The Secret History Of One Of The Most Sampled Albums Of All Time
In July, members of Vinyl Me, Please Classics will receive the first official U.S. release — with the original artwork — of Lafayette Afro-Rock Band’s Soul Makossa, the debut LP from a cracking U.S. funk band that recorded in France and which provided the backbone for much of early rap music. You can can sign up here.
In 1971, the Bobby Boyd Congress fled Long Island due to funk saturation and fear of death. Both were ineluctable realities that could torment any band aspiring to breakthrough in a New York City convulsing with kinetic break beats, opiate addiction, and the casket lottery of the Vietnam draft. So in the tradition of Josephine Baker and James Baldwin, the band decamped for the city of lights.
No one would mistake the Paris of 1971 for a funk mecca. The suave chansons of Jacques Brel and Serge Gainsbourg’s Lolita-lite baroque pop ruled the airwaves as a Gaullist government attempted to erase the lingering specter of 1968’s near-revolution. The change offered the Roosevelt natives the potential for adventure and opportunities ostensibly occluded in a five boroughs world controlled by funk linchpins, Mandrill, the Fatback Band and B.T. Express.
Things didn’t go as planned. Despite his prodigious gifts as a singer, songwriter, saxophone player and bandleader, Bobby Boyd failed to even become the most famous musician named Bobby Boyd (a Texan country songwriter outranks him). His eponymous 1971 debut later became a holy grail of rare groove fetching up to 1500 Euro’s a copy, but the limited edition run of 300 vanished into the Gauloises-wreathed attics of the left bank. Swiftly reconsidering his decision to expatriate, Boyd returned to American anonymity, leaving his band to parse the New Wave wanderings of a post-Weekend world.
The Americans in Paris established their habitué inside the clubs of the Barbes district, a swath of the 18th arrondissement largely populated by North African immigrants. Amidst the avenues of vegetable stalls and halal butchers, kebab stands and African hair salons, the New Yorkers conjured a vulcanized funk, durable and lubricious, adopting the ras el hanout of the neighborhood to their loose-limbed American swing. Discovery was imminent and arrived via a peripatetic Parisian harmonica player who had once attempted to teach French to a pre-adolescent Stevie Wonder under the orders of Berry Gordy.
His name was Pierre Jaubert, a raconteur whose storied resume almost reads like a one-man “Losing My Edge.” The stories bequeathed seem almost too surreal to be true. He was in Detroit in 1962, teaching Lil Stevie how to sing in French and turning down Gordy’s offer to run Motown’s international operations (Pierre hated the idea of being in an office). He met Smokey Robinson and watched the sorcery of Motown’s in-house Merlin, Norman Whitfield, brewing masterpieces inside that converted house studio, Hitsville USA, with low-hanging ceilings and a grand piano. He rubbed shoulders with Marvin Gaye and flirted with a teenaged Diana Ross, before “settling” for Mary Wells.
He was in Chicago to witness the birth of Windy City soul, catching the nascent sessions of Curtis Mayfield and Phil Upchurch and the Dells. If you listen close on some of those Kennedy-era spells, he once claimed you could hear him breathing. Then sometime shortly before the Age of Aquarius took hold, he returned to Paris because in America, everything seemed to be at “right angles.”
The story somehow only gets more random. In Paris, Jaubert doubles down on his jazz roots, laying down tracks with Charlie Mingus and Archie Shepp. He doesn’t merely dabble in the blues, he commences sessions with John Lee Hooker and Memphis Slim. On a return sojourn to America, a chance encounter with a Bay Area packing clerk named John Fogerty leads to the discovery of Creedence Clearwater Revival.
“The subsequent alchemy would yield a grease fire funk classic that became one of the most sampled albums in hip-hop history.”
“He told me, oh I have a group,” Jaubert recalled in 2011. “I heard his tape. It was very good. So when I spoke to Saul [Zaentz, the owner], I said, ‘Hey, the guy who is working for you, you should record him.’ So that is how Creedence Clearwater Revival ended up on Fantasy records.”
