio K.
NOTE: While concessions will be open in the REACH for your enjoyment, food and beverage will not be allowed in Studio K.
Support the Arts in America
The Kennedy Center is a non-profit institution, and
your tax-deductible gift helps expand our arts and education offerings
throughout the country.
The latest iteration of Georgia Anne Muldrow’s VWETO
series (meaning “gravity” in Kikongo) builds on the success of the
previous two with a 17-track clinic on creating rhythmic frameworks that
wow you with their complexity and propel you into movement.
As a producer, Muldrow has worked with a range of industry titans including Mos Def, J Dilla, Erykah Badu, and Robert Glasper;
her own catalog of recordings––more than 20 full-length albums since
her first in 2006––showcases an even wider range of musical styles. You
can find her rapping over ’90s old school beats on A Thoughtiverse Unmarred; you can dig into Mama, You Can Bet! (named on The New York Times’
Top 20 Albums of 2020) and get in touch with her jazz roots––her
father, Ronald Muldrow, was saxophonist Eddie Harris’ sideman on guitar
for decades.
Discussing the conception and evolution of VWETO III,
Muldrow expresses a desire to build music that creates its own
environment: one of her influences was “an Isaac Hayes LP where even the
reverb had grain and texture”. These tracks are “intended for movement”
and should “be played when you birth yourself back outside after a long
introspective period to get the things you need.” The long
introspective period of the past year is proof that Muldrow didn’t start
baking bread in her downtime off tour, but rather an intricately varied
beat tape that elevates itself into the status of a proper album by
creating its own atmosphere.
Jean-Michel Basquiat said, “Art is how we decorate space. Music is how we decorate time.” He didn’t say this about VWETO III, but the album is a ringing endorsement of this notion. “Slow Drag”
immediately throws you in between a steady piano groove and a
shimmering organ, then gets you nodding your head with its wailing
guitar. “Unforgettable” jets across a lush landscape built from several different layers of synth. The variety of instrumentation on “Passin Ooout!” will astonish you when you realize there’s only one musician behind it. Outside of a couple of guest appearances on vocals, VWETO III is entirely Muldrow’s own: composed, recorded, mixed, and mastered by Muldrow herself.
On Overload, her 2018 Grammy-nominated release, “Vital
Transformation” offers this declaration: “If you know me well / you know
that I ain’t the kinda girl who likes to waste her time.” That
statement is irrefutable when you consider both the quality and quantity
of her work. VWETO III makes 2021 the fourth consecutive year with at least one new album from Muldrow.
Her collaborators have compared her to Nina Simone, Roberta Flack, and Ella Fitzgerald;
that’s high praise, for certain, though Muldrow possesses the sort of
roving, genre-bending creativity that defies comparison. In 2009, Early
became her third full-length album, but it was recorded seven years
earlier when Muldrow was only 17––further proof of the fact that she’s
never been one to waste time. Her latest album solidifies her status as
an artist to watch closely for decades to come.
Muldrow’s
creative constellation hints at a wide-ranging skill set. Her parents
were musicians within a flourishing L.A. community, and Alice Coltrane
was a family friend. Muldrow moved to New York City to study jazz, as a
voice student at the New School, but she found the instruction rigid and
dropped out to explore electronic music, becoming a mentee of Don
Preston, the keyboardist for Frank Zappa and the music director for
Meredith Monk. Muldrow found the process of working with computers far
more intuitive and liberating than formal jazz indoctrination. “The
allure of technology and sound design and sound creation with computers
was my experience as a composer of being listened to,” she told the Times.
By the late two-thousands, Muldrow had worked with artists across rap,
jazz, soul, and R. & B., including a turn with the neo-soul sage
Erykah Badu, coining the phrase “stay woke.”
As an electronic-music practitioner versed in the ways of hip-hop,
Muldrow has been a fixture on the L.A. beat scene, which is defined by a
community of producers who make production-focussed, electronics-led
tracks and is demarcated by its relationships to spaces: record stores, club nights, labels, and locally based Internet radio.
Although the music that Muldrow makes has grown more eclectic (she is
also prone to songs that are more vocals-based), she is one of the
scene’s foundational players. In the mid-two-thousands, Sketchbook, a
L.A. beat night started by the d.j. and producer Kutmah, became an
experimental venue where she played CD mixes alongside such defining
artists as Daedelus, Dibiase, Teebs, the late Ras G, and Flying Lotus.
In 2018, Muldrow released the future-soul album “Overload,” on Lotus’s
esteemed Brainfeeder label, and she remains an influence on scions of the beat scene, such as Linafornia.
The
beat scene put emphasis on ambience, the way that production functions
in a live space. After Sketchbook fizzled out, a new weekly event arose:
the influential Low End Theory club night, which ran at the Airliner
until 2018. A sound once defined by hardware and laptops began to merge
with other instrumentalist movements. “The beat scene being the center
of gravity, at least in LA, being at Low End Theory, these guys start
coming through,” a co-founder of the club night, Daddy Kev, said
in 2017. “All of a sudden, it’s not just FlyLo with his laptop anymore,
it’s FlyLo and [bassist] Thunder[cat], that’s one show. Then the next
time he plays it’s FlyLo, Thunder, and Ronald Bruner, Jr. The next thing
you know we’re booking Kamasi [Washington] down there.” Muldrow exists
at the scene’s intersection of rap, jazz, and digitized MIDI-created
sounds, woven together in improvisational performance. Her 2020 album,
“Mama, You Can Bet!,” released under the moniker Jyoti, which was given
to her by Alice Coltrane, was an introspective jazz release that
centered on lineage—Muldrow’s place along the continuum of female
musicians and her connection to her mother. It was a project fit for the
self-reflection of an imposed quarantine. But, after being cooped up,
the wide-open beckons. Her new album, “Vweto III,” the third installment
in an instrumental series, is fidgety and animated, as if longing to
escape confinement and vibrate toward something.
The
last year has pushed music inside, but it seems like there is an
unfurling coming. Muldrow’s new album is part of such a transition. It
is like static running along power lines, awakening them. “ ‘Vweto III’
is intended for movement,” Muldrow wrote in a short note on her Bandcamp
page. “It’s to be played when you birth yourself back outside after a
long introspective period to get the things you need.” In the Times
interview, she spoke of the album’s instrumental tracks as a sort of
call to others, saying, “They’re like D.I.Y. songs that people can have
for themselves. I want to see the sisters rapping up a storm.” The
themes of returning to the open air and collaboration gel with a
post-pandemic society in which we are all attempting to rëestablish
contact.
“Vweto” is a word that means “gravity” in
the Congolese Kikongo language, and though Muldrow’s previous music has
often dealt with matters of urgent importance—with a particular interest
in the paths toward Black liberation—the gravity here is a physical
force: the internal pull of the grooves. These tracks aren’t designed to
detonate and diffuse across a dance floor, but there is the unshakeable
impulse to move to them, to feel the way they respond to the shifting
textures of the outdoors, to absorb them as a city passes and comes into
focus. The music is casually kinetic: it exists in the classic
beat-music tradition of turning something computerized into atmosphere.
Muldrow’s
creations feel so organic that it’s difficult to tell which parts are
digital and which are actual instruments. The idea that computers can
listen and respond, like any instrument, is key to how Muldrow puts her
Afrofuturist music in conversation with the past—and her ability to
contort the shape of those recognizable sounds is essential to her art.
(“Get a MIDI controller and you feel like you can play anything,” she once said.)
She works on most of her compositions herself, formulating and playing
and plugging in sounds to assemble rich cuts that carefully unfold
themselves as they get further along. With song titles such as “Old Jack
Swing,” “Throwback Baps,” and “Boom Bap Is My Homegirl,” the album
invokes a deep love for classic hip-hop, along with the soul and funk
traditions from which the genre has always borrowed heavily. This
transference makes “Vweto III” a perfect gateway through which to
appreciate the old in a refreshing new context. In its most vibrant
moments, the album feels like venturing out, arms outstretched,
releasing the tautness of a body left idle for too long.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Sheldon Pearce is a music writer for Goings On About Town.
Georgia Anne
Muldrow laughs easily when she speaks. The charm of her laughter does
not come from anything silly, although she can be downright funny in
frank conversation. Rather, the breathy chortle you hear when speaking
with the free, funky progressive jazz/R&B/hip-hop multi-hyphenate
expresses sheer joy at the fact that music is an everyday part of her
self-empowered existence, and that all of her sound and all of her life
flows into, and from, one towering tributary: her soul.
“Thank you so much for knowing that,
because it is all ongoing and going on, all at once,” Muldrow says from
her forever home in Los Angeles, a studio-house environment where she’s
been letting loose with spirited left-field jazz and sumptuous space
soul ever since her 2006 debut, Olesi: Fragments of an Earth.
