VMP Magazine

Curtis Mayfield was a revolutionary. A guitar was his weapon of choice; the singer’s gentle voice bristled with righteous dissent. Mayfield’s music lobbied black pride and self-determination, while probing every ripple of systemic racism and urban mismanagement. It’s a tragedy that his words seem so relevant, so vital in 2017. That we still have them to sooth strange times is something to be thankful for.

As a singer and creative center of the Impressions in the 1960s, Mayfield cut rousing civil rights songs you could build a movement on. Into the 1970s, the message became grimier—his tales from the inner city not always coming pre-packed with a positive outcome. But it was the documentary-precise lyrics matched with scintillating funk orchestration that made the whole thing so thrilling. In an alternate universe, Curtis drops the bleakness to cut more digestible songs about girls and stuff to help launch his star. But in this world, the gentle genius’s mind just didn’t grind like that.

Not that Mayfield couldn’t do it all. His arsenal is stacked with doo-wop toe tappers, soulful ballads, disco floor-fillers and yearning blues jams, all scattered across the body of work of an artist who embraced the 12-inch parameters of the LP. Curtis made cohesive, functioning albums. Many are classics, some are just very, very good. All are worth your attention. Here’s 10 of the smoothest, funkiest, straight-up most noble records in the Curtis Mayfield canon. Treasure them.

Dizzy Gillespie loved to tell an anecdote about Chano Pozo, the great Cuban conguero brought to him by destiny to help forge modern Afro-Cuban jazz. It went like this: since Pozo spoke no English and the trumpeter spoke no Spanish, the two collaborators were asked how they communicated with one another. Echoing Pozo’s response, Gillespie would do an impression of his friend’s broken English. “Dizzy no speak Spanish, me no speak English,” he’d imitate, but here was the kicker: “Both speak African.”

Dizzy’s name is in the pantheon of all-time jazz greats; his face belongs on the trumpeter Mount Rushmore. John Birks Gillespie came up mirroring the fast, risk-taking style of his hero, Roy Eldridge, but it wasn’t long before he took off to a different stratosphere. Dizzy’s angular solos, performed at breakneck speed, helped usher in jazz’s bebop era in the early 1940s. Genius calcified during late-night jam sessions at Minton's Playhouse in Harlem as Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Lester Young, Kenny Clarke, Max Roach, Charlie Christian and others spun this adventurous new form into existence.

It begins with MC Keithy E, a name so typical of old-school rap monikers that it could have come from a Derrick Comedy sketch. Mercifully, the whip-smart emcee, born Keith Edward Elam to esteemed parents, would later upgrade his alias to Guru. The name was a backronym for “Gifted Unlimited Rhymes Universal,” a collection of words that captured a mastery of language to rival many fireside poets of New England.

There is Christopher Martin, emerging from the Houston black soil of Fifth Ward, a rap pilgrimage site that has produced such regional royals as Willie D, Bushwick Bill and the 5th Ward Boyz. The Martin household exposed Christopher to profound amounts of soul and jazz music, and he frequently journeyed to Brooklyn to visit his maternal grandfather, a professional jazz musician. The first time Christopher was in New York, a guy jumped in front of a subway train he was riding on. Away from these more grisly exposures, Christopher bore witness to the birth of hip-hop. Before any 12-inch rap record existed, the future DJ Premier watched the Rock Steady Crew and other B-boys toprock in slimy grimy Times Square. By age 13, he recognized the city as his spiritual home.

There’s no need to sterilize the hyperbole: London’s local jazz scene is having what you might call “a moment.” We are witness to a surge of ingenuity that may well meet the criteria of being historic; a creative boom led by young musicians finding new angles to a classic genre that feel fresh and imaginative. It’s music that captures the pluralistic flavor of the U.K. capital. In the backdrop of Brexit-era Britain and the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment — punctuated by the horrors of the Grenfell Tower fire and the Windrush scandal — this doesn’t just feel refreshing, it is vital.

In December, members of Vinyl Me, Please Essentials will receive an exclusive deluxe edition of Aretha Franklin’s I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You, the singer’s breakthrough album. This new edition was remastered all-analog from the master tapes by Ryan Smith at Sterling Sound and pressed on pink and purple swirl vinyl at GZ. You can sign up to receive it here.

To celebrate our reissue, we're republishing this essay written in March of 2017, before Aretha's death, when I Never Loved A Man turned 50.

It begins with the sound of the space-time continuum being twisted and bent. The echoing beeps and blips of Herbie Hancock’s kaleidoscopic jazz number “Rain Dance” is the soundtrack of you falling through a forbidden vortex and spiraling into another dimension. Final destination: a bizarro version of New York City. Your guides: hip-hop hippies Ishmael “Butterfly” Butler, Mary Ann “Ladybug Mecca” Vieira, and Craig “Doodlebug” Irving. The Great Gatsby’s Nick Carraway once described Roaring Twenties NYC as “always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.” Almost seven decades later, Digable Planets daring debut album repainted Gotham in a way that would have caused F. Scott Fitzgerald’s mind to swell.