Stones Throw Podcast 31 MADLIB LIVE AT HELLA INTERNATIONAL This short DJ set from Madlib includes bits of new material including Beat Konducta 5 and his unreleased Madvillain remixes, spinning live at Hella International, Stones Throw’s yearly event at Miami’s Winter Music Conference. Special thanks to host Aloe Blacc and to Hella International’s presenter VTech Phones for allowing us to make this a free event.
Back in 2002 that wasn't so obvious. At that time he was beginning the experiments that led to the Yesterday New Quintet records from 2003 to today. Peanutbutter Wolf used to slide Coleman and myself CDs of those early "rehearsals" as Madlib would call them and we spent many hours dissecting and discoursing on them and how he was changing the music.
When the possibility of the Keepintime crew going to Brasil came up I asked Madlib one night outside the Rootdown if he wanted to go. "Cmon man…. Azymuth is one of my favorite groups" he confided. I had seen many Azymuth records over the years, the Rio de Janeiro trio on Milestone with some dodgy looking covers. I knew their proto-house anthem Jazz Carnival but they weren't my favorite group.
Music has a beautiful way of making you re-evaluate what you may have discarded. Madlib is an artist that gives one new ears every couple of years if you choose to pay close enough attention. I'm happy to say that in regards to Azymuth - Madlib blew our heads open. The next time I saw him at the Rootdown, he slipped me a CD of covers. All Azymuth. To this day that CD still makes me giddy. Entrando Pelo Janela from that session made it onto the Keepintime remixes. Madlib had gone through the Azymuth catalogue and taught himself to play his favorite songs and then recorded it. Okay. Now I'm back at the record store frantically looking for those dodgy looking covers.
When we went to Brasil to recruit drummers the only name I knew I wanted for sure was Mamão. Mamão is the drummer of Azymuth. I didn't know how to pronounce his name right and indeed my pronunciation of Azymuth (Azze-muchi if you need to know how its done!) confused most Brasilians. João Parahyba of the legendary Trio Mocoto picked up the phone and called him for us and from there Ivan 'Mamão' Conti was a part of the project.
Mamao is a fantastic drummer and a warm generous person. That scene in the film where we played him the Madlib CD is a beautiful emblem of the spirit of the Brasilintime. Mamão reacted with genuine excitement at the music - singing and playing percussion along with it. Even calling in his wife to hear. We knew that a Madlib, Mamão collaboration would only take time and organization.
Mamao of course isn't simply the drummer of Azymuth. He has a long career in the studios of Rio that stretches back to the Jovem Guarda era with the rock group the Youngsters and which includes sessions for Roberto Carlos, Marcos Valle, Maria Bethania, Hyldon, Edu Lobo, Chico Buarque, Gal Costa among many others. He is also the drummer on the Dom Salvador record with the monster break! He continues to be active playing and producing many projects for Far Out Records.
In 2006 after the Premiere of Brasilintime in Sao Paulo, Madlib, Coleman and I went to Rio. We had two reasons to be there, to play at MD2's record release party and record with Mamão. On a rainy humid Rio evening we convened and after some deliberations Mamão played an hour and half of rhythms. The excitement in the room was palpable as he went through his paces. Lots of Whooos were heard and pounds were swapped.
Madlib then played a new CD of tracks that he had been working on with this project in mind and there was one that stuck with Mamao. Segura esta Onda is that track and it is really a tribute to Azymuth. Mamao ended up singing on it.
It was a great night and within two months Madlib had turned those rhythm tracks into the album you have in your hands.
Filled with songs from the greats of Brasilian music of the mid sixties to early seventies. Luiz Eca, Chico Buarque, Joao Donato, Baden and Vinicius, Marcos Valle, Dom Um Romao, Airto even George Duke gets a look in. And of course Azymuth.
This a very special set of music.
I hope you have as much fun listening to it as we did watching it being made….
Madlib's fondness for aliases obscures the fact that he's one of hip-hop's pre-eminent creative forces. Can one guy be doing all that?
