Month: December 2015

CHRIS BLACKWELL

Posted on by Sacha Cosentino

I met Island Records founder Chris Blackwell in the fall of 1972. I was in London to try to convince a young, London-based Jamaican film star, Esther Anderson (she had starred in the just-released Hollywood studio movie A Warm December opposite Sidney Poitier), to do my picture—which was to be my first feature—for free! I had assembled a cast of young, happening French actors including Zouzou (Chloe in the Afternoon), Jean-Pierre Kalfon (Weekend), Pierre Clémenti (Belle de Jour)—who had just gotten out of prison in Italy for possession of hashish—and an unknown Maria Schneider, who had starred opposite Marlon Brando in the soon-to-be-released Last Tango in Paris, to make a movie of our planned trek to the Andes in search of a hallucinogenic root used by the Incas.

When I arrived in London from Paris I phoned Esther. I was focused and on a mission to round out my cast with a “Hollywood” star. She said, “Be at my flat at 7 tonight. We’re going to the movies.” She was bossy in a Joan Crawford kind of way, and she wasn’t asking. It was an order and I was to humbly obey.

She lived in a small but very posh flat in Cheney Row in the very upscale Chelsea. The place was sumptuously embellished with expensive-feeling North African carpets and pillows flaunting a disregard for nationalistic boundaries. Esther was even more exquisitely gorgeous in person than on the screen—piercing dark eyes, long, straight black hair and a warm, ebullient, coffee-toned aura that belied her rising establishment stardom. Elegantly and eclectically adorned in an earthy way that rose above categorizing as “privileged class,” she intoned through her dress and manner a release from the bonds of colonialism in a Far Eastern way that accented her Indian ancestry (her great- grandparents having arrived in Jamaica as indentured servants after England “abolished” slavery in 1839).

She said, “My friends made this movie and we are going to the premiere.”

What threw me was that it wasn’t a limo that picked us up. Rather, Chris Blackwell himself was driving, and the movie’s director, Perry Henzell, was next to him and it wasn’t a Rolls or Jaguar. It was a 1969 Firebird convertible, which, of course, for England had the steering on the wrong side. It was outside the realm of pretension and a minor shock compared to what was in store for me that evening.

Until then I knew Chris by reputation only. He had a larger-than- life aura. He was in a pantheon of music moguls that included Ahmet Ertegun, founder of Atlantic Records (the premier R&B record label); Clive Davis, who ran Columbia Records; Bill Graham, who owned the Fillmore East and West and managed the Grateful Dead and Santana; and Arthur Grossman, who managed Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin. For me Chris had an even greater mystique than any of them.

What the Island Records label represented was a dedication to allowing art to flourish in the domain of popular culture.

Indeed, Island was having huge commercial success with Traffic, an eclectic band that combined elements of jazz and West African music with poetic lyrics and psychedelic rock, and singer- songwriter Cat Stevens, who was selling millions of albums, as well as rock groups such as Jethro Tull, Free, Uriah Heep and Roxy Music. But for me, what separated Island Records from all other labels in the pop music realm was that it was also releasing amazing music that had little or no chance for wide commercial success, yet at the same time it treated the artists producing this music with the same respect as its biggest pop stars. Acts like the experimental electronic group White Noise, idiosyncratic guitarist John Martyn, enigmatic singer-songwriter Sandy Denny, Brian Eno and the list goes on and on.

We were headed to Brixton—London’s West Indian ghetto. This was new to me. I was naive to the extent that I didn’t even know a place like that existed in London.

For all intents and purposes this was a premiere, but I learned several decades later, when an ailing Perry Henzell gave a talk before a screening in Jamaica—in Ocho Rios—that this was actually the third night the movie had played.

The first night no one came. Perry explained that several months earlier another West Indian movie had been released (a first of its kind) and was really bad and people just thought The Harder They Come would be like that. Perry recounted that the next morning he went to the Island office and mimeographed (there were no Xerox machines yet) flyers—and personally went all over Brixton handing them out and imploring people to come. That night the theater was about one quarter full.

When we arrived at the theater that third night—Chris, Perry, Esther and myself—there was a line around the block. Sold out on word of mouth from the night before …

The theater was electric with anticipation. I was the only person of non-Jamaican origin in the audience.

LEE JAFFE: When you brought me to see The Harder They Come in 1972, I knew nothing about Jamaican music. Like so many North Americans for whom it became an instant classic, I too was profoundly influenced by both its desperation and its humor. It opened a whole world of possibilities—in particular, a sense that with music, words could assume a power that might be greater than bombs and bullets. When The Harder They Come was being made, did you have a sense that it could make the type of impact that it has?

CHRIS BLACKWELL: Well, you see, it’s just like making a record. One gets involved because you feel it could be something great. With The Harder They Come I felt particularly close to the subject, of course, by being Jamaican and for my love of Jamaica. So when the opportunity came to be involved with the movie (the director, Perry Henzell, was my friend), naturally I wanted to help. Island Records had Jimmy Cliff on the label, and we felt it could be a great vehicle to promote his career. Jamaica is such a remarkable place. Ethnically it’s so diverse, with many people having some Amerindian DNA and of course European, African and Asian all mixed historically and genetically. I think those diverse influences are what gives reggae its universal appeal. At the time I had confidence that a movie—by bringing visuality to the music—could help expand the reach of Jamaican music. It was a time when there were great artists making compelling records in Jamaica—Toots and the Maytals, who appear in the movie, are a great example—and the soundtrack, from a record company point of view, became a kind of sampler, a way of introducing the music to an audience beyond Jamaica.

LJ: I think for many of us who were new to the music the movie represented a microcosm of a global struggle for independence—a struggle to loosen the chains of colonialism, and of course it was a first introduction to Rasta. Did you feel a closeness to Rasta culture?

