Sylvia Vanderpool Robinson

The awesome woman of the day for Wednesday, July 4, 2012, is Sylvia Vanderpool Robinson, U.S. singer, record producer, and record label executive. Born March 6, 1934, NYC, NY, USA. Died September 29, 2011, Secaucus, NJ, USA.

Sylvia was probably best known as the Sylvia in Mickey and Sylvia ("Love is Strange")

However, Love is Strange is NOT the reason I am profiling her today. I learned this morning that Ms. Robinson was a co-founder of Sugar Hill records, that she co-wrote and produced "The Message":

... and that she was the genius who, the story goes, recruited the rappers on Rappers’ Delight by having her son drive her around Englewood, NJ. 

At the time, the conventional music industry wisdom was that the live energy of rap was impossible to capture on vinyl. Nevertheless, one hot August night in 1979 Robinson made her son Joey drive her around Englewood, New Jersey, looking for rappers. 

He told NPR in 2000 that he took his mother to a pizza place and introduced her to Henry Jackson. "He closed the pizza parlor down," said Joey Robinson about the man who would become Big Bank Hank. "He's got all this dough on him. He weighs about 300 to 400 pounds at the time. And he jumps in the back of my Oldsmobile and starts rapping."

The Robinsons kept driving around, people kept hopping into the car and The Sugarhill Gang was born. 

None of the rappers had ever worked together before. In the studio, Sylvia Robinson cued each one by pointing at them, and they recorded "Rapper's Delight" in one uninterrupted 14-minute take. Robinson personally mailed the single to radio stations and badgered them to play it. 

So much for conventional wisdom.

For more information:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Robinson

Carol Kaye

Today’s Awesome Woman is musician Carol Kaye. Although you’ve probably never heard her name (I just discovered her last week), you have defininitely heard her play. As a session player, she played guitar or bass guitar on an estimated 10,000 recording sessions in a 55 year career. She started playing guitar in 1949 and plazed bebop jazz guitar in clubs around Los Angeles. In 1957 she did her first session for Sam Cooke. Carol describes her move into session work and her later move to bass guitar: “The session went well, so I decided to aim for the stability of studio work that paid good wages as I supported a family of 4 back in the late 1950s.” “In late 1963, when the Fender Bassist didn't show up for a record date at Capitol Records, I was asked to play someone's bass and liked it, liked its role, and liked creating good latin-funk lines of my own. I had been a successful pro musician since 1949, playing all styles of music so playing bass was easy as I knew what bass should sound like, been there doing the guitar dates for 5 years always thinking "I'd have played the bass parts differently" and so now I had my chance. It was fun to groove, and feel that power and responsibility as the basement of the band, so I started even a heavier work schedule playing elec. bass from 1963 on.” (1)

Carol became part of a group of about 350 musicians that worked steadily behind the scenes on albums, movie soundtracks & television themes. Throughout the 1960s, she played bass on a significant percentage of records appearing on the Billboard Hot 100, although she was almost wholly unknown to the general public at the time. She created some of the most distinctive & memorable bass lines of the era such as “The Beat Goes On” by Sonny & Cher and the theme song for the original tv series “Mission Impossible”. Here’s just some of the people she worked with The Beach Boys, Phil Spector, The Doors, Ritchie Valens, Frank Sinatra, Nancy Sinatra, Glen Campbell, Leon Russell, Sonny & Cher, Joe Cocker, Barbra Streisand, Ray Charles, Frank Zappa, Ike & Tina Turner, Johnny Mathis, Simon & Garfunkel, The Righteous Brothers, Herb Alpert, Paul Revere & The Raiders, The Monkees, and Buffalo Springfield. Beginning in 1969, Kaye wrote and published many tutorial books, audio cassettes, and video tapes instructing others how to play the bass. Kaye has also taught many now well-known bass players and has given workshops throughout the United States.

I could go on and on about her - I now have a major idol crush on her. I had never even heard of her until last week. During the Grammys someone on FB made a snide comment about Glen Campbell. As I was looking up info about him, I stumbled across her name and started looking into her. She is an amazing, awesome woman. Reading some of her notes about her work and watching some of her interviews - she is totally kick ass! Her confidence about her work & her professionalism inspires me by her ability to combine her creativity with getting the job done. And she provides a fascinating window into the creation of the music she worked on. So if you get a chance, take five minutes & watch the YouTube video - I hope you like her as much as I do!



