Born in Chicago in 1940, Herbie was a child piano prodigy who performed a Mozart piano concerto with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at age 11. He began playing jazz in high school, initially influenced by Oscar Peterson and Bill Evans. He also developed a passion for electronics and science, and double-majored in music and electrical engineering at Grinnell College.
 
In 1963, Miles Davis invited Herbie to join the Miles Davis Quintet. During his five years with Davis, Herbie and his colleagues Wayne Shorter (tenor sax), Ron Carter (bass), and Tony Williams (drums) recorded many classics, including 'ESP', 'Nefertiti' and 'Sorcerer'. Later on, Herbie made appearances on Davis' groundbreaking 'In a Silent Way' and 'Bitches Brew', which heralded the birth of jazz-fusion.
 
Herbie's own solo career blossomed on Blue Note, with classic albums including 'Maiden Voyage', 'Empyrean Isles', and 'Speak Like a Child'. He composed the score to Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 film 'Blow Up', which led to a successful career in feature film and television music.

1970s: The Headhunters and VSOP

After leaving Davis, Herbie put together a new band called The Headhunters and, in 1973, recorded 'Head Hunters.' With its crossover hit single "Chameleon," it became the first jazz album to go platinum. 
 
By mid-decade, Herbie was playing for stadium-sized crowds all over the world and had no fewer than four albums in the pop charts at once. In total, Herbie had 11 albums in the pop charts during the 1970s. His ’70s output inspired and provided samples for generations of hip-hop and dance music artists. 
 
Herbie also stayed close to his love of acoustic jazz in the ’70s, recording and performing with VSOP (reuniting him with his Miles Davis colleagues), and in duet settings with Chick Corea and Oscar Peterson.

1980s: Future Shock, Film & TV

In 1980, Herbie introduced the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis to the world as a solo artist, producing his debut album and touring with him as well. In 1983, a new pull to the alternative side led Herbie to a series of collaborations with Bill Laswell. The first, 'Future Shock', again struck platinum, and the single "Rockit" rocked the dance and R&B charts, winning a Grammy for Best R&B Instrumental. The video of the track won five MTV awards. 'Sound System', the follow-up, also received a Grammy in the R&B instrumental category. 
 
Herbie won an Oscar in 1986 for scoring the film "'Round Midnight", in which he also appeared as an actor. Numerous television appearances over the years led to two hosting assignments in the 1980s: "Rock School" on PBS and Showtime's "Coast To Coast".
 
After an adventurous 1994 project for Mercury Records, 'Dis Is Da Drum', he moved to the Verve label, forming an all-star band to record 1996's Grammy-winning 'The New Standard'. In 1997, an album of duets with Wayne Shorter, '1+1', was released.

1990s: Verve Records and Headhunters Reunited

After an adventurous 1994 project for Mercury Records, 'Dis Is Da Drum', he moved to the Verve label, forming an all-star band to record 1996's Grammy-winning 'The New Standard'. In 1997, an album of duets with Wayne Shorter, '1+1', was released. 
 
The legendary Headhunters reunited in 1998, recording an album for Herbie's own Verve-distributed imprint, and touring with the Dave Matthews Band. That year also marked the recording and release of  'Gershwin's World', which included collaborators Joni Mitchell, Stevie Wonder, Kathleen Battle, the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Wayne Shorter and Chick Corea. 'Gershwin's World' won three Grammys in 1999, including Best Traditional Jazz Album and Best R&B Vocal Performance for Stevie Wonder's "St. Louis Blues." 

2000, Album of the Year and Today

Herbie reunited with Bill Laswell to collaborate with some young hip-hop and techno artists on 2001's FUTURE2FUTURE. He also joined with Roy Hargrove and Michael Brecker in 2002 to record a live concert album, 'Directions In Music: Live at Massey Hall', a tribute to John Coltrane and Miles Davis. 
 
'Possibilities', released in August 2005, teamed Herbie with many popular artists, such as Sting, Annie Lennox, John Mayer, Christina Aguilera, Paul Simon, Carlos Santana, Joss Stone and Damien Rice. That year, he played a number of concert dates with a re-staffed Headhunters, and became the first-ever Artist-In-Residence at the Tennessee-based festival Bonnaroo.
 
In 2007, Hancock recorded and released 'River: The Joni Letters', a tribute to longtime friend and collaborator Joni Mitchell featuring Wayne Shorter, guitarist Lionel Loueke, bassist Dave Holland and drummer Vinnie Colaiuta and co-produced by Larry Klein. He enlisted vocalists Norah Jones, Tina Turner, Corinne Bailey Rae, Luciana Souza, Leonard Cohen and Mitchell herself to perform songs she wrote or was inspired by. The album received glowing reviews and was a year-end Top 10 choice for many critics. It also garnered three GRAMMY nominations, and two wins for Best Contemporary Jazz Album and Album of The Year. This marked only the second time in history a jazz album has won music’s highest honor with the last taking place almost 50 years prior.
 
To cap off his illustrious career to date, Verve records released ‘Then and Now: The Definitive Herbie Hancock’ in 2008. This essential collection is the first-ever career retrospective of the jazz visionary’s unparalleled work. 
 
Herbie Hancock also maintains a thriving career outside the performing stage and recording studio. He is the Creative Chair for Jazz for the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association, and serves as Institute Chairman of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, the foremost international organization devoted to the development of jazz performance and education worldwide. He is also a founder of The International Committee of Artists for Peace (ICAP).
 
Now in the fifth decade of his professional life, Herbie Hancock remains where he has always been: in the forefront of world culture, technology, business and music. Though one can't track exactly where he will go next, he is sure to leave his inimitable imprint wherever he lands.


OFFICIAL BIO
Regarded upon his 2006 arrival as a promising beatmaker looming in the shadows of J Dilla, Madlib, waterfalls and Dabrye, Steven Ellison -- known as Flying Lotus -- nullified all comparisons only two years later with Los Angeles. On that album, his first of five for the Warp label, Ellison distilled a uniquely crisp, spasmodic, and heady sound with elements of hip-hop, avant-garde jazz, IDM, and dubstep. While the abovementioned producers fueled Ellison, he had also been excited as a youngster by the '90s West Coast rap classics that combined programming and live instrumentation. His sound continued to develop as he put his own twist on the approach, recording with a crop of jazz musicians including the indispensable likes of bassist Thundercat and strings master Miguel Atwood-Ferguson. This process began with the turbulent 2010 set Cosmogramma and peaked in terms of acclaim in 2014 with You're Dead!, which crashed the Top 20 of the Billboard 200 and spawned the Kendrick Lamar collaboration "Never Catch Me," a Grammy nominee for Best Dance Recording. Ellison devoted a few years to various forms of film work and the operation of his revered Brainfeeder label, and returned in 2019 with Flamagra, his second consecutive album to top Billboard's Dance/Electronic chart.

Fresh Air with Terry Gross, the Peabody Award-winning weekday magazine of contemporary arts and issues, is one of public radio's most popular programs. Each week, nearly 4.5 million people listen to the show's intimate conversations broadcast on more than 500 National Public Radio (NPR) stations across the country, as well as in Europe on the World Radio Network.

Though Fresh Air has been categorized as a "talk show," it hardly fits the mold. Its 1994 Peabody Award citation credits Fresh Air with "probing questions, revelatory interviews and unusual insights." And a variety of top publications count Gross among the country's leading interviewers. The show gives interviews as much time as needed, and complements them with comments from well-known critics and commentators.

Fresh Air is produced at WHYY-FM in Philadelphia and broadcast nationally by NPR.

- http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5013


SEUN KUTI “You gave me your mud and I made gold from it” 

This famous Baudelaire quote could be the Kuti family motto, employed by father and son alike. Their songs, filled with the corruption, ignorance, malady, sadness, pollution and the many others ill that ravage contemporary Africa, are veritable musical treasures, flamboyant, jubilatory songs that make you want to get up and dance. So are you ready to dance like crazy to the misfortunes of Africa? Just be sure to dance and listen to what Africa is telling us. Manu Dibango, Seun Kuti’s friend has said that “the most beautiful flowers grow out of manure”. 

Seun’s songs, like those of his father, are these “flowers of evil” blossoming out of the shit, out of the foul smelling lagoons of Lagos, the most unbearable, yet most alive and most human of cities, the place that both Seun Kuti and his father would never dream of leaving. The illustrious Ransome Kuti family come from the Yoruba people, the largest ethno-linguistic group in Nigeria. It is said they descend from Oduduwa, the demi-god who founded the Ife kingdom in the 12th century. 

When Oduduwa died, he ignored the custom of leaving his throne to the first born son and instead left it to the cleverest and most capable last born. Since then the Yoruba people have always maintained a particular esteem for the youngest family member and it’s no different for Seun Kuti, born in 1982, the third son to be recognised by Fela Kuti... Seun (pronounced “Shehoun”) is an abbreviation from his Yoruban name Oluseun: “God has done great things”. It’s also, ironically, the first name of President Obasanjo, the Kuti family’s sworn enemy and originally comes from the Abeokuta village, like the Nobel literature prize winning Wole Soyinka, Seun’s uncle and friend. 

