interview

a lil somethin somethin. ish speaks on the historic tour that him and tendai have been on with my morning jacket.

ish on the shabazz-my morning jacket shows by trent moorman for the stranger

or read text only below:

Ish on the Shabazz - My Morning Jacket Shows

Posted by Trent Moorman on Fri, Sep 7, 2012 at 11:56 AM

Shabazz Palaces opens for My Morning Jacket tonight at Marymoor Park. A unique and charged pairing of preeminent bands. On August 19th, they did a show together at New York’s Williamsburg Park. Shabazz’s Palaceer Lazaro (Ishmael Butler) spoke moments ago about the proceedings.

 Are you a MMJ fan? How did these Shabazz and MMJ shows come about?
Ish: Yes. I know and like their music. I got into it seven or eight years ago. They seem like they know and like our music as well. We met them when we did that show in New York and they talked about listening to Black Up. I think we have a mutual sensibility and appreciation. As far as teaming with them to have us open up, I think it was their idea to give us a look and help give us exposure to some people that wouldn’t ordinarily see us. They kinda big bro’d us up, looking out for us, and wanted to hang out and chill. They’re of that size and stature where they can do what they want, and I think this was just something they wanted to do. It’s really cool of them to think of us in that way. The show we did with them in New York was awesome. They run an amazing set up. Their show is off the hook, their production, every aspect. It’s good to see that level of fun and enjoyment mixed with the professionalism. It’s inspiring. A+.

They play 18 minute songs live.
Oh yeah. They’ll get on a riff, and carry it. That’s the part I dig the most. Of course they have good song structure, but sometimes they take off on a riff, and that shit is just nasty. Dude picks up the Flying V! And starts shaking it up. It’s something to see.

What about a My Morning Palaces Collabo Album?
If they’re up for doing some collaborations, we’d definitely do it. I spoke to Jim James a little bit, and he has a rig with him on the tour. If something happens, I’m with it. I got a lot of respect for those guys. After seeing them live, it put the icing on top. They’re serious. You never know. I don’t want to say anything though, like that it's definitely happening. No tabloid shit [laughs]. Nothing's been confirmed. But if it’s possible, it would be cool.

barksdale corners video

a not-really-official-but-approved video for 'barksdale corners', although it's labelled something else. really intoxicating, psychedelic meditation on blackness by christian j peterson, the dude who designs most of shabazz palaces' visual output including album art. barksdale corners is a subliminal masterpiece, whose lyrics dance deeply and cinematically.

(unmissable) interview

utah's city weekly magazine just published this fantastic interview with ish by austen diamond. it gives us as great a glimpse into his creative process as we've gotten so far and he himself also lays out why his poetry has the impressionistic, collage quality that has mesmerised listeners for the last twenty years. click here to read it in its original home or read below for the cut n pasted words.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Shabazz Palaces

Ishmael Butler: All questions, no answers

Some influences: Alain LeRoy Locke, Nikki Giovanni, James Baldwin, Last Poets

By Austen Diamond

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass,” wrote Anton Chekhov.

Although removed by more than 100 years, Ishmael Butler (aka Palaceer Lazaro) epitomizes the Russian existential writer’s show-don’t-tell style—the essence of this quote—and his disregard for traditional story structure. Chekhov also believed that what is obligatory of an artist is not to provide answers, but to properly pose questions.

In this vein, Butler, the rhyming half of Seattle’s Shabazz Palaces, pushes the boundaries of storytelling in hip-hop. First, there was the band members’ anonymity—virtually unheard of within a genre of celebrity names—during the first two EP releases, allowing merit alone to gain notoriety without relying on the successes of Butler’s previous group, Digable Planets.
Butler also offers mysterious, semi-cryptic titles, like “An Echo From the Hosts That Profess Infinitum” and “Endeavors for Never (The Last Time We Spoke You Said You Were not Here. I Saw You Though.)” from the critically acclaimed 2011 release Black Up.

Each song shows its own “glint of light on broken glass” in a smattering of vignettes written seemingly as stream of consciousness. Butler would argue that these several-lines-long scenes sewn together are the most realistic approach to penning a narrative.