CB: Yes, absolutely. An incident happened when I was a teenager that profoundly affected me. I had a tiny sailboat, and I had been taking it out by myself. One time I got caught in a storm. I thought I wasn’t going to make it. The mast had been struck by lightning and the boat had split, and I was holding on to a charred piece of the broken hull and eventually was thrown up against some rocks along a barren stretch of isolated coast. I had been knocked unconscious, and when I woke up I had no idea how long I had been there and no idea where I was. The storm had passed and the sun was blaring and I was scarred and parched and felt like I would be overcome by thirst and dehydration. Then—and it seemed a miracle to me—out of nowhere, there was a Rastaman standing above me, with long thick dreadlocks. He led me to some shade and climbed a tree. He chopped down some coconuts and split them, and I felt like I was being brought back to life. … From that time I have always felt close to Rasta culture. Their concept of leading a life based on being close to nature has influenced me to start an organic farm in Jamaica—it’s called Pantrepant. We have worked with EARTH University in Costa Rica to get it going. We intend to supply the hotels that have been importing all their food, which Jamaica could be capable of supplying instead.

LJ: How did you come to sign the Wailers to Island Records?

CB: What happened at that time—near the release of The Harder They Come—surprisingly, Jimmy Cliff decided to leave Island Records and sign with A&M. It was a bit of a shock because we had been involved in producing the movie and marketing it and of course it was, among other things, a star vehicle for him. Although we had been involved with releasing Jamaican music since the beginning of Island, mostly it was through licensing music from Jamaican labels. Jimmy Cliff was the only Jamaican artist at the time signed directly to Island. I felt with our limited staff—at that time we were only a U.K. company and licensed our music to Capitol Records in other territories—that we didn’t have the necessary resources to give proper attention to a second Jamaican act. So fortuitously, a week after hearing that Jimmy was leaving the label, the Wailers just happened to be in London and called to schedule to meet with me. Truth is, if Jimmy hadn’t just left I wouldn’t have taken the meeting.

LJ: Did you know the Wailers?

CB: Not personally. I was a big fan of their music, but that was the first time I met them.

LJ: What was your initial reaction?

CB: I must say they were an overwhelming presence. Incredibly charismatic. It was all three of them, Bunny Livingston, Peter Tosh and Bob Marley, that collectively and individually exuded this sense of power. I signed them on the spot. I asked them what they thought they needed to make an album and Island provided them the budget and the freedom to do what they wanted. They went to Jamaica and recorded the Catch a Fire album, and when they had finished recording they called me. I suggested they come to London to mix the record and they agreed, and we worked at the Island Studios on Basing Street.

LJ: You have been accused of softening the power of the Wailers’ music by encouraging the adding of elements that until Catch a Fire were absent in Jamaican music, such as blues/rock guitar solos. Those accusations have really bothered me, so of course, when in Kevin Macdonald’s exemplary documentary, Marley, you yourself said that you “pasteurized” the music, I was really annoyed.

CB: [Laughs.] Maybe that was a poor choice of words. However, I felt my job and responsibility to the group once I had committed to them was to help their music and message reach as many people as possible and, of course, there were obstacles beyond those that an English band might have. In the U.S., for instance, radio was a very segregated medium. There were radio stations that would only play music by white artists, and then there were the R&B stations that would only play black music. The problem was that reggae didn’t fit either format. I felt initially that the Wailers would have a better chance to expand their audience beyond Jamaica by adding elements that would have some sense of familiarity to foreign listeners. And, yes, it was my idea that they come to London to do the mixing. The Island studios on Basing Street, from a technical standpoint, were better equipped than anything in Jamaica at the time. I wanted the record to have the production values that would enable it to compete with any of the most successfully commercial records. And, yes, I also suggested they try using a young guitar player—he couldn’t have been more than 20 or 21 at the time—from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, who was living in London and doing session work at our studios: Wayne Perkins.

LJ: I would like to tell you about an experience that has so positively impacted my life ever since. A couple of weeks after you brought me to the theater in Brixton to see The Harder They Come (my first acquaintance with Jamaican music and culture), I was in New York and went to the Windsor Hotel to visit our mutual friend Jim Capaldi [drummer and co-writer in the band Traffic]. Traffic had just played in Madison Square Garden—sadly it was one of their last shows. For me, Traffic signified unquestionably that popular music could be at once powerful, popular, multicultural and high art. It was English poetry and African percussion. It was the blues and it was symphonic.

I got out of the cab at 56th and 6th. It was February and the sky was crystalline with a dark winter sun bouncing off the filthy white remnants of week-old snow. I shivered. I knew my life was at a crossroads. I was 22 years old. I had a stellar cast and crew assembled, which included Maria Schneider, who was the star of Last Tango in Paris opposite Marlon Brando, which had just opened in New York the night before. We were supposed to leave for Chile the next day to start filming what was to be my first feature—an unscripted search for a mystical hallucinogenic root in the southern Andes that the great sculptor Gordon Matta- Clark had told me about. He had come across it on a recent trip to discover his ancestral roots—but the CIA had upset my plans. People were disappearing, including our Chilean co-producer. Soon Salvador Allende was to be assassinated. My world seemed then as uncertain as Jim’s must have seemed to him with his band imploding.

Bob Marley—completely unknown to me—was in Jim’s suite. He had a cassette of the unreleased Catch a Fire. Jim had a boombox and asked Bob to play it for me. With budding dreads, Bob seemed shy and reticent, yet his eyes were keen and radiant—as if nothing could get past them.

What I experienced in the next 90 seconds changed for me indelibly all that would follow. The mixture of sounds: rhythms upside down so new to North American ears; Peter Tosh’s guitar used as percussion instrument; the hipness of the clavinet, which had just then burst on the scene with Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition”; the innovative Joe Higgs–taught harmonies informed by the whole of R&B history; and the interminable power of the poetic—“Concrete Jungle”—a voice that once and for eternity deconstructed the myth of the smiling, docile native blissful in a tropical paradise and the colonialist concept of “noble savage” soon to be gently faded below the horizon like a Caribbean sunset.

