How important is living and working in New York/Brooklyn?
It’s important in that I’m in close proximity to the people I work with regularly, and of course family and friends, but I can’t say NY/Brooklyn has much “vibe” anymore. I’m from here and can’t help but feel it to be my home, but it’s changed a lot
While I don’t have much romanticism about the old NY, I do feel that the new NY/Brooklyn feels corny. Luxury apartments galore, affordable housing scarce. While parts of the city are cleaner and safer than they’ve ever been, it’s been made that way for newcomers with money to enjoy, not New Yorkers who’ve been here for generations. You know, the typical trajectory of gentrification.
Some of my personal favorite things you’ve done were the tracks with Mayra. Don’t you still have some work in the cookie jar with her? Tell people about her and the nature of her talent.
To use your own words, she is what you’d call a natural talent. She’s not a “professional” singer in the sense that she sings or performs or collaborates vocally in any consistent way. But it was her idea for me to cover the songs we did, and she can sing and act and write. I do have another track with her which I’d love to finish, but more pressing projects keep coming along that have prevented me from finishing that.
Talk about working with Uzimon.
Ganja and punanny abound.
Talk about working with Sugar Minott.
I’ve recorded him 3 or 4 times. I’d been a fan of his for so long, I found it really strange to be in a setting where I was producing. Carter, you were there the first time he came to my studio for the session which yielded “Praise His Name”. That time I didn’t have to really produce because he was just on fire. He listened to my track on loop for a long time and wrote his song, and he pretty much knew what to do and how to do it, and all I had to do was hit the record button and witness his greatness.
The other times I had him over I’d picked out songs for him to cover. Soul tunes that he was vaguely familiar with. Those sessions were much more challenging, because at each of those sessions we’d bump heads a bit, and it was the most awkward feeling to be in a moment of tense disagreement with one of your favorite singers.
In each instance though, we’d eventually reach some breakthrough moment where he’d understand what I was going for. Once I was able to get us on that same page his demeanor would shift immediately and he’d just trust me for the rest of the session, and from there we just flowed together really well. THAT was a great feeling. Once we got rolling he never seemed interested in taking a break. I noticed this and mentioned something to him like “man you’re tireless!”, and he just shrugged and said, “I love my work.”
He passed just a few months after the last time I’d worked with him. Actually my last moments with him were in my living room after the session watching a Lina Wertmuller movie which he was really enjoying, yelling out “MADMAN DAT!!!”. A very funny moment, you had to be there kinda thing…
I’d performed with him back in 1999 too and that was a very memorable evening. He just killed it. It was one of those rare gigs where all the musicians onstage were kinda grinning ear to ear the whole show cause it was so damn good!
Talk about the role you played on the Amy Winehouse album and how you feel about that.
My only role was that I played piano on the songs Mark Ronson produced, which makes up about half of the “Back to Black” album.
Those sessions were really the beginning of me and musicians in the Daptone family getting calls from the outside world to do session work. It’s interesting that that particular session ended up being part of the record that’s bigger than anything we’d been a part of to that point or since, but the significance of that session for me had less to do with Amy and more to do with our relationship with Ronson. He enjoyed working with us so much, that since then he’s called upon us for all kinds of session work.
I really enjoy doing sessions with those musicians. We’ve played together for years so there’s great chemistry between us, but with Ronson we’re doing something outside of what we normally do stylistically. Actually the Amy record is a great example of that. We’d never actually played those specific kinds of things, but her music was in the same family of what we already did so it was a stretch but not a big one. Since then we’ve been pushed much further which I like.
