Rapper Big K.R.I.T. serves rhymes caught in a time-honored tension

April 29, 2012 By

Boston Globe, April 29, 2012

There’s a juxtaposition you sometimes hear in hip-hop, a mood swing that throws the listener from heights of hedonistic excess to the depths of an artist’s soul-searching on life, loss, and the meaning of it all. Strip-club anthems might give way to raw expressions of despair, even laced with evocations of suicide.

No region owns a monopoly on these themes, but the pairing seems most effective when it comes from the South. Classic work by groups such as OutKast, from Atlanta, or Geto Boys, from Houston, shows an emotional range that elsewhere might be viewed as overly candid or unedited, commercially imprudent or politically incorrect.

Big K.R.I.T., born Justin Scott, of Meridian, Miss., is the newest Southern MC to hit the big time behind this mixture of manic and depressive, sacred and profane. At 25, K.R.I.T. (the name stands for “King Remembered in Time”) has honed his voice through the now-standard method of releasing free-download mixtapes and in a flurry of side projects and collaborations.

In the process, he’s earned plaudits as much for songs such as “The Vent,” in which he reflects on death and depression, imagining asking Kurt Cobain what drove him to take his own life; and for “Money on the Floor,” in which dollars are spent, bottles pop and rear ends shake with abandon.
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Delta spirit

February 18, 2011 By

Boston Globe, February 18, 2011

One hundred years ago – the exact date was May 8, 1911 – Robert Johnson was born in Hazlehurst, Miss. He lived 27 years and left only 29 songs, but his impact on the blues and its progeny, rock ‘n’ roll, is immeasurable. The legend around Johnson – its crux his mythical encounter with the devil at a dusty Delta crossroads – only amplifies his aura.

The paradox is that Johnson is, in other ways, little known, as if the legend overwhelmed the facts of a man’s brief, hard life. Performed by everyone from Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page to legions of anonymous players in nondescript bars, his songs – “Ramblin’ on My Mind,” “Love in Vain,” “Sweet Home Chicago,” and more – are so tightly bound to the sinew of American culture as to feel like common property.

Johnson himself remains phantomatic, that thin voice and haunting guitar on scratchy original recordings that only got mass-market diffusion with a 1990 complete box set.

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A convergence of cultures in Afrissippi

May 9, 2008 By

Boston Globe, May 9, 2008

Sometimes an artistic project comes along that seems at once utterly unlikely, yet at the same time completely logical. Unlikely because of the strange sequence of events that it took for it to occur; logical because the connections it explores are ones that were present, if submerged, all along, just waiting to be brought back to life.

One such connection is the one that binds the hill-country blues of north-central Mississippi – a deeply entrenched regional American tradition, yet quite obscure relative to the better-known Delta or Chicago blues – with the rhythms, melodies, and performance styles of West Africa.

And the band Afrissippi, formed when a Fulani musician from Senegal named Guelel Kumba made his way fortuitously to Oxford, Miss., and discovered in the out-of-the-way college town an uncannily familiar creative home, has made it its mission to restore and renew those ties.

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Surviving a rough patch: Drive-By Truckers

March 21, 2008 By

Boston Globe, March 21, 2008

Last year was a time of transition for the Drive-By Truckers, the Athens, Ga., band with the dual gift for high-octane rocking and magisterial front-porch storytelling. Personnel flux and a sense of fatigue led the group to pare down its sound, perform acoustic gigs, and take time out to serve as backing band on a soul-music project.

But with the brand-new album, “Brighter Than Creation’s Dark,” and a tour that stops at the Paradise Rock Club for a sold-out show tomorrow, DBT, as their fans call them, have emerged from the murk in triumph, making the most mature and emotionally intimate music of their career.

“Brighter” is the band’s eighth album but first since the departure last year of Jason Isbell, who came on board in 2003 and more than held his own alongside co-leaders Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley as a writer, singer, and partner in a three-guitar front line.

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He’ll keep trucking, but solo: Jason Isbell

July 15, 2007 By

Boston Globe, July 15, 2007

The Alabama band Drive-By Truckers has earned something of a cult following both for its fresh take on classic themes of Southern music and for its powerful three-guitar front line, made up most recently of Patterson Hood, Mike Cooley, and Jason Isbell, all native sons of the musically distinguished Muscle Shoals region. Now Isbell has gone solo, a development that has caused some alarm among Truckers fans, but that also marks a broadening of the revival and reinvention of Southern rock that DBT has heralded.