With those words and wailing vocals, a voice appeared that spoke for the billion poor of all the shantytowns of this “planet of slums.” Yet for me—the middle-class-bred North American—it was the inclusion of a searing and brilliant lead guitar that created a dichotomy that blazed through any previously impenetrable cultural or ethnic walls. What was that? Who could possibly be playing that? How did that get there in that impeccably mixed recording? Where did that most conscious decision to have this guy come and play on this track come from? How was it that this budding dreadlocks in the room with me advocated for its inclusion?

It was that guitar that said to me (and subsequently to the multitudes of Euro-Americans like me) that this is not a foreign music to be appreciated as the great art it is from a lofty hegemonic viewpoint. This scorching guitar declared unmistakably and interminably that this music was not just of the “Other.” Yes, this music was of all—of “We” …

Boss, I take great exception to your use of the word “pasteurize” to describe the effectiveness of this guitar part. Its inclusion is conceptually diametrically opposed to the notion of “pasteurization.” “Pasteurize” implies a softening. On the contrary, its inclusion makes the music more powerful—more inclusive, more universal. Precisely, it has been your ability to attract the most outstanding culturally and ethnically diverse talents, nurturing them and helping them and the world to share, which signifies your incomparable contribution to popular culture. Did you “pasteurize” Black Uhuru? Sly and Robbie? Burning Spear? Grace Jones? Tom Waits? Linton Kwesi Johnson? Nick Drake? Tricky? King Sunny Ade? Ijahman?

I love defending you—but please stop undermining my efforts.

CB: Well, Jaff, you know, [Wayne Perkins] was there, and I could see he loved what the Wailers were doing, and he had his guitar and you could just feel he wanted a go at it, so I figured why not. And then after he laid down a track, everyone seemed to love it. … Sometimes it’s just being at the right place at the right time—and great music should have no boundaries.
 

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MURAT OZTURK

Posted on by Sacha Cosentino

“When I feel good about something, I want to do it more and more,” says Murat Ozturk. “I want to get better and better at it.” It’s an approach he’s developed since his first job working at a denim factory in his native Turkey, and today, it’s the same way he looks at his role at Citizens of Humanity.

Inside his office at the company’s headquarters in downtown Los Angeles, Ozturk proudly displays his work: Along one wall, his latest patterns compete for space next to denim-inspired street- style shots, fabric samples and a few reminders from back home. The rest of the room is dominated by a floor-to-ceiling Laser Systems Technology (LST) machine, one of the six machines that Citizens of Humanity counts in its arsenal for distressing denim—the same technology that Ozturk, 30, has to thank for bringing him to Los Angeles to live out his American dream.

The third boy in a family of five brothers and two sisters, Ozturk was born in Ağrı, a small city in eastern Turkey. His father is a shopkeeper by trade, and his mother grows the flowers and vegetables they sell. “When you are little, it’s hard, but when you grow up, it’s amazing,” says Ozturk of a childhood spent surrounded by siblings. “You take care of each other.” When he was 15, the family, including his aunts and uncles, uprooted and headed for Istanbul, in search of a better quality of life and a better education for Ozturk, his siblings and cousins. Immediately the teenager felt at home in the country’s largest city, and upon graduating from high school, Ozturk landed his first job, at Turkish denim staple Mr. Bright.

There he immersed himself in the art of jean making, navigating his way through the process of dying, rinsing and treating the fabric. “On the weekends, I missed going to work,” says Ozturk, whose enthusiasm for learning was not lost on his peers (it’s a small, tight-knit industry in Istanbul, he says). Within a year and a half, he was handpicked to join the team that produced denim for Tommy Hilfiger and Levi’s.

Not before long Ozturk found himself on the front lines for the Levi’s Team, using his newfound know-how in etching designs onto fabrics, combined with his background in washes and treatments.

After four years, he was tapped to join the LST team. Taking his skills and knowledge into the field, Ozturk helped to educate other industry players about the possibilities of LST—including Citizens of Humanity on the other side of the world.

When Ozturk landed in Los Angeles almost three years ago, his plan was to stay for a month before heading to China on his next assignment, but he had a life-changing moment at Citizens. “We liked each other so much that they asked me if I wanted to stay.”

The young Turk, who had previously communicated via translator, began furiously studying English several hours after work each night. As of late, he’s embarked on Spanish lessons, too, to communicate even more effectively with his 10-person team.

Ozturk didn’t just bring six LST machines with him from Turkey; he’s also brought as much of the culture as he can. Instead of swimming in the Bosphorus, Ozturk now spends weekends in the water at Redondo Beach. Here he fishes regularly early in the mornings with friends—a hobby picked up in Turkey. Also a lifelong soccer fanatic, he continues his passion stateside as a member of a soccer team, playing matches every Friday night in the South Bay. He’s tried to pick up new interests, too, including surfing, which didn’t exactly go as planned. “I saw people doing it and thought I had to too, but it’s really hard.”

These days, it’s family and food that Ozturk misses most from his native Turkey—but even that’s changed. His new bride, Auka—has just moved to Los Angeles. “I really love Los Angeles and I don’t have any plans to go back to Turkey,” he says as he takes stock of his new life in America. “I really think anything you can imagine is possible here!”
 

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TUNDE ADEBIMPE

Posted on by Sacha Cosentino

HUMANITY: What’s the source of your name? Where is it from?

TA: It’s from West Africa. My parents are from Nigeria.

HUMANITY: Your name is so rhythmic—it sounds like music.

TA: That’s good. It’s good that it doesn’t sound unlike music. That’s cool.

HUMANITY: So, listening to your demos, it’s amazing how it’s like night and day from the completed songs. When you come up with your ideas, what’s your process of turning them into songs? And then bringing that to a band, what do they add?

