Sweetback Sunday: Melvin Van Peebles 90

Heliocentrics/Melvin Van Peebles/Archie Shepp - The Cavern

The little tool I had that converted the FLACs to mp4s broke, so we're back to pix at the top, with a scratch audio player underneath for the sample du jour.

This has to be brief, as I'm now supremely irritated at Nonsense Tech.

I don't usually do filmmakers, but this one dabbled in music so we'll make an exception.

He passed last year and he'd have been 90 today, so celebrate we shall.

The acknowledged father of Blaxploitation, and really a primary avatar of African-American cinema of the last 50 years, movies in general would look a lot different had he never existed.

He first burst onto the scene at the dawn of the 1970s, with a film that still turns people's minds inside out five full decades later.

Part action adventure, part polemic, and all mayhem, this first big film catapulted him to the forefront of the culture almost fully formed.

Other acclaimed films followed. He had a son -- who became a superstar in front of the camera -- named Mario, with whom most are familiar.

And like I was saying, all the while he dabbled in music.

The soundtrack to his first film doubles as the debut of Earth, Wind & Fire, in addition to containing his own sounds.

All of his subsequent movies have songs of his, and he even has a couple of records that have no film tie-in and are just standalone examples of him doing music.

He also intermittently collaborated with other musicians, and today I've plucked the audio from a European satellite TV broadcast to illustrate this.

Here we have quite the combination, with our hero and new nonagenarian getting busy with noted maestros The Heliocentrics, and if that wasn't enough you get tenor titan Archie Shepp commentating on the whole 75 minutes.

The Heliocentrics

Melvin Van Peebles

Archie Shepp 

Jazz à La Villette 2015

Espace Charlie Parker

Grande Halle de la Villette

Paris, France

9.8.2015

01 Prologue

02 Big Bang Reincarnation

03 Searching for Signs of Love

04 Blue Mist

05 The Cavern

06 Transformation, Part I

07 Transformation, Part II

08 Telepathic Routine

09 The Dance

10 Trust the Cosmos (Believe In the Universe)

11 Infinite List (Toss the Dice)

12 Epilogue

Total time: 1:15:27

Adrian Owusu - guitar

Shabaka Hutchings - bass clarinet

Ollie Parfitt - keyboards

Jessica Lauren - keyboards

Jake Ferguson - bass

Malcolm Catto - drums

Jack Yglesias - percussion

Tom Hodges - electronics

Archie Shepp - tenor saxophone

Melvin Van Peebles - narrator

192/48k audio extracted from a 2016 HD "Mezzo" satellite TV broadcast

converted to 16/44 CD Audio, volume boosted and tracked by EN, August 2022
385 MB FLAC/direct link

I might do one or two more for August if all goes according to plan.... which it almost never does.

But today is the day when we say thank you and HBD to Melvin Van Peebles, born this day in 1932 and forever, eternally singing that badass song.--J.

8.21.1932 - 9.21.2021