Long before the General Obasanjo became president in 1977 following a military coup, he had already organised a murderous assault with over a 1000 armed men on the residence of Fela, who had called his home “The independent Republic of Kalakuta,” and which is still where Seun Kuti and the musicians in the Egypt 80 orchestra live. 

Seun’s grandmother, Funmilayo, Nigeria’s most important human rights and feminist activist, was thrown out of a window to her death by Obasanjo’s troops. The satirical song, whose title is also that of the album, Many Things, starts off with an extract from a recorded speech by Obasanjo and is a good summary of his dotted 30 years in power: They built magnificent bridges but the people underneath them still had to drink the water into which they piss. 

There’s no doubt that Seun is the worthy heir of Fela Kuti’s hardline militancy. Moreover he has adopted his father’s second Yarouba name, Anikulapo (“I’ve got death in my quiver”). In other words his songs are arrows that never miss their targets; the corrupt, bribers and oppressors. Apart from the erotic Fire Dance, every track on this CD is a ravaging pamphlet against the corruption and carelessness of African leaders from Think Africa and Many Things to Na oil and African Problems. Seun had recently joined Youssou N’Dour in a major project fighting against malaria and Mosquito Song explains how the governments’ negligence in teaching the importance of hygiene is responsible for the effects of this plague that kills more people than AIDS... With the same energetic and booming voice as Fela, Seun has added his own raging rhythm clearly influenced by rap. He cites Chuck D, Dr Dre and Eminem among his musical heroes. Aged eight Seun Kuti was his father’s orchestra’s mascot travelling everywhere with them as his mother – who passed away last year – danced and sang in the chorus of Egypt 80. 

The name of Seun Kuti’s inherited orchestra might be seen as surprising. Fela’s renamed his original group, Africa 70, in 1983, after he’d read the resounding works of Senegalese historian-physician, Cheick Anta Diop, on black Africans originating from Pharaonic civilisation. The orchestra is legendary in the true sense of the word... it is Africa’s equivalent of what Duke Ellington’s jungle music did for the Afro-American Diaspora and boasts some remarkable resemblances. For example, just like Ellington, the baritone saxophone is at the heart of Kuti’s music, Afrobeat. Veteran musician Lekan Animasahun, nicknamed Baba Ani, has now relinquished his sax lead to the excellent Adedimeji Fagbemi, (stage name Showboy, who also plays the role of MC) as the instrument became too heavy for the seventy-year old. Baba has now taken on the keyboards but remains musical director of the orchestra. And what an orchestra it is! 

As soon as Egypt 80 blasted out their first notes, they instantly set things straight. It’s been easy to forget what big dance orchestras are all about, what the likes of Fletcher Henderson, James Brown and Sun Ra, Count Basie and Lionel Hampton really mean. And not forgetting George Clinton, another – very audible! – influence on Seun Kuti. But Seun’s orchestra isn’t a clone of his fathers, even if we do see as much crazy, frenetic movement on stage and even if two thirds of the orchestra’s members were already there in Fela’s time. Above all they are just the best funk group today, which is no surprise really. For the last 25 years they’ve played and rehearsed daily in Lagos at the Shrine Club... the name of the club says it all. Egypt 80 embody the major aspect that’s been lost in popular music; endurance. They been together for over 20 years and it shows. Music is after all about human relations. 

Duke Ellington once said that to play well with another musician, you have to know how he plays poker! And that’s where the magic of this album lies. Seun Kuti & Egypt 80 are more than just an orchestra, they’re a musical family who deserve enormous respect for having stayed united so long, especially since the last years of Fela and those that followed were so hard. This cohesion and longevity alone explains the absolutely terrifying precision of the rhythmic reflexes down to the thousandth of a second that makes their ultra-syncopated polyphony the perfect ‘swing’ model. It could seem passé to use a word like swing, but it’s difficult to find a better way to characterise Afrobeat at this level of expression. 

Let’s not forget that in the 1930s and 40s, Ghana and then neighbouring Nigeria adopted and adapted jazz to create “highlife”, the direct ancestor of Afrobeat, which Fela himself practised in the early days. Today Seun too makes the most of this long musical tradition. Aged eight, Seun would find himself back stage at the Harlem Apollo, the place where, little did he know, all the Afro-American musical greats from Aretha Franklin to James Brown, had begun. He watched his father sing and said to himself, “I want to sing too.” Fela laughed but let him try anyway... with success. From that moment on Seun never quit the orchestra, taking control after his father’s death from AIDS in 1997. He briefly studied music, as his father had long ago, in England. Nothing too serious though, just like his father he isn’t a virtuoso saxophonist and he knows it, but maybe that’s not what counts... 