TA: Well, my process isn’t really a process. I often walk around and then I’ll hear a melody in my head and it’ll just get stuck. Now I sing it into my phone notes or something. But before, I would basically be walking around with the song in my head until I got home and then just kind of hummed it into a four track or harmonized with myself in a four track. You know, you get a melody down, and then you just put words on top of it quite randomly, and then … just little by little you shape it, you shape it into something that sounds and feels right to you. It can be narrative storytelling, it can be poetry, or it can be total nonsense. But yeah, my four-track stuff, it was an extension of keeping sketchbooks, you know? Where it’s just kind of like, OK, put this idea down and maybe later you can flesh it out, or maybe this is the final, you know. A lot of the friends I had when I started making music in New York, before TV on the Radio, was like a real kind of low-fi recording community where people who had no business using recording equipment or anything, they barely had any idea. So that kind of made it seem to me like I could do it. But yeah, I have these little sketches or notes on an idea, and when we started TV on the Radio, Dave [Sitek] and I initially kind of became friends over the fact that we had all of these four-track tapes of things we’d made individually. We just sort of traded them and listened. There’s a version of “Young Liars” on one of the demos.

HUMANITY: What was the inspiration for that one?

TA: It’s very different than the final version, but the whole song is pretty much there. Most of the songs that I put on that compilation were things that I felt could exist as vocals alone, like if I wanted to just go into a studio and record them a cappella, that I could do that. But then I met Dave, and it was sort of just like, “Oh, here’s this incredibly talented musician. We can work on stuff together, we can work on each other’s stuff.” It’s really weird—inspiration is a strange thing.

HUMANITY: Those songs are from 2003, right?

TA: Yeah, they came out in 2003, but the sketches—I found a tape that said “Four-Track Dumps 1999.” “Young Liars” was on there.

HUMANITY: Is there something that’s happening in your life that turns into a song for you or where does it come from?

TA: I feel like a lot of that stuff definitely, without sounding too weird and going into too much … I don’t even know if it shows up in the song, but it’s the closest thing I’ve had to a supernatural experience, and it was focused on a relationship and there was definitely someone or something besides the two of us. I refuse to believe that it’s just us.

HUMANITY: Is that why it’s called “Satellite”?

TA: Oh, no. “Satellite” is different. I think the version I put on there was something where Dave and I played with an idea, and it wasn’t really formed yet so we just kind of went and worked out the nuts and bolts of it, which also will happen sometimes when you have a song and it sounds really big but the internal workings of it don’t really do anything for me, or it doesn’t feel right. It’s like you fucked up a painting or something. I’m just going to sketch it out again and see what it looks like and then I’m going to go back and build up on it again. But sometimes with the things that feel slightly overwhelming, a song is a good way to put it in one place, so it’s not swirling around your head.

HUMANITY: What about some of the other songs you put on the compilation? “DLZ,” “Tonight,” “Reasons.” Is there a story on “DLZ”?

TA: I have no idea where that came from—that’s when it was in a Brooklyn loft with no heat, no nothing, and I feel like I found it. I was scrubbing through it and it’s going on like for 45 minutes, just those three notes. I got out of this crazy zone and then that broke and the second thing that I put on there was like the next layer of it, where I rerecorded something, put another layer on it. I didn’t have Pro Tools or any of that—I was literally recording on the tape, like a drum part and a keyboard part, and then getting another tape player and playing that out, and then getting a mini- disc recorder and playing it, so everything was happening, like a little orchestra with boxes in front of me. But I don’t know, this particular one. It’s hard to process, but the idea that everything we’re doing is destroying the planet. The intense arrogance of someone who thinks that you can win at life by making the most money or by hoarding natural resources for yourself. And again, you can think about these things and have a nervous breakdown, or you can kind of put them into a song and figure it out.

HUMANITY: It reminded me of Massive Attack.

TA: Very cool. I love that. Those guys are good friends—they’re really awesome.

HUMANITY: And then I was listening to “Tonight,” which is so completely different. Compared to how it turned into a song, I feel like your demos are darker, and when you bring it to TV on the Radio, it lightens up. How does your solo stuff differ versus TV on the Radio?

TA: I write all the time—well, a little bit. Since I moved, like a little bit less than I have for a while, but I’ll write, and something can sound like it could be a TV on the Radio song. Especially after being with the band for so long, I’ll just hear something and think, Oh, OK, I can bring this to a stopping point, and it’s a very concise song that I know the band could do justice to. If we don’t, then I’ll put it with the 200 other things that I’m never going to get to. I feel like with my solo stuff, and I feel weird even calling it “solo stuff,” because I just haven’t had time to put it out. I’ve performed by myself, just with some of those things, like a lot of improvisational vocal stuff. I have a couple of sets of songs that I’d like to do with just mostly voice and very minimal instrumentation, which I’d like to actually get to doing this year, because I’ll have some time. But now I’ll write a schedule. If I know that we’re planning on making a record, I’ll write in that direction. I feel like with my own stuff, it’s not as concise. I guess for better or worse, it’s not anything I can see being pop music.

HUMANITY: Do you think your solo stuff is going to be more in the realm of the demos on this record?

TA: Some of it, yeah. That’ll definitely be one of the textures. I was thinking of doing a 15-song set, five songs apiece. And I always think of things in terms of a complete art piece. One will be songs that are basically voice, guitar and drum—very, very raw. And five songs that are vocals with minimal electronic and then five will be completely a cappella.

HUMANITY: Do you think you’ll be releasing your solo record anytime soon?

TA: Yeah, I think later this year. We’re going to be touring until October. But realistically probably very early next year. If I can get something out this year, that’d be great.

HUMANITY: What’s your musical background? Did you play an instrument?

TA: No, I had very minimal piano training. When I was young, I was the least musical member of my family.

HUMANITY: That’s hard to believe.

TA: I know, but it’s true. My dad played the piano, my mom sings, my brother was an excellent piano player, my sister sings opera. I was terrible at piano—I couldn’t stick with it. So I started taking drum lessons when I was 12. I took two lessons and my drum teacher quit, because he got a job with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. But I was convinced it was because I was terrible, which shows you what a completely spineless, whiny child I was. But I sang in the choir in high school, things like that, but I never thought music would be how I spend most of my time.

HUMANITY: Did you listen to all sorts of music? Who influenced you musically?