“There really isn’t demarcation, a place where one stops and the other
begins. I’m always making music.” And it is always making Muldrow.
In discussing that which she does under her own name as a vocalist/instrumentalist (e.g., albums like 2010’s Kings Ballad), as showcases for her Technicolor production skills (three VWETO albums, the latest being VWETO III),
or through the pseudonym Jyoti, a name given to her by free-jazz giant
Alice Coltrane (the latest album to use that moniker being 2020’s Mama, You Can Bet!),
Muldrow has found herself compared to Lauryn Hill, early Roberta Flack,
Geri Allen, Amina Claudine Myers, Erykah Badu (with whom she’s worked),
and the late great Mrs. Coltrane. Yet listening to the multitudes that
fill VWETO III (everything from cool postbop and thundering dub to Blaxploitative soul) or the transcendental jazz of Mama, You Can Bet!—both
albums recorded with nary a collaborator save for voice and sax—leaves
the listener without any real comparison, despite all of the possible
influences. Everything Georgia is a genre apart: positively
Muldrow-nian.
“She really is her own universe,” says saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin, Muldrow’s longtime friend and lone outside contributor to Mama, You Can Bet! “And to be invited in to be part of that is rare, and a pleasure.”
One of the first clues to Muldrow’s
everything-all-at-once-ness comes from her selection of favorite music.
“Coming up, I loved anthologies, like Curtis Mayfield’s, that showed his
ride from his time with the Impressions to his solo-career vibes at
Curtom,” she says. “Box sets like James Brown’s Star Time, Motown
reviews with the Four Tops and Martha and the Vandellas, and Rhino soul
collections from the ’60s with Dyke and the Blazers, Otis Redding, and
Jackie Wilson. You could hear the growth of an artist. It was an
affordable way to do so too.”
When I tell her I hear some raunchy Jimmy
Jam and Terry Lewis-style synth bass lines in her work, she screams
with happiness. “OF COURSE I AM A JAM & LEWIS JUNKIE,” she yells.
“Without question. Their production of the S.O.S. Band influenced how I
sing.” And while she slips in Stevie Wonder’s Secret Life of Plants (“hands down my favorite Stevie”) and tracks by Bahamadia and KRS-One, Coltrane’s A Love Supreme (“that album changed my life”), Bobby McFerrin’s Medicine Music, Salif Keita’s Soro, and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers (“Take your pick of which album … he made me want to be a drummer”) are at the head of her psychic mixtape.
Jazz, in particular, gave young Georgia
Anne additional exposure to the aesthetics of her parents. Her late
father was jazz guitarist Ronald Muldrow, famed for his gig with
saxophonist Eddie Harris; her mother Rickie Byars-Beckwith co-founded
the Sound of Agape and worked with Pharoah Sanders and Roland Hanna. “My
mother and father lend me my coherence,” Muldrow says. “Their influence
keeps me from going off the deep end. My dad lent me my melodic
coherence and my mom gives me harmonic coherence. Phrasing and the way
the words fit the melody—my mom gave me that too. Instead of being too
hip for the blues, I’m modifying the blues.”
Georgia Anne studied jazz at Manhattan’s
New School, where she majored in voice; she dropped out. She then worked
with mentor/former Mothers of Invention keyboardist Don Preston, who
encouraged all levels of experimentation. A picture of dissatisfaction
at any form of status quo develops. “Who likes to do things the
so-called correct way?” she says with a laugh. “It was about getting
away from the grid.”
‘I want to supply my people with some theme music something to keep their heads up high'--Georgia Anne Muldrow. Photograph: Priscilla Jimenez
The
LA musician, who has unleashed another of her psychedelic funk and
hip-hop beat tapes, talks about social justice, her time in Brixton and
the battle over ‘woke’, a word she helped popularise
Georgia
Anne Muldrow may be more than 20 albums into her career and the woman
who brought the word “woke” to wider consciousness, but she is not one
for counting off milestones. “I’m the type of traditionalist that wants
to give meaning to life,” she says. “My [concept of] success is directly
linked to how Black folks see themselves; it’s not enough for me to be
filthy rich or something, owning an island somewhere in the midst of
what we live through.”
Since debuting with her EP Worthnothings in 2006, she has become known for her chameleonic ability to master different genres – soul, G-funk, jazz, electronic – under a number of aliases (for instance Jyoti) and collaborative projects. Last week, the 37-year-old vocalist, songwriter and producer released Vweto III,
the latest in a series of beat tapes. These are self-produced and
mostly instrumental albums full of psychedelic funk and prowling hip-hop
(track titles such as Boom Bap Is My Homegirl show where her head is
at). Besides solo releases, she has been featured on tracks by artists
such as Erykah Badu, Flying Lotus and Yasiin Bey (formerly Mos Def), who
described her as “like [Roberta] Flack, Nina Simone, Ella [Fitzgerald] –
she’s something else”.
She video-calls from her kitchen in Los Angeles,
and is so charming that it feels as if I have been physically ushered
into her home. She is making a huge batch of homemade muesli, and people
come in and out: we are interrupted by her mother and friends, as well
as her 12-year-old son, Nokware, who joins midway to dance for us and
show his new hairstyle. Muldrow is as cool as you would imagine, her
sentences interspersed with “You know what I’m saying?” in a relaxed,
smoky cadence, and she drops phrases so winning they stick like lyrics
(“I was already happy to be nappy by the age of two,” she quips,
referring to natural Black hair).
An
absence of vocals can sometimes turn off the average listener, but
Vweto III is captivating. Unforgettable features west coast G-funk
synths and 70s disco claps, conjuring up images of lowriders on highways
in her native sunny LA, while eccentric outliers such as Ghostride
21716 captivate with echoing synths and glitchy, skittering beats.
Muldrow made the tape to alleviate the downcast mood brought about by
the racial reckoning of the past year and the pandemic; to weather the
“traumatic events experienced as a community online and offline”.
‘I
felt seen by people without even expressing any musical talent, in a
world where people don’t see little Black girls’ --Georgia Anne
Muldrow. Photograph: Priscilla Jimenez
“It’s like a symbiosis kind of thing,” she says. “You know how Shaft had theme music, or Black Dynamite?
I want to supply my people with some theme music so that they can feel
self-confident, self-possessed; something to keep their heads up high.
And posting the beats on Instagram and seeing the comments – people
saying: ‘Please take my money!’ – helps me to know that somebody’s
looking forward to what I share in a time where we can’t play any
shows.”If
somebody uses ‘woke’ in a derogative way, I don’t really care for
what’s on their mind. I don’t really care about somebody who don’t even
like Black people.
Muldrow grew up in LA. Her father was the jazz
guitarist Ronald Muldrow, while her mother, Rickie, sang in the church
where the daughter first honed her vocals. She recalls rubbing shoulders
with musical greats: the late Leon “Ndugu” Chancler
once stopped by her Sunday school to teach her “traditional African
drumming and West African rhythms” with a pair of claves and plastic
water bottles. She also sat at the feet of civil rights activist and
drummer Babatunde Olatunji
to hear him play the conga. “It’s been a magical life,” she admits. “I
felt seen by people without even expressing any musical talent, in a
world where people don’t see little Black girls. It just so happens that
those people were world-class musicians.”
The
desire to make music professionally hit around age 15, and she began
picking up music production skills soon after. Her beatmaking is easily
the match of her more famous leftfield male peers Flying Lotus and Danger Mouse,
although she doesn’t have their recognition factor. Muldrow agrees that
misogyny in the industry tends to obstruct female producers from
getting the appreciation they deserve. “Oh heavens – yes! And don’t let
anybody tell you differently.” But it’s given her some resilience. “It’s
made me fierce. And what better obstacles than those of chauvinism,
misogyny and racism to be a catalyst for becoming fierce?”
Georgia Anne Muldrow arrives at last year’s Grammy awards in Los Angeles. Photograph: Mike Blake/Reuters
The theme of social justice runs through her work. By co-writing Erykah Badu’s Master Teacher,
with its lyrical hookline “I stay woke”, Muldrow brought the word to
the modern lexicon. Muldrow previously said the word meant “being in
touch with the struggle that [Black] people have gone through”, but its
modern-day meaning has been mangled beyond belief. There has been an uptick in the sarcastic usage of “woke”
as a means of criticising “social justice warriors” and people
perceived to be oversensitive. Even this week, culture secretary Oliver
Dowden said: “I worry that elements of what has been branded woke culture runs contrary to the great liberal traditions of western democracies.”
Muldrow is largely unfazed:“If
somebody uses ‘woke’ in a derogative way, I don’t really care for
what’s on their mind,” she says. “I can’t worry about what some
Republican is worried about; I don’t really care about somebody who
don’t even like Black people. If people understand it, I feel blessed by
that. But me having a sense of consciousness about my food, water,
health and wellbeing is more important.”
She is more concerned with the material welfare
of Black people around the globe, and issues such as gentrification.
Muldrow spent time in Brixton, south London, during the mid-2000s and is
concerned with the rapidly changing social landscape and how Black
communities bear the brunt of it all – the “flavour tax”, she calls it.
“I’ll never forget Brixton, the quality of the people at that time was
amazing. But everything’s changing all over the world. I can’t get my
head around it; if everywhere is rising in price, where are Black people
gonna go?
“That’s
what’s deep about gentrification: people not being able to sustain
living somewhere after they gave that place all its appeal. It’s like a
penalisation for having flavour.”
Muldrow instead wants to have a mutually giving relationship with her fans, and to invest in the wellbeing of her community.
“First
and foremost I make my music for Black folk,” she says. “I definitely
want to be more of a community worker and find ways where my music aids
the community directly, and partner with organisations. I want it so
that when people support my work they’re not just supporting me, they’re
supporting the lives of folks who are moving their bodies in aid of
others. I want to be a benefactor for our human right to flourish.”
The best tool to use, in her opinion, is the thing that’s aided her all her life – music.“Black
music is my superpower. It’s the music of my ancestors. It’s my way of
showing love, paying homage, keeping sounds alive that sometimes people
think are dead. It’s reviving dead forms of music, and honouring them.
That’s the functionality of art.”
Georgia Anne Muldrow - 'Overload' (Official Video)
Acclaimed west coast
singer, songwriter, and producer Georgia Anne Muldrow releases a
collection of astral instrumentals. VWETO, which means gravity in
Ki-Kongo, has just that: a significance that rings true on a deep and
profound level, a mixture of dreamscape and fonk. Each instrumental
journeys through sonic realms that wash over the listener with ease,
taking them out of their body and into the spirit plane. The vibrations
knock hard enough for any Hiphop head, yet bend and curve through the
recesses of mind in a much more esoteric way, bringing a fOnk unique to
Georgia that hits hard enough to turn Dre's head. Distinctly west coast,
yet like nothing released before, Georgia Anne Muldrow's VWETO is a
layered album that explores the instrumental depths of funkrock, Hiphop,
PianoSpace, and Soul.
"I Was A Reluctant Afrofuturist!"-Going Deep With Georgia Anne Muldrow
May 26, 2021
Sound Of Life
Georgia Anne
Muldrow is perhaps one of the lesser known figures on the US West Coast
avant garde hip hop and jazz scene in comparison to contemporaries like
Flying Lotus, Madlib and Thundercat, but she's certainly not a lesser
talent. Far from it. Over the course of a huge discography, alone and in
collaboration with artists like Mos Def, Erykah Badu, Madlib and Robert
Glasper, she's stretched her creative wings wide. Following closely an
album by her more jazz-leaning alter-ego Jyoti, she's just released the
third in her beat heavy VWETO album series. While these have previously
been instrumental, this one features more of her vocals, further
blurring the boundaries between her many projects. It’s also presented
as an open collaboration: she’s asked singers, rappers, dancers and
remixers to respond to it, the results of which will be showcased on her
Instagram.
Mixtape spoke to her at home, to find a little more about her utterly unique approach...
Did you have a conceptual framework for this? It's kind of in between an album and a beat tape...
It's really more of a beat tape though. If you follow me on
Instagram, you'll be familiar with the things I do - sometimes I'll have
hooks that I'll present on there and say, "here you go, this is a
bundle", these are the things to sell online, just hustling on the net.
It's a very real thing, folks make beats and then sell 'em, this is
giving you an experience of that.
Like a snapshot of ongoing work in progress?
Yeah. I have done a LOT of records - I think it's even more than 20, I
think it's 22 records. So the deal is like, I don't feel like there's
no rules to making no record, and if there is I don't care about em, you
know? I feel this is open-ended music, I've said so many things about
where I'm at, they may modify themselves as they speak - but Black folks
still need to be compensated for their labour, they still need to be
able to afford to rest, they need to be free. So I can either flog a
dead horse, or I can I go the hell on and have a little stuff on record
where people can rap to it, they can interact with it and do their own
thing with it... I'm making space for people to be the star of the
story, that's the record. That's why I said this music is the theme
music so people can be their own superhero.
You don't sit exactly within hip hop, or jazz, or electronic, or experimental music...
Welllll... when it comes to hip hop, if someone wants to battle me on
beats it would be a very good thing, I know what I'm doing in hip hop!
Sure, but you're not constrained within any one of those
things... Is there a specific desire to show people that they can be
free from these definitions?
Yes I want my people to be free! There's a very specific category of
people that my priorities lay with, and it's the people who are
oppressed, the people among the African diaspora. Those are the main
people that I want to know they can be free to do whatever the hell they
wanna do. That's my main focus. The music is just a by-product of what
my intent is. I want people to know, there's no such thing as music
that's too brainy on the one side - if you love Coltrane, you want to
express that shit through your music, then do it! But then on the other
side, if you want to just sing the blues and it's not as so-called
brainy as the other thing that's out there, do that - be yourself.
Whatever your moment call for, be yourself in that moment and own it.
That's what I'm on. It's all about freedom, the freedom to choose your
own expression and be tough enough to not give a damn what someone else
has to say about it.
There's a lot of academic discourse on "Afrofuturism" that
seems to insist that it has to be complicated or ultra radical, and
writes off anything that's simple or straight-up emotional...
First thing on that: I have no critique of my people. I have nothing
but love and space for us figuring out whatever it is we need to figure
out. That should be noted. Now, for many years, I was very much a
reluctant Afrofuturist, until I just did a deep research and deeper
inquiry into what was going on there and then it was "oh... that's
exactly what I'm doing!" My only thing is I'm an ultra-present African, I
strive to be ultra-present. With time, I think a lot of things can get
misconstrued with the title "Afrofuturism" as far as what the aims of it
is: but it's a dealing with time itself, knowing we been here so long,
and I really believe in the past, present and future merging into one
thing. That comes out in my sound, in how I talk to people, in my sense
of humour: the whole spectrum of Black people throughout time. It's not
just in the future, it's happening right now. All we've ever had is
"right now", moment to moment. I'm into technology: my job title is that
I'm an "instrument of the ancestors", and I work with computers, so
that's really Afrofuturist. But that was really happening naturally
before that title gained more traction for naming things and labelling
them and shipping them off. Which is cool: that's allowed me to be a
guest on college courses, I've had great experience in what this is as a
philosophy, and it's beautiful that this is something that's of value
to academia or the like. But when you zoom out, academia has a far way
to go in the values that it holds for children, for people who seek to
gain knowledge. Some of the values it holds are very flawed and very
colonial. So when it comes to Afrofuturism, it's cool that people can
name it this, that or the third, but it's always been happening, it's
just another name for us living, for Black folks just be. We talk and we
talk, we been in the past, present and the future, so I say "that's
just how we be": it's different to "that's just how we are."
When you look to musical expression of the past do you think
of genres and eras? There are definite parts on this record that seem to
reference specific times, whether it's 60s soul with hammond organs,
80s synth stuff, classic 90s hip hop breakbeats...
Yeah! For the longest time, what afforded me a sense of being able to
travel when I couldn't afford to go nowhere, was the sense of being
able to travel through time. I could build my own time machine through
music, and feel the vibe and speculate about how it would feel to
be an adult in that time or an artist. With jams like "Unforgettable"
it was definitely some new wave kind of thing, but there's breakdancers
that love that kind of song. I always envision groups of people, places
and things when I make music. Something that's always intrigued me is
convergence of different scenes at one point, like how hip hop brought
together punk rock, new wave, a lot of different people because they're
all on the outside looking in on general society, which wasn't working
for them.
Talking of scenes, do you feel part of, or close to, what people call the "beat scene" out of California?
Man, c'mon, I know these people! I made record with Madlib, I know
these people, these people know me, know what I'm saying? They know that
I got beats. Even before the beat scene turned to what it turned to
with the more abstract leaning, I really had something to do with that
going that way. I'm definitely part of that. I'm from L.A. Yes! I'm
literally from here!
Do you have feelings about how that sound and scene has gone
global, so now you've got people making off-kilter, Californian inspired
beats from Moscow to Macau?
Well.... my main target is Black people. I think that's what
distinguish me from some other beat scene people: the Black folks is my
concern. I feel in servicing them, everyone else going to be serviced.
