COZI TV LAUNCHES WEEK-LONG CELEBRATION OF BLACK MUSIC MONTH WITH ORIGINAL, SHORT-FORM CONTENT AND CURATED PROGRAMMING

Press Release
June 16, 2017
NBC Universal

NEW YORK, NY – June 16, 2017 – COZI TV will commemorate Black Music Month with the premiere of new, original short-form vignettes featured in a week of curated programming, complete with cameo appearances from some of black music’s most iconic artists. The celebration runs from June 19 through June 23 on the national multicast network.

Famous black artists such as James Brown, Isaac Hayes and Little Richard made memorable appearances on episodes of COZI TV shows such as Miami Vice, The A-Team and Baywatch. The original vignettes feature hip-hop and pop culture influencers discussing their TV performances as well as their musical and societal contributions. Commentators in the segments include Angela Yee, host of Power 105.1’s The Breakfast Club; Janine Rubenstein, music reporter for PEOPLE; music producer DJ Clark Kent and news journalist Alicia Quarles.

The vignettes will be showcased within COZI TV’s curated episodes and will also live on COZITV.com with additional and extended versions that discuss the evolution of black music and its mark on pop culture. A full list of commentators can be found here.

The curated episodes will air at the following times:

June 19, 10:00PM: The A-Team, “A Lease With An Option” featuring Della Reese
June 20, 11:00PM: Miami Vice, “Missing Hours” featuring James Brown
June 21, 11:00PM: Miami Vice, “Bought and Paid For” featuring El DeBarge
June 22, 10:00PM: The A-Team, “The Heart of Rock N’ Roll” featuring Rick James & Isaac Hayes
June 22, 12:00AM: Baywatch, “The Runaways” Short featuring Little Richard
June 23, 11:00PM: Miami Vice, “Florence, Italy” featuring The Fat Boys

For more on Black Music Month and COZI TV, click here or follow along on Twitter at @COZITV and “Like” us on Facebook @cozitv.

ABOUT COZI TV
COZI TV is NBC’s national multicast network designed to deliver an easy-to-watch, comfortable and familiar viewing experience to audiences across the country. COZI TV features many of America’s most beloved and iconic television series, including Murder, She Wrote, The A-Team, Hart to Hart, The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman. COZI TV launched on January 1, 2013 on the multicast channels of the NBC Owned Television Stations and is now available in more than 94 million homes nationally, or nearly 82 percent of the U.S. The network has 104 affiliates, serving nine of the top 10 U.S. television markets. COZI TV is programmed around the clock, including scheduled blocks of time each day for viewers to connect to their community with local news, sports and special events. For more on COZI TV, visit www.cozitv.com.

MEDIA CONTACT:
John Durso, Jr.
212.664.5247
John.Durso@nbcuni.com

recent Larry Dodson interviews

HBO’s Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine Documentary, ‘The Defiant Ones’
By Jem Aswad, Cynthia Littleton Variety

For all the bluster and mythmaking that’s been spun over the 25-odd years of the partnership between Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine, it’s easy for longtime observers to forget the fact that this odd couple really does have a remarkable story.

That oddness wasn’t lost on HBO or director Allen Hughes, whose four-part documentary on the two, “The Defiant Ones,” premieres on July 9. The doc focuses on the relationship between Iovine and Dre, who came from very different background but clicked on a level that transcended race, age and experience — and not only changed the sound of hip-hop with Dre’s “The Chronic” album, released through Interscope Records when Iovine was chief of the label, but also with Beats by Dre headphones, which has become a kingdom within Apple’s empire including Beats 1 radio and more.

“We both grew up racially charged neighborhoods,” Iovine said at a Television Critics Association press tour earlier this year. “This is about the relationship between a white guy and black guy at a time when the country in this moment is so screwed up in this area… We stayed together under some of the most difficult working circumstances you could possibly have.”

The pair’s unlikely journey — which also includes Interscope’s departure from Time Warner’s Atlantic Records in the mid-1990s as part of the witch hunt against “gangsta rap” — is laid out in great detail in the documentary, and includes detailed interviews with the pair as well as Bono, Eminem, Nas, Ice Cube, Gwen Stefani, Tom Petty, Trent Reznor, Snoop Dogg, and Bruce Springsteen.