TA: That’s a ton, a ton, a ton of people. There was always a lot of jazz in our house and classical music playing. My dad really liked Thelonious Monk a lot. We’d play Chopin and things like that. But I think that the first time I really started thinking about writing songs was when I listened to Nat King Cole and old rock ’n’ roll, Chuck Berry. My dad would find dollar tapes and just be like, “This is what you should listen to, don’t listen to any of that crap you’re listening to.” Trying to think of what else. As a teenager, Bad Brains, Minor Threat and Nirvana. I was a huge Nirvana fan. There was a period of time that I felt like, “I hope no one else ever finds out about this band,” you know. It was like 1990, ’92. And then people find out, and you’re like, “OK, cool, people found out, but they’re making good records,” and then it’s the cliché where the football captain or whatever is wearing a flannel, and he’s still a dick, but he’s dressed like someone who’s not a dick, and then the whole world … going on for 15 years, I still am sort of in denial that that band or his songwriting had such a huge effect on me, but it totally did. Nirvana and the Pixies and …

HUMANITY: What ignites you to keep on making music?

TA: I have the most boring answer, which is, “I’m lucky enough that it’s my job right now.” I should probably pay that luck back by doing it. It’s strange, because I’ll go through some periods of time where I really don’t feel like making music, and I used to feel really worried about that, but now I think it’s really healthy. I don’t believe in forcing yourself to do something. Whatever allows you to create; I just like making stuff.

HUMANITY: You guys have a huge fan base, and you have an effect on people as musicians. Are there messages or things that you intentionally try to share through your music?

TA: I’ve always just liked the idea of hearing something really personal, that seems to only mean something to you and then you can hand it off and you discover that someone else can use it in a way that you didn’t intend for them to use it. But I think of how much music and art literally changed the course of my life, you know. When I look at it now I’m really grateful. I just like the sort of message-in-a-bottle idea of it—not the Sting song, but the idea of putting something out to the world. You don’t really know who it’s for; it’s kind of for you, but it might be more valuable to someone else, like once you get through whatever you’re trying to do. But I don’t think there are any direct messages, except maybe we’re all on the ship together.
 

 

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DAVID MUSHEGAIN

Posted on by Courtney Ngo

Fashion photographer, world traveler and former street performer David Mushegain had been friends with Anthony Kiedis for some years, surfing with the Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman on a regular basis. When they realized they would both be in Japan at the same time, they thought it would be cool if Mushegain took some photos of the show, the second stop on the band’s I’m With You tour. So Mushegain took his camera and stood in front of the stage, but instead of training his lens on the musicians, he found himself intrigued by the fans. After the show, Mushegain sat down with the band and showed them his photos—an homage to the faces that stared back at the band night after night on the road. The band members were fascinated and invited Mushegain to compile a book of photos just like that, focusing entirely on the fans.

 

 

Soon enough, Mushegain found himself on the road with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Four years, 130 shows and 100,000 photos later, the book Fandemonium would be born, featuring Mushegain’s anthropological approach to rock concert photography, a document of the passion that orbits one group of California musicians as they travel the globe.

There were the new fans, the lifers, the 8-year-old kids at their first concert. And the woman whose husband had died the day before, who flew six hours to see her favorite band nonetheless because she knew the music would ease her pain. Sometimes Mushegain went to the fans’ homes and peeked inside their world, stepping out of the heightened concert experience. Until embarking on the project, Mushegain had no idea the band had such a massive, cult-like following around the world, stretching from Argentina and Brazil to Eastern Europe. “We talked to so many people in so many cultures,” says Mushegain. “It was such a big thing to put your arms around, documenting a group of fans that numbers in the millions.”

One fan who stood out was Julia, a girl from Madrid who seemed to be at every single show on the tour. One night in Ukraine they saw a female figure curled up on a bench … it was Julia. “I said, ‘What are you doing here?’ And she said she was lost because she couldn’t understand the road signs.” They found her a place to sleep. “Her whole life is based around this band, and that kind of blew my mind,” says Mushegain, who is a musician and a music fan, but, alas, never with the quasi-religious fervor he saw on the road with the Chili Peppers.

 

 

 

Raised in an Armenian family in Los Angeles, Mushegain grew up playing the drums, and in the ’90s he took off around the world with his hand drums, playing on the streets in Ibiza, Peru, India, Brazil, Iran, Pakistan and Prague. After riding horses deep into the Amazon jungle to track down a shaman, a trip that resulted in many of his fellow travelers falling ill, he returned to New York, planning to take a break. A few weeks later 9/11 happened, altering the possibilities for travelers and forcing Mushegain to choose a new life path.

A lifelong fan of photographers Yousuf Karsh, Gerda Taro and Robert Capa, he had already been experimenting with various cameras, shooting shop mannequins around the world. When Johnson Hartig invited him to travel to Paris with him for Fashion Week, Mushegain found his new calling in the world of fashion. Vogue Italia published some of his mannequin shots, and soon Mushegain was in demand as a fashion photographer, particularly for the various editions of Vogue magazine. Unlike most fashion photographers, he always prefers to shoot his subjects (whether they be models, musicians or his friends) in their own environments, creating a highly personal body of work that he hopes will resonate for many years to come.

“When I approach work, I approach it with the idea that it will mature over time,” he explains. “Like with the Red Hot Chili Peppers project—I almost think they will have more pertinence 50 years from now, as people look at them and ask, ‘Remember when they were alive?’ That is fascinating to me.”

 

 

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Anderson Silva

Posted on by Courtney Ngo

The video went viral. “Anderson Silva’s leg wraps around Chris Weidman’s waist like a piece of spaghetti!” exclaimed a journalist for ESPN the day after 38-year-old Brazilian UFC champion Anderson Silva broke his leg dramatically in a fight against New York-born Weidman, a fighter nine years his junior. It’s impossible to watch Silva kick at Weidman then fall back without cringing, and equally impossible to imagine the pain. In the footage from that night, December 28, 2013, in Las Vegas, the fighter’s leg does indeed wrap unnaturally and limply around his opponent’s torso. Those standing or sitting cage-side heard a cracking sound.