That's where I'm coming from. My beats is not really off-kilter - I'm
doing ancient rhythm. It's informed by very ancient African rhythm what
I'm doing, it's not just to be abstract and bleeps and bloops! I have a
background in experimental synthesiser music too, and in my experience
of that, when you're shaping a waveform and seeing where it's going to
take you, you're not doing it just so it sounds experimental, you're
doing it to search. You're not thinking about other people trying to
figure out how you did it, you're doing it to unleash a vibration,
right? That's where I'm at with it. I very much do appreciate the
respect I get in L.A., I've worked really hard to bring a sound to life
that people could use. I really wanted to bring about an open-source
sound: a sound that allows people to interface their own whims and
preferences on to it, and just to be themselves on it. And yeah that's
happening here, it's finally happening. It's happening because of the
devotion of fine musicianship, the devotion of fine multi-media artists,
and due to folks just wanting to hear more things as listeners. All of
those things have contributed to me being able to still work, and I do
appreciate it. I love it. I love that this sound is growing, because
it's my sound! So if this sound is expanding into the world, that allows
me to keep on experiencing and reaching myself, and being able to
actually work.
And do you tend to work on discrete projects, or multiple things at once?
Oh man, I be jumping, skipping, hopping and tripping - I love music.
I'm always doing something different. Just when I think I can't,
there'll be something inspiring to lead the way. A collaboration that
presents itself, or the right band, or the right kind of creative
environment that's going to provide. I just released a new single,
"Can't Let Go" with Donn T who's an amazing singer and fellow Black
woman, so I'm excited about that. I been dropping guerilla stuff, doing
all kinds of stuff, it's quite immense and I love it. Because I'm just
still into being what I want to do when I want to do it, and getting
people into the concept of sharing as they feel, and that's it!
Joe Muggs is a writer, DJ and curator of many years standing,
covering both mainstream and underground. His book 'Bass, Mids, Tops',
covering decades of UK bass music, is out now via Strange Attractor /
MIT Press, and you can subscribe to his newsletter at
tinyletter.com/joemuggs
From funk and soul to hip-hop and electronic music, Georgia Anne
Muldrow has rarely limited herself to any one particular genre. Over the
course of a broad discography spanning nearly two decades, she’s
regularly touched upon and frequently blended all of these and more for
releases on labels like Mello Music Group and Stones Throw, as well as
her own SomeOthaShip Connect label.
Her latest album Mama, You Can Bet! comes under the
name Jyoti, an infrequently used moniker that has generally served to
explore the jazzier side of her sonic spectrum. As the daughter of two
musical parents—her father the jazz guitarist Ronald Muldrow and her
mother singer-songwriter/composer Rickie Byars—her uniquely suited
background and continued progression as an artist make the record a
sublimely compelling listen.
Released under her own name, her 2018 album Overload for Flying Lotus’
Brainfeeder imprint earned Muldrow a Grammy nomination in the Best
Urban Contemporary category. Though the nod was admittedly unexpected
and her record ultimately lost to Lizzo’s Cuz I Love You,
she looks back on it with fondness for the surreal experience. “It was
fun to bring my mom there and have a walk,” she says over the phone
about attending the red carpeted festivities back in January. “We
definitely gave our telecast tickets to some homeless people.”
It's been nearly seven years since the last project under your Jyoti moniker. What brought you back to it?
Sometimes I want to be doing things that are more free. I do whatever
I want; that's the rule. But there's this part of me that is greatly
informed by improvised music. Jazz, as we call it today, some people
call it Black American music, some people call it American music, music
of the diaspora, Pan-African—it's all types of different things. It's a
more responsive forum for my emotions.
And how has jazz informed your creative process?
That's like asking how water informs a fish. It's something I was
born into for sure, just like with the funk and everything else. Being
immersed in it, in the world of Art Blakey’s music, Max Roach’s music,
Wes Montgomery’s music, my father's music. That's the music he played.
We weren't allowed at that time to touch the radio dial in the car. We
weren't allowed to touch the radio in the house. A lot of us access
music for the first time through a parent or through whoever our
guardians were because we didn't have no tablet, you feel me? You got a
chance to study your parents. Watching my father enjoy music, and seeing
what he enjoyed about the music he listened to, taught me a lot about
who he was, the part that he would not openly share. Certain songs, the
way the mix will sound, the way the groove is sounding, the harmonic
structures, all of those turned into language for me at a very early
age. So I access it in the same way to be able to get to feelings I feel
inside to you guys. Trying to name what you feel, some people are very
good at summing it up. But for those whose feelings got colors and
shadows, sometimes music is the only thing that can explain it.
Jyoti, that body of work, allows me to dive into this beautiful well
of my childhood, my young adulthood, my teenage life, trying to
understand my father, trying to know him better and, at the same time,
working out my feelings about him. And my mom, the way she used chords
and stuff in the music that she's doing, both of them being really chord
savvy people, that's what's made me my ear just naturally hear
something. It's not like I'm trying to be hip. The point is that it's
something natural. There's a natural idea that comes to a composer. In
the world that I've been raised in, the culture I've been raised in,
that has been a very valid form of communication, just as talking with
you now. That's the way I raise my kids with music that's not even
recorded. We just talk in music sometimes. It's like the second language
of the home—the first language of the home and English as a second language, for sure, when you have jazz-informed parents.
One of the things that differentiates this new album from 2013’s Denderah
is the increased use of voice and, in particular, singing. What
prompted you to include more of a vocal presence on this album?
It was just a metamorphosis going on inside of me where I want to be
more free. I want to sing where my voice carries me and this allows me
to do that. Since Denderah, the deal has been like, how can I merge these worlds into a performance?
I don't want to be singing in the same song the same way for 35 years. I
don't. I'm willing to sacrifice the audience that would have me do
that. I love to reinvent music, reinvent a song. I was raised to do
that, to make it a new experience every time. I was trained to do that.
You gotta have a certain amount of undifferentiated chaos in your sound.
You gotta have a certain percentage of it so that it can engage the
chaos in other people.
Is that also kind of why you reached for those Charlie Mingus
compositions “Bemoanable Lady” and “Fables of Faubus” for the album?
Oh yeah! I totally resonate with his stuff because [of] his honesty.
His honesty was his music and his honesty was what he’d feel, his
honesty about the time he had to live in. All those things, it equates
to a certain type of innocence. That don’t mean do no harm.
Humans do harm—period. But just the innocence in as much as that he
wants you to experience who he really is and not who he thinks you’ll
like. It comes out in his music with the melodies that he has, with the
trajectory of rhythm and harmony that accompany that melody. It's very
legit, but then it's very pure.
Your Overload
full-length for Brainfeeder earned a Grammy nomination for Best Urban
Contemporary Album. I’m assuming your process has never been about that
sort of recognization as an aim, correct?
It's definitely never been the goal. You're good to pick that one up.
You did it on your own terms, the way you wanted to do it,
and put out into the world. So what's that experience like then for you
being nominated for Grammy in that context?
It was unexpected to say the least. I know some folks that really
have a team and they write down goals and complete their tasks so that
they can manifest and bring those goals to life. They really are pushing
to best by, like, international standards. For real, I just want my mom
to smile and be proud of me. I want my kids to be proud of me, to think
I'm cool, maybe, you know, sometimes. And those things kind of make
your kids think that you might be cool. At the same time, there is
nothing like playing in Leimert Parkand the elders who you've looked up to do music are coming up to going, I've heard your work, I think it’s wonderful. When
I get that, that does something for my soul. Like when my elders, I
just don't remember. My uncles or aunties can look at my work and smile.
It brings a lot of honor to my soul. It lets me know that it’s needed,
it's important. Not so much that it's the best, but that there's a place
for it.
You see somebody like Keb’ Mo’ on the red carpet and then you feel
like it's less strange for you then. He played on some of my mom’s
records, you know what I'm saying? I got a chance to hear that banjo,
all the heritage he played. And so to see him in a different place and
we see each other, I like that. I like seeing my brothers and sisters
there, and celebrating each other while we're there. We know that the
press unfortunately is only looking at a few people, because that's the
nature of the celebrity culture, of the investments that very large
companies invest into a single human being in order to be better than
all. It's a model that I feel is clunky, personally. I feel like it
needs to be streamlined and updated. And it is updating itself, more and
more each day. So I feel like, that nomination let me know that certain
things may be changing.
Something particularly notable is that the award category you
were nominated in had its name changed recently. In the light of the
Black Lives Matter protests following George Floyd’s death, it’s now
become Best Progressive R&B Album.
Yeah! We we kicked up some dust about that urban. I was part
of the gang that was doing that, definitely was getting that. [laughs] I
was kicking up a lot of dust, because I think that it just means
n*****. I feel like Tyler [The Creator] said it really well. I mean,
it's going to take more than just renaming stuff. It's going to take
people really getting into the heart of the matter. And if you’re
calling it progressive R&B, really look into that field and really
look into the pioneers of the sounds that are there. I feel like that's
good though. I think that that's very good though. We’re prog-R&B!