And while this doc will probably take the pair’s mythmaking to an even higher level, it remains a great story.

The Oral History Of Maze Featuring Frankie Beverly's 'Before I Let Go'
By Lauren Porter • Jun, 08, 2017 • Essence

For its undeniable contribution to music and our community—from BBQ’s and beyond—we talk to the singer about the anthem that makes the summer.

There isn’t a cookout, not a wedding or family reunion in Black America where you won’t hear one song in particular. Whether it’s during the height of the summer season or on a fall day when there is a cold chill in the air, there is something about Maze featuring Frankie Beverly’s “Before I Let Go” that just makes you feel every emotion of elation all at once.

Released on the B side of their 1981 Live in New Orleans album, the song stood out almost instantly from the rest. It wasn’t because the song wasn’t recorded live in New Orleans, as the album title would suggest. It was in fact that the groove of the guitar struck your ears and stayed with your soul.

“‘Before I Let Go’ really did turn out to be something more than I even imagined,” Beverly told ESSENCE. “I got blessed with that.”

The band formed in 1970 and relocated to San Francisco where they made their first album. Going into the studio, the soul singer had no intention that the song released 11 years later would have such a resounding and long-lasting appeal. Mostly because, it wasn’t supposed to have the uptempo melody we all know and love.

“I was seeing some lady but I was just with someone [else] and we broke up. And it got kind of hard because I wasn't with the woman I wanted to be with and I couldn't stay with the one I was with,” said Beverly of how the dynamic five minute and six second track came to be.

He continued: “It was one of the girls [from] Alton McClain and Destiny, she passed away. She died in a car accident. Her name was Dee (n.e. Delores Marie "D'Marie" Warren). I had to kind let her go because I was already with some other girl and it was very, very, very, very unique [situation] that you have to leave somebody, and you feel so different. It was [about] somebody who was really having trouble letting go of something. That inspired that song.”

Written more as an ode to a love lost, when presented to his band, Maze, their artistic creativity took over and a hit was born.

“When it was written, the song it wasn't like a groove song like it came out to be. It was more, well it wasn't a ballad. It came out like that when I introduced it to the band. When the band got a hold of it, we started rehearsing it and that's when it got the sound that you guys hear now.”

In the nearly 36 years since the song’s release, it’s has been the foundation for musical excellence for generations of listeners. Staying with audiences both young and old, the way it does, Beverly says is humbling.

“Not too many [artists] get something that takes on like that. When I wrote the song, it was not in my mind to make it a hit. I was just trying to do a good record and for it to turn out the way it is. I think by the time we went in to record it, I think it had a good chance to make some noise but I had no idea that it was gonna be what it turned out to be. I mean it just shocked me. I mean to even hear you say it’s like the Black folks national anthem, that's even more than I can wrap my head around. It's too impressive.”

Just recently, the 2017 graduating class at Brookwood Junior High School in Glenwood, Illinois went viral when they remixed the song. Leah Oduro-Kwarten uploaded the video of her son Mesiyah and his classmates singing the song.

After the video was brought to his attention, Beverly watched the children’s meaningful rendition with both admiration and appreciation.

“I was blown away with that because they changed some of the lyrics because I think they were talking about their parents helping them to be able to graduate. It was very very moving.”

So what are Beverly’s favorite songs from the groups catalog?

The Philadelphia native, born to a mother from Virginia who was one of 19 children, says Marvin Gaye’s life and death inspired some of the ones he holds near.

“‘Happy Feelin’s’ is one my favorite songs because it was inspired to me by Marvin Gaye. We had already started on the album and I met Marvin and he just helped us in so many ways that it inspired ‘Happy Feelin’s’. That wasn't even our album. So he inspired ‘Happy Feelin’s’ so that's one of my favorites too.”

After Gaye’s death in 1984, the group paid tribute to his legacy with the song, “Silky Soul,” which made the charts as a Top 5 R&B hit song.

“‘We Are One’ I put in one of my all time favorites [too],” he says.