“I don’t remember much about fights,” Silva says in retrospect. “It happens very fast. But this match, when I suffered the injury, I remember certain things perfectly.”

The fighter, who was born into poverty in Curitiba, Brazil, and initially learned martial arts by watching neighbor kids who could afford lessons, heard the cracking sound, too.

“I was preoccupied with holding my leg, but I held it in a lot of pain,” he remembers, “and my trainer, Rogério Camões, and Ed Soares, my manager, came. When they allowed my manager in, I still remember I said: ‘Boss, why did God allow this to happen to me? Why did God do this to me?’ In that moment, I thought it was all over. I was in a state of shock. I was worried about my family. I was worried about my leg, if I would walk again, train again, if I could fight again. A thousand things came to mind.”

Silva would be carted off that night on a stretcher and have emergency surgery to repair the tibia and reset the fibula in his left leg. Later, it took nearly six months for him to recover, he would wonder if God had indeed been trying to tell him something that night. Was it time for him to slow down?

Silva is 6-foot-2 and stoic with a square jaw and a defined, serious brow. Before his fateful fight against Weidman, The Spider, as he is often called, had gone undefeated for seven years, winning 16 consecutive fights and defending his UFC Middleweight Champion title a record 10 times. He had defeated one great fighter after the next, including Forrest Griffin, Chael Sonnen, Vitor Belfort and Dan Henderson. He could beat his rivals at their own games, and he was starting to seem unstoppable. “There have been plenty of moments in The Spider’s career that have already cemented him as the best of all time,” wrote Adam Hill for Bleacher Report in spring 2013.

But six months before his potentially career-ending fight, Silva had faced Weidman at MGM Grand Garden Arena for UFC 162, a middleweight championship fight, and lost his title.

“I lost the first time due to lack of focus,” he says in retrospect, and the reasons for that lack of focus ran deep: “Because I was thinking of other things, because I was unhappy with myself within what I was doing in my sport and disappointed even with the organizers of fighting, and the downfalls of celebrity and fighting itself.”

A few months later, as he geared up for his December rematch with Weidman, he had regained his composure, calmed his self-questioning.

“The second fight, I was completely ready for,” he says. Then his leg broke, dramatically and severely. “God gave me a signal there: ‘Dude, you gotta stop. You have to stop. I gave you a sign; you didn’t understand…’ But more than that, it was about being able to see yourself, to see yourself, which is very hard, and realize, ‘Darn, I’ve been doing everything wrong.’ ”

That’s what he had time to think about as he began his slow, multi-month recovery, going from lying on his back to using crutches to limping. The pressure of being and staying a champion had distracted him. “I didn’t have time to live my life, my reality, which was to be with my kids, to be with my family,” he says. The push—traveling to promote the fights, handling the back talk and insults opponents throw at each other, talking to journalists, playing the champion—had been wearing on him.

 

Illustration by Ryan McMenamy

 

“People don’t care if you’re injured, if your head is in the right place,” he says. “They want you to make it happen; the show must go on, and it has to be real. But this isn’t real. For me, it was never real. The system takes away the truth from you, takes fighting away from you as something you love.”

Silva, who had an obsession with superheroes as a child and began learning martial arts first through magazines and then by hanging around neighbor kids who trained in Tae Kwon Do, lived with his aunt and uncle for much of his childhood—his parents had been unable to afford his upbringing. During his middle-school years, he used to slip into a local Tae Kwon Do gym just to watch the kids in white uniforms train. After a while, an instructor who had noticed him lurking offered to teach him if he agreed to clean the gym in exchange. In high school, he took the same approach again, lingering around a nearby Muay Thai gym that he had to pass each day to and from home. That’s how he met his first trainer, Edmar. “Do you train in Muay Thai?” Edmar asked him one day when Silva was standing outside. “I train in Tae Kwon Do,” Silva answered. “Come over and I’ll train you,” Edmar said. Silva did, and stayed at that gym until he’d become a mixed martial arts phenomenon. The physical prowess, elation and magic that came with being a skilled fighter was probably as close as he could get in real life to the Spiderman and Superman fantasies he entertained as a child.

The fighter stayed in São Paulo until 2007, when his success in MMA made it financially possible, and also perhaps necessary, for him to move to the U.S. In Brazil he had been driving around in an armored car and worried about the safety of his family. He has €five children, three in the U.S. now and two in Brazil.

So he was in Los Angeles during his long, self-reflective recovery. Friendship, family, children, legacy: Those were the things he thought about most often, he says now. “One fight or two can’t define the human being, or the man,” he explains. “What defines you is your attitude as a friend, as a brother, as a father, as a son, as a citizen. This, yes, defines me as a person.” But watching his children at sports practice, running, jumping and
making plans for their futures, the fighter began to itch to return to his own love. “I still don’t know if I’m ready and if I can do what I did with such excellence before,” he says, though the apprehension wasn’t great enough to keep him from trying.

In the summer of 2014, speculation that Silva would return began circulating in MMA press. When he announced he would be facing Nick Diaz in January 2015, MMA Junkie referred to him as an “ex-champion” who, it was “safe to say,” was “returning with a bit more humility.” Silva won that fight against Diaz.

It wasn’t the same, though. He was the older, once-defeated fighter making a comeback.

“This thing, being a champion,” he says, “I can’t say that I don’t miss it sometimes… but when I started fighting, you just went there, fought, won if you won. Tomorrow it was all over, water under the bridge. All the victories I always had, the successful results I obtained, were always based on this: I go there, I fight, it’s over. I win, it’s over. I lift my arm, I go home. I lift my arm, it’s over. And then back to the start again.”

 

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CHRISTY TURLINGTON

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THE ICONIC SUPERMODEL AND FOUNDER OF EVERY MOTHER COUNTS ON FASHION, TRAVEL AND FINDING HER REAL MISSION IN LIFE.