I
am a freelance writer, music critic, content creator, and marketing
professional born and raised in New York City. In addition to Forbes, my work on music, entertainment, and popular culture has
appeared in various outlets including Billboard, Complex, Deadspin, The
Guardian, High Times, The New York Times, Pitchfork, Remezcla, Rolling
Stone, Vibe, and Vice. I began writing on these topics in 1999 and have
done so more or less continuously since then. In January 2020, I founded
the hip-hop media brand Cabbages, beginning as a newsletter and
expanding to include a namesake podcast later that same year.
In mid-July, during a 48-minute Instagram Live interview with the Black culture and art website Afropunk, Georgia Anne Muldrow explained the meaning behind Mama, You Can Bet!,
her third album under the pseudonym Jyoti. As she put it, single
mothers forgo their own desires for the betterment of their children;
the album was written to celebrate them. “I wanted to make a song for
when a daughter sees their mother as a woman, for when the child
respects a mother’s right to have passionate love in her life,” Muldrow
said. “They say after a certain age, you’re not beautiful. They say that
this woman, who’s given her whole body [and] done the holiest thing
known to man, has now depreciated in value.” On the title track, which
also opens the album, Muldrow speaks specifically to Black mothers. And
with its distinctly West African sound—a woozy mix of goblet drums,
upright bass, and quiet piano chords, produced by Muldrow in her home
studio—it’s meant to empower a group of women who’ve been historically
mistreated and disconnected from their ancestry. “There’s many a man
who’d love your hand,” she sings. “Love is waiting for you.”
Muldrow has made a career of such empowerment. Long before being
“woke” was trendy, she and Erykah Badu coined the term in the song
“Master Teacher,” from Badu’s 2008 album New Amerykah Part One (4th World War),
where they sang about finding utopia and themselves in times of
madness. In the early 2000s, as a student at the New School in
Manhattan, Muldrow and her friend and saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin
talked about wokeness as a way to understand how they could
contextualize their music within the political battles of their everyday
lives. “Most of the conversation in our friendship was about putting
our struggles in our music because that was all we could do,” Muldrow told Pitchfork in 2018.
“[We spoke about] trying to find points of power: in your soloing, in
your composing. Most of our conversations were about things situated
around African liberation all over the world.” To that end, Muldrow, who
had been releasing rap and soul music under her own name, has long
encouraged Black people to fully embrace their heritage and fight
systemic oppression. “We play nice while they stackin’ up kills,” she
proclaimed on “Blam,” from her Grammy-nominated 2018 album, Overload. “How much we gotta grow, before we can learn to defend ourselves?” On “187,” from the collaborative Black Love & War, with the rapper Dudley Perkins, she declared, “Death to all oppressors.”
As Jyoti—a name given to her by family friend Alice Coltrane,
which means “light” in Sanskrit—Muldrow creates a wistful blend of
spiritual jazz indebted to the work of jazz greats. Through
contemplative piano and organ solos, thick bass lines and electronic
drums, she crafts a sound equally informed by the past and present, as
if she’s trying to imagine how legends like the aforementioned Coltrane
and Nina Simone would fit within the scope of modern-day jazz. It’s also
decidedly West Coast; listening to it, one hears the lush Afrocentric
influences of Los Angeles stalwarts Horace Tapscott and Charles Mingus.
There’s a certain ease to Muldrow’s Jyoti work; she borrows and riffs
on the textures of Coltrane, Tapscott, and Mingus in her jazz-centered
arrangements with panache. Yet, while she pays homage to her influences,
she doesn’t center them to the point of diminishing her own sound.
Muldrow remixes two Mingus songs on Mama, You Can Bet! For
“Bemoanable Lady Geemix,” she brightens his moody arrangement with big
electronic drums and darting synths, turning the down tempo original
into a glossy hypnotic thump. On “Fabus Foo Geemix,” she quickens the
original with an upbeat drum loop and electric bass, turning an old
Mingus cut into a funk-infused breakbeat. Equally spacious, scenic, and
forward-looking, they both use traditional jazz as the basis for
something remarkably new and vibrant.
Born in Los
Angeles to a musical family, Muldrow’s current creative direction is
rooted in her biography. Her father, Ronald, was an acclaimed funk and
jazz guitarist known for his work alongside the saxophonist Eddie
Harris. Her mother, Rickie Byars-Beckwith, is an experimental vocalist
who specializes in New Thought music
and used to sing with the jazz musicians Pharoah Sanders and Roland
Hanna. Muldrow started composing her own music at the age of 10. In
2006, the LA-based Stones Throw Records released her first full-length
album, Olesi: Fragments of an Earth, a dense collage of hip-hop, Black Liberation soul, and free jazz that foreshadowed Muldrow’s work as Jyoti.
Muldrow’s first two Jyoti albums, the free-jazz-focused Ocotea and the more straight-ahead Denderah,
were released in 2010 and 2013, respectively, before the resurgence of
interest in jazz that’s occurred in recent years. In 2015, amid a
nationwide reckoning over police killings of Black people, the music of
certain artists took on a darker, more political tone: Rappers like
Kendrick Lamar and musical collaborators like the saxophonist Kamasi
Washington responded to the moment with jazz-centered protest music that
thrust the genre back into vogue. Muldrow predates Lamar and
Washington, even though her Jyoti work was never appreciated to the same
extent. “I don’t care how that shit happens, we need breakthroughs,”
she once told me.
“I’m very thankful that people are making jazz their own, and making it
live in a unique way for them.” Still, she should be applauded for
releasing such resonant jazz at a time when few were looking. Whether
it’s bringing the term “woke” to public view or helping shape the
current state of jazz, Muldrow’s work represents thinking ahead, waiting
for people to catch up with her.
Mama, You Can Bet!
is livelier than the previous Jyoti records, leapfrogging swing,
ambient, and hip-hop through shorter instrumentals that don’t linger too
long. Across the 15-song album, Muldrow doesn’t just nod to the past.
On “Ancestral Duckets,” she summons her ancestors through meditative
chants. On “This Walk,” in particular, she sounds weary yet resolute,
lamenting state violence and how it takes a toll on mental health.
Overall, Mama feels more like a beat tape resembling the
instrumental projects she’s released under her own name. Where those
albums display Muldrow’s love of electronic funk and West Coast hip-hop,
the Jyoti work reaches back even further—to the late 1960s and early
’70s, when jazz musicians such as Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock
broadened their sounds to include traces of funk and psych-rock. Jyoti
celebrates the music of her youth while honoring the relatives and
artists who’ve passed away. “Black improvised music is my foundation for
life,” Muldrow told Afropunk’s Timmhotep Aku. “The Jyoti stuff is the
root. It’s the square root of my sound.”
That explains “Ra’s Noise (Thukumbado),” a
brassy cut featuring Benjamin, with its rhythmic scatting dedicated to
the cosmic jazz pioneer Sun Ra. Its sauntering pace and vast arrangement
is more restrained than Sun Ra’s sprawling compositions, but I can
still hear parts of him in the track, from Benjamin’s shrill saxophone
wails to Muldrow’s shouts of “interplanetary!” in the background. Sun Ra
believed that Black people would never find peace on Earth and should
live on other planets. “Ra’s Noise,” in turn, seems to score a voyage to
deep space. “Orgone” similarly finds Muldrow longing for another place
far from America’s systemic racism. “How I dream of living in Africa,”
she sings over sparse piano chords. “I wanna go back, way back to the
time when I was free.” Of course, a declaration like this isn’t
surprising for her. She’s long sought this sort of liberation for
herself and her people. Now that social unrest and police brutality have
reached a feverish clip, Muldrow’s calls for Black freedom ring louder
than ever.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Marcus J. Moore is a contributing writer for The Nation and the author of The Butterfly Effect: How Kendrick Lamar Ignited the Soul of Black America.
Joe Muggs is a writer, DJ and curator of many years standing,
covering both mainstream and underground. His book 'Bass, Mids, Tops',
covering decades of UK bass music, is out now via Strange Attractor /
MIT Press, and you can subscribe to his newsletter at
tinyletter.com/joemuggs
From funk and soul to hip-hop and electronic music, Georgia Anne
Muldrow has rarely limited herself to any one particular genre. Over the
course of a broad discography spanning nearly two decades, she’s
regularly touched upon and frequently blended all of these and more for
releases on labels like Mello Music Group and Stones Throw, as well as
her own SomeOthaShip Connect label.
Her latest album Mama, You Can Bet! comes under the
name Jyoti, an infrequently used moniker that has generally served to
explore the jazzier side of her sonic spectrum. As the daughter of two
musical parents—her father the jazz guitarist Ronald Muldrow and her
mother singer-songwriter/composer Rickie Byars—her uniquely suited
background and continued progression as an artist make the record a
sublimely compelling listen.