“I like what it says. It's the truth and it just is what it is. We are. If we really look at it we're all the same.”

Jimmy Carter: Black Music Association Remarks at a White House Dinner Honoring the Association
June 7, 1979

How many of you know what month this is? Somebody said June. Right on! This is Black Music Month.

As you know, the purpose of the Black Music Association is to preserve, protect, and perpetuate black music on an international basis. And the time to do it on an international basis is right now at the White House, the center of your Government, and Rosalynn and I are very glad to have you here.

The Black Music Association is not an old organization, but it was one that was organized at the right time in the fight place for the fight reason. It's only a year old, but I understand it already has 2,000 members. And tomorrow in Philadelphia, you'll have your founders meeting in a very appropriate place.

As you know, our own Nation was founded in Philadelphia. And I was thinking this afternoon that if we had had the Black Music Association organized 203 years ago, so that Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson and George Washington could have just heard some of this music at the very beginning, our country could have avoided a lot of trouble and a lot of heartache and a lot of struggle and a lot of suffering and a lot of division, and would be even greater than it is now.

It's important, in my opinion, for our own Nation and the rest of the world to know the importance that the President of the United States and his family and friends attach to black music, because in many ways, the feelings of our own black citizens throughout the history of our country has been accurately expressed in the music. And it presents a kind of history of our Nation when you go back and see the evolution of black music. It's meant a lot to me as a young boy and a young man and adult in Georgia.

I won't make the other States feel inferior by naming all the black musicians that have come out of Georgia. I'll be nice to you this afternoon. But I think that it's accurate to say that in many ways, the deep feelings of pain and suffering, of alienation and a sense of being an outcast in one's own community, in one's own nation, a sense of hope and a sense of unity, a sense of deep religious faith, a sense of vision, sense of beauty has been expressed very deeply and in forceful terms in black music not only for me, from the South, but for all Americans, both black and white.

And it's obvious that this has not been limited to the United States of America. There's been a transcendent effect of black music that has never paid any attention to international borders. I think black music is a way to tie the black people of our country to their own ancestors and to tie the United States to other nations of the world. It's been an avenue for understanding and friendship that has been effective when politicians could not succeed.

In many ways, you've expressed the hopes of our country—life, even when slavery was characteristic of black people, liberty and a struggle for it, when it seemed to escape generation after generation of struggling people. And no one can doubt that black music has always exemplified the pursuit of happiness.

So, in many ways I think that you have not only mirrored and described what was happening in our country, but you have presented a guide in times of despair and failure to what our country ought to be.

We are very deeply grateful tonight to have performers who in a very brief way can show the progress of black music during this historical time that I have just mentioned. There would be no possible way to choose enough different black musicians to give a total picture of what is meant by what you represent.

Sunday afternoon I went to a memorial service for A. Philip Randolph. I sat there and listened to Leontyne Price sing "The Lord's Prayer." When she approached the end of the song and hit a very high note, I said, "This is impossible for a human being to do." And then she raised about a half an octave and hit another note and cold chills went down my spine. And then she hit the final note and tears burst out of my eyes and flowed down my face; and I was not the only one. And although she hadn't quite finished the song, because she had to say "Amen," the entire audience, hundreds of people, broke out into simultaneous applause-just one type of music that is performed superbly.

And tonight we have four great artists. I'm not going to describe to you their biographies, because it's in your program. But we'll have Sara Jordan Powell, Chuck Berry, my long-time friend Billy Eckstine, Evelyn "Champagne" King, and Andrae Crouch to perform for us.

And I've learned one thing about black music, and that is that people who talk before the performance are not appreciated nearly so much as the performance itself. So, I'm ready now to join the audience, but to express on behalf of the 220 million people in our country my thanks to superb black musicians throughout the history of our country and my congratulations to the Black Music Association for spending your first birthday party here at the White House with us.

Thank you and congratulations.

_________________________________________________
Note: The President spoke at 7:45 p.m. on the South Grounds of the White House.

Wonderful words from the President.

