|  Georgia Anne Muldrow
A Lesson in Respect
By Susan Brooks
Photo by Pete Jones
“A deeper level of producing is being a servant. It takes a special kind of person to surround someone with a whole sonic environment. That’s a very spiritual thing,” says Georgia Anne Muldrow, who herself belongs in that category of specialness. An old-school triple threat, Muldrow is a singer/songwriter/producer with a beautiful voice, a poetic bent, and a musical production pedigree to put anyone to shame. Her first releases were The Worthnothings EP, and a full-length album, Olesi: Fragments of an Earth, both of which she wrote, performed, recorded and produced on her own. Her newest project is G&D, a duo formed with longtime associate Dudley Perkins (a.k.a. Declaime), a rapper and former labelmate from Stones Throw Records. Their first release, on San Francisco’s Look Records, is The Message Uni Versa, an epic combination of funk, hip-hop and soul. The album looks back to such influences as James Brown, LL Cool J and Parliament-Funkadelic, and combines them with the pair’s own talents in a way that’s exciting and new.
A female producer is still a rarity in a male-dominated professional field. Muldrow says that a strong tendency towards production work was inculcated in her early on by the atmosphere surrounding her musically inclined and well-respected parents, jazz rhythm guitarist Ronald Muldrow and singer Rickie Byars Beckwith. Constant exposure to their energy and that of their professional circle brought out Muldrow’s natural artistic tendencies and grounded her in an understanding not just of composition and performance, but of how to realize songs through production. “It’s about respecting the role of each instrument in the live ensemble first. That’s been in me my whole life. I’ve been mentored by some great producers, veteran West Coast producers who were relevant to their time and not afraid to take risks. I was seeing people at the top of their game, making money with their music. I always had music in my head, it was just about decoding it. By 14 or 15, I knew what my job was going to be.”
 With such potent creative seeds planted in her, Muldrow began to cultivate her own produce. “It’s because of the people that my mom knew and my dad knew: different sensibilities of groove, serious elders of wisdom, and serious heavy percussionists. That’s what got me on my way as an artist.” Those same seeds inspired Muldrow’s own musical style. About her approach to songwriting, she states, “There’s a feeling that precedes each song. You have to keep it as real as possible - not be too frilly-dilly.” She says that her father’s individual technique of playing funk counterpoint was especially influential for her, with his way of “getting down to the bare bones of what the groove is.”
Muldrow was exposed not just to American West Coast sensibilities via her Los Angeles upbringing but to African music as well, renowned for its incantatory powers of initiation and healing. Muldrow takes understandable pride in her ancestry and feels that her familial and cultural heritage is inseparable from her art. As someone fortunate enough to have had such extraordinary childhood nurturing, she wants to share that legacy as much as possible through her music. “This record is for everyone. Hip-hop is the heart of all pop music right now. I want to educate everyone of their true African nature. I’ve gotta be down for bringing that groove together and I love that I get a chance to reach out to people.”
Regarding her decision to collaborate with Perkins, Muldrow says, “I think it was divine fate for us to meet. From the very first day we met we’ve never parted ways. Our records were completely compatible. I wanted to extend my heart. That was where my roots were anyway. That’s my medicine man. It was more than a label situation - it was a soul situation.” They both had a feeling for a while that they should make something together and Muldrow says that finally, “It was about us getting real deliberate, a straight ahead album.”
 The Message Uni Versa is a remarkable recording that demonstrates G&D’s compatibility. It also highlights the duo’s blithe evasion of any kind of critical pigeonholing via an abandonment of rigid dictates of musical form, contrasted with unexpected performance art touches. The album starts with the spoken word “Ye Olde Skit,” a light-hearted interchange between Muldrow and Perkins ad-libbed over a Baroque electronic background. Skits II and III are sprinkled throughout the record too, whose many tracks contain several short interludes of a like nature. One of the most memorable is “P.I.F.O.T.P.H. 34” with the line, “Bush! I’ve got my eye on you, you demon!” That’s a good illustration of a dominant theme: much of the album is political, liberal and very vocal in its opposition to the Iraq conflict and those responsible for it. “War Drums” is the best example of that cord, scolding a dissociated American populace, “Wake up and don’t sleep.” While such topics are potentially controversial and could alienate some listeners, the message is an unfiltered one of love and unity. Muldrow is deeply spiritual and her love for God is palpable in both her speech and singing; her interpretation of the divine is inclusive and colorblind. She says, “Jah is the king of my heart. I’ve spent all my life in studies of something spiritual. I thank God that I’ve always had a love of spiritual stuff because it’s helped me.”
Muldrow says that besides their collaborative effort with the new music of The Message Uni Versa, she and Perkins have one solo record each on the way. And in addition to being so prolific with her own projects, she says that in the last 12 months she has produced albums for five other artists as well - “I never knew I could do so much in a year.” Muldrow’s fundamental reason for the hard work and dedication that’s engendered such an astonishing level of productivity boils down to a simple declaration of her love for her music and respect for the trailblazers who went before her: “This is my chance to tell James Brown that I love him.”
http://www.myspace.com/georgiaannemuldrow |