“A film or book is a nonrealistic view of life,” says Butler, who then describes a fictional scenario of a couple cyclically falling in and out of love. “It seems abstract [as it’s happening]. You can pick out those parts and then, later, put it in line [for a story]. But that’s not the way life goes; it’s not the way you hear, think, feel.

“I’m trying to reflect what’s happening to me and the world more realistically than sitting down and filtering out a linear story,” says Butler, whose songs, rich in imagery, allow open interpretation, much like a work of non-narrative contemporary film art. It poses questions and gives nary an answer. For example, “Are you ... Can you ... Were you? (Felt)” muses on the illusion of time, the problem with materialism, the adoption of television over literature, the struggles of African-Americans and so on.

Also within that song are clues to Butler’s writing processes: “Aw, dude/ The spicier the food/ When you chew, fuck their rules/ It’s a feeling.” Furthermore, as he speaks via phone from his home, the way he describes his creative process isn’t dissimilar to how a medium would describe how they channel a deity from another realm.

“When I’m making music, I don’t feel like I’m doing something, as much as I feel like something is happening to me,” Butler says.

The environment has to be perfect—the lights dimmed, the proper tools put in place and Butler relaxed and calm. And then “it” just comes. He has difficulty (or maybe it’s reluctance) describing the process further, but gives the allusion of it being meditative—hypnotic even.

Butler doesn’t think too much—about the lyrics or the industrial, minimalistic beats that he produces with Tendai “Baba” Maraire. “I don’t necessarily like all the sounds or the rhymes [that come out], but I believe in them,” he says. “[It’s like] you’re spiraling up or down or to the side. But when your instincts come, that’s where it’s at.”

Yet it’s not all from a higher power; there is responsibility on his end, be it culling sources of inspiration or habitually jotting down lyrical sketches. He cites Harlem Renaissance poets—like Nikki Giovanni, Alain LeRoy Locke, James Baldwin and, especially, The Last Poets—as shaping his worldview and opening his eyes to wordplay and the power of language. These were tradition-challenging writers whose fresh and clever approach was derived from their urban environment. Butler is doing just that now. His work is not derivative of these cats, just informed.

“Everything is born of something else,” Butler says. On his phone, there are roughly 2,500 recorded notes—phrases, sketches, rhymes—but he rarely goes back to them as a direct source material. “Everything that I record or think about or write down or whatever, even if you never see it again, it all leads to a song in one way or another.”

The whole process is magical, he says. “What’s happening is some divine stuff. You’re channeling and you feel like you’re plugged up into something. It’s hard to describe or chronicle. I’m not able to do it. I’m always amazed when cats can do that ... maybe when I’m older [I will be able to].”

It’s admirable to deal in the currency of mystery, though. After all, “It’s a feeling.”
Even if Butler could describe his creative process, he probably wouldn’t—that’s not his ethos. He shows glints of light on the broken glass of his fractured storytelling, and the listerner can extrapolate meaning. Butler’s job isn’t to provide answers, it’s to ask questions. 


SHABAZZ PALACES
w/ Dumb Luck, Ruddy CarpelThe Urban Lounge, 241 S. 500 EastMonday, Sept. 10, 9 p.m.$12ShabazzPalaces.com

video & tune: flying lotus "until the quiet comes"

directed by the mysterious kahlil joseph, who also did two videos for shabazz palaces. i see why ish and this man get along: both have a non-linear, impressionistic or collage approach to their respective artforms. the interview above gives a fascinating point of view from ish that this is how life is actually perceived. i would add that that's how we 'should' be experiencing life but the modern world has many of us filing away all the fresh gleaming experiences and perceptions of our days into 'dusty categories' so we are no longer 'alive' to the present moment, and are living these shadow lives in our minds. i've found that reconnecting with my creativity has meant recognising this fact and using cunning (rather than willpower) to turn the situation around. anyway! here it is:

some good writing on shabazz:

http://thefiddleback.com/issue-items/the-rebirth-of-slick-shabazz-palaces-live

apologies for the lack of updates, ishmaelites.

tune: hemisphere ~ paradis

(2012, beats in space records) one of the best music videos i've seen since "are you... can you... were you... (felt)"

Music & Water: Ish interviews Quincy !

Read in its proper home ">here on the City Arts magazine's website. A city that has a free arts magazine of this caliber is somewhere I am going to live in one day...

Music and Water
June 25, 2012 | by City Arts Staff

At Garfield High School in the Central District, there’s an auditorium named after Quincy Jones—composer, producer, 27-time Grammy winner, class of 1948. Ishmael Butler played his first-ever gig there before graduating in ’87 and now leads Shabazz Palaces, the most vital musical project in Seattle today.

Quincy reminds me of Seattle. A lot of cats from Seattle, when I see them around the world, they have this centrifugal force. Especially Garfield people, people from the Central. In my grandparents’ generation, most people who ended up in this corner were daring people who went out on a limb, who heard about a place and went there because it had the appeal of the frontier. The product of that is visionary, imaginative, personable, familiar people who are explorers at heart.

Quincy’s very uncle-ish. He’s gonna shoot straight with you. Call bullshit on you. But it’s all from a very loving and caring and selfless point of view. He sees family as something important. There’s a musical family, a cultural family, a family of race, a family of people concerned with the same thing. Then he talks to you like that. Because he cares. About you, your well-being, what you know, what you believe, what’s true. That’s rare in this increasingly individualistic society.

He’s a creative and mathematical thinker, a composer. He knows whether to have two or three trombones versus many trumpets and saxes. What the parts are gonna be and who’s gonna play when. This is how his mind works. Who can think like that at 80 years old? You’re putting together 40, 60 years in one sentence and it makes sense? C’mon. He’s a super human.

Talking to him was a bit surreal. At first I was anxious. Like, what am I gonna say? But you don’t have to say much. —Ishmael Butler



ISH I hear you’ll be dipping off to Europe tomorrow.

QUINCY No, I just got back from Paris. I saw [Salman] Rushdie, [Nicolas] Sarkozy, [Roman] Polanski. Everybody. I used to live there.

ISH I know! We played one time at Montreux and they invited us to the house you got up there for a barbeque.

QUINCY Up to the chalet?

ISH Yeah.

QUINCY We’re opening the festival on the first of July. Claude [Nobs, Montreux Jazz Festival cofounder] and I are partners now. We’re partners with the whole festival—the jazz cafés, 15,000 hours of content, all that stuff. He’s an amazing cat, man. They made him a legend at the Apollo—first European they did that to.

ISH You know, when I was in this group called Digable Planets, we played at the Grammys, and you know who played with us that day?

QUINCY Who?

ISH [Trumpet player] Clark Terry.

QUINCY That’s right. Well guess what? I’m going to Arkansas Monday, I’m recording Snoop Dogg with Clark Terry.

ISH Yeah?

QUINCY Yeah. Snoop is doing the hip-hop and Clark’s gonna do “Mumbles.” It’s a historic record, because it’s like 40 generations apart. Clark taught me when I was 12 and was also the one that influenced Miles Davis.

ISH I read that in Miles’ book. Where did you meet Clark Terry? In Seattle?

QUINCY Yeah, I was 13 years old and Basie kind of adopted me. I was out at the theater all the time and Clark was playing with Count Basie.

ISH Wow. He’s a little older than Miles, right?

QUINCY He’s 91! Are you kidding? I conducted Miles’ last concert in Montreux in ‘91. He was 65 then and he died the next year, the end of ‘91. It was a sad day, man.

ISH You know that’s right. When was the last time you been to Seattle?

QUINCY I come up all the time! My brother is a federal judge there.

ISH I know—a couple of my friends have been in front of him before.

QUINCY I bet they have! He did the Ridgway case, the serial killer. He’s a crazy dude, man. He told me he had a guy in front of him, and he said, “Can I have your name, sir?” He says, “Fuck no.” He said, “Excuse me, you’re in a court of law. You could be held in contempt of court. I’m gonna ask you one more time, may I have your name?” He says, “Fuck no.” He was Vietnamese: P-h-u-o-c N-g-o. His name was Phuoc Ngo. He was crazy, man. They’re talking about my brother for the Supreme Court now.

ISH Oh, really?

QUINCY Yes, sir. To replace Clarence Thomas.

ISH Do you know about Wheedle’s Groove and all those cats, the funk stuff around Earth, Wind & Fire days?

QUINCY Well, I started up there with Ray Charles. He was in Jacksonville, Florida—he could see ’til he was six, when he got chicken pox and he scratched his eyes and got infected. He went to a white hospital and they wouldn’t let him in. By the time he got to a black hospital, he was blind. He told his friend when he gets $600 he wants to get as far away as he can. And that’s definitely Seattle. I met him in ’47 in Seattle. And it went from 14, 16, our whole life together. He taught me how to read music in Braille. Amazing brother, man. He started out singing like Nat Cole and Charles Brown and playing alto like Charlie Parker, then he went to California and got hung up on smack and started singing like gospel.

ISH I’m curious about Miles, too. I read this book and he talked about his St. Louis days, but coming to New York, too. Were you coming to New York around that time, too?

QUINCY Did you read Quincy Troupe’s book?

ISH That’s the book I read.

QUINCY I’m all over that book, man. Miles—he was one of my closest friends. He and Sinatra were the same. The bark was stronger than the bite. It was nothing but love, man. Nothing but love all the way.

ISH I’m curious about the session musicians you had playing on the Michael Jackson records. Were those cats you just knew? How’d you get them all together?

QUINCY Like I do all the rest of them: Just get the guys that fit the job. Every producer is based on something else. They’re engineers or they’re songwriters or they’re singers. I was based on orchestration and composition. I was an orchestrator since I was 14 years old and I went all the way to symphony orchestras. It’s a question of knowing exactly what sound will make them sing better than they’ve ever sung in their life.

ISH Did you have tryouts or did you already know those cats?

QUINCY Of course! I knew every bad motherfucker that ever walked, man. In the world.

ISH Right on.

QUINCY ’Cause I love music, man. When we came up, we were not into money or fame at all. There was no entrepreneurship. It was just to be as good as you could be and try to help revolutionize the music. I came out on the end of that, because I came out of the big band era.

ISH What part of town was the music poppin’ in Seattle when you were coming up?

QUINCY Jefferson. The Washington Social and Education Club, the Rocking Chair, the 908 Club. We used to go down to the Elks Club, which was on Jackson in the red-light district, and we’d play down there just to jam, just to play our bebop, you know. We’d play the Seattle Tennis Club first, play pop music, then play Washington Social Club, play stoop music, then rhythm and blues, you know. We’d play everything in Seattle back then. We worked for the kitty. You know what the kitty is?

ISH What is it?

QUINCY It’s a stand with a pole on it and it’s got a wooden cat’s head, and a light in it, and they’d come up and ask you, “You know the song ‘Big Fat Butterfly’?” And if you do, they’d put 50 cents or a dollar in there. That’s what we used to work for. We didn’t get paid; we worked for the kitty. Ray Charles, everybody. Everybody worked like that back then.

ISH What band you got going now?

QUINCY My band! I got a group of young kids, from nine years old to 15, 16. Twenty-seven of the best musicians on the planet, man, trust me. From Cuba, Africa, Budapest—the baddest suckers on the planet. I have a nine-year-old girl, half Moroccan. Man, she’s been composing for symphony orchestras since she was five years old. Obama calls her Baby Mozart. But she plays bebop, she plays bossa nova, everything.

ISH So you just meet them along the way on your travels?

QUINCY No, they find me, man. These two in Budapest just found us. They’re gonna play with us on July 1. I’m talking about a little gypsy guitar player that at 10 years old plays as good as George Benson, man. I’m serious. You know I know.

ISH I know you know!

QUINCY It’s just astounding to see the quality. Because the reality is they know more about our music than we do. Outside of about 10 rappers, you ask a kid who Louis Armstrong or Basie or Duke or Coltrane or Charlie Parker is, they don’t know who the fuck you’re talking about. And that’s not gonna work, man.

ISH Right.

QUINCY I just talked to [writer] Nelson George about an hour ago—we’re gonna do a book on how this shit really went down. When do you think rap started?

ISH Well, it’s hard to say.

QUINCY It’s not hard to say if you know!

ISH My dad would say H. Rap Brown or even Oscar Brown, Jr. That’s what he would tell me.