As a reward for ushering “Proud Mary” into the world, Jaubert successfully finessed the rights for a friend to release CCR’s music in France. That victory led to Jaubert being given free rein to indulge any sonic whim. This is when the Lafayette Afro-Rock Band finally glides into the mise en scene.
In the wake of their front man’s flight, the one-time Congress rebranded themselves as “Ice,” an alias they were still using when Jaubert received a phone call from a friend. Said friend had a studio and recognized Ice’s talent, but didn’t know what to do with an American soul-funk crew. So he called up his friend Jaubert, the house producer at Parisound Studios. In Jaubert’s 2011 recollection, the call went a little something like this: “Look, I have these guys from New York. Please take these guys. I don’t want to see them again. They want money for their music, please take care of that. Bye Bye.”
Money was a practical consideration almost entirely absent from the subsequent proceedings. Their initial foray with Jaubert, Each Man Makes His Own Destiny, flopped miserably. The music was fine, but it was commercial kryptonite. If not for a chance conversation with the Cameroonian afro-funk legend, Mani Dibango, it’s possible that it would’ve been the last anyone ever heard of the transplanted New Yorkers. But Dibango insisted that Jaubert should continue working with them and try to score them a hit. First, there was the matter of their name.
“I could not call it Ice, because first legally you cannot register the name Ice. There are many names like this that you cannot record under or register commercially. That is why you have so many variations. Ice Cube, Ice T, everybody is using Ice,” Jaubert said in 2011. “I thought, I’ll make a name that is easy to register to record under. In France we use complicated names, so the Lafayette Afro-Rock band, that name was kind of complicated. So I invented that and registered the name immediately. It was a group that did not exist. There was no such group as [The] Lafayette Afro-Rock Band. I had to invent them.”
Inspired by what he’d learned from Gordy, Jaubert conceived the Lafayette players as a rotating ensemble that could double as the Parisound house band — the Gallic equivalent of Motown’s Funk Brothers. Jaubert owned the name and swapped in a fungible cast of guest players, but the core trinity was comprised of Frank Abel, the keyboard player and pianist; Michael McEwan, the electric guitar player; and Arthur Young, who handled drums and percussion. The subsequent alchemy would yield a grease fire funk classic that became one of the most sampled albums in hip-hop history.
Source: http://www.vinylmeplease.com/magazine/classics-soul-makossa-july-18/
They planned to ‘shoot off some rounds.’ Two men ended up fatally shot in the head
News from Tacoma Washingtion
Two men shot to death inside a car in University Place went with their alleged killer to fire off random rounds while driving around, court documents state.
On Tuesday, Pierce County prosecutors charged Javgier Valenzuela Feliz, 30, with two counts of second-degree murder for the May 14 deaths of Adrian Valencia, 19, and Wilberth Acala, 22.
A 21-year-old man also arrested in connection with the homicides has not been charged. He was released to the the U.S. marshals earlier this month on an unrelated matter.
Read more——–> https://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/crime/article213911514.html#storylink=cpy
Terry Crews testifies before the U.S Senate sexual assault case
https://www.facebook.com/time/videos/10155829082421491/
Officer charged in Antwon Walker’s Murder
He got charged but will he get convicted? We know the answer. #BLACKLIVESDONTMATTER #BLACLIVESMATTER?
Joe Jackson, patriarch of Jackson 5 family dead at 89
Talent manager Joe Jackson, father of Michael Jackson and manager of the Jackson 5, has died at age 89, ABC13’s sister station in Los Angeles has confirmed.
READ MORE——> http://abc13.com/entertainment/joe-jackson-father-of-michael-jackson-dies-at-89/3662929/
House GOP plan would cut Medicare Medicaid to balance budget
I’m sure the TRUMP supporters will blame Obama
Original article written June 19, 2018
House Republicans released a proposal Tuesday that would balance the budget in nine years — but only by making large cuts to entitlement programs, including Medicare, that President Trump vowed not to touch.
The House Budget Committee is aiming to pass the blueprint this week, but that may be as far as it goes this midterm election year. It is not clear that GOP leaders will put the document on the House floor for a vote, and even if it were to pass the House, the budget would have little impact on actual spending levels.