(1)https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=247456118665236&id=168440386566810

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Carol-Kaye-II/168440386566810
http://www.carolkaye.com/www/biography/index.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carol_Kaye
http://www.enotes.com/kaye-carol-reference/kaye-carol
http://abbeyrd.best.vwh.net/carolkay.htm

Alixa and Naima - Climbing PoeTree

The Awesome Women of the Day are Alixa and Naima, a performance duo called Climbing PoeTree. Poets, performers, print-makers, dancers, muralists, and designers, the Colombia- and Massachusetts-born, Brooklyn-based team has toured the world, working the intersections of so many artistic disciplines and presentation modalities that they defy categorization.  They describe themselves on the Climbing PoeTree website as "the Heart Beat Soul Sister Artist Warrior duo." Their work confronts difficult issues of social and environmental justice and offers a perspective shift, an incensed yet loving realignment to everything about today's world that could get you down, a thinking/feeling view that will infiltrate the heart and mind of anyone who has even a small chink left open in their emotionally protective armor.

In a review of their 2009 show Hurricane Season, Onome Djere writes:

Climbing Poetree were already touring as a spoken word group, waxing eloquent about the economic greed and racism that fuels the prison industry. Using dance, poetry, tapestry, and storytelling, Alixa and Naima started giving birth to Hurricane Season by connecting the numerous dots of environmental and socio-economic oppression they had observed. One example was the news of mercenaries who were contracted to help patrol New Orleans in the Katrina aftermath - in effect, criminalizing its predominantly black and low-income population. Though Climbing Poetree covered everything from the hurricane to the displacement of Palestinians to the plastic island floating in the Pacific, they managed to avoid information overload and maximize emotional impact with graceful transitions and seamless multimedia layering.

The entire theatrical experience embodied the sacred and tempestuous nature of water: the dimly lit underwater cave-like performance space, the fluid dance movements of the performers, the tidal waves of images, metaphors, poignant quotes and audio collages of survivor stories, ebbing and flowing across a huge screen.

I have only begun to get familiar with their work and am utterly captivated by everything I've seen and heard. Among my favorites so far is this existentialist piece that ponders whether the other elements of nature perhaps experience the same sort of silly angst that we, the human element, put ourselves through over issues of appearance, social role, parenting, mortality. For me, the final line of the poem has already become a touchstone I come back to throughout the day, to regain my center when my mind is spinning out on a trip fueled by worries and fears:



In a historical context, we could call Climbing PoeTree "the wandering minstrels of today," or,  "itinerant philosopher shamans." For me personally, though, I see them as brave, shimmering living goddesses of Heart and Truth. Even in a small box of video on my screen, they take me, wake me, and remake me.

Joan Jett

Today’s Awesome Woman is Rock Goddess Joan Jett. As frontwoman for The Runaways, Joan Jett became a female pioneer in the male-dominated world of rock music. She is also a songwriter and producer. I adore Joan Jett. In the 80s she was my style icon - her kick ass swagger combines with leather and enough attitude to out macho the guys. There was nothing coy about her. Her iconic song “I Love Rock’n’Roll” was anthemic. This year Joan is being inducted into the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame.

At age 15 Joan was a founding member of the punk-pop all female band The Runaways, along with Lita Ford, Cherie Currie & Micki Steele. The band was the subject of the biopic The Runaways, a film based on Cherie Currie's biography Neon Angel: The Cherie Currie Story. Joan served as an executive producer on the project, and assisted actress Kristen Stewart with her portrayal of Jett. ‘The band was ahead of its time in many ways, with its hard-rock sound emerging during an era when disco music was king. They also felt dismissed by audiences and critics because of their young age and their gender; the public didn't seem to know what to do with five girls who sang about sex, rebelling, and partying. The musicians' fashion choices also alienated them from mainstream fans; Currie chose to wear lingerie on stage, and Jett often appeared in her trademark red, leather jumpsuit.’ (1) Although The Runaways were poorly received in the US, they were popular in Europe, Asia, Australia, Canada and South America.

In 1980, Jett tried to get a record label to distribute her new album, but she was rejected by 23 different companies. Out of frustration, she and producer Kenny Laguna and songwriter Ritchie Cordell founded Blackheart Records in 1980. Joan toured with her band, the Blackhearts, and put together another album. I Love Rock 'n' Roll became a huge hit, driven in large part to the title track, which hit the top of the pop charts in early 1982.