When playing live Seun can’t help but pay homage to Fela by playing a couple of his tunes. But this first album is resolutely his, emphasising his own compositions and those of the orchestra. From the opening bars of Many Things, as with Fela’s records and perhaps even more so, ideas, words and notes whiz about with abandon. The Afrobeat magic is set in motion, the delirious, unrelenting machine carries us away and yet we can’t miss a second. The rhythm section is simply arresting. Then there’s drummer Ajayi Adebiyi, who follows in the footsteps of contemporary jazz greats such as Al Foster or Paco Séry. The two guitarists, David Obanyedo and Alade Oluwagbemiga have a very contrasting sound as they endlessly braid captivating riffs that weave the whole thing together. 

Both Emmanuel Kunnuji and Olugbade Okunade, the two trumpet players, perform remarkable solos on Many Things and Mosquito Song. So ten years after Fela’s death, the orchestra of which he was so proud continues, and there’s no doubt that he would be happy with what his son is doing and proud of the singer that he has become. Seun Kuti is indeed a great live performer with his daddy’s charisma and energy radiating from every pore. After several triumphant tours everyone who has seen him in concert knows this and he hadn’t even recorded an album, only a rare 12” vinyl... 

His first American tour, last summer, was certainly on everybody’s lips. The Egypt 80 musicians only got their visas after Barack Obama intervened and their concert in Chicago practically became a riot as hundreds of spectators leapt onto the stage, much to the distaste of the security services. The festival organiser declared it the best concert of his life! All you have to do now is listen to the album and understand why all other dance music seems so desperately mechanical, static and dull when compared to the incredible Afrobeat of Seun Kuti and Fela’s Egypt 80.

Channelled madness – the sound Dawn of Midi spent years shaping, culminating into their most mesmerising work yet

With Dysnomia, the Brooklyn-based group Dawn of Midi abandons improvisation in favour of composition, utilising sophisticated rhythmic structures from North and West African folk traditions to weave a sonic tapestry of trance-inducing grooves. From close up one may see only dots, but when stepping back an undulating image reveals itself. “We didn’t want to create anything cerebral,” says Belyamani, “we wanted something visceral, something that would awaken our instinctive dance impulses.”
Having met at California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles in 2006, bassist Aakaash Israni, pianist Amino Belyamani and drummer Qasim Naqvi found their original rapport through late night tennis matches on the campus court. The chemistry they founded there eventually led them back indoors to improvise together; something they did in total darkness to deprive themselves of all their senses except the crucial one – their hearing.
The manner, by which a trio of solely acoustic instruments ends up sounding like electronic music, has to do with the unconventional ways the group play their instruments on Dysnomia. The record comes to life in the trio’s critically acclaimed live shows, a test of endurance and trust that involves performing their hand-looped acoustic minimalism note for note, just as the compositions were recorded. Dawn of Midi’s sets are as energetic and rhythmic as a seamlessly mixed DJ-set, mesmerising fans in the same way the group’s favourite experimental and electronic acts have for decades.
The album was recorded to 2-inch tape at Waterfront Studios in Hudson, New York - a former church that was purchased and transformed into an analogue recording playground by the great engineer Henry Hirsch. Once the band visited the studio and met Henry, an expert in analogue recording equipped with a vintage Helios console, 16 and 24-track tape machines and a superb collection of microphones, it was obvious they had to record there; it was miles ahead of anywhere else they had visited. Rusty Santos then mixed the album to make sure it would hit as hard as the group’s favourite electronic albums do in spite of it being entirely acoustic.
“We wanted to make a record that sounded both musically futuristic and sonically vintage,” explains Israni, “and since the album never saw a proper international release, it is very exciting to see what might happen when more people are exposed to it. And to be aligned with Erased Tapes, whose enthusiasm for the music they release has done a lot for exposing unique instrumental and electronic music, makes it that much more interesting.”

Dysnomia will be released worldwide on June 1st, 2015 through Erased Tapes – available on 2x LP, CD and Download.

We're a metal band from Dallas, TX. Just started playing and writing together March, 2013. 

Clay-Drums
Brian-Guitar & Bass

We are currently auditioning vocalists and bass players. We will be uploading our rough drafts, concepts, and some finished pieces. Should be fun traking our "work in prgress".

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