Spring 2021 News

One year and counting into this pandemic. So much of what I do and love has been put on ice, indefinitely.

We (Antibalas) didn’t win the Grammy this year, but to quote Bill Withers, “I’m flattered to have mattered.”

I’ve been raising a baby, composing and recording new music, restoring a 1975 Rhodes piano (and playing it). I’ve been getting together regularly with a circle of synth geeks to make improvised electronic music and collaborating with my Antibalas bandmates on new material for our next album.

I was recently appointed contributing editor at Stranger’s Guide, one of my favorite travel/culture/literary magazines. I curated a collection of music for their latest Colombia issue and will be doing a brief chat at their issue launch (online like everything else these days).

UC Berkeley invited me to do a workshop for students and resident faculty on Critical Genealogy. I helped a student and a professor get back to the 1750s in their respective family trees in the span of 45 minutes which was fun and intriguing.

Right now I’m reading “Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica” by Jovan Scott Lewis, “Intimations” by Zadie Smith, and spending far too much time than I should scrolling my Twitter feed.

So many people are dying, I’m blessed and lucky to remain alive.

Grammy Nomination "Fu Chronicles" 2020 Best Global Music Album

I am pleased to see “Fu Chronicles,” my latest work with Antibalas, nominated for a 2020 Grammy Best Global Music album, along with albums by Burna Boy, Bebel Gilberto, Anoushka Shankar and Tinariwen.

I co-produced, arranged and performed on this album, released in February 2020 on Daptone Records.

The songs on this record were the results of two decades of vision and persistence on the part of Amayo, the composer and frontman, and the scores of musicians who kept the heart of these songs beaten until the moment when they could be recorded, as well as the skill and vision of Daptone Records who enters their third decade of putting out quality music made by real musicians with a reverence for and a connection to our musical elders.

Arranging the album was painstaking— so many good parts of the songs had to be compressed, truncated, even sometimes deleted for this to be something resembling a record. A double or triple album wasn’t an option. In the end we managed to squeeze five songs into about forty minutes, the amount of time you are limited to when making a vinyl LP. (anything more and you drastically reduce sound quality, especially in the bass). In their live incarnations, the songs on Fu Chronicles could/can last anywhere from 12-25 minutes long.

We began 2020 with a lot of momentum, with a run of sold-out shows from Los Angeles to Vancouver to Denver. We went home for a few days before the tour picked up in Boston and had bookings through the end of 2020 on four continents prior to the Covid-19 shutdown. I don’t know when we’ll be able to hit the road again, but hopefully this nomination will put us/keep us on the radar till live music is back up again.

You can sign up on our mailing list or go here to listen to / buy the album.