Mama's Gun Show: Erykah Badu 55

Erykah Badu - A.D. 2000

OK, last one of the month is Black History Month platinum, and it's not a guy!!!! Sausage Festus interruptus!!!!

This lady is still relatively spry and still out there recording and concertizing, a rarity for this page where most honorees have been dead longer than Stephen Miller's eternal soul.

It occurs to me that she might be the most photogenic, stylish person I've ever put up here. Every picture is like Fashion Runway caliber.

Fortunately, Erykah Badu's got the tunes and the groove to match the image, also an increasing rarity these Autotuned days.

She hit in 1997, right when the latest silly category the Music Biz was inventing from whole cloth to sell was called Neo-Soul.

I halfway remember her coming to SF during the tour I'm spotlighting here, and thinking I should go. But I didn't. Regrets.... I've had a feeeeeeewwwww. But then again, too few to mentiooooooonnnn....

That album and subsequent tour, both called Mama's Gun, were really the moment when she arrived as her own, distinctive thing apart from the stupid industry boxes.

It isn't that she isn't Soul, or isn't a very effective mneumonic torchbearer for the golden era of that music. It's just that there's galaxies more to what she does, integrating Jazz, World themes, a whole lotta Funk and a good measure of well-applied theatricality into a presentation as compelling and unique as any around today.

Anyway, she's outlasted any attempts to categorize her music and style into a convenient little coffin like the Money Men like, becoming one of those artists (yes, it's even harder for women in an industry still Super Sausagey) to forge a long career essentially on her own terms.

So yes, that Mama's Gun excursion, which happened just before 9/11. Think of it as controlled demolition of a Dutch festival venue, using only musical instruments and the clarion voice of the birthday girl.

Erykah Badu

North Sea Jazz Festival

Statenhal

Den Haag, The Netherlands

7.14.2001

01 Rimshot (Intro)

02 Otherside of the Game

03 Penitentiary Philosophy

04 Didn't Cha Know/My Life

05 On & On

06 Cleva

07 Kiss Me On My Neck (Hesi)

08 A.D. 2000

09 Liberation

10 Orange Moon

11 Tyrone

12 percussion interlude

13 Green Eyes

14 Bag Lady/outro

Total time: 1:33:29

disc break goes after Track 07

Erykah Badu - guitar & vocals

Geno "JuneBugg" Young - keyboards & vocals

R.C. Williams - keyboards

Raphael "Lock Johnson" Iglehart - drums

Ramon Gonzalez - percussion

Dwayne Kerr - flute

Braylon Lacy - bass

Kevin Hanson - guitar

N'dambi, Chinah Blac & Yahzarah - vocals

320/48k audio extracted from an extra-HD YouTube Premium file

spectral analysis is lossless to 20 kHz, making this equivalent to a preFM source

converted to 16/44 CD Audio, edited, repaired, tracked & ever-so-slightly volume boosted throughout by EN, February 2026
433 MB FLAC/direct link

That's it for February, and for the first time in a while, I got to 8 posts in a month! Celebrate accordingly, everyone.

I shall return to March ever onward. But before February's Groundhog Days dissipate into Spring, I was intent on honoring Erykah Badu's big, double nickeled day with this blistering 93 minutes of awesome!--J.

Afrobeat Poetry

Ebo Taylor & Afrobeat Academy - Love & Death

It's the end of the weekend, but here's the next post in my little Black History Month series so you can imagine your next vacation. Or a permanent one, I dunno. We'll all go together when we go, as the late Tom Lehrer once said.

Of course these Ziopsychotic chumps might initiate global WWIII by then, so we gotta get our jams in before the nuclear winter settles. And you can kiss your ass goodbye, as the great Sun Ra once said.

Amyway in our continuing, 12+ year odyssey into People Not To Be Found On The Epstein List, tonight we have a cat that I have dug since I heard songs of his at a party in SF in the early 1990s.

He jussssst made 90 before leaving our rapidly deteriorating excuse for a world a couple of weeks ago, but in the decades before he did he sure put a hootenanny on the thing.

One of the Twin Towers of Afrobeat -- standing tall alongside the more well-known Fela Kuti -- there isn't nanothermite powerful enough to topple what those two guys built in their time on Earth.

I know there are other contenders for the crown, but it's hard not to come up with the opinion that Ebo Taylor is the greatest musician ever to come from Ghana.

Starting in the early 1960s and all the way up to February 7th and his astral departure, he led the way for Highlife and Afrobeat -- which became so globally popular and influential among other musicmakers -- as much as anyone, even Fela himself.