 “I’m not a great dancer,” says Christy Turlington Burns, a name synonymous with the supermodel era of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Born in Walnut Creek, California, to an American pilot and Salvadoran flight attendant, the genetically blessed  icon’s alleged two left feet have never held her back from soaring into a storied career that encompasses countless catwalk appearances, numerous lucrative contracts, hundreds of magazine covers and a host of memorable shoots with famed fashion photographers, such as Herb Ritts and Irving Penn.

She also appeared in a handful of show-stopping cult-classic films and music videos, from Robert Leacock’s  Catwalk  to George Michael’s “Freedom.” (Who could forget when Turlington Burns glided through those double doors barefoot and wrapped in a white sheet?) And in 1993, the Metropolitan Museum of Art declared the rising star the “Face of the 20th Century” after famed fashion designer Ralph Pucci created 120 mannequins modeled after her exclusively for the Met’s Costume Institute. No big deal.

But Turlington Burns is more than just the world’s most humble supermodel; the wife (she married actor and filmmaker Edward Burns in 2003) and mother of two (Grace, 9, and Finn, 7) is also a super humanitarian.  Determined to gift the globe with more than just a striking physical presence that includes an entrancing green-eyed gaze and legs for days that support her 5-foot-10 frame, the 44-year-old activist’s instinctual empathy for others inspired her to start giving back in a major way. “My parents passed their awareness of the world and love of travel onto me, so early on I knew that I wanted to live a life of purpose and was always searching for ways to be useful,” she reveals. “I found personal experiences—such as efforts to rebuild post-war El Salvador (1993), my mom’s birth country, or losing my father to lung cancer (1997), or even my own childbirth complications (2003)—have inspired me to engage in a more meaningful manner.”

Turlington Burns became a global maternal health advocate when she became a mother in 2003. After delivering her first  child, she experienced a childbirth-related complication. Since then, she has worked closely with humanitarian organizations such as CARE, ONE and (RED). In 2008, she entered the master’s program at Columbia University’s Mailman School and started production on No Woman, No Cry.  The film premiered  at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2010.

Every Mother Counts (EMC) was founded the same year. EMC is a campaign to end preventable deaths caused by pregnancy and childbirth around the world. EMC informs, engages and mobilizes new audiences to take action to improve the health and well-being of girls and women worldwide. “Meeting women who feel the same as I do about this cause has been the most rewarding aspect of my work with EMC,” Turlington Burns notes. “When people learn about these statistics, they want to take action.” EMC has gone on to reach a number of exciting milestones, including raising $140,000 during  the ING New York City Marathon in 2011 and releasing a second Every Mother Counts compilation album in 2012 that featured moving contributions from the likes of Eddie Vedder, Patti Smith, Lauryn Hill and David Bowie.

Since 2012, she has served on Harvard Medical School’s Global Health Council as well as the Dean’s Board of Advisors at the Harvard School of Public Health. Her advocacy goal is to inspire action in other women to make pregnancy and childbirth safe for all moms. “I’m a woman. I’m a mom,” says Turlington Burns. “Those two things are very much at the front of who I am.”

Turlington Burns is the latest subject of Citizens of Humanity’s monthly Just Like You inspirational film series, which celebrates  game-changing innovators from all walks of life through a cinematic salute that showcases their captivating charisma (past stars include legendary ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, famed tattoo artist Mark Mahoney, internationally renowned French chef Michel Rostang and Academy Award-winning costume designer Colleen Atwood, among others). In the film, Turlington Burns visits Haiti to share her organization’s  landmark initiatives with the company. As of last year, EMC has begun to provide grants to support programs on the ground in western Uganda and central Haiti. “EMC’s grant provides the funds to train 17 skilled birth attendants with midwives for the country,” she adds. “We’ve been documenting the progress of the students, and this was our second trip to check in on them during their year-long training.”

Crewmembers piled into two jeeps with Turlington Burns to travel out of Port-au-Prince on a three-plus-hour drive to Hinche in the central plateau to meet at the house of EMC’s sister organization, Midwives for Haiti (Sage Femmes Pou Ayiti).

When Citizens of Humanity approached Turlington Burns for the series, she immediately knew that it was the right fit for a  partnership, down to the name. “Humanity means all of us working for the betterment of all of society,” she explains. “It’s always exciting to learn that people are aware of and interested in supporting our advocacy efforts. We are always working to engage new audiences by participating in projects that allow us opportunities to share our mission with more people than we could reach on our own. It’s a really nice acknowledgement to be part of such an esteemed group of humanitarians.”

Turlington Burns’ unwavering passion for EMC is a labor of love that consumes most of her time these days, but she’ll never forget her groundbreaking fashion roots and where her work in the industry has taken her—even though “model” is one of the last titles noted on her Twitter bio, after mom, wife, daughter, yogi, marathoner, founder and author. So what does the supermodel, supermom and superwoman want to be remembered most for? “I try to live in the present, which doesn’t really allow for such musings,” she explains. “But I guess I would want to be remembered as having lived life fully.”

 

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Scott Lipps

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“Sharing beauty” has been Scott Lipps’ personal mission since he founded One Management, one of the world’s leading modeling agencies. The agency represents a who’s who of beauty in America; the faces that capture his imagination become the faces that we see on billboards and the pages of magazines. He represents Helena Christensen, Eva Herzigova, Iman, Bar Refaeli, Claudia Schiffer and Poppy Delevingne. Women whose eyes, lips and skin will be remembered as what defined beauty in the 20th and 21st centuries. And reveling in the perfection of the human form is something we all deserve to enjoy, according to Lipps.

“Sharing that beauty is the thing that gets me up in the morning,” says Lipps, speaking from his office in New York. “That’s what makes me excited about doing the job—creating stars. The high you get from finding someone and the next thing you know she’s scoring cosmetic campaigns and covers of magazines. You start to see someone grow. It’s exciting!”
Born and raised in Long Island, New York, Lipps moved to L.A. as a teen and studied drumming at the Percussion Institute of Technology and media management at Cal State Northridge, during which time he played with L.A. Guns singer Paul Black. When an arm injury put an end to his musical aspirations, he took a job at NEXT Model Management, upon the suggestion of his mother, who remembered his interest in the fashion world. Natural charisma, combined with a remarkable eye for what photographs well, helped him rise quickly through the ranks. He branched out on his own and established One Management in 2002 and now reps not only models but celebrities like Nicki Minaj, Norman Reedus, Steve Aoki and Tiesto.
At that point, there were around 500 working models in New York City. Now there are anywhere from 1,500 to 2,000 world-class beauties wandering the streets of Manhattan at any given time.

