Erykah Badu
She hasn’t released anything since the 2015 mixtape But You Caint Use My Phone and hasn’t put out an official album since 2010’s New Amerykah Part Two (Return of the Ankh), but it certainly does not feel like Erykah Badu has been idle. She’s been performing (including this month at the Riverfront Jazz Festival), touring, hosting award shows, doing DJ sets, acting, and building her own streaming service so she could keep it all rolling during the shutdown.
Despite all that, she’s the famous Booker T. alum most likely to pop up on campus. She’s been known to drop in and teach a dance class. But even if you aren’t lucky enough to catch her there, you’re likely to run across Badu somewhere in the city, probably when and where you least expect it. She’s the closest thing we have to royalty, and has been since dropping Baduizm in 1997, but she’s a woman of the people.
Badu leaves the city from time to time, but she’s never left us.
Norah Jones
It’s been 20 years since Norah Jones released her debut album, and it’s still stunning what a phenomenon it became. Come Away With Me was a slow-burning success that even various contributing factors (prime point-of-sale placement at Starbucks, the fragile psyche of post-9/11 America) can’t fully explain. It hit the top of the Billboard 200 almost a full year after it was released, after debuting way down at No. 139, and by then it had already sold a million copies.
But that was just the beginning. Come Away With Me earned six Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year, and has gone on to sell 27 million copies. (Only two other albums have sold more since 2000: Adele’s 21 and Eminem’s The Eminem Show.) A bombastic return for a quiet mix of cocktail-hour jazz and bedtime country and folk, tied together by Jones’ comforting voice and spare piano.
Jones hasn’t run from the enormity of her initial stardom so much as she has leveraged it into the freedom to do whatever she wants, play with whomever she wants—switch genres, switch instruments, even switch names. (She was Maddie in the one-off El Madmo.) Which doesn’t mean she hasn’t continued to be a commercial success. Come Away With Me accounts for only a little more than half of the 50 million records she has sold over the course of her career.
Edie Brickell & New Bohemians
“What I Am,” the first single off Edie Brickell & New Bohemians’ 1988 debut, Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars, only needed about 15 seconds to prove it was a hit. It took the band from the clubs of Deep Ellum straight into the zeitgeist. But they didn’t linger there: the group never had another real smash and never recorded another song as instantly recognizable. Which would have been difficult, anyway. “What I Am” is a bit like scaling Everest the first time you go for a hike. Kind of hard to top.
The song is such an undeniable jam that it became the basis for another hit a few years later. The hip-hop group Brand Nubian used the song’s skittering acoustic guitar riff and Brickell’s yelped hook for its own “Slow Down,” which landed at No. 3 on Billboard’s Rap Singles chart in 1991. The New Bos had broken up by then. Brickell left to marry Paul Simon, whom she met when “What I Am” took the band to Saturday Night Live.
Four-fifths of the group—Brickell, drummer Brandon Aly, guitarist Kenny Withrow, and percussionist John Bush—graduated from Booker T. They reunited in 2006, and they still play together off and on, releasing Hunter and the Dog Star just last year. Brickell also recorded an album with Steve Martin (2013’s Love Has Come for You) and toured with the comedian and banjo player.
Roy Hargrove
When Roy Hargrove died in late 2018, at only 49 years old, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson eulogized him on Instagram: “He is literally the one-man horn section I hear in my head when I think about music.” It’s no surprise, and not just because the Roots drummer played with Hargrove occasionally. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, they were both part of the Soulquarians, the rotating collective of musicians whose jam sessions at New York’s Electric Lady Studios helped produce records by D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, and Common.
Thompson’s comment, however, goes beyond just their personal association. Hargrove could be heard all over. Starting out, he was a traditional jazz trumpet player, discovered while he was still a junior at Booker T. by a touring Wynton Marsalis. He was recognized as one of the “Young Lions,” returning the genre to the classic foundation laid by Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk and others.
But Hargrove was a searcher. He teamed with Cuban musicians (for 1997’s Habana, which earned him a Grammy), experimented with electrified funk and soul (leading The RH Factor), and added his horns to projects by John Mayer, The 1975, Boz Scaggs, Angélique Kidjo, and others.
Hargrove roamed as if he wanted to be the one-man horn section everyone hears in their head.
This story originally appeared in the September issue of D Magazine with the headline, “High School, Musical.” Write to [email protected].
Author
