Burnt Sugar had a wonderful Summer with a lovely evening dance fest at Real Art Ways in Hartford Ct. and a seven-day trip to Oporto Portugal to close the 2010 edition of Serrelves Em Festa.
Here’s the review in the main newspaper:
The review gives Burnt Sugar background info; says “Make It Funky” (with Bruce Mack conducting) was the best song of the night. Mentions the songs performed and that Burnt Sugar gave a strong homage to the funk and all that it encompasses, giving fresh interpretations to the material, going beyond simply covering or reproducing it, but stretching it beyond the expected by incorporating so many seemingly disarate genres.
Now that it’s Fall, Burnt Sugar kicks it off (feelin the football reference!) with a week-long residency at the Apollo Theater’s Salon Series where we’ll have a 25-person-crew recreating and mashing James Brown material. In November we return to Detroit for three days with a stealth crew of Greg Tate, Mazz Swift, Latasha N. Nevada Diggs and Jared MIchael Nickerson; mix in some of the Motor City’s finest including James “Black Man” Harris, Duminie Depores, Skeeter Shelton and Joel Peterson for a musical presentation at The Museum Of Contemporary Detroit on the 5th; trail blazing to Greenpoint Brooklyn’s hot spot Coco 66 on November 19th with the MK Groove Orchestra & Dope Sagittarius; then winding our year down with an always bangin time at the Blue Note on December 4th. Yes, it’s been good and looks to keep getting better.
Next January, during the ISPA Conference, Burnt Sugar will supply the soundtrack for “The James Brown Project” directed by Mr. Otis Sallid,” an Apollo Theater-sponsored dance tribute to the music of JB.
In February, we return to Paris following last year’s two sold out nights presenting the world debut of the theatrical version of Melvin Van Peebles Sweet Sweetback’s Badassss Song” at the Sons D’Hiver Festival. Burnt Sugar will be returning to Sons D’Hiver hitting two times on the same night highlighting the music of JB & Miles. Here’s what our peerless leader Greg Tate has to say about that:
“The musics of Miles Davis and James Brown are really the folk music of modern Black America–indeliibly inscribed on our memory banks from an early age they become, as we grow older, culturally definitive, talismans of music as magic and the necessity thereof. For Black American musicians of a certain generation Miles and James were our gateways to a more expansive comprehension of music’s many protean forms–Africa, Europe the blues, bebop, rock, funk, soul. One’s musical intelligence quotient can’t help but become stellar when you decipher the extremes and energetic properties that made both of their flames so freaking hot. When Burnt Sugar plays their music the point is never to just honor the notes but to always honor the intensity, the heat, the total mindmelt they both brought to the stage every time.”
March see us back in the NYC at The Atrium at Lincoln Center for a Target Free Thursday tribute to David Bowie entitled “Burnt Sugar Arkestra Reboots Ziggy and the Berlin Trilogy,” and that’s all in the first three months. Oh Yes Yes Y’all, the Sugar is starting to flow like that!