The Rock/Soul storyteller, Nadir, is back, this time with his first vinyl single! “Go It Alone” is a soulful, swinging slow burning banger that builds a bridge from blues to rock.

The Drew Parfitt directed music video reveals Nadir as a man on a mission. His target is in sight, but his position has been compromised, and “The Man” is on his tail.

Meanwhile, “Love Thang” is a righteously funky b-side that gained an audience for itself in the single’s first week of release. The hot and heavy go-go groove was named Song of the Day on Funk Gumbo Radio, and is spinning in the UK at Radio Cardiff.

These tracks set the stage for Nadir’s forthcoming album The Book of Jonah, scheduled for an early summer release. In between, Nadir plans to kick out another vinyl single, a collaboration with Mayaeni, another soulful Detroit songwriter.

“We’re bringing heat on this record,” Nadir says, “The goal was to create something innovative and classic. The vinyl definitely helps take it there.”

Click HERE to purchase the 7 inch vinyl single “Go It Alone”/”Love Thang” from Submerge Distribution.

Yaminah Brock is a veteran of stage and studio, and has sung every style of music from house and funk to country and Big Band and swing.

But now, she’s the boss, leading her own band, Yaminah and Jazzy Soul, and financing and marketing her solo debut, “Endless Journey,” a full-length collection of jazz-inflected soul music slated for a spring release.

While spending more than two years recording and assembling her band, Brock discovered the rewards and challenges that lie on the road to independence. Yet, she stays on course by staying true to herself—and the music.

“I have new respect for anybody who has [recorded an album] independently, because this is no joke,” Yaminah says. “It’s a whole other job! But it’s well worth it. I’ve learned a lot.”

Read More HERE

Highland Park, Michigan native Rick Robinson is on a mission to transform classical music. As a bassist with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra for 22 years, Robinson is rooted in the storied classical tradition.

But the animated original compositions and inventive arrangements of classical and jazz masterpieces that he creates for his own ensembles, the nine-piece CutTime Players and his string sextet, CutTime Simfonica, inject vim and vigor into the sometimes-staid classical form.

Now with the performance series Classical Revolution Detroit, the 2010 Kresge Arts Fellow aims to remove the physical barriers between classical musicians and their audiences by offering intimate presentations in restaurants, cafes, bars and other non-traditional venues around the city.

Click HERE to Read More

Kelly Beckett of G4′s Attack of the Show features the Beat Thang and a few other great products at NAMM 2012 in Anaheim, California. As she mentions, Beat Thang won DJzone DJ Magazine’s Crystal Disc Award for Best DJ Innovation of 2011-2012. Congrats, guys!!

A native of Detroit’s west side, Redd seized the solo spotlight for the first time in 2010 with “No Discipline,” an eight-song EP of raw, bluesy soul. A year later, rather than watch a collection of songwriting demos languish in the dustbin, she offered an exciting and diverse 15-track mixtape as a free download through NecoRedd.bandcamp.com. October 2011′s “The Full Disclosure” shows off Redd’s powerful pipes, her versatility and her funky attitude.

Still, Redd promises that the real heat will arrive this spring with the release of her first full-length album, “Still Trippin.” She describes it as a “bass heavy, guitar heavy,” horn-driven album with live instrumentation provided by Tony Ozier’s West Coast band The Doo-Doo Funk All-Stars.

Read More at BLAC Detroit Magazine

The EP jumps and jits with four phenomenal tracks including “Lottie The Body” and “Black Bottom Stomp”, both mixed by EAPro’s J. Nadir Omowale.

www.UndergroundResistance.com

“Underground Resistance is like Harriet Tubman escaping from the South.” So says rebel leader “Mad” Mike Banks, of his label, musical collective and revolutionary electronica movement Underground Resistance. “She always had to reinvent herself. I’m sure they had to take a million different angles to get out of there,” Banks explains.

Founded in the late 80s by Banks and his former partner, Jeff Mills, UR charted a critical path through the history of music by packaging hard-hitting electro, house and techno with stark imagery, militant rhetoric, and a post-apocalyptic, futuristic vision of life in the streets of Detroit. Originally inspired by the activist hip hop of Public Enemy, the computer-generated funk of Kraftwerk, and the political philosophy of the centuries-old tradition of resistance movements across the planet, UR’s cadre of artists, producers, DJs and musicians continues to plant sonic landmines in dance and hip hop clubs on six continents.

Like Tubman, UR’s underground railroad moves largely under cover of darkness, in their quest to invent the cutting edge of music, and to combat what they see as the oppressive grip of mainstream media programmers. Banks rarely appears in public without a mask, and on stage, the groups perform in the shadows so the audience can concentrate on the music.

Timeline (feat. Jon Dixon & De’Sean Jones): Lottie The Body by nomowale

Timeline (feat. Jon Dixon & De’Sean Jones): Black Bottom Stomp by nomowale

“I’m a firm believer that music is greater than the men who create it,” says Banks. “If you ever needed any form of spiritual assurance, it is music. Certainly music is more powerful than man, because the man fades and goes, but the music – the spirit, and the work – lives on. Beethoven’s been dead hundreds of years, but somebody is playing Beethoven tonight.”

