Little Axe
Who has released records on all these labels: the legendary r'n'b label OKeh, the nu-blues stronghold Fat Possum, the key rap originators Sugar Hill, Tommy Boy and 4th & Broadway, Real World Records and the innovative On-U Sound?
Which musician links Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaata, Lee 'Scratch' Perry, James Brown, Robert Plant, Mark Stewart & The Mafia, Sinead O'Connor, and Megadeth?
The answer to both questions is Skip McDonald, and Skip is LITTLE AXE. Skip made his name as an integral part of the Sugar Hill house band playing on the most influential early rap classics like 'Rapper's Delight', 'The Message' and 'White Lines' and as part of Adrian Sherwood's On-U Sound crew he has made some of the most adventurous and praised UK music of the last 20 years.
What exactly is Little Axe? It's what you get when you take the blues and subject them to the 21st century. It's not a complicated thing. The blues is a feeling, not a technique. And feelings don't change as much as we'd like to think. In fact, it's entirely feasible to imagine that were Charley Patton, Howlin' Wolf, Leadbelly, Blind Willie Johnson and Skip James alive and kicking today, they'd recognise Little Axe as a continuation of their own work by other means. Little Axe is the blues, the deep blues channelled through time, dubbed, tweaked, sampled, processed, explored, refreshed - surfing the present, from the past, into the future.
'I like to surf time. What I like to do is study time-periods - get right in to 'em, so deep it gets real heavy in there. And I study hard. I like creating the grooves you thought you'd forgotten about,' says Skip.
The story goes like this. Some time around the start of the Eighties, the guitarist and bluesman's son Skip McDonald, finds himself operating as an element in the most important rhythm section on the planet, the Sugar Hill Gang house band. He and his partners in groove, drummer Keith Le Blanc and bassist Doug Wimbish, are the guys putting the booty into 'Rapper's Delight', 'White Lines' and 'The Message' - the rap records that changed music forever.
Soon, Le Blanc introduces McDonald to an interesting Englishman in New York. Adrian Sherwood is a pioneer of a different sort, a "mixologist" responsible for putting together the never-ending dub/roots/soundsystem project known to all hip Brits as On-U Sound. Sherwood is in the US making connections, as is his wont. They convene in London and Sherwood, Le Blanc, Wimbish and McDonald, plus vocalists Gary Clail and Bernard Fowