Читать книгу The Last Poets - Christine Otten - Страница 16

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NEW YORK CITY, SEPTEMBER 2001

Bill Laswell, producer

And so I play I play I play walking to their smiles

Pain uptempo

Sensitivity open to the four winds

I want you to feel this thing I feel when fingers touching strings

This strange thing that kisses my lips

Whispers in my ears

‘Eddie Hazel was a terrific guitarist, very influential, a member of the Funkadelic family. It’s a tragic story. Eddie struggled for years with drugs and alcohol. We were supposed to record an album with him. I had helped him get a recording contract and some money; he tried to get clean. He really was on the up and up. Then I had to go to Japan for a few concerts. I postponed the recordings a month. That was in the fall of ’92.

I got a call in Tokyo. Bad news. Eddie was dead. Overdose. I was too late. I went back to New York. In the studio I listened to Eddie’s material. It was so beautiful. Maybe we should record a tribute to him with all the people he worked with. Bootsy Collins, George Clinton, Pharoah Sanders, Bernie Worrell, Sly Stone.

Umar was living in Greenpoint, Brooklyn at the time, in the space upstairs from my studio, together with DXT and a couple of other musicians. He was making a comeback. Umar was fascinated by Eddie. I think they had a lot in common. One night we listened to one of Eddie’s numbers together, a ballad. Right away Umar was on it, he dug into the music. Into Eddie’s raucous high licks. I saw it happen: he was totally immersed. Umar is a true musician, even though he can’t play a note. His father played trumpet. Music has nothing to do with technique. Absolutely nothing. Being a trumpeter has nothing to do with the trumpet. It’s all about the experience of creating. Sometimes you have to wring yourself inside out before something raw and honest emerges. That makes you vulnerable, you become a threat. To create something nobody else does, that’s not mainstream. That takes pain, frustration. Drugs can help sometimes. Drugs are cheap.

Umar was gutted when the music stopped. He went upstairs and wrote a poem. “Sacred to the Pain”, he called it. We recorded it the next day, over the music. Umar’s voice was so strong. He’s got a flawless instinct for phrasing, what note to linger on and when to repeat a word. When his voice has to go up, and then up some more. He learned it from Miles and Coltrane. From his father. That searching for the right tone. The recording was perfect in a single take.

Bootsy and George were in the studio that afternoon, and a few other boys from the neighborhood. When the music finished, it was dead quiet. I turned around and saw that not a single one of them had dry eyes, not even George Clinton. Clinton! When you can achieve that with words and music—that’s gotta mean something, right?’

Embraces all that I am

This thing called love

Love with no one to receive it

Love with no one to understand it

Love with no one to care for it

Musical discontent in a trance

Eyes rolling back into my head …

Needs something no not that

My head needs something no not that