Nonetheless the budget serves as an expression of Republicans’ priorities at a time of rapidly rising deficits and debt. Although the nation’s growing indebtedness has been exacerbated by the GOP’s own policy decisions — including the new tax law, which most analyses say will add at least $1 trillion to the debt — Republicans on the Budget Committee said they felt a responsibility to put the nation on a sounder fiscal trajectory.
“The time is now for our Congress to step up and confront the biggest challenge to our society,” said House Budget Chairman Steve Womack (R-Ark.). “There is not a bigger enemy on the domestic side than the debt and deficits.”
The Republican budget confronts this enemy by taking a whack at entitlement spending. Lawmakers of both parties agree that spending that is not subject to Congress’s annual appropriations process is becoming unsustainable. But Trump has largely taken it off the table by refusing to touch Medicare or Social Security, and Democrats have little interest in addressing it except as part of a larger deal including tax increases — the sort of “Grand Bargain” that eluded President Barack Obama.
The House Republican budget, titled “A Brighter American Future,” would remake Medicare by giving seniors the option of enrolling in private plans that compete with traditional Medicare, a system of competition designed to keep costs down but dismissed by critics as an effort to privatize the program. Along with other changes, the budget proposes to squeeze $537 billion out of Medicare over the next decade.
The budget would transform Medicaid, the federal-state health-care program for the poor, by limiting per capita payments or allowing states to turn it into a block-grant program — the same approach House Republicans took in their legislation that passed last year to repeal the Affordable Care Act (the repeal effort died in the Senate, but the GOP budget assumes that the repeal takes place). It also proposes adding work requirements for certain adults enrolled in Medicaid. Changes to Medicaid and other health programs would account for $1.5 trillion in savings.
Social Security comes in for more modest cuts of $4 billion over the decade, which the budget projects could be reached by eliminating concurrent receipt of unemployment benefits and Social Security disability insurance.
The budget also proposes a number of other cost-saving measures, some of which could prove unpopular if implemented, such as adding more work requirements for food-stamp and welfare recipients and requiring federal employees — including members of Congress — to contribute more to their retirement plans. It assumes repeal of the Dodd-Frank Act that regulated banks after the financial crisis 10 years ago, something Congress recently rejected in passing a banking bill into law that softened some of the key provisions of Dodd-Frank but left its overall structures intact. And the budget proposes $230 billion in cuts from education and training programs, including consolidating student loan programs and reducing Pell Grant awards.
The budget also relies on rosy economic-growth projections and proposes using a budgetary mechanism to require other congressional committees to come up with a combined $302 billion in unspecified deficit reduction.
House Republicans released a proposal Tuesday that would balance the budget in nine years — but only by making large cuts to entitlement programs, including Medicare, that President Trump vowed not to touch.
The House Budget Committee is aiming to pass the blueprint this week, but that may be as far as it goes this midterm election year. It is not clear that GOP leaders will put the document on the House floor for a vote, and even if it were to pass the House, the budget would have little impact on actual spending levels.
Nonetheless the budget serves as an expression of Republicans’ priorities at a time of rapidly rising deficits and debt. Although the nation’s growing indebtedness has been exacerbated by the GOP’s own policy decisions — including the new tax law, which most analyses say will add at least $1 trillion to the debt — Republicans on the Budget Committee said they felt a responsibility to put the nation on a sounder fiscal trajectory.
“The time is now for our Congress to step up and confront the biggest challenge to our society,” said House Budget Chairman Steve Womack (R-Ark.). “There is not a bigger enemy on the domestic side than the debt and deficits.”
“I see reasons to believe our health system can solve this crisis.” – David Calabrese, Chief Pharmacy Officer, Optum Rx
Read More
The Republican budget confronts this enemy by taking a whack at entitlement spending. Lawmakers of both parties agree that spending that is not subject to Congress’s annual appropriations process is becoming unsustainable. But Trump has largely taken it off the table by refusing to touch Medicare or Social Security, and Democrats have little interest in addressing it except as part of a larger deal including tax increases — the sort of “Grand Bargain” that eluded President Barack Obama.Trump promised over and over to ‘save’ Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Will he?