“It’s inundated,” he says, acknowledging that there are worse problems for a city to have. But now, with increased competition, it’s no longer enough for a model to rely on remarkable genes to score the big campaigns; his or her beauty needs to shine from the inside too. “The newer concept of inner and outer beauty means it’s about the entire package,” he says. “You have to have a beautiful personality as well as being aesthetically remarkable. That’s what makes a model successful these days.”

Lipps’ particular take on beauty is firmly rooted in the timeless supermodel look, à la Christy Turlington and Claudia Schiffer, as opposed to edgy, trendy looks that might only last a few seasons. That timelessness doesn’t always equal perfect symmetry, though. Sometimes there’s a mystery factor, and it just works in photographs. “Someone’s face might not exactly be in proportion; there might be something a little bit untraditional and that can really work too.”
You can take a peek at Lipps’ adventures through the beauty sphere at his site, PopLipps (some of his photographs were published in his book POPLIPPS: Plus One) and in his Friday column on Interview magazine’s website. Must be a dream job, being surrounded by some of the greatest beauties of our time, day in day out. Indeed it is, although Lipps admits that after a while even beauty becomes something you get used to. “I see girls on a daily basis, thousands upon thousands over the years, and you do get desensitized.” But still, when a truly remarkable face walks in the room, his heart rate jumps. “It doesn’t happen everyday… but still, I get stunned.”
 

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LEILA YAVARI

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Leila Yavari’s background is as inspiring as her sense of style: raised in Bordeaux, France, and then Southern California after her family fled a post-revolutionary Iran in 1979, when she was one. While studying at UC Berkeley she led a double life, political science major in session, international model during vacation. “It was a really good thing for me. I tended to be a bit bookish, and it made me engage with people, go out and work with creatives,” she says. She stayed at the university as a post-grad and became a teaching fellow “looking at the economy of development and post-colonial theory,” until the call of international travel and full-time modeling became too much. “It came to a point where I had to make a choice. I felt that the experience of traveling was more adventurous than just reading about it in a book, and I thought, ‘I’m going to regret it if I don’t take this opportunity.’ I always thought I’d just come back to school,” she laughs. Neatly, this experience has directly fed into and shaped her career now, in her current position as fashion director of Stylebop.com. “As an international fashion retailer we speak to a really big audience, and my experience traveling and working in fashion has helped me become very sensitive to cultural nuances. When you’re buying you need to have that global customer at the forefront of your mind: how they work, what sizes they like, questions of modesty. Those are the things that you really have to have engaged with on the ground—for example, European women wear very different kinds of pants than women in Asia, but you don’t really understand that unless you see it.”

While living in Paris she became a sort of default correspondent for editor friends back in San Francisco. “They’d call me and be like, ‘Hey, Murakami’s doing a collaboration with Louis Vuitton—can you run over there and take a couple of pictures and write a piece about it?’ ’’ And so the next phase of her career began to evolve, and three years ago she signed on with Stylebop.com owners as fashion director, overseeing their visual and editorial content. What appealed to Yavari about the e-tailer was its intellectual attitude toward style. “We always say we’re bringing the catwalk to the sidewalk. It’s really about the mix between high and low. Our customer is a modern sophisticate, she’s a career woman, she’s independent, she’s busy and she wants fashionable solutions for everyday dressing. We approach fashion from the angle of design. Our online magazine is very art focused, so we cover all of the international fairs and talk about the artists we’re excited about. We want to give our customers access to sub-cultural movements and make sure they’re in the know before those artists become the next big thing.”

Alongside spotting emerging trends and brands, Yavari’s passion lies in the tech side of her world. “There’s a lot of space for innovation and creativity; the sky’s the limit in this field. We’re in the process of developing an app where you can virtually try on sunglasses, and I’d like to see virtual wardrobes. We want to be at the forefront of innovation, which is really exciting.”

One thing her role does make her is seriously busy. To get an idea of her schedule, Yavari has just flown in from New York Fashion Week. This morning, before we meet for breakfast—at 8 a.m.— she has already filmed a quick interview for Bloomberg. She’s in town for London’s leg of Fashion Month, then on to Milan and Paris. She is ostensibly based in Munich, where the Stylebop. com HQ is, but laughingly tells me, “I’m rarely there—I’m on the road probably nine months of the year. I don’t have kids at the moment, so I’m just trying to enjoy it as much as I can.” How does she manage a relationship among all this? “It takes a very special man to be as supportive as my boyfriend! He always tries to come out at the weekend, but he shows up and is like, ‘Let’s go out!’ And I’m like, ‘I have to be up at 7!’ ”

When she does get home she’s greeted by one of her Kathryn Garcia artworks. “She’s a longtime friend from California, and I really love her work. It’s in our foyer, so when you walk in the flat, the first thing you see is Kat’s work. I love that.” The rest of her home is “minimal and clean. I like mid-century vintage pieces, and I’m really into lighting. We have a beautiful chandelier in our bedroom and some 1970s lamps, but I’m the kind of person that would rather have an empty home and slowly build.” When she has time, her favorite getaway is the South of France. “That drive from Nice airport to Ramatuelle,” she muses, “it reminds me of my childhood in Southern California, just driving through the canyons to the coast. We also spend a lot of time in St. Tropez. It’s a magical place.”

Academic, model, business maven—I wonder if she thinks of herself as ambitious. “I don’t think I’m driven by ambition, I think I’m passionate. If I think about the women that I’ve left behind in Iran, I feel that if I don’t make something out of the opportunity I’ve been given, it’s an insult to them and everything they have to do every single day just to be able to exist.”

 

Leila Yavari - Humanity Magazine

 

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