By Joshua Alston
Newsweek
Updated: 6:22 p.m. ET Sept. 6, 2007
Sept. 6, 2007 - Give Madlib a compliment, and you get back a question. I told the idiosyncratic underground hip-hop producer I liked his new record, and he asked "Which one?" It's a reasonable response. Since the year started, Madlib, 33, has released four albums, counting "Liberation," a full-length collaboration with rapper Talib Kweli; a deluxe rerelease of "Champion Sound," his project with dearly departed producer J Dilla; "Yesterday's Universe," a collection of amorphous jazz fusion; and, most recently, the latest installment of his instrumental hip-hop series "Beat Konducta." This is to say nothing of the numerous tracks and remixes he's done for other artists over the course of the year.
But if one were to make a shortlist of hip-hop's workhorses, a few names might come to mind—Kanye West, Jay-Z, P. Diddy—but Madlib's name probably wouldn't make the cut. That probably has a lot to do with the peculiar attribution of his impossibly constant flow of material. He likes to make up aliases. A lot of them. For example, "Yesterday's Universe" is credited to Yesterday's New Quintet, a jazz band consisting of Madlib (going by his birth name, Otis Jackson Jr.) and four imaginary band mates, despite the fact that he's playing all the instruments. "Universe" also introduces 10 new totally imaginary groups, among them The Last Electro-Acoustic Space Jazz & Percussion Ensemble and Kamala Walker & The Soul Tribe. The reason Madlib doesn't immediately come to mind when one thinks of hip-hop's pre-eminent creative forces is the same reason he is one of hip-hop's pre-eminent creative forces: he's just really, really eccentric.
The Madlib story begins in Oxnard, Calif., a city much better known for its strawberries than for its hip-hop. 'Lib was born to Otis and Senesca Jackson, both musicians, who surrounded him with sound from a young age and whom he still considers his biggest musical influences. "My dad would take me to the studio with him, and I would touch the buttons and play with the knobs. I showed that interest at a very young age." In his 20s he started to collaborate with a group called Lootpack, who caught the attention of L.A.'s Stone's Throw Records, a label that has established itself as a place of refuge for outré musical minds. It's a perfect spot for Madlib, who since graduating from Lootpack has created a huge, quirky catalog of woozy jazz and off-kilter hip-hop.
I try to compliment him on being so prolific and he asks another question, then answers it. "Do I release a lot of music? I don't know. I guess, but not as much as I'd like to. For every album I release there are 10 more I don't. I have 20 installments of 'Beat Konducta' finished. The groups on 'Yesterday's Universe'? Every one of those groups has five albums completed." His restless creativity and Calvinist work ethic are attributed in part to a love of marijuana and the fact that he "gets bored a lot." And just as the best writers are the most voracious readers, Madlib is listening to music as much as he's making it, mostly because his hip-hop work is largely composed of samples he pulls from other albums—lounge, psychedelia, soul, whatever obscurities he can find. His most recent release, "Beat Konducta in India," is made up of beats he constructed from old Bollywood soundtracks.
Madlib takes chunks of music and recontextualizes them to create a completely new form of art. If what he does were executed with tangible materials on a canvas board and hung in an art gallery, it would probably be called "mixed-media pop art." Because it's hip-hop, though, it's often just called creative theft. This is an idea that heats the unusually laid-back Madlib up a few degrees, the notion that sampling is less musical than playing live instruments. "I don't understand that mind-frame at all," he says. "You can take a sample and chop it up, and it's like you're a conductor. It's a different skill, but it's equally musical. I'd like to see a musician try to do what I do."
By that he means make music using samples, but naturally he could easily be talking about his ability to crank out album after album. He says he makes one every week, but doesn't put an emphasis on quantity over quality. So with such a large body of good music, why doesn't Madlib get more recognition? He'd probably love to wax poetic on that subject. Unfortunately, there are hundreds of records to make and thousands of noms de plume to think up.
Free copy of "Liberation" - the Talib Kweli & Madlib collab This free download was available from midnight Jan 1st through the rest of the first week of 2007. Hope you got it.