This is another one of those deaths where it's almost impossible to bemoan it as this awful tragedy, because the person lived into their 90s and had almost the best possible life whilst here, leaving behind a beautiful legacy that will endure for generations and more.

Of course you wish he got more recognition and flowers in his lifetime, but as we alluded to Fela kind of gets all the juice and credit for this particular strain of sound, even though a figure such as Ebo Taylor arguably was just as instrumental, over time, in establishing the longevity of the music.

I guess Fela is the Nigeria wing and Ebo is the Ghana wing of the Afrobeat/Highlife axis. And somewhere, King Sunny Adé is reading this and dispatching a high-value, super elite hit squad armed with submachine guns that are shaped like guitars to my house.

I guess I'll have to get to King Sunny, who turns 80 later this year, before he gets to me and put up a concert or ten.

Anyhow, so rather than wait for Ebo's next birthday next January, let's smash up this wild collab with Afrobeat Academy from 12 years ago in his eternally deserved honor.

Ebo Taylor & Afrobeat Academy

New Morning

Paris, France

3.26.2014

01 walk-on applause

02 Kwame

03 Aborekyair Aba

04 Nsu Na Kwan

05 Kruman Dey

06 Victory

07 Love & Death

08 Kweku Ananse/band introductions

09 Dofu

10 Yaa Amponsah

Total time: 1:13:30

Ebo Taylor - guitar & vocals

Henry Taylor - keyboards & vocals

Eric "Sunday" Owusu - percussion & vocals

Ekow Alabi Savage - drums, percussion & vocals

Ben Abarbanel-Wolff - tenor saxophone

Philip Sindy - trumpet

Emmanuel Ofori - bass

Franck Biyong - guitar

320/48k audio extracted from an HD YouTube video

spectral analysis is lossless to 20 kHz, making this equivalent to a pre-FM source

converted to 16/44 CD Audio, edited & slightly remastered by EN, February 2026

481 MB FLAC/direct link

Poor Ebo looking like he's contemplating imminent catastrophe there, but he's probably somewhere happy he at least got the heck outta here before the whole world is turned to a pile of nuclear, glowing excrement hitting a giant fan, thanks to the psychosis that's always implicit to Supremacist Delusions.

I'll be back in a few days, if there's a world to come back to. On the off chance there will be, do enjoy this scorching and highly syncopated 73 minutes in celebration of Ebo Taylor, still never mentioned -- along with no gays, no trans, no drag queens, no Black people, no "illegals" and pretty much no anyone not a craven, childfucking white, straight male Ziomonstrous bumbaclaat slab of jackalshit -- a single time in 5 1/2 million pages of those terrifying files!--J.

1.6.1936 - 2.7.2026

A.D. 1951: Anthony Davis 75

Anthony Davis Quintet - Hocket In the Pocket

So here's what happened, I swear.

Originally I was trying to get out ahead of February, and I sort of frontloaded it up to the 15th with no idea about anything after that.

When I started to post it all, I realized that I had completely omitted anything related to February's status as Black History Month, and was instead putting up five things that were so white, you couldn't have seen them in a blizzard with night vision goggles on.

This bugged me so badly I went ahead and constructed four more posts -- a whole, additional month's worth -- to right that wrong, of which this is #1.

And an appropriate milestone birthday post it is, if I dare say so myself.

See, once, about 35 years ago in NYC, I was taken to a performance of this really unusual, striking opera presentation constructed around the life of Malcolm X.

It featured a score by its creator, which was uncategorizable in its scope, pulling in elements across all culture to make the experience of it far beyond your average Lincoln Center, Puccini night on the tonk.

Anyway this was the way in which I was introduced to the musical multiverse of Anthony Davis, a composer and musician so hard to categorize, he almost needs his own section in the record store.

Equal parts Classical, Jazz and Avant Garde in his approach and output, I wouldn't even know how to describe what he does except to say that it's 101% American, and that Anthony Davis is as criminally undersung a figure of American music as has come across in our epoch.

Let's time travel back to a festival in Switzerland 45 years and get a small taste of what this huge creative mind had his guys up to back then.

Anthony Davis Quintet

Willisau Jazz Festival 1981

Festhalle

Willisau, Switzerland

8.30.1981

01 Lady of the Mirrors/band introductions

02 Fugitive of Time 

03 Past Lives

04 Wayang No. 4 (Under the Double Moon)

05 A Walk Through the Shadow

06 Hocket In the Pocket

Total Time: 1:16:17

Anthony Davis - piano

Marty Ehrlich - clarinet, bass clarinet & flute 

Terry King - violin

Rick Rozie - bass

Pheeroan akLaff - drums

off-air FM master capture of indeterminate origin, taped from DDR1 radio in East Germany

edited, denoised & remastered by EN, February 2026
399 MB FLAC/direct link

I'll be right back either tomorrow or Sunday with the next BHM treat, this time venturing back to the Motherland for a tribute to a recently departed icon of African sounds.