Released under her own name, her 2018 album Overload for Flying Lotus’
Brainfeeder imprint earned Muldrow a Grammy nomination in the Best
Urban Contemporary category. Though the nod was admittedly unexpected
and her record ultimately lost to Lizzo’s Cuz I Love You,
she looks back on it with fondness for the surreal experience. “It was
fun to bring my mom there and have a walk,” she says over the phone
about attending the red carpeted festivities back in January. “We
definitely gave our telecast tickets to some homeless people.”
It's been nearly seven years since the last project under your Jyoti moniker. What brought you back to it?
Sometimes I want to be doing things that are more free. I do whatever
I want; that's the rule. But there's this part of me that is greatly
informed by improvised music. Jazz, as we call it today, some people
call it Black American music, some people call it American music, music
of the diaspora, Pan-African—it's all types of different things. It's a
more responsive forum for my emotions.
And how has jazz informed your creative process?
That's like asking how water informs a fish. It's something I was
born into for sure, just like with the funk and everything else. Being
immersed in it, in the world of Art Blakey’s music, Max Roach’s music,
Wes Montgomery’s music, my father's music. That's the music he played.
We weren't allowed at that time to touch the radio dial in the car. We
weren't allowed to touch the radio in the house. A lot of us access
music for the first time through a parent or through whoever our
guardians were because we didn't have no tablet, you feel me? You got a
chance to study your parents. Watching my father enjoy music, and seeing
what he enjoyed about the music he listened to, taught me a lot about
who he was, the part that he would not openly share. Certain songs, the
way the mix will sound, the way the groove is sounding, the harmonic
structures, all of those turned into language for me at a very early
age. So I access it in the same way to be able to get to feelings I feel
inside to you guys. Trying to name what you feel, some people are very
good at summing it up. But for those whose feelings got colors and
shadows, sometimes music is the only thing that can explain it.
Jyoti, that body of work, allows me to dive into this beautiful well
of my childhood, my young adulthood, my teenage life, trying to
understand my father, trying to know him better and, at the same time,
working out my feelings about him. And my mom, the way she used chords
and stuff in the music that she's doing, both of them being really chord
savvy people, that's what's made me my ear just naturally hear
something. It's not like I'm trying to be hip. The point is that it's
something natural. There's a natural idea that comes to a composer. In
the world that I've been raised in, the culture I've been raised in,
that has been a very valid form of communication, just as talking with
you now. That's the way I raise my kids with music that's not even
recorded. We just talk in music sometimes. It's like the second language
of the home—the first language of the home and English as a second language, for sure, when you have jazz-informed parents.
One of the things that differentiates this new album from 2013’s Denderah
is the increased use of voice and, in particular, singing. What
prompted you to include more of a vocal presence on this album?
It was just a metamorphosis going on inside of me where I want to be
more free. I want to sing where my voice carries me and this allows me
to do that. Since Denderah, the deal has been like, how can I merge these worlds into a performance?
I don't want to be singing in the same song the same way for 35 years. I
don't. I'm willing to sacrifice the audience that would have me do
that. I love to reinvent music, reinvent a song. I was raised to do
that, to make it a new experience every time. I was trained to do that.
You gotta have a certain amount of undifferentiated chaos in your sound.
You gotta have a certain percentage of it so that it can engage the
chaos in other people.
Is that also kind of why you reached for those Charlie Mingus
compositions “Bemoanable Lady” and “Fables of Faubus” for the album?
Oh yeah! I totally resonate with his stuff because [of] his honesty.
His honesty was his music and his honesty was what he’d feel, his
honesty about the time he had to live in. All those things, it equates
to a certain type of innocence. That don’t mean do no harm.
Humans do harm—period. But just the innocence in as much as that he
wants you to experience who he really is and not who he thinks you’ll
like. It comes out in his music with the melodies that he has, with the
trajectory of rhythm and harmony that accompany that melody. It's very
legit, but then it's very pure.
Your Overload
full-length for Brainfeeder earned a Grammy nomination for Best Urban
Contemporary Album. I’m assuming your process has never been about that
sort of recognization as an aim, correct?
It's definitely never been the goal. You're good to pick that one up.
You did it on your own terms, the way you wanted to do it,
and put out into the world. So what's that experience like then for you
being nominated for Grammy in that context?
It was unexpected to say the least. I know some folks that really
have a team and they write down goals and complete their tasks so that
they can manifest and bring those goals to life. They really are pushing
to best by, like, international standards. For real, I just want my mom
to smile and be proud of me. I want my kids to be proud of me, to think
I'm cool, maybe, you know, sometimes. And those things kind of make
your kids think that you might be cool. At the same time, there is
nothing like playing in Leimert Parkand the elders who you've looked up to do music are coming up to going, I've heard your work, I think it’s wonderful. When
I get that, that does something for my soul. Like when my elders, I
just don't remember. My uncles or aunties can look at my work and smile.
It brings a lot of honor to my soul. It lets me know that it’s needed,
it's important. Not so much that it's the best, but that there's a place
for it.
You see somebody like Keb’ Mo’ on the red carpet and then you feel
like it's less strange for you then. He played on some of my mom’s
records, you know what I'm saying? I got a chance to hear that banjo,
all the heritage he played. And so to see him in a different place and
we see each other, I like that. I like seeing my brothers and sisters
there, and celebrating each other while we're there. We know that the
press unfortunately is only looking at a few people, because that's the
nature of the celebrity culture, of the investments that very large
companies invest into a single human being in order to be better than
all. It's a model that I feel is clunky, personally. I feel like it
needs to be streamlined and updated. And it is updating itself, more and
more each day. So I feel like, that nomination let me know that certain
things may be changing.
Something particularly notable is that the award category you
were nominated in had its name changed recently. In the light of the
Black Lives Matter protests following George Floyd’s death, it’s now
become Best Progressive R&B Album.
Yeah! We we kicked up some dust about that urban. I was part
of the gang that was doing that, definitely was getting that. [laughs] I
was kicking up a lot of dust, because I think that it just means
n*****. I feel like Tyler [The Creator] said it really well. I mean,
it's going to take more than just renaming stuff. It's going to take
people really getting into the heart of the matter. And if you’re
calling it progressive R&B, really look into that field and really
look into the pioneers of the sounds that are there. I feel like that's
good though. I think that that's very good though. We’re prog-R&B!
I
am a freelance writer, music critic, content creator, and marketing
professional born and raised in New York City. In addition to Forbes, my work on music, entertainment, and popular culture has
appeared in various outlets including Billboard, Complex, Deadspin, The
Guardian, High Times, The New York Times, Pitchfork, Remezcla, Rolling
Stone, Vibe, and Vice. I began writing on these topics in 1999 and have
done so more or less continuously since then. In January 2020, I founded
the hip-hop media brand Cabbages, beginning as a newsletter and
expanding to include a namesake podcast later that same year.
In mid-July, during a 48-minute Instagram Live interview with the Black culture and art website Afropunk, Georgia Anne Muldrow explained the meaning behind Mama, You Can Bet!,
her third album under the pseudonym Jyoti. As she put it, single
mothers forgo their own desires for the betterment of their children;
the album was written to celebrate them. “I wanted to make a song for
when a daughter sees their mother as a woman, for when the child
respects a mother’s right to have passionate love in her life,” Muldrow
said. “They say after a certain age, you’re not beautiful. They say that
this woman, who’s given her whole body [and] done the holiest thing
known to man, has now depreciated in value.” On the title track, which
also opens the album, Muldrow speaks specifically to Black mothers. And
with its distinctly West African sound—a woozy mix of goblet drums,
upright bass, and quiet piano chords, produced by Muldrow in her home
studio—it’s meant to empower a group of women who’ve been historically
mistreated and disconnected from their ancestry. “There’s many a man
who’d love your hand,” she sings. “Love is waiting for you.”
Muldrow has made a career of such empowerment. Long before being
“woke” was trendy, she and Erykah Badu coined the term in the song
“Master Teacher,” from Badu’s 2008 album New Amerykah Part One (4th World War),
where they sang about finding utopia and themselves in times of
madness. In the early 2000s, as a student at the New School in
Manhattan, Muldrow and her friend and saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin
talked about wokeness as a way to understand how they could
contextualize their music within the political battles of their everyday
lives. “Most of the conversation in our friendship was about putting
our struggles in our music because that was all we could do,” Muldrow told Pitchfork in 2018.
“[We spoke about] trying to find points of power: in your soloing, in
your composing. Most of our conversations were about things situated
around African liberation all over the world.” To that end, Muldrow, who
had been releasing rap and soul music under her own name, has long
encouraged Black people to fully embrace their heritage and fight
systemic oppression. “We play nice while they stackin’ up kills,” she
proclaimed on “Blam,” from her Grammy-nominated 2018 album, Overload. “How much we gotta grow, before we can learn to defend ourselves?” On “187,” from the collaborative Black Love & War, with the rapper Dudley Perkins, she declared, “Death to all oppressors.”