Although she has not since reached the commercial success of that era, Joan continues to tour extensively. She produced Riot Grrrl acts Bikini Kill and L7. Biography.com notes, "She has also taken an active part in signing bands to her record label. 'We made Blackheart Records what we wanted it to be,' Jett said. 'It's a place where girls can feel comfortable to be—both in a work environment and on an artistic level.'”

Away from work, Jett devotes much of her time to social causes. She is active with Farm Sanctuary, an animal protection organization.” The rock 'n' roll legend has served as a PETA spokeswoman for several years, encouraging others to become vegetarian.

1) http://www.biography.com/people/joan-jett-531004
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Jett

Joan Jett Biography

www.biography.com

Check out the aggressive and popular music of punk pioneer, and women's role model, Joan Jett at Biography.com.

Laurie Anderson

Sunset over Lower Manhattan, cool June breezes from the East River, a bevy of songbirds swirling above in the summer sky… What do these images & sensations conjure? Last night, friends & I had the pleasure of seeing and hearing a mesmerizing (and free!) concert by Laurie Anderson at NYCs Castle Clinton in Battery Park, Lower Manhattan in which this Awesome Woman of the Day collaborated with a fellow musician, Bill Laswell, for a night of improvisational & deeply-felt beats and melodies.

Laura Phillips "Laurie" Anderson (born 5 June 1947) in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, is an influential American experimental performance artist, composer and musician who plays violin and keyboards and sings in a variety of experimental music and art rock styles. Initially trained as a sculptor, Anderson did her first performance-art piece in the late 1960s. She graduated from Barnard College magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, studying art history. In 1972, she obtained an MFA in sculpture from Columbia University. Her first performance-art piece—a symphony played on automobile horns—was performed in 1969. In the early 1970s, she worked as an art instructor, as an art critic for magazines such as Artforum and illustrated children's books.

Throughout the 1970s, Anderson did a variety of different performance-art activities. Many of Anderson's earliest recordings remain unreleased, or were only issued in limited quantities. In 1978, Anderson performed at The Nova Convention, a major conference involving many counter-culture figures and rising avant-garde musical stars, including William S. Burroughs, Philip Glass, Frank Zappa, Timothy Leary, Malcolm Goldstein, John Cage, and Allen Ginsberg. She also worked with comedian Andy Kaufman in the late 1970s.

She became widely known outside the art world in 1981 when her single "O Superman" reached number two on the UK pop charts. She also starred in and directed the 1986 concert film Home of the Brave and also composed the soundtracks for the Spalding Gray films Swimming to Cambodia and Monster in a Box. She also hosted the PBS series Alive from Off-Center during this time, for which she produced the short film What You Mean We? Personally, I have been a fan of hers since a friend from college made me a mix tape, which I still play, that introduced me to her single, Big Science, and the album with the same name.

Anderson is a unique pioneer in electronical music and has invented several devices that she has used in her recordings and performance art shows. In 1977, she created a tape-bow violin that uses recorded magnetic tape on the bow instead of horsehair and a magnetic tape head in the bridge. In the late 1990s, she developed a talking stick, a six-foot-long baton-like MIDI controller that can access and replicate different sounds. In 2003, Anderson became NASA's first artist-in-residence, which inspired her performance piece, The End of the Moon. The single "Sharkey's Day" was for many years the theme song of Lifetime Television.

Anderson married uber-cool singer/songwriter and guitarist Lou Reed (of The Velvet Underground fame) in 2008. Who would have thought that two of the most unorthodox icons in avant garde music, longtime live-in couple Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson, would ever get hitched? The unconventional pair tied the knot after decades of living together in a private ceremony. Since the latter part of the 1990s, Anderson and Lou Reed have collaborated on a number of recordings together. Anderson was awarded the 2007 Gish Prize for her "outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to humankind’s enjoyment and understanding of life."

Last June, Laurie Anderson debuted her original "Music for Dogs" composition outside the Sydney Opera House on . Anderson - who often plays music for her rat terrier Lollabelle - said the idea originated during a chat with cellist Yo-Yo Ma while the two were waiting backstage at a graduation ceremony. Hundreds of dogs and their owners bounced around as Anderson entertained them with 20 minutes of thumping beats, whale calls, whistles and a few high-pitched electronic sounds imperceptible to human ears. What will she think of next…?

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