But before I do that, I wanted to make sure Anthony Davis -- born this day in 1951 and still challenging the boundaries we've decided exist in our minds and in music -- got some much deserved respect, despite his career-long defiance of expectation and category.--J.

Beirach Steady 2: Quest In Show

Quest - M.D.

We're back and bopping, with more 'Rach and roll to follow up yesterday's helping of Heinz Sauer -- in which our hero served up some mighty tasty piano, as if he was capable of playing anything not mighty tasty -- with a whole main course of delicious blissness that brings Richie Beirach more out front, where players and writers of his Galaxy-class distinction belong.

Obviously he passed at the end of January, and no tribute I could articulate could do justice to a figure of this massive musical magnitude. But I'll try.

I'm trying to think if I ever saw him play in person and I don't think I ever did, sad to say. As for the first time I ever came across him, it must have been in college 40 years ago. I remember when I first became aware of his ECM LPs, thinking this is sort of the natural heir to Bill Evans.

Of course he's really more similar to McCoy Tyner, but these comparisons come and go like fashion models on the runway. If you had to describe in words what Richie Beirach was about when seated at a piano, you wouldn't be too wrong if you placed him somewhere between those two pillars of Jazz keyboard foundation, with a whole vocabulary of Classical understanding underpinning the vibe.

Abstract and obtusely awkward comparisons aside, I guess when people think of Richie Beirach, they're always going to think of his association with Dave Liebman and the heavenly music their lifelong collaboration produced.

Almost inextricably linked, it's not unfactual to say that what those two guys got into, in so many different configurations, is gonna be hard to top. This, just in terms of several, accumulated decades of the rarity that happens when two people of such a high musical caliber stick together that long. When they become noticeably and reliably telepathic with each other on a stage or in a recording environment.

Of course what those two guys produced over the course of all those years playing together is almost a damn record collection in itself, but there's some unissued stuff well worth hearing too.

Here's a few hours from German radio, recorded more or less recently, that depicts them both in a duo setting and in the band they ran together for over four decades, in a Quest to put all the meat on some of the bone. Just a small fragment of what RB and his buddy Lieb could whip up on a Jazz loving public all over the globe.

David Liebman & Richie Beirach

Jazzfest Bonn

Kammermusiksaal

Beethovenhaus

Bonn, Germany

5.6.2016

01 Pendulum

02 Master of the Obvious 

03 Redial 

04 Testament 

05 RB announcement

06 Rectilinear

07 RB announcement

08 Kurtland

09 Softly, As In a Morning Sunrise 

10 All Blues (fragment)

Total time: 1:12:57

David Liebman – tenor saxophone

Richie Beirach – piano

Tracks 01-04: 256/44k digital FM FLAC stream, captured by Lewojazz

Tracks 05-10: 320/48k digital FM mp2 stream, captured by Lewojazz & converted to 16/44 CD Audio by EN

assembled, edited, retracked and remastered for unity by EN, February 2026
383 MB FLAC/link is below

Quest

53rd Deutsches Jazzfestival

HR Sendesaal

Frankfurt, Germany

10.26.2022

01 introduction by Jürgen Schwab

02 Pendulum

03 band intros & announcement by RB

04 M.D.

05 Rectilinear

06 RB announcement

07 Testament

08 Master of the Obvious

09 RB announcement

10 Elm

11 Footprints

12 unidentified title

Total time: 1:15:27

David Liebman - saxophones & flute

Richie Beirach - piano

Ron McClure - bass

Billy Hart - drums

320/48k digital FM FLAC stream, captured by Lewojazz

converted to 16/44 CD Audio, edited, retracked & remastered -- with a few tracks in the Quest set demux-denoised -- by EN, February 2026
480 MB FLAC/direct link to both shows in same folder

This concludes the first half of February. I'll be back around starting next weekend with a full slate of Black History Month stuff.

As for our hero of the 88 keys, I can't believe he's gone on into history now, but everyone dies eventually. What supersedes mere physical death is the idea that while he was here, Richie Beirach combined an extensive Classical knowledge with a finetooth compositional comprehension steeped in the deepest Jazz to produce a one-of-a-kind sensibility and style. One multifaceted enough to inform what will go on for a whole lotta players when they take a seat at the piano for generations to come.--J.

5.23.1947 - 1.26.2026