As Jyoti—a name given to her by family friend Alice Coltrane,
which means “light” in Sanskrit—Muldrow creates a wistful blend of
spiritual jazz indebted to the work of jazz greats. Through
contemplative piano and organ solos, thick bass lines and electronic
drums, she crafts a sound equally informed by the past and present, as
if she’s trying to imagine how legends like the aforementioned Coltrane
and Nina Simone would fit within the scope of modern-day jazz. It’s also
decidedly West Coast; listening to it, one hears the lush Afrocentric
influences of Los Angeles stalwarts Horace Tapscott and Charles Mingus.
There’s a certain ease to Muldrow’s Jyoti work; she borrows and riffs
on the textures of Coltrane, Tapscott, and Mingus in her jazz-centered
arrangements with panache. Yet, while she pays homage to her influences,
she doesn’t center them to the point of diminishing her own sound.
Muldrow remixes two Mingus songs on Mama, You Can Bet! For
“Bemoanable Lady Geemix,” she brightens his moody arrangement with big
electronic drums and darting synths, turning the down tempo original
into a glossy hypnotic thump. On “Fabus Foo Geemix,” she quickens the
original with an upbeat drum loop and electric bass, turning an old
Mingus cut into a funk-infused breakbeat. Equally spacious, scenic, and
forward-looking, they both use traditional jazz as the basis for
something remarkably new and vibrant.
Born in Los
Angeles to a musical family, Muldrow’s current creative direction is
rooted in her biography. Her father, Ronald, was an acclaimed funk and
jazz guitarist known for his work alongside the saxophonist Eddie
Harris. Her mother, Rickie Byars-Beckwith, is an experimental vocalist
who specializes in New Thought music
and used to sing with the jazz musicians Pharoah Sanders and Roland
Hanna. Muldrow started composing her own music at the age of 10. In
2006, the LA-based Stones Throw Records released her first full-length
album, Olesi: Fragments of an Earth, a dense collage of hip-hop, Black Liberation soul, and free jazz that foreshadowed Muldrow’s work as Jyoti.
Muldrow’s first two Jyoti albums, the free-jazz-focused Ocotea and the more straight-ahead Denderah,
were released in 2010 and 2013, respectively, before the resurgence of
interest in jazz that’s occurred in recent years. In 2015, amid a
nationwide reckoning over police killings of Black people, the music of
certain artists took on a darker, more political tone: Rappers like
Kendrick Lamar and musical collaborators like the saxophonist Kamasi
Washington responded to the moment with jazz-centered protest music that
thrust the genre back into vogue. Muldrow predates Lamar and
Washington, even though her Jyoti work was never appreciated to the same
extent. “I don’t care how that shit happens, we need breakthroughs,”
she once told me.
“I’m very thankful that people are making jazz their own, and making it
live in a unique way for them.” Still, she should be applauded for
releasing such resonant jazz at a time when few were looking. Whether
it’s bringing the term “woke” to public view or helping shape the
current state of jazz, Muldrow’s work represents thinking ahead, waiting
for people to catch up with her.
Mama, You Can Bet!
is livelier than the previous Jyoti records, leapfrogging swing,
ambient, and hip-hop through shorter instrumentals that don’t linger too
long. Across the 15-song album, Muldrow doesn’t just nod to the past.
On “Ancestral Duckets,” she summons her ancestors through meditative
chants. On “This Walk,” in particular, she sounds weary yet resolute,
lamenting state violence and how it takes a toll on mental health.
Overall, Mama feels more like a beat tape resembling the
instrumental projects she’s released under her own name. Where those
albums display Muldrow’s love of electronic funk and West Coast hip-hop,
the Jyoti work reaches back even further—to the late 1960s and early
’70s, when jazz musicians such as Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock
broadened their sounds to include traces of funk and psych-rock. Jyoti
celebrates the music of her youth while honoring the relatives and
artists who’ve passed away. “Black improvised music is my foundation for
life,” Muldrow told Afropunk’s Timmhotep Aku. “The Jyoti stuff is the
root. It’s the square root of my sound.”
That explains “Ra’s Noise (Thukumbado),” a
brassy cut featuring Benjamin, with its rhythmic scatting dedicated to
the cosmic jazz pioneer Sun Ra. Its sauntering pace and vast arrangement
is more restrained than Sun Ra’s sprawling compositions, but I can
still hear parts of him in the track, from Benjamin’s shrill saxophone
wails to Muldrow’s shouts of “interplanetary!” in the background. Sun Ra
believed that Black people would never find peace on Earth and should
live on other planets. “Ra’s Noise,” in turn, seems to score a voyage to
deep space. “Orgone” similarly finds Muldrow longing for another place
far from America’s systemic racism. “How I dream of living in Africa,”
she sings over sparse piano chords. “I wanna go back, way back to the
time when I was free.” Of course, a declaration like this isn’t
surprising for her. She’s long sought this sort of liberation for
herself and her people. Now that social unrest and police brutality have
reached a feverish clip, Muldrow’s calls for Black freedom ring louder
than ever.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Marcus J. Mooreis a contributing writer for The Nation and the author of The Butterfly Effect: How Kendrick Lamar Ignited the Soul of Black America.
“The
people keep you fresh. They keep you on your toes,” Georgia Anne
Muldrow told me over the phone last month. The prolific L.A. musician,
whose output ranges from experimental hip-hop to neo soul to jazz and
everything in between, is releasing her fifth record in four years on
Friday, and the third overall in her beats series. VWETO III(FORESEEN + Epistrophik Peach Sound)follows last year’s Mama, You Can Bet! (released under the name Jyoti), 2019′s collaboration with Dudley Perkins and VWETO II, and 2018′s acclaimed, Grammy-nominated Overload. Unlike any of the previous albums, it was put together with some “calls to action” in mind.
Thought some of the songs were around for longer, VWETO III as
an entity was made last year, “over a course of time where things were
changing in terms of different recording techniques I was trying,” said
Muldrow, harking back to techniques and inspirations from her early
years of music making. The record was also, obviously, formed during a
global pandemic that caused folks to lock down, and Muldrow is conscious
to giving listeners opportunities to reach out on her very active Instagram account.
Each of the album’s singles have been paired with those aforementioned
calls to action. “Unforgettable”, which combines 80′s-sounding synths
with 90′s G-funk, calls for vocalists to submit performances to go along
with Muldrow’s vocals on the song. “Mufaro’s Garden”, inspired by an
illustrated folktale book called Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters,
asks for visual artist submissions. On the day of the album’s release,
Muldrow will ask for dance submissions to “Slow Drag”, a throwback
Hammond-guitar-piano ditty named after the juke joint dance of the same
name. Next month, it’ll be “Action Groove”, with calls for turntable
scratch ‘n’ sampling remixes from DJs. And it’s not just the singles
that exemplify Muldrow’s desire to connect with listeners on a granular
level. Many of the songs on VWETO III refer to or are inspired by
specific eras, from the Afrofuturist jazz of “Afro AF” to the genre
tribute “Boom Bap Is My Homegirl”. That the titles are clearly
referential, too, like “Old Jack Swing” or “Synthmania Rock”, shows that
Muldrow’s not winking and nodding or trying to fool us, earnestly
inviting us to dive in.
Moreover, VWETO III is coinciding
with what Muldrow’s calling the Teacherie, classes she’s trying to
develop to spread knowledge of what she’s learned throughout her own
career, everything from philosophy to instrumental-specific classes.
Right now, from her saved Instagram story called “Teacherie!,” you can
take an assessment to fill out what you’re interested in. “It helps me
to see what skill levels people have and what they want to learn in the
class,” Muldrow said. “I seek to continue to stay open enough to make
relevant music and have relevant things to share with people.” Overall,
Muldrow is the type of artist that uses online platforms the way they’d
be used in an ideal world. Her use of NFTs, too, is noble; the album art by Cape Town-based Breeze Yoko is being auctioned off, with 50% of proceeds going to prison abolitionist organization Critical Resistance.
Even when the offline world returns–Muldrow’s slated to play Pitchfork
Music Festival on Saturday, September 11th–Muldrow’s created a blueprint
for navigating an increasingly isolating digital world, by seeking out
real connections.
Below, read my conversation with Muldrow, edited
for length and clarity, as she discusses making the record, being
inspired by African rhythms, the influence of Digital Underground, and
why her work logically extends into prison abolition. You can also catch
her tomorrow on Bandcamp Live at 8 PM CST.
Since I Left You: Why did you decide this was a good time to revisit your beats album series?
Georgia Anne Muldrow:
The people love it, you know? I always like to post beats on Instagram
and share my poetry or state of mind of what’s going on in the world
according to my people, and provide a place of joy and uplift. The voice
of the people kind of determined what songs were on there. There are
some songs that nobody’s ever heard. Different ideas, something a little
bit more energized.