Herbie Hancock Teaches Jazz
Posted on June 15, 2017 MasterClass News

Legendary icon and fourteen-time Grammy® Award-winning musician Herbie Hancock will teach his first ever online class exclusively with MasterClass. The class is currently available for pre-enrollment starting today at www.masterclass.com.

In his class, Hancock teaches his approach to music and how this translates into life philosophy. From his mentorship with Miles Davis through his genre-bending work as a bandleader and solo artist, he will share stories from a life in music and deliver expert technical lessons for professional and amateur pianists, musicians, jazz performers, composers across all genres, lovers of music and jazz aficionados.

Miles Davis taught me a lesson I’ll never forget: in jazz there are no mistakes. Every note you play is an opportunity to take your music further. That idea opened my ears to worlds of musical possibilities. In my class, I will share those ideas and help you discover your sound. Through lessons in harmony, rhythm, composition, and improvisation, I will show you how to write and perform with freedom,” – Herbie Hancock

“Herbie is simply amazing. He is not only a music legend, but he is devoted to helping the next generation of musicians. The depth and the joy with which he shares his craft is a revelation” – David Rogier, CEO and Co-Founder of MasterClass.

In addition to being recognized as a legendary pianist and composer, Herbie Hancock has been an integral part of every popular music movement since the 1960’s. At a young age, Hancock had already gained recognition as a child piano prodigy and performed an impressive Mozart piano concerto with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at age eleven. He went on to play jazz in high school and explored his passion for both electronics and science. In 1963, Hancock joined Miles Davis’ Second Great Quintet. Davis served as an inspiration and mentor for Hancock. Hancock continued to progress in his field and became one of the most influential jazz musicians, discovering the melodious bridge between traditional jazz and electronic sound. His many accolades include being named a Kennedy Center Honoree, UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador, Institute Chairman of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, and Co-Chair of International Jazz Day. Now in the sixth decade of his professional life, Herbie Hancock remains where he has always been: at the forefront of world culture, technology, business, and music. He is currently in the studio at work on a new album and most recently announced a world tour.

Herbie will also appear in the upcoming sci-fi movie "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets" opening in theaters on July 21, 2017.

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Thank you for this thread.

Dasein said:

Thank you for this thread.

You're welcome

This is the song in the Black Panther trailer

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Cosmo Pyke

Motown legend Bobby Taylor ailing
by Soul Tracks July 18, 2017

Bobby Taylor has been a legend in the annals of Motown for two reasons: He was the lead vocalist of the group Bobby Taylor & the Vancouvers, which scored with the hit “Does Your Mama Know About Me” in 1968; but perhaps more importantly, Taylor has been credited by many for discovering The Jackson 5, one of the most important soul music groups of all time. Sadly, Bobby is reportedly suffering from throat cancer and is need of prayers as he prepares for more treatment.

The 83 year old Taylor was a doo-wop staple in the 50s, quietly working with such acts as Little Anthony & The Imperials and Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers, before teaming with guitarist Tommy Chong (yes, the same Tommy Chong who would later be ½ of the comedy duo Cheech and Chong), Eddie Patterson, Wes Henderson, Robbie King and Ted Lewis to form The Vancouvers. Motown signed the sextet and they scored immediately with “Does Your Mama Know About Me,” a hit on both the pop and soul charts. The Vancouvers landed a few more hits, most notably “Malinda,” before splitting up.

In 1968, after seeing The Jackson 5 perform as a warm up act, Taylor brought the group to the Motown brass, leading to the signing of the quintet that would become Motown’s signature act of the 1970s, and the springboard for Michael Jackson’s historic solo career. And Taylor played a key role. In addition to discovering the group, Taylor mentored the Jackson 5 and helped produce the quintet’s smash debut album.

Taylor has continued to perform as a solo act over the years, and reunited briefly with The Vancouvers in the 1980s for a recording in the UK.

As a performer and as a producer, Bobby Taylor has played a key role in the development of soul music over the past half century. We’ll be sending out our prayers for strength and a full recovery. You can find Bobby's Facebook page here.

Black Excellence

I was watching this new Kendrick & Rihanna music video and a part I wasn't expecting popped up and made me think of the Depeche Mode video Wrong.

The Moments ~ Dolly My Love {1975}

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