Sheldon Taylor's Souls of Black Notes

                                                                             "That wasn't a turning point in my life. I was born again a year earlier, in Anaheim It had nothing to do with no woman." ----Al Green (taken from an interview excerpt in  Wax Poetics Magazine) In 2008, Al Green finally put a long-running urban legend to rest. It was a growing spiritual conversion over a series of concerts, not a rejected lover, a pot of grits, and a tragic suicide that prompted the soul legend to relinquish a platinum and gold-laden career to become a gospel singer and preacher.                                                             ...

Leave it to Morris Day to write the closest thing we'll ever get to a Prince memoir. On Time: A Princely Life of Funk peels back so many layers of the flashy front man from the legendary funk band The Time. Thankfully, Day bypasses the sober reflections atypical of other memoirs that are so unworthy of his larger -than- life personality. On Time has a bounce that keeps the reader's attention throughout. How do I know? I pulled it out of my mailbox around 1:00am and sat  in my car reading it cover-to cover until I finished nearly three hours later. On Time also details the history of the Minneapolis Sound and Day's complex relationship with his friend and ally. Collaborator and mentor. Bandmate and occasional adversary. Day even brings Prince along for the ride, masterfully re-creating their sharp tag-team banter recalling their Purple Rain days. It works too. Prince's spirit hovers over Day, pushing, prodding and interrupting. So much so that their sim...

 As another luminary of Black Star Power walks through heaven's door, another link in my childhood chain is broken. Is becomes was. History's pulse quickens, anxious to be documented before being overtaken by the sands of time. As Diahann Carroll tributes flood social media, my mind is transported back to Carroll's cinematic tour de force, Claudine. Momentarily leaving her Fifth Avenue Bergdorf sheen behind for an anti-star trip across 110th Street to Edgecombe Avenue, Carroll nailed her role as the Harlem single mother navigating her brood through poverty's turbulent waters set to a moving soundtrack that was the wing beneath the movie's wings.  Friends and neighbors, they graciously gave me access to their massive record collections when I visited. Thumbing through the racks, I rediscovered music that conjured up long lost memories banished to the corners of my mind. I could always count on seeing the Claudine soundtrack mixed in between Songs In T...