Sheldon Taylor's Souls of Black Notes

  Man gives awards. God gives reward . Denzel Washington’s words are both ethereal and emancipating. Transparency and truth are his testimony, finally casting off the cloak of public perfection long shadowing his career. Long devoted, Washington’s faith has increasingly taken a front and center stage position as he slowly winds down an acting career spanning nearly five decades across TV, film, and stage. His past is illustrious, but it’s his beatific future that he’s anticipating. At 70, traces of Sidney Poitier’s regal restraint still remain. In the past, he wielded his high wattage grin like a singular weapon: gracefully fending off critics and dazzling fans. Now it's flashes of Washington’s Money Earnin’ Mount Vernon roots that are roaring to the surface these days: Washington boxes out interviewers with direct frankness and confronts out-of-pocket paparazzi.  Washington's spirituality grounds him, but he's still a live wire.  Instead of high fashion curated by stylis...

  Barry Michael Cooper.... You may not know his name but you know his (pen) game. Pages torn from memories of his mind would spawn Nineties classics "New Jack City" (1991) "Sugar Hill" (1994) and "Above The Rim" (1994). Cooper was the creative force behind this Harlem film trilogy penning their screenplays inspired by his time of coming up in New York in the 1970s.   Years before Hollywood came calling, Cooper sealed his legend penning articles in the Village Voice and Spin Magazine.  Cooper hit my radar during his prolific period (for me anyway)between 1988-1990 thanks to joints like his May 1989 dope Big Daddy Kane  piece   ("Raw Like Sushi"): "Big Daddy Kane is a cool head on a dangerous body. He's the greatest rapper of all time---maybe. He is what he is and that's what scares people." He'd already written a few potent narratives I would read later.  Cooper's February 1986 Spin piece  "Crack"  transported r...

Forty-five years ago, Michael Jackson's "Off The Wall" was released to critical and commercial acclaim. Jackson's breakthrough album solidified the singer's transition from child star to adult entertainer.  Let the madness in the music get to you..... I remember the time so very well because it was when I emerged from off the wall: a ten-year-old moving from music spectator to consumer. Since there were  no younger acts back then, every kid my age was drawn to music made by adults ten, twenty, and nearly thirty years older.  It was heady time.  From around '74 to '79, my life played out to a soundtrack that was one long musical highlight reel.  I wasn't buying music yet but it didn't stop me from reading about it or watching documentaries or television shows devoted to musical subjects.  As a toddler I was transfixed by Jackson Five album covers laying around the house. I can't remember when I first learned they were from my hometown of Gary, I...

                                                                "But if you can still hold onto what is yourself, that part of me that makes me Roberta and does not make me Chaka or Anita ... I'm going to hold on to that no matter what, and I'm going to nourish and cherish and nurture that and strengthen that."   Roberta Flack’s confident occupation of her creative space, captured in a 1989 Washington Post (“Roberta Flack; Charting Her Own Course") interview among the pantheon of Black female vocalists, evokes the title of one of her classic albums: quiet fire. There’s no one like her: traces of Minnie Riperton’s ethereal poetry live on in Jill Scott’s airy word-speak. Aretha’s litanies of longing are precursors of sorts to Mary J. Blige’s own heartache homilies. A young Evelyn King’s pairing with producers T. Life and...