Something for the people. It’s really great
that I have direct contact with them. Some of the songs are things I
like to try based on the vibes I get from their feedback. It’s great;
it’s a beautiful thing for me. I’ve gone through phases where critics
love me, but the voice of the people that really support your work is
really cool to hear. It’s like a little focus group. I just like sharing
my music with folks because it’s my way of contributing love energy to
the world in a direct, immediate way.
SILY: A lot of folks are
still staying home and needing that connection. You’re connecting with
them but also providing a platform for them to connect with each other.
GAM:
Yes. I’m way into that and seek to be expanding that in an even more
literal sense with my classroom project [Teacherie], like a live webinar
sort of thing, that enables folks to speak amongst themselves. A more
extended form of what I do on social media. An intimate look at what’s
really going on in music. They can see where my emotions end and the
music begins and try to make things seamless within their own music.
Teach what I’ve picked up along the way, because I won’t be here
forever. Spreading the love but the knowledge, too, with the music that I
share. There’s a certain quality that you can achieve if you have
patience.
SILY: Did you always know you wanted to do these
calls for action, like for vocalists on “Unforgettable”? And how did you
decide which tracks you wanted to do them for?
GAM:
It’s definitely my way of trying to promote some sort of hip hop jam in
lieu of the isolation that folks are weathering…I’m really inspired by
the early age of hip hop where everyone had different dances. They
brought their art books to the hip hop jams. The jackets with the art on
it, the MCs rapping. The breakdancing, the DJs. All of the different
things in place for it to be complete. That’s part of what got me hooked
on production. One night years ago, [when I first played] my stuff, and
folks started to dance, it got me hooked–to make somebody move.
Somebody can rap over this, somebody can dance to this or draw to this.
That’s the reason for the calls to action. Opening up a hip hop jam all
over the world. I hope it gains some momentum. That would be nice, for
more people to put themselves out there. But I do understand we live in
different times right now and people are trying to get by. I still have
to post some of the artists from “Mufaro’s Garden” and these rap videos
from “Unforgettable”.
SILY: You’re giving people an
opportunity, even if they’re just trying to get through the day, to take
a break or have a beneficial creative exercise.
GAM:
Yeah. Being creative together, and togetherness. The thinking that the
songs aren’t complete without dance. Lyrics are a certain kind of
fulfillment of music. But the movement of the body is another one. [It]
goes back to gravity. Drummers harness the power of gravity and
manipulate it so things can fall at a certain time. Same thing with
dance–[dancers] don’t manipulate gravity, but interact with it and
create an interdependence with it. When somebody’s dancing, they come
back down to the ground, and you could let that go and let gravity guide
what your dance looks like. Rhythm is a form of gravity–a form of
gravity engaging with life. I feel like movement is the fulfillment of
all the arts. I just seek to do my part.
SILY: You mentioned
being inspired by a specific early era in hip hop, and there’s a lot on
here inspired by genre or era-specific trends, like the G-funk
in “Unforgettable” and “Boom Bap Is My Homegirl”.
GAM:
[Boom bap] is one of the things that I specialize in. It’s a home base
for me. In my experience, it’s a very African point of access. A lot of
the boom bap rhythms are straight from Africa. Most of them are. Off the
shores of West Africa. I heard so many of them, from The Gambia,
Senegal, Mali. Over there, you hear so much of it. I want to be part of
that. At the same time, I might wake up and make a free jazz record. I
don’t feel like a traditionalist; I just want to preserve the culture of
Black music from this hemisphere. I love traditional ideas, but it’s
not like I’m gonna do this one idea for the sake of staying in a lane.
There’s no place that Black music hasn’t influenced, molded, shaped,
nurtured.
SILY: When was the last time you were able to perform in Africa?
GAM: I believe it might have been 2017. These years have started to run together. I don’t mind it, though. Keeps me young. [laughs]
VWETO III cover art by Breeze Yoko
SILY:
How did the songs on here with vocals come together, whether the ones
with your singing or the ones with featured artists? Did the words or
beats/melodies come first?
GAM: The beats came first
except for “Shana’s Back”. Shana Jensen is my sister; she’s the mother
of my niece. Every time she’d come over and I had an idea to compose
songs around her, they’d end up being huge songs. She’d be
like, “Bye!” [laughs] I guess she wanted something a little more
understated. I’d always end up doing big Motown sounds. There’s a song
on The Blackhouse called “Shana’s Groove”. It’s a like a reoccurring situation and character. It’s kind of funny at this point.
The
other ones, like “Unforgettable”, I’m very much matching the vibe, the
punk-funk aesthetic. Sometimes a little hook just pushes it over the
edge and gets them into the mindset I was in when thinking about it.
Other songs like “Love Call” I just wanted to sound like it was in an
arena. Arena rock, funk, Digital Underground-inspired, all the way.
SILY: Are you a big Digital Underground fan?
GAM:
I think it shows in a lot of the music I make. I don’t think I can hide
it. This record has so many examples of that. I love Shock G so much.
He was so bad, as a thinker, a philosopher, a community builder, artist,
pianist, maestro. The “Love Call” groove, “Unforgettable”, “[Old] Jack
Swing”, you can hear it. I was raised with that kind of music in my head
as a child. Unashamed to be funky and make a groove have extra grease
on it. That’s what distinguished our sound from other region’s sounds.
Getting greasy. While still doing the boom bap and all that other stuff.
For me, it was always a goal to represent where I’m from in my music in
a non-traditional way. Bringing what I love about the West Coast to
whatever I was working on.
Shock G lives in all of us. He brought
so many different vibes. A rhythmic pocket that breathes. Somewhat right
under “Atomic Dog”. It keeps you moving. It has a breath of life in it.
I’m so thankful to have lived in an era where I could hear and
experience his work.
SILY: How did “Ayun Vegas” come together?
GAM:
Ayun is my little brother. I think I’ve known him since 2014 or ‘15.
He’s quite a talent. I love his style. He’s from [New] Jersey. I love
his sense of rhythmic dynamic. His use of metaphor, double entendre. I
feel like he’s really a gifted poet. He can do all types of different
things. He’s an amazing MC–he just released a project with Jacob
Rochester called Slaps & Hugs. I’m gonna lean towards people who are creative themselves and insert themselves into everything they do.
Ayun
is very secure in being different. He came out to Vegas, and I had this
song. Usually, when I play leftfield stuff, MCs want that beat they can
crush and not feel challenged by. This song is really old. I feel like
it was made in 2016. I feel like that was the first time when somebody
was willing to rap on an idea that was out of the ordinary. It’s not
just in your face. It’s something different, but I want you to rap for
your life on this. Something more like a movie score, where you find
your character. He did it! He didn’t leave one beat behind.
He’s
rhythmically gifted and quite the poet. He almost went into pro football
but he chose music. He’s a very enterprising brother, doing all types
of apparel. He was working in the visual artist community, in the
videographer community. Any time I can showcase what it is that he got
to share, I’m there. He’s not afraid to speak the truth. This verse is
impressionistic. It’s like somebody is taking a really big brush and
making a beautiful image, strong-arming it. It’s dope. I love it.
We did another song together on the Overload album, but it didn’t make the cut. The Japanese version of Overload has
a song called “What Can We Do Now”, and it has Ambrose Akinmusire,
Ayun, and me. I’d love for that to be heard stateside, because it’s
definitely about what’s happening over here.
SILY: Why did you choose to have the proceeds for this record go to Critical Resistance?
GAM:
I’ve always wanted my music to be a tool for the motion of people. It
doesn’t stop with dance and rapping and singing and drawing. It begins
with that. Where it ends up, the movement of people coming into their
powers, truths that in order to have a more humane society, we are going
to have to throw some of this bullshit away. The spoils of enslavement.
We’ve got to get rid of those spoils so we can get to a more realistic
place of folks being cognizant of the activities that they take a part
in. Jails ain’t gonna help people feel like they’re part of the
community. They cage people and endanger their lives and run the risk of
ruining somebody’s mental, emotional, and spiritual state even if they did commit the crime they’re in there for.
There’s
a sense that all crime is committed from a place of fear. Many crimes
people are locked up for is just folks trying to find a way. I don’t see
how more fear is going to rehabilitate. The idea that punishment leads
to enlightenment. People in the public school system are taught about
some of the baddest people that ever lived–mass murders. But they’re not
the type of people held accountable. They’re who brought over the
imprisonment systems from their failed nations.
I don’t believe in
reform at all. Critical Resistance seeks to abolish prisons as we know
them. I love that their resolve is so sure and bold.
THE MUSIC OF GEORGIA ANNE MULDROW: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH GEORGIA ANNE MULDROW:
TERENCE BLANCHARD
