Who comes to bury you. Greg Tate, 1957-2021

December 9, 2021 8:22 PM

A Note in Praise of Greg Tate, by Hanif Abdurraqib "Greg Tate knew the secret America hasn’t ever been able to keep up with: the multitude of ways black folks communicate, and it ain’t all spoken, but it’s all language."

A few of his articles from the Village Voice:
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Flyboy in the Buttermilk
Hiphop Nation: It’s Like This Y’all
On Malcolm X: Can This Be the End for Cyclops and Professor X?
Stagolee vs. the Proper Negro: Eddie Murphy, Wynton Marsalis & Prince

Some musical samples from his application of Butch Morris' improvisational Conduction technique - Burnt Sugar Arkestra Ensemble:
- Fubractive Since Antiquity
- We Insist! Max Roach's Freedom Now Suite
- The Rites (with Vijay Iyer, Melvin Gibbs, Pete Cosey)
- Coo Dank West Coast "Off the Top of the Dome" Improvisation

His (cofounded) Black Rock Coalition focused on recentering Black musicians in the history of Rock music, and supporting Black rock artists.

Ahmir Thompson on Greg Tate's impact on him personally: "I started reading his bits round 87 and I was changed forever. Greg was the first person who validated the art that I loved and made it intellectually viable. I never heard anyone speak of hip-hop in those terms before him. I had never heard of Afro-futurism. I had never encountered a writer who made the case that Public Enemy was just as important as the Beatles, and who made it with such intelligence."

posted by SoundInhabitant (16 comments total)

The peerless imagination of Greg Tate (NYT)
posted by praemunire at 8:39 PM on December 9, 2021 [4 favorites]

I only learned of him through that NYT article this morning, praemunire, but just the little snippets of his writing that it shared were electrifying.

SoundInhabitant, thank you for sharing all these for those of us new to him to explore. What a eulogy: “…when I read Greg Tate on a sentence-level and feel like I am being both schooled and loved on with equal ferocity.”
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 9:38 PM on December 9, 2021

Fly As Hell: An Interview With Greg Tate (Leah Mirakhor, LA Review of Books, March 2018)

License to Ill (Greg Tate, Village Voice, Oct 18, 2005)

(An) amazing staff of editors midwifed and made the paper sing in the '80s: Robert Christgau, M. Mark, Vince Aletti, Kit Rachlis, Ross Wetzsteon, et al. -- the Voice was a writer's paper, where editors were encouraged to help you say what you wanted to say in the way you wanted to say it and stay vaguely consistent with the style manual. ... For myself and Nelson George, Stanley Crouch, Barry Michael Cooper, Lisa Jones, Thulani Davis, and others, the Voice was once upon a time a place where you could actually get published (and get paid) to think long and hard about the meaning of being Black in a style and form that was racially motivated, and maybe even racially overdetermined for some overwhelmed readers' tastes, but never dull, if only because of how furiously we were all riding our own prose dilznicks and cliznits. We were the sheet, knew it was our time, and let the record show, we all wrote as if we knew it.

posted by virago at 9:57 PM on December 9, 2021 [6 favorites]

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posted by From Bklyn at 3:11 AM on December 10, 2021

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posted by Phyllis keeps a tight rein at 4:36 AM on December 10, 2021

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posted by box at 4:47 AM on December 10, 2021

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posted by wicked_sassy at 5:35 AM on December 10, 2021

Will miss his voice.
posted by kozad at 6:01 AM on December 10, 2021

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I knew him from reading the Flyboy anthology in bed with my girlfriend (now wife) at the close of the 90s. Not sure how I got hipped to his Burnt Sugar ensemble, maybe the Earshot Jazz organization in Seattle, but I had my wig peeled at LO-FI in the early 2000s. I marveled that Tate as conductor had only marginal control of where the music would go, signifying consensus-driven collaboration in an ostensibly Western Classical form.

The ensemble was here in Durham a month or so back, but we had just bought a house and started unpacking, so I begged off. my latest regret.
posted by SoundInhabitant at 7:17 AM on December 10, 2021 [1 favorite]

Here's the review of Eric B & Rakim's Follow the Leader that Abdurraqib praises in his remembrance.
posted by ardgedee at 8:31 AM on December 10, 2021 [1 favorite]

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Thanks for this: the affection shown here is a was a sweet note in a sour week.
posted by ivanthenotsoterrible at 9:20 AM on December 10, 2021

This is a really great post.

Here's 'Cult-Nats Meets Freaky-Deke,' originally published in the Village Voice in 1986 and later in Flyboy in the Buttermilk, an excellent collection of Tate's essays.

Here he is writing about Bad Brains, and doing an interview about an anthology he edited, the excellent Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking From Black Culture.
posted by box at 10:02 AM on December 10, 2021 [1 favorite]

We went to a hip-hop exhibition this summer at Boston's MFA and his work on curation and his writing throughout was such a revelation (I feel so late to that party). This really hit me, like when you meet a new friend and assume you will have plenty of time to get to know them. Dammit.

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posted by allthinky at 10:13 AM on December 10, 2021

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posted by May Kasahara at 3:27 PM on December 10, 2021

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posted by riverlife at 7:25 PM on December 10, 2021

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posted by TwoStride at 9:47 PM on December 10, 2021