I am currently in Brooklyn attending the School for Improvisatory Music’s Winter Intensive. It has been an eye-opening week of masterclasses, philosophical/spiritual discussions, great playing, and wonderful people from all around the world. I will write a post about my experience as soon as I get back to North Carolina.
In the meantime, I was surprised (and giddy) to find out that the Independent Weekly has written an article about the Top 10 things to listen for in the Triangle in the upcoming year, and The Beast is number three! Thanks for the words of encouragement, Grayson; we strive to challenge ourselves in rehearsal and performance to combine our influences in unexpected ways that are meaningful for us and exciting for the audience. I think this is the first time there has been press describing what The Beast seems to be all about. See what you think:
One of the Triangle’s new bright lights, Durham’s The Beast subverts a half-dozen stereotypes, and that’s just staring at the surface: The Beast, for instance, isn’t a metal band, and the name’s not a reference to malt liquor. Instead, the multi-racial quartet makes live band hip-hop that opens its doors to history—Bob Marley covers, Gil Scott-Heron references, soul vocals, jazz style and taste—as emcee Pierce Freelon (yes, he has a mom) implodes preconceptions about being black in Durham. Listen to his “More2Me,” and relish in the possibilities for them and, well, for us.
I woke up at 4:30am this morning to drive an hour to Greensboro with The Beast where we appeared on WFMY Channel 2′s Good Morning Show. I am about to take a power nap before I can make it through the rest of the day, but while I sleep you can enjoy the clip which has already been posted to the WFMY website. Check it out!
This weekend is the Shakori Hills Grassroots Music Festival and The Beast is appearing on the main stage Friday 10/10 at 5:45pm. If you want to hear some great music and relive your Woodstock days, head on down to Silk Hope, NC!
Hey all, this is a big week for The Beast. I just spent six hours at The Kitchen Mastering with sonic wizard Brent Lambert yesterday, putting the final touches on our debut CD. As a band, we’ve decided to eschew the traditional pattern of EP –> album for a variety of reasons. Instead we are collecting our artistry and resources around a project entitled “In The Belly of the Beast.” This will come in three installments (I like serial deliverables!) of our own music, plus intriguing graphic art by Durham’s own Gabriel Eng-Goetz. The first chapter is called “Belly” and will be released this coming Thursday at a free show at the Broad Street Cafe in Durham. Besides the band, the album features an all-start cast of North Carolina’s finest jazz and soul musicians, including Nnenna Freelon, YahZarah, Mark Wells, Scott Sawyer, the See and Harvest Gospel Choir, and the Orquesta GarDel horns. Ridiculous, right? I had a blast arranging for and recording with each of those artists.
I’m particularly excited for the next morning when we’ll be a featured interview on NPR/WUNC’s “The State of Things.” We’ll be talking to Frank Stasio live and also performing live in the studio. I’ve recorded interviews for Zenph to tape but never for live broadcast, so this will be a first for me. I’m thrilled, but a little nervous of course.
The show is at Broad Street Cafe, 1116 Broad Street, in Durham, North Carolina. It is free and starts around 10pm. They have a new pizza oven and lots of beers on tap, albums will be only $5, I’d love to see you there! I’ll soon post where you can get the album at local stores, and an e-tailer will be set up soon enough. I’ll also post a track here on my site for your listening pleasure.
To tune into “The State of Things”, set your dial to 91.5 FM at 12pm Friday 9/12, or if you aren’t local catch the online stream here.
****UPDTATE 09/12/08 4:36pm****
The show went great! Here is the link to download the mp3.
Hey all, I’m writing to you from the mountains of Eastern Tennessee where I am resting and relaxing before a big push on all fronts (Beast, GarDel, my own jazz group, Zenph research). I am writing this post on a dial-up connection. Do you realize how addicted we’ve become to fast bandwidth and processing? Waiting one minute for Google News to load is apparently the most excruciating thing ever. And you can just forget about images. But the sound of the modem brings me back to childhood. That was when you had to reboot your Mac LC so that you could plug in your external CD-ROM drive via SCSI so you could load up your encyclopedia program so you could do homework.
But I digress. Next week I’ll be announcing some really big things for my hip hop band, The Beast. For now we’ll say that it involves dope beats, a gospel choir, Nnenna Freelon, crazy-awesome graphic art, NPR, and a club near you.. I haven’t properly introduced The Beast on this blog, so I’ll give some background, pics, music next week. In the meantime, I’m really excited to share with you the result of our first year’s work together. It will all have to wait for my cable modem though..
