August 2007

Hey…haven’t heard from us in a minute, but we’re same as we ever where, and to start things off due to the ban­gin response “Chopped and Screwed — Vol­ume 2″ has received from Burnt Sugar cd pur­chasers as a give-away item, B.S.I.llc has decided to re-issue this limited-edition release exclu­sively on CD Baby for pur­chase!!
Buy It Now.…Smile About That Deci­sion Later!!
A few words on Chopped & Screwed:

Dave Stelfox, critic for The Wire in the April 2007 issue:

” Eclec­tic and exper­i­men­tal, yet taut and sure­footed, it’s a del­i­cate and won­der­fully realised bal­anc­ing act embrac­ing jazz, hiphop, soul, rock, and blues that never loses grip of its groove.
Despite owing absolutely noth­ing to Hous­ton, Texas’s lazy and hazy remix­ing, Chopped & Screwed Vol­ume Two is no dis­ap­point­ment. Most notable amongst it’s 18 tracks are three lap­top com­po­si­tions from Black Body Radi­a­tion, Tate’s own movie about a futur­is­tic “New York pop­u­lated by var­i­ous Mus­lim sects and mys­tic extrater­res­tials”. Parred down and mechan­i­cal, they lack the vis­ceral thrills of Burnt Sugar’s live instru­men­tal work, yet the same patiently mea­sured ten­sions are at play, cre­at­ing an omi­nous and eerie dystopian vision.
How­ever, the best is kept until last, with Butch Mor­ris him­self mak­ing a clos­ing appear­ance. Dis­cor­dant as the rib­bons (the Burnt Sugar horn sec­tion) blows over the rolling basslines of “Butch Vs the Wretches” may be, their ease and flu­id­ity make it clear that the vet­eran cor­net player is both per­fectly at home and per­fectly in tune with his collaborators.”

Brian Hull for okayplayer.com gives Chopped & Screwed Three & a Half Afros
( out of Four ) and says…

” It’s funny to think of Burnt Sugar releas­ing remix albums. It is said they never play the same thing once, in effect mak­ing remix­ing the rule, not the excep­tion. Still, the ambling themes pre­sented here cre­ate a strong argu­ment for doc­u­ment­ing what would bet­ter be termed evo­lu­tion. Chopped and Screwed Vol. 2 marches ideas out of the depths and onto vir­gin land com­plete with the suc­cesses and fail­ures inher­ent in the adap­ta­tion of species.

Built around Burnt Sugar’s con­tri­bu­tions to another Greg Tate cre­ation, Black Body Radi­a­tion, a post-apocalyptic sci-fi film that col­lides ancient African reli­gion into Star Trek, Chopped and Screwed demol­ishes estab­lished tracks to pull new life from the flames, like aster­oids careen­ing into the atmos­phere. As if exam­in­ing the fos­sil record, the album must be bro­ken into parts and reassem­bled. “Ahem Sal­adin” strings along a famil­ial line of mutated tracks that can be rearranged in dozens of lis­ten­ing pat­terns. Much of the record pro­gresses in a sim­i­lar fash­ion often dis­tanc­ing a theme and its vari­a­tion so that musi­cal ideas bub­ble back up from the pri­mor­dial ooze.

A band this depen­dent upon impro­vi­sa­tion always risks los­ing nuance in their trans­la­tion to record. Geog­ra­phy has pre­vented me from see­ing Burnt Sugar live to test this the­ory, but moments in this record, as in most of their records, feel inac­ces­si­ble through a set of head­phones. Despite exten­sively lis­ten­ing to Sun Ra, I never under­stood his claim of “dis­ci­pline and pre­ci­sion” until see­ing live per­for­mances in the doc­u­men­tary A Joy­ful Noise. I sus­pect sit­ting in New York’s Tonic with Mr. Tate and fam­ily on stage would have a sim­i­lar effect of enlight­en­ment after years of feel­ing a grav­i­ta­tional tug back to a music I don’t always understand.

Ulti­mately it may be impos­si­ble to judge this record in a lin­ear fash­ion. In African drum cir­cles the mas­ter drum­mer counts not lin­early from zero to infin­ity, but cir­cu­larly from zero back to zero. Burnt Sugar is born out of an African tra­di­tion assim­i­lated by a Hen­drix obsessed Miles Davis. Dur­ing the Agharta era, Miles spi­raled Michael Henderson’s 5-note bass lines to pull impro­vis­ing musi­cians into a cohe­sive orbit with one another. With this col­lec­tion of remixes Burnt Sugar demon­strates their abil­ity to bal­ance these ancient and futur­is­tic forces. Per­haps not on the inter­plan­e­tary scale imag­ined in Black Body Radi­a­tion, but instead at a mol­e­c­u­lar level. Ever cir­cling, chem­i­cally alter­ing their sur­round­ings, and if prop­erly stim­u­lated, launch­ing mush­room clouds into the heavens.”

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Also we have the August Suga-Tri-Fecta is fast approach­ing Y’all.…
(visit our cal­en­dar for details)
Tues­day, August 21st — Zebu­lon (10pm),
&
Fri­day, August 24th — Williams­burg Music Club (10pm)
&
Tues­day, August 28th — Knit­ting Fac­tory Tap Room (Doors 8:30-Show 9pm)
with spe­cial guest Hip Hop MC Legend.…Ramm El Zee!!
Greg Tate, our fear­less conductor’s feel­ings on the Tues­day, August 28th com­bustible possibilities:

“Burnt Sugar Vs Ramm El Zee–Burnt Sugar is pan-African con­ducted improv at it’s loop­i­est. Ramm El Zee is a painter, sculp­tor, MC, hiphop astro­physi­cist who devised Ikonok­last Panz­erism, a the­ory that sees graf as Alpha Betic war­fare. He can be seen in the leg­endary film Wild­Style and heard invent­ing a style of rhyming that would influ­ence The Beastie Boys, Cypress Hill and Zach De Rocha  on the equally epochal 12 inch sin­gle “Beat Bop/Ramm El Zee Vs K. Rob” pro­duced by Jean Michel-Basquiat. Come wit­ness the clash of our madnesses!”

Here’s the haps for the whole night:
AUGUST 28th
Tap Bar, ‘NEW YORK BURNING MAN PARTY’

DR. MADD VIBE’s Com­pre­hen­sive Linkol­ogy Fea­tur­ing the Med­i­cine Cab­i­net - 6PM
ANGELO MOORE, front­man of Fish­bone, is Dr. Madd Vibe
6PM, $8 adv / 10 at the door
www.myspace.com/drmaddvibe

BURNT SUGAR THE ARKESTRA CHAMBER FEATURING RAMM EL ZEE
8:30PM
$8 adv / 10 dos — ‘pan-African con­ducted improv at it’s loop­i­est’
MONIKA H BAND
11PM, $8 adv / 10 door– ‘Dance with con­tra­dic­tion… dream­like poetry’

monikah.com/
.myspace.com/monikahband
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Dur­ing our lit­tle break we re-freshed our gear…Ladies, you need to get your Burnt Sugar T!!! We have four super­fly sum­mer col­ors and when they’re gone…

I’ll say no more cause, well, we like to stay on the pos­i­tive tip!!!!

So there you have it.…new release ( a lit­tle dif­fer­ent from the free give-away too. )
gigs and a spe­cial night and new fly Ts.Y’alll Take Care