It was the notion of reinvention and evolution that prompted accomplished musicians Banks and Mills to experiment with a melding of techno and jazz music. “I felt like jazz had kind of topped out,” Banks reveals. “Of course, you have to be a great musician to play it, but a lot of times [jazz musicians] are copying [music] innovated in the 40s and 50s, and they’re innovating nothing.”

Influenced by artists like Chick Corea and Herbie Hancock who combined funk and rock with jazz, and employed synthesizers to create jazz-fusion, Mills and Banks applied a similar concept to create the song “Nation 2 Nation” in 1990. After Mills left UR to go solo in 1992, Banks produced the EP “Galaxy 2 Galaxy” which included a song called “Hi-Tech Jazz”, and the style took off internationally.

Banks later shared the concept with Detroit jazz and gospel musicians like “The Deacon” Gerald Mitchell, Derwin Hall, and the late Derrick Jamerson, son of Motown bassist James Jamerson. In 2001, Banks and Jamerson wrote a song called “Timeline” that exploded onto dance floors in the US and around the world. Dancers in Detroit still hustle, ballroom and jit to the tune today.

Then in 2007, Banks recruited keyboardist Jon Dixon, and saxophonist De’Sean Jones, two recent Wayne State University grads, to perform with him as part of Galaxy 2 Galaxy at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.

“I know a lot of people who play jazz who have never played the Montreux Jazz Fest,” Dixon marvels, “so here I am 22 or 23 years old, and I’m playing one of the most popular jazz festivals in the world, and I didn’t even know who Underground Resistance was.” When he and Jones heard the song “Hi-Tech Jazz” on the radio in a cafe in Switzerland Dixon was asked by a customer if he was “Mad” Mike. At that point Dixon researched and learned about the rich heritage of electronica of which he was now a part.

After Montreux, Banks, Dixon and Jones added DJ, turntablist, producer and community leader Sicari Ware to the fold forming Timeline. The collective’s mission is to take Hi-Tech Jazz to the next level. Their critically acclaimed first performance was at an opening event for Detroit’s Movement Festival in May of 2010, and the group released its first EP in October 2011.

“The one thing I like about Hi-Tech Jazz more than anything else is that it really embodies what I think music should, which is complete freedom, creativity, flexibility and improvisation while having structure, but also giving the people a good time,” Jones says. He believes Hi-Tech Jazz invokes the spirit of Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington and Count Basie, men who are remembered as great composers, and bandleaders, but who, back in the 1940s, played the dance and party music of the day.

At the same time, Dixon appreciates the complexity of the music.  “[Musicians] are looking for something different that they can challenge themselves on,” Dixon says. “Like with any new genre, this is a whole different approach. Everything you know, put that [to the side]. I feel like a little kid again. I can take everything I’ve learned and combine it and it’s just… fun!”

But Jones also stresses the importance of the message and what UR represents. “Music is do or die. It’s that serious,” Jones says. “It’s a gift, but it’s also a responsibility. If you take music seriously, you understand that you’re an ambassador to the world as a musician. It’s more than just the notes. The notes are just a medium for something much greater.”

For Banks Timeline is about continuing to innovate. “We never get stuck in one sound too long,” Banks says. “If an artist can’t grow, you can’t keep up with UR. Like I said, it’s like being a runaway slave. For us it’s a matter of survival.”

An earlier version of this article appeared in BLAC Detroit Magazine.

Efforts to promote Saxappeal’s 2009 debut album “Stay Saxy” were often rebuffed by smooth jazz radio programmers who judged it “too urban” for their stations. That was good news.

That first album by Saxappeal, also known as LaDarrel Johnson, blends hip hop and new soul sensitivities with a sultry contemporary sax sound that is meatier and more adventurous than typical smooth jazz fare. The prominence of the horn, however, ensures that Saxappeal’s music won’t be played on most R&B, urban contemporary or hip hop stations, where all songs must feature singing or rapping.

He could have bowed to the pressure and churned out a second album that conformed to the dictates of the almighty programmers. Instead, he stayed true to his art, titled his new disc “Unmarketable” and set about creating an album of music that he describes as “delicious jambalaya.”

Read More In BLAC Detroit Magazine

David Allie Strauss, otherwise known as D’Allie, grew up in a household where music was a family affair. He inherited a love for many types of music from his guitar-playing, Jewish father, Gary Strauss—who is featured extensively on his son’s albums—and his mother, Komeh Allie Strauss, who is from Sierra Leone.

“When I was maybe 6 or 7, my dad was playing at bars late night, and then waking up early to go teach,” D’Allie, now 28, remembers. “Occasionally he would bring me out for the first set, around 10 or so.”

Papa Strauss built a small, short-scale guitar for little David, but the instrument fell by the wayside when some older cousins introduced the youngster to “Yo! MTV Raps.” D’Allie began writing rhymes at age 7.

Fast forward about two decades, his hip hop duo Progress Report released the full-length album, “Eddie Logix and D’Allie Are Progress Report,” last month.

READ MORE AT BLACDETROIT.COM