QUINCY Oh man, please! Are you kidding? I worked with Oscar Brown in the ’60s, man. It was around 30 years before. You got a minute? Lemme read something to you.

ISH OK.

QUINCY

I was walking through the jungle
With my d--- in my hand.
I was the baddest motherfucker
In the jungle land.
I looked up in the tree
What did I see?
A little black mama
Trying to piss on me.
I picked up a rock,
Hit her in the c---,
Knocked that bitch
A half a block.

Now, when do you think they did that?

ISH I don’t know, man.

QUINCY That’s rap, ain’t it?

ISH Yeah, it is.

QUINCY 1929! [Laughs] The Dozens, man. The gangs used to use that to start fights, but it was stone hip-hop, stone rap. I was involved in rap in 1937. I was six or seven years old, out in the streets with the gangs. [Ed note: The Dozens is a game of insults historically played in African-American communities. Jones is reciting a famous “Dirty Dozen.”] It came from Africa, man—the play shouters in South Africa and the griots in West Africa. The breakdancing all came from capoeira in Brazil, some martial arts. The problem is people don’t know history. We’re trying to get a definitive curriculum so they know what the fuck really happened, man. Because they don’t know! That’s not good. We’re the only country in the world that does not have a minister of culture. We went into all these situations like Columbine because kids do not know who they are. If you don’t have a culture, you can’t know who you are.

ISH That’s true.

QUINCY If you know where you come from it’s easy to get where you’re going.

ISH So you’re gonna do a book on the history of music?

QUINCY Yeah, everything. All of it. How it got started, how it picked up. How we wouldn’t have jazz if it weren’t for the French and slavery and Congo Square and Paris. Just to lay it down like it is, like it was.

ISH Right on. One record that was big for me was that soundtrack you did for Sidney Lumet. I remember listening to that and a lot of other rappers were listening to that, too.

QUINCY The Pawnbroker?

ISH Yeah.

QUINCY Sidney Lumet gave me my first five movies. They didn’t have black composers back then. We had to break the ground open for that. Sidney [Poitier] was the acting thing and he passed the composing thing to me, you know. Because you couldn’t get in. It was a challenge, man. But I love challenges. Say it’s impossible, man, and you got my attention.

ISH What do you think of the new rap music? You listen to a lot of it?

QUINCY The stuff that’s good, yeah. To me there’s nothing but good and bad music, and no genre. I mean, I understand every genre out there. It’s either they know what they’re doing or they don’t know what they’re doing. Don’t have to call no names, but I know who doesn’t know what they’re doing. I know who wouldn’t know a B-flat if it had a red suit on! You know? That’s the problem, because the rappers are just like the jazz dudes. Very creative, but they have to deal with music people that don’t know what the hell they’re doing. They don’t have a clue. So they do the samples. You know, we used to get [requests for] 30 samples a week. Tupac’s “How Do You Want It” is a sample of mine. All of them. Kanye, Ludacris’ stuff, Wu-Tang Clan. All had samples of our stuff. That’s all good, man, but what are you gonna sample 20 years from now?

ISH Yeah.

QUINCY We gotta start creating music, too. I remember Bone Thugs-N-Harmony started to take the rhymes and make melodies out of them. That’s a natural progression, you know. That should happen more. And it will. It’s like “Moody’s Mood for Love.” It’s been around since 1949. Moody did that in Stockholm in 1949—he played a jazz solo over the chords to “I’m in the Mood for Love” and played his own—“There I go, there I go, there I go”—which Eddie Jefferson wrote. That was the first vocalese song. And that’s when you take a jazz solo and write lyrics to it. Kids are still singing that on American Idol.

ISH Oh yeah.

QUINCY It’s an interesting evolution. But we, more than anybody, have to know what the hell really happened. And we don’t know. Because the school system doesn’t teach it, because they don’t know. Our classical music is jazz and blues and everybody in the world knows it. That’s why we’re working on a definitive curriculum. We’re on top of it, man.

ISH That’s good news.

QUINCY Music is a powerful animal. You cannot see it, you can’t touch it and you can’t smell it. But, man, it can sure touch you and turn your soul upside down. I believe music and water will be the last things to leave this planet.