President Trump promised over and over to ‘save’ Medicare and Social Security. Will he? (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)
The House Republican budget, titled “A Brighter American Future,” would remake Medicare by giving seniors the option of enrolling in private plans that compete with traditional Medicare, a system of competition designed to keep costs down but dismissed by critics as an effort to privatize the program. Along with other changes, the budget proposes to squeeze $537 billion out of Medicare over the next decade.
The budget would transform Medicaid, the federal-state health-care program for the poor, by limiting per capita payments or allowing states to turn it into a block-grant program — the same approach House Republicans took in their legislation that passed last year to repeal the Affordable Care Act (the repeal effort died in the Senate, but the GOP budget assumes that the repeal takes place). It also proposes adding work requirements for certain adults enrolled in Medicaid. Changes to Medicaid and other health programs would account for $1.5 trillion in savings.
Social Security comes in for more modest cuts of $4 billion over the decade, which the budget projects could be reached by eliminating concurrent receipt of unemployment benefits and Social Security disability insurance.
The budget also proposes a number of other cost-saving measures, some of which could prove unpopular if implemented, such as adding more work requirements for food-stamp and welfare recipients and requiring federal employees — including members of Congress — to contribute more to their retirement plans. It assumes repeal of the Dodd-Frank Act that regulated banks after the financial crisis 10 years ago, something Congress recently rejected in passing a banking bill into law that softened some of the key provisions of Dodd-Frank but left its overall structures intact. And the budget proposes $230 billion in cuts from education and training programs, including consolidating student loan programs and reducing Pell Grant awards.
The budget also relies on rosy economic-growth projections and proposes using a budgetary mechanism to require other congressional committees to come up with a combined $302 billion in unspecified deficit reduction.
Overall, the partisan proposal is reminiscent of the budget released in 2011 by now-House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), who was then the Budget Committee chairman and advanced a bold proposal attacking entitlements, slashing spending — and creating lines of attack for Democrats once Ryan became Mitt Romney’s vice presidential running mate on the GOP ticket the following year.
Democrats were quick to criticize the GOP proposal while contending that Republicans were opening themselves up to election-year attacks by releasing it at all.
“The 2019 Republican budget scraps any sense of responsibility to the American people and any obligation to being honest,” said Rep. John Yarmuth (Ky.), the top Democrat on the Budget Committee. “Its repeal of the Affordable Care Act and extreme cuts to health care, retirement security, anti-poverty programs, education, infrastructure, and other critical investments are real and will inflict serious harm on American families.”
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2018/06/19/house-gop-plan-would-cut-medicare-social-security-to-balance-budget/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.afc7a9a7335f
Elfen’s Neosoul Hip Hop New Music Tuesday Flux By Deca
Deca FLUX release date June 15th 2018
I have always been drawn to creative. The mad crazy artist. Music with a rhythm and a beat brings out my words, sentances and phrases for a blog, a quote or a poem. This weeks what’s new to me is old to you. What old to you is new to me comes from Deca. Deca’s new album flux. Gives you that instrumental hip hop flow. With a head bobbin’ beat. Say what you want about sampling. The samples he uses are EVERYTHING.
DECA BIO
Deca makes use of an experimental style as a doorway to a stylistic everchanging evolution and not as a goal in itself. Great inventor of oneiric charms, he was at first inspired by the cosmic school and later he created his personal alchemy of tradition and innovation, blending natural and synthetic sounds. He has found inspiration in different musical genres but always remaining elusively versatile, so as not to be easily identified in one particular style.
He is an eclectic performer, his music ranges from pure electronic to a minimalist pianist-oriented style, but he doesn’t like to follow trends, he rather changes continuously following his own path and tries to avoid the mainstream. A path which began in predictable ways (descriptive music, techno-pop) and then led him to compose the more complex and cryptic, obscure concept-albums he has since produced. Famous music critics and musicians appreciate some Deca’s works as important chapters of electronic sound evolution, putting titles as “Simbionte” inside the gotha of contemporary avantgarde artists.
