rip Mtume: Master Creator, My Mentor
The musician, songwriter, activist and radio talk show host was a mentor to me.
https://studio.youtube.com/video/ZBzhoccngFE/edit
https://studio.youtube.com/video/mISdalTBSok/edit
So many amazing, important people to black culture have died in the last few years. It’s a sad and stunning list. But, for me, the passing of James Mtume hits particularly hard. Back in the mid to late ‘80s when I was struggling to write an history of rhythm & blues music I had innumerable late night phone calls with Mtume about the relationship of music and culture to America and racial identity. He was more than an master musician (with Miles Davis) and songwriter-producer (Stephanie Mills, Roberta Flack), but had been a political street organizer and a member of Ron Karenga’s US organization. So he had both creativity and cultural nationalism in his soul, a philosophical marriage that made him an endlessly fascinating person to speak with. Plus he had a great sense of humor and understanding of people’s sensual nature that you heard in the songs he composed for others and for his own band Mtume. One of the biggest contributions he made to my intellectual development was turning me onto Haraold Cruse’s landmark ‘The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,’ an ambitious work about the relationship of black thinkers to capitalism, celebrity and each other, that impacts me to this day.
A lot of people will focus on the drum programming and sampling of “Juicy Fruit” as the centerpiece of Mtume’s legacy, but that’s just one piece of a long and varied life that embraced many modes of expression and impacted so many people. He wrote classic ballads (“The Closer I Get to You”), was a provocative and beloved radio show host (New York’s KISS FM), a true raconteur, a father and a husband. Mtume’s life was too big a life to be summed by one record.
Linked above are two YOU TUBE clips from an interview I conducted with him at his home in New Jersey that was largely about his years with Miles Davis and the then controversial ‘On the Corner’ album, but I have many much more video with him that I’ll reluctantly dig through in the coming year. I say reluctantly because Mtume not being in this realm is not a fact I can easily accept.
#ripmtume He transitioned at age 76.