Virtuoso guitarist Vernon Reid will release his new solo album. Hoodoo Telemetry, on 3rd October via Artone/The Players Club Records. Ahead of that and out now, new single and accompanying video for the first single, ‘The Haunting’, taken from the album.
Recently hailed by Rolling Stone amongst the top 50 players of all-time, Reid’s Grammy Award-winning records with alt-rock trailblazers, Living Colour, still sound as fresh and fierce as when ‘Cult Of Personality’ hijacked the Billboard chart in the late ’80s. But to take the pulse of the zeitgeist as he sees it – and hear his fearless musicality in microcosm – you need only drop the needle on his new solo album.
If you’ve followed the beats of his half-century career, you’ll know Vernon Reid as an artist who paints in every colour. Depending on the era you dive into and the album on your turntable, you’ll find the New York polymath pinballing between jazz, metal, punk, funk, electronica and hip-hop, cutting heads with collaborators as eclectic as Mick Jagger and Public Enemy, endlessly shedding his skin yet always speaking his truth.
“Hoodoo Telemetry is like a piece of my all-over-the-place mind,” the 66-year-old said of his forthcoming kaleidoscopic 14-track opus. “ It took me a while to start this record because I was thinking about what I wanted to do next, managing my time with all my other projects. I was also in different spaces with these songs: some are new, others are reclamations of material from a long time ago. But suddenly, I found the focus and it was very clear to me: I gotta do this now.”
The overdriven funk bassline and glistening soul of first single, ‘The Haunting’ finds Reid tipping his hat to a fellow chameleon, “I’m a huge Prince fan and there’s some of who he was in that song’s DNA” he noted, while the scratch ‘n’ glitch of the brass-driven ‘Bronx Paradox’ salutes one of New York neighbourhood’s greatest musical export. “I wrote that in tribute to DJ Logic,” he explained. “Everybody considered the Bronx a wasteland, a warzone. But with hip-hop, those kids created the final original music of the 20th century.”
Hoodoo Telemetry isn’t a linear piece, but has been described as a “hrillingly tangled tapestry of genres, collaborators and material from different time periods”. Its energy and chaos seems to reflect and challenge what Reid considers the “tumultuous”.
Living Colour, Reid’s best-known band burst into bloom on a New York live circuit that was more fluid than ever before or since. “We had an ecology of clubs to play at, from CBGBs to the Cat Club and the Ritz,” he recalls of the first steps of a solidified lineup featuring Corey Glover (vocals), Muzz Skillings (bass) and Will Calhoun (drums).
Carried by word of mouth, the tinderbox was already set to explode when the patronage of Mick Jagger sent the band over the top, The Rolling Stones singer manning the desk for their demos. “He worked on ‘Glamour Boys’ and ‘Which Way To America?’” explained Reid, “and he was a great producer. He really coached Corey along. But it was so fundamentally weird that he entered our lives. I didn’t know where to put my hands.”
Seizing his opportunity, Reid threw everything on his mental jukebox at Living Colour’s deathless debut, 1988’s Vivid. “You had ‘Broken Hearts’ on the same album as ‘Cult Of Personality’,” he pointed out of a track listing where anything could happen. “We might be playing metal one moment then writing a country song with hip-hop the next. Or ‘Funny Vibe’, which is like prog-folk informed by King Crimson.”
Sailing to #6 on the US Billboard chart – and ultimately double-platinum status – Vivid proved adventurous music could still sell by the ton. The following year, a support on The Stones’ Steel Wheels/Urban Jungle tour bumped their profile – and gave Reid a close-up glimpse at the rock ‘n’ roll super-league. “Backstage on that Stones tour they had all the parlour games – I remember Bill Wyman kicking my ass at ping-pong!”
Alongside Living Colour’s six albums and counting, Reid has worn a thousand different hats since those breakout years, whether producing Grammy-nominated albums for the likes of Salif Keita, composing hit movie scores or lending his guitar skills to a who’s who including Janet Jackson, B.B. King, Tracy Chapman and Mariah Carey.
No doubt, it’s these competing demands that mean Reid’s solo career (which began with 1996’s Mistaken Identity) has lain dormant since 2004’s Known Unknown. “But with everything that’s been happening, suddenly I had a focus,” he says of the febrile context to Hoodoo Telemetry. “Y’know, the world is a ball on a pendulum. It swings. Right now, we’re living through unprecedented times, and not just in America.”
In hard times, Hoodoo Telemetry doesn’t have the answers. But to play Vernon Reid’s ambitious new album is to hear many shades of humanity and question where we are headed next. “These songs are looking at the past through a different lens, then looking forward,” he concludes. “Like, ‘Where is this going and how are we getting there? Are we driving the bus or are we passengers in this self-driving vehicle into the future?’ That’s the space that Hoodoo Telemetry is really exploring.”
Hoodoo Telemetry‘s full track listing is: ‘Door Of No Return’, ‘Freedom Jazz Dance’, ‘Good Afternoon Everyone’, ‘The Haunting’, ‘Bronx Paradox’, ‘Or Knot’, ‘Dying To Live’ ‘Politician’, ‘Black Fathom Five’, Beautiful Bastard’, ‘Meditation On The Last Times I Saw Arthur Rhames’, ‘My Little Zulu Babe’, ‘In Effigy’ and ‘Brave New World’.
