Tag: madlib (page 1 of 1)

A hip hop concert with dancer CeSee center stage as DJ House Shoes spins records to her right and other performers mill about behind her.
April 19, 2025 / 1 Comment

Shades of madlib

The floor of The Echoplex pulses as bass pumps through the speakers. CeSee, in her black tank top and tutu, is center stage, freestyling her flowing dance moves in perfect harmony with every scratch, jab, and trick that each DJ delivers. Stacy Epps, Wildchild, and Sway Calloway hype the crowd, urging us to make noise for the performers, Los Angeles, and hip-hop.

But no one lets us forget why we’re here: to raise funds and honor the residents of Altadena, who were devastated by January’s wildfires. This Tribute and Benefit concert centers around one resident in particular: Otis Jackson Jr., the DJ, composer, producer, and rapper Madlib.

A promotional graphic for Madlib, featuring bold text that reads 'MADLIB' against a starry background. In the bottom section, there are logos for various sponsors and a QR code with the instruction to 'SCAN HERE TO DONATE.'

The last time I was at The Echoplex might have been more than a decade ago—in 2014, for a show called Ultimate Breaks and Beats. I don’t want to believe that much time has passed, but so much of these past ten years has been a blur. Even these months since the fires in January have been lost in a haze of the near-daily disasters that have defined 2025. Here I am, though, among heads of all generations, seeking fellowship through breaks and beats. 

From 7 p.m. until the wee hours, a roster of beloved DJs, beatmakers, and Rhymesayers rotate through 20-30 minute sets, crafting soundscapes from Madlib’s vast catalog, including unreleased joints, deep cuts, and rare grooves. Linafornia and DJ Benji B deftly open the show. Then comes House Shoes, whose presence yanks me back to the 2000s when I was chasing turntablists across every venue in town, trying to sustain the high achieved through deft blends and scratch mastery. Shoes mixes Madlib with Dilla in an “LA to Detroit” set that awakens something long dormant in me. The Gaslamp Killer follows with his signature chaos, spinning a hard-hitting electric fusion ending with an inspired blend of Kendrick Lamar’s “Squabble Up” and its sample, Debbie Deb’s “When I Hear Music” that is our return flight to the City of Angels.

Rhythms of the Village takes the stage at the show’s midway point. The cultural hub and store are among the event’s beneficiaries. Their performance is the night’s only non-hip-hop set. Before the djembe drums and singing begin, Onochie Chukwurah—a Nigerian elder and co-founder of the Altadena center for African heritage—addresses the crowd. “Even though the fires took our business, they didn’t take our lives,” he says. The din of the crowd quiets as he commands our attention—his words and the soulful performance root us. What could have been a bathroom break becomes a balm for the soul.

A group of performers on stage at a live event, singing and engaging with the audience, with a backdrop of colorful lights. The atmosphere is lively and celebratory.

It’s 10:30, and unexpected guests are flooding the stage. Taboo and will.i.am are dapping up Miles Brown and others as Monalisa navigates her set, her laptop threatened by flying elbows and sloshing drinks. The man of the hour, though, was nowhere to be found. Wildchild tells us it’s no surprise: Madlib rarely wants the spotlight. The Beat Konducta doesn’t even own a cell phone. The show is being live-streamed on DJ Spinna’s Twitch, and we’re told he’s watching.

He’s not physically here, but his presence fills the building.

After all, he’s always performed partly in silhouette, rhyming through his animated alter ego Quasimoto. And as we move through his sonic legacy—beat by beat, sample by sample—you sense how impactful his unique point of view has been. It’s a retrospective 25 years deep. You don’t need to see him. You hear him. You feel him.

I look around and notice the gray in performers’ beards, the wrinkles on their foreheads, the stories about kids turning eighteen, and events from the previous century. I should feel my age, but that’s not the dominant emotion. Instead, I think of one of Madlib’s most transcendent projects: Shades of Blue, the 2003 album where he was granted access to the Blue Note archives and created something timeless. New recordings built from classics, made fresh for young ears.

That’s the magic Madlib and his peers have gifted us. It is timeless, communal, and everlasting.

I’m not, though. So we left The Echoplex before last call. That livestream Madlib was watching? I joined him there—from the comfort of my couch—as Nu-Mark, The Alchemist, J Rocc and others continued to guide us through sound.

As Mr. Chukwurah reminded us, coming together like this makes us better. In these layered frequencies, these echoes of jazz, hip-hop, and fellowship, we find ourselves and each other.

These are the shades of Madlib: fractured, funky, reverent, rebellious.

And Lord Quas willing, I’ll be back in the crowd again soon.

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January 5, 2021 / 0 Comments

Chasin’ The Bird

“Salt peanuts, salt peanuts.”

— Dizzy Gillespie

Dave Chisholm‘s graphic novel about Charlie Parker’s time in Southern California is the first book I’ve read released during the COVID-19 pandemic. It acknowledges that timing in the foreword by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Jabbar—the long-time Angeleno—wonders whether much has changed between Jim Crow in Parker’s 1940s America and last year’s Black Lives Matter summer of anguish. My gut reaction is to say, very much yes, even through the book’s lens where Bird must stay at an all-black hotel and permission to book an integrated band is seen as a great gift or concession. But a character in the story—a white one, no less—extols us never to trust LA cops, and 2020’s refrain of “defund the police” rings in my ears, and I question my gut’s optimism.

Despite growing up in a lifelong jazz musician’s home, I am not knowledgeable in the greats. My appreciation for jazz records comes via hip-hop connections: Guru’s Jazzmatazz, Q-Tip and Ali Shaheed Mohammed’s frequent bebop sampling, and Madlib’s Shades of Blue. My dad is a founding member of the Blackbyrds and, yet, I didn’t give much of a listen to Donald Byrd until J Dilla and Erykah Badu gave me an entryway I was willing to take. Even then, my explorations have been solely into the music with very little understanding of the people or those moments in time that made these tunes possible.

Chasin’ the Bird provided a new kind of door for me. The first chorus is told in Dizzy Gillespie’s voice, and he gives form to what it was like being a jazz cat in 1947. The book makes that Los Angeles and that club real for me. He name-checks a few songs, Salt Peanuts and Koko, and visualizes what it might have felt like to hear Bird blow his horn in person for the first time. I immediately went to my preferred music streamer and pulled up a Charlie Parker playlist. My toe began tapping. My eyes closed for a while, and then I opened them again, hoping to have been transported. I wanted to be looking around the darkened smoky room, searching for someone else’s eyes with which to lock. I’d shake my head as if to say, can you believe this? We’d chuckle together. I’d wipe my brow and return my attention to the stage, enraptured.

The story continues from there, taking on the perspectives of several others who encountered Bird during his time in my beloved city. Ultimately, the goal is to unravel the mystery of what happened to the man in Los Angeles, especially during his six-month-long disappearance from the scene. What we don’t get is the man himself in his own words. While Parker casts such a long shadow over the music of his time and what followed, he didn’t make it past his 35th year. He never gave himself the chance to tell his own story.

And while that’s a loss that this story can’t fill, it hits all my other sweet spots. It’s an LA story. It’s noir. It’s moody and sexy and a puzzle. The art sings. There are pages—the outro most intentionally so—that I’d swear I could hear. And the words are just as mesmerizing as the visuals and the jazz.

In Coltrane’s section, the illustrated Bird says to him:

The Universe we live in don’t waste nothin’. Everything has existed eternally. Every piece of energy is recycled. Every piece of motherfucking matter. You know what else is eternal?

Fuckin’ soul.

My soul stirred.

I highly recommend.