One of his recognized peculiarities is a great mastery of the sound: in his compositions he creates and works, almost with a manic care, on the tones and he often ends up with embryonic ideas for other future albums. He often has been defined as a sound alchemist.
He has been part of the international electronic and industrial scenes for twenty years now, but he has always preferred to make editorial choices without compromising his individuality in the slightest, with a limited production of records addressed to an audience of lovers and collectors and a distribution reduced to specialized routes. He has also contributed to other projects as well, involving himself in different artistic fields: for example in theatre, cinema, multimedia, even to ballet and giving shape to his personal research into the contamination of the genres.
He has an MA degree and one in geography, he studied classical piano for long years and has become quite versatile with the synthesizer in the studio as well as on stage. His career began back in the 80s, and while playing the piano on a mainly classical basis he made use of sequencers and electronic sounds. He then developed his first recordings in his first two official albums.
Deca is hardcore band from Vrnjačka Banja, Serbia. It consists of four sick maderfakers: Luka, Ivan, Ognjen and Miša. Band was formed in 2010 and they’re still thrashin’ and smashin’.
Bio Source: https://www.last.fm/music/Deca/+wiki
Another decades-old Tacoma murder solved? Suspected killer of 12-year-old Michella Welch arrested
Michella Welch 1986 murdered Tacoma WA
NEWS from Tacoma WA
Possibly solving a second high-profile cold case murder in two months, Tacoma police on Wednesday arrested a man suspected of killing 12-year-old Michella Welch more than three decades ago.
Officers booked Gary Charles Hartman, 66, into the Pierce County Jail just after 3:15 p.m. on suspicion of first-degree murder, jail records show. Prosecutors are expected to charge him Thursday.
Police declined to talk about the arrest or how they linked Hartman to Welch’s death. A news conference set for Friday is expected to provide answers.
Read more——–> http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/crime/article213538554.html#storylink=cpy
White supremacists run Tacoma tattoo parlor protesters claim
A group called Tacoma Against Nazis protested Friday outside a tattoo shop on East 72nd Street. The group contends the shop’s owners are affiliated with white supremacy groups, an accusation the shop’s co-owner denies. David Montesino [email protected] LOCAL White supremacists run Tacoma tattoo parlor, protesters claim
NEWS from Tacoma Washington
NOTE: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Nazi flags had flown outside the tattoo shop. They were instead flying outside an employee’s home.
About three dozen members of Tacoma Against Nazis protested Friday outside a Tacoma tattoo parlor, carrying signs that read, “Tacoma is for lovers not haters” and “I thought we were done with Nazis tattooing people in 1945.”
Several politicians were part of the protest, including state Rep. Laurie Jinkins, D-Tacoma, and Tacoma City Council members Catherine Ushka and Justin Camarata.
We want to make sure they know they’re not welcomed,” Jinkins said. “Their beliefs aren’t welcomed.”
On Thursday, one of the co-owners of the shop in the 1100 block of East 72nd Street told The News Tribune he is not a racist.
“I’m not a Nazi,” the man said.
He urged the newspaper to interview people associated with the Black Lives Matter movement instead.
“That’s OK, right?” he said. “But if you’re white and you have any kind of pride it’s a big deal.”
He declined further comment.
Tacoma Against Nazis member Chuck Knigge said the group has multiple pieces of evidence and documentation that show the shop’s owners and staff are affiliated with hate groups.
“What sold me was the plethora of pictures, the tattoos they’ve done on people,” Knigge said.
On occasion, flags associated with white supremacy have flown outside the home of a shop employee, members of the group said.
The group said they were under no illusion that the protest would shut the business down. Awareness was its No. 1 goal, spokeswoman Amanda Westbrooke said.
“It’s awareness for the people of Tacoma that a neo-Nazi hate group has opened up a business in the most diverse neighborhood in Tacoma,” Westbrooke said.
In February, the website for Puget Sound Anarchists posted a story alleging that the owner and associates of the tattoo shop were members of the Northwest Hammerskins.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that tracks hate groups and hate crimes, lists the Hammerskins as a “Racist Skinhead” hate group.
Read More——-> http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/article213532784.html