"I don't know how I could write music without it having some kind of protest or some kind of strong insight into the injustice of the arrangement of things," Gilchrist says. (J.M. Giordano)
Add ethnomusicologist to Lafayette Gilchrist's résumé. The Washington, D.C. born and raised, Baltimore-based jazz composer and pianist is sitting in a Mount Vernon coffee shop using Parliament's 'Aqua Boogie' to illustrate the way go-go, the dance music that began percolating out of Washington in the late 1960s and '70s, saturated his life growing up. The P-Funk song, he explains, follows Sir Nose D'Voidoffunk, the funkless character who claims he can't swim. He's tossed into the water and emerges, baptized, at last able to get under the groove.
"Go-go was like that," he says. "Nobody stood still—even those hard heads, man. They wouldn't dance a whole lot because they were gangsters but they would be like," and he nods his head a little bit. "And I mean gangsters—that was their job. Even they would be at the go-go show."
Gilchrist often turns to other artists and music to discuss his new album, "The Go-Go Suite" (on Bernard Lyons' Creative Differences imprint), which was inspired by Washington's homegrown dance music and its figurehead, the late Chuck Brown. Of course music forms the building blocks of his mind; he's a musician. But even those of us who can't combine noise and time to stir the soul recognize music's Proustian power. It's memory's wallpaper; its notes, rhythms, and feelings peel back the layers of our individual experiences.
Go-go's origins as the people's party music anchors the album. Gilchrist envisions it as a single night's dance-floor experience, telling a story about what's gone on in his hometown's African-American communities since the music bubbled up through the inner city and spread out into the suburbs today.
Gilchrist says his first exposure to a number of jazz classics were performed by Brown and set to go-go's leisurely, syncopated rhythms. Billy Strayhorn's 'Take the "A" Train,' Duke Ellington's 'It Don't Mean a Thing (If it Ain't Got That Swing)'—these songs first hit Gilchrist's consciousness as dance-floor funk. "One tune that really caught my ear that he used to play a lot, especially at Chapter III, was 'Harlem Nocturne,'" Gilchrist says, referring to the Earle Hagen and Dick Rogers standard and the now-closed Southeast Washington nightclub. "When I first heard 'Harlem Nocturne' the way it's traditionally played, I was like, 'Why they messing up the rhythm?'" He hums the melody as a stately strings ballad, shakes his head and laughs, and begins humming it again with a hip-wiggling bounce. "Man, that would get everybody on the dance floor."
"The Go-Go Suite" opens with 'The View From Here,' which builds from go-go's instantly recognizable pulse and spreads into a tapestry of brassy horns and driving funk. Gilchrist's band, the New Volcanoes—trumpeter Michael Cerri; reeds players John Dierker, Tiffany DeFoe, and Gregory Thompkins; guitarist Carl Filipiak; bassist Anthony "Blue" Jenkins; percussionist Kevin Pinder; and drummer Nathan Reynolds—chews into the song, using the backing beat as a launching pad for soaring, intertwined solos and finishes with Gilchrist's piano walking away from the melody to a more poignant, reflective moment. For Gilchrist, the song is a portrait of his Washington and "what's happened to various neighborhoods that I knew, which haven't changed all that much," he says. "But what's around them has changed."
- Bret Mccabe (City Paper, Oct 27, 2014)
www.baltimoresun.com/citypaper/bcp-lafayette-gilchrist-harnesses-gogo-and-jazzs-dancefloor-solidarity-on-gogo-suite-20141027-story.html
released October 25, 2014
Nonet, with Michael Cerri (trumpet), John Dierker, Tiffany DeFoe, Gregory Thompkins (reeds), Carl Filipiak (guitar), Anthony "Blue" Jenkins (bass), Kevin Pinder (percussion), Nathan Reynolds