Used-Bin Bargains: Weldon Irvine

Weldon Irvine - Watergate (Nodlew 1973)

Weldon Irvine – Time Capsule / Nodlew

Weldon Irvine is a hard figure to ignore when exploring underground/socially-conscious rap music in the 90s and the very beginning of the 00s. You may not see his name directly, though perhaps his rap moniker Master-Wel pops up on occasion, but he’s there. Snippets of his music have been flipped effortlessly by Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Boogie Down Productions on many occasions; that’s him playing organ on Black Star’s “Astronomy (8th Light)” and arranging Mos Def’s Black on Both Sides; he’s the one schooling the ambitious rappers like Q-Tip, Common and members of The Roots on the intricacies of keyboard playing; hell, just put on one of your four-hundred Madlib records and I can guarantee that at least one Irvine sample is quilted in there somewhere during each album. He’s one of the very rare multi-generational artists who has found his musical niche no matter the decade: studying jazz in the 60s, purveying fusion in the 70s, writing musicals in the 80s, schooling the rap crowd (and producing a couple records himself) in the 90s and being fully embraced before his untimely death in the early 00s. Yet, Irvine is far from a household name. In fact it took me two or three years after first stumbling upon his name to come across a CD that was not being imported at my expense. One fateful day last fall while digging through the plastic slip cases of Chicago’s Reckless Records, I finally located not one but three used Irvine CDs, two of which were still Japanese imports but not priced accordingly, and I was finally properly introduced to the soulful sounds of Mr. Irvine. Of the three I am now quite familiar with, 1973’s Time Capsule, 1974’s Cosmic Vortex (Justice Divine) and 1976’s Sinbad, I have decided to concentrate on Time Capsule because of its acclaimed reputation and that it happens to be my personal favorite as well.

Surprisingly with his musical context in mind, Weldon Irvine was raised in a very privileged setting. His parents were divorced at his birth, so he was brought up in Hampton, VA by his grandfather, a dean at Hampton Institute (later Hampton University), and his grandmother, a classically trained upright bass player. Even called a “Victorian upbringing” by Irvine himself, the childhood provided a life-long set of amiable manners and well-read knowledge, though in the 50s, he was exposed to the polar opposite environment when moved off campus. His teenage years living in the ghetto completely rounded out Irvine’s unique childhood revealing both sides of life, the privileged and the unappreciated, and what it took to survive in each. It’s a theme that would surface in his later music time and again, the urgency of struggle and oppression brought to life through thoroughly trained musicianship and all other possibilities of such a rare pairing. His late teens in the mid-60s were spent like most kids these days, in college to appease their parents, but actually immersed in one exciting counterculture or another; in Irvine’s case, the burgeoning scene of post-bop and spiritual jazz. A promising keyboardist, Irvine moved to New York and was immediately recruited by Kenny Dorham and Joe Henderson for their big band where he spent the next three years honing his craft. In 1968, he auditioned for Nina Simone’s open-call for an organist to tour with her new ensemble. Not only did he get the gig, but he did it with his very first chord at which point Ms. Simone proclaimed he had perfect pitch and eventually brought him on not only as an organist, but the bandleader, arranger, road manager and co-writer as well. Irvine spent the next three years with Simone during which he penned an unfathomable amount of songs including his most famous composition, “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black” inspired by Lorraine Hansberry’s play of the same name.

In the early 70s, Weldon Irvine ventured out on his own forming a 17-piece group whose sound is typically categorized as jazz-funk or fusion but incorporated elements of soul, R&B, blues, gospel, pop, Latin and rock as well. The fusion tag I especially hesitate on, though I can easily see why it’s so often used. Irvine typically played the electric piano and as the years went on incorporated more and more buoyant bass lines and synthetic characteristics, so it’s hard not to drop that vague tag. His early albums are decisively jazz-funk though; think a combination of Stevie Wonder, Alice Coltrane, Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson and Charles Mingus. His themes have always been that of political and social change as well as deep spirituality and he often used student musicians in his band. 1972 saw Irvine’s first solo album, Liberated Brother on his own label Nodlew (look at it in a mirror), whose rampant style meshes, political and philosophical undertones and funky, electric sound would define his recordings from here on out.

This finally gets us to 1973’s Time Capsule, his last before jumping from his own imprint to RCA. Usually heralded as the defining album in Irvine’s career, Capsule finds the perfect equilibrium for all of his many, many influences and distinguishing musical elements, not to mention characteristics of genres yet to come, especially rap. Political, spiritual, funky, grooving, buoyant, sprawling, infectious, challenging and masterfully arranged and played, it’s an album that really takes on the mindset of 1973’s counterculture. Irvine mostly sticks to his keyboards whether it is the piano, acoustic and electric, organ or melodica, as well as adding occasional lyrical content. The record opens with a poem called “I Am” by Charlotte Cook, which is revisited again later in the album, discussing the spirits of man over Irvine’s electric piano accentuations. “Feelin’ Mellow” follows setting the stage for the groovy vibe of the album; interestingly enough, Irvine decides to save the more potent political shout-outs for later and begins with a friendly, out-reaching hand. He then pens an ode to the lady with “Soul Sisters,” a Jimmy Smith-derived soul-funk number with an outstanding trumpet solo care of Jimmy Owens. “Déjà vu” splits the record with nine-and-a-half minutes of Latin-jazz-leaning electric-funk that screams for sampling. It also displays Irvine’s poetic fortitude as he tries to unite all the spiritual people of the world no matter your actual religion with a shared interest in peace. “Watergate” is probably the most striking song though with it’s shuffling, Stevie Wonder-like backdrop for what Irvine calls a “kind of group free style.” Members of the band take turns improvising typically humorous lines of political observations that eventually ends with a call for togetherness. “Spontaneous Interaction” shows off Irvine’s ability to seamlessly interweave genres as he combines a loose, spacey psychedelia and an impressive walking bop bass line. After revisiting the “I Am” poem, which you know already if you’ve spent any time with Madlib, the album closes with “Bananas,” the shortest instrumental of the record that actually leaves you with a feeling of incompleteness. I’m not sure if it’s on purpose or not, but it always sends me for either the repeat button or another album wanting to listen to more.

Weldon Irvine had a string of well-received albums through the rest of the 70s, though they didn’t produce the sales figures a major label like RCA expects. He was released from the label in 1976 at which point he almost left the music industry to concentrate on writing musicals. Throughout the 80s more than 20 of his plays were shown at The Billie Holiday Theatre in New York including Young, Gifted and Broke, The Vampire and the Dentist, The Will and Keep It Real. Hip-hop was sprouting at the same time, and Irvine was an active participant in it from the beginning. He encouraged producers to sample his back-catalogue, trained aspiring rappers to write their own music, admired groundbreaking artists like the Wu-Tang Clan and Eric B. & Rakim, pushed the socially conscious rappers to speak their minds and even rhymed a little himself. Also during the 90s, he recorded a few hip-hop-inspired albums for indie labels and rapped under the alias Master Wel while providing arrangements for rappers he appreciated like Mos Def, Common and Q-Tip. Tragically though, Irvine committed suicide on April 9th, 2002 at just 58 years old for reasons unknown. It’s an incredibly sad ending for an amazingly inventive and groundbreaking artist who was known as much for his amiability as his musicianship.