At 28, Isbell is quite a bit younger than Hood or Cooley, but he made himself essential both as a musician and as a gifted songwriter on the group’s last three records. Hood and DBT drummer Brad Morgan and bassist Shonna Tucker, from whom Isbell is divorced, appear on Isbell’s just-released solo album, “Sirens of the Ditch,” confirming that all these splits have been amicable. Isbell is touring now with a brand-new group; they stop at T.T. the Bear’s in Cambridge tomorrow.

An afternoon phone call on the eve of the tour’s launch finds Isbell at a bar in Muscle Shoals, taking a break from helping to set up for the next day’s gig. “I wanted to do a local show to kick off the tour,” he says. Though the town is home to the legendary FAME studios, where countless soul and rock classics were once recorded, it has no large music venue, and Isbell and friends are converting a firehouse-turned-studio into a concert hall for the occasion, which has involved practical matters like getting a vendor’s license.

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Rolling “Thunder”

September 22, 2006 By

Boston Globe, September 22, 2006

Cassandra Wilson has long since cemented her place as one of America’s great singers. Hers is a music of confluence, in which the blues, jazz, and pop provide aesthetic guidance that’s all the more powerful because it’s so free-ranging and loose. On her latest album, “Thunderbird,” the Mississippi-bred, New York-seasoned Wilson turns to material that’s distinctly Western in spirit, evoking Native American symbolism, prairie expanses, and the open road. An inspired collaboration with producer T-Bone Burnett, of “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” soundtrack fame, “Thunderbird” laces Wilson’s famously smoky tone with contemplative slide guitars over relentless grooves: The result is a music that lingers even as it moves ahead, like clouds in an easy wind.

“Thunderbird” came out in April, but Wilson, who lives near New York but spent much of the year in her native Jackson, Miss., is touring behind it only now. Her five-city East Coast stint brings her to the Berklee Performance Center tomorrow, before she heads to Europe. We spoke to her by phone as she prepared to launch the tour.

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They keep the Mississippi sound alive

November 12, 2005 By

Boston Globe, November 12, 2005

When you name your band after the place you call home, you’re making a statement. When the place is Mississippi, you’re also staking out spiritual ground, raising ghosts. Field hands birthing the blues in the ruthless Delta heat. The young Elvis Presley, cutting his teeth in Tupelo. Emmett Till, the Philadelphia Three, and the countless “strange fruit” of the famous song, still hanging from the poplar trees, anonymous and unavenged.

But Mississippi is modern, too. It’s the state with the most black elected officials. Its music is that of Cassandra Wilson. It’s rapper David Banner and his gutter-yet-righteous dual personality. And it’s the North Mississippi Allstars, who raised the flag of Southern rock only to color it thick with gospel and blues, and who bring the festive, organic results to the Paradise tonight.

The Allstars’ Luther and Cody Dickinson and the brothers’ high school buddy Chris Chew grew up in the Hill Country, the high ground east and away from the sweltering Delta. The region, which includes the college town and literary mecca Oxford, has long been good to creative eccentrics. Their mentors included dad/producer Jim Dickinson, bluesman R.L. Burnside, and Otha Turner, the curator of the area’s distinct fife-and-drum sound who was prominently featured in last year’s PBS series on the blues.

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An heirloom rice returns

September 21, 2005 By

Boston Globe, September 21, 2005

CHARLESTON, S.C.—In the Colonial era, this elegant seaport was the richest city in the New World, thanks to an exquisite variety of rice known as Carolina Gold prized as far away as China that blanketed the lowlands of the coastal era. The hallowed grains are on the rise again.

Carolina Gold’s revival has become important enough to warrant its own symposium, which was held here last month. Academics and foodies discussed the variety’s origins, its role in American history, and how best to grow and market the rice, while savoring interpretations by Charleston chefs of dishes that date to the plantation era.

The rice’s return makes it possible to render the sophisticated Creole cooking of the Lowcountry to traditional standards. At one time, slaves tended the rice under harsh conditions, battling malaria and typhus. But after the Civil War the plantations emptied, Charleston declined, and Carolina Gold faced oblivion. Carolina Gold seeds were preserved in several land-grant universities, including Texas A&M and the University of Arkansas; growers planted it in the mid-1990s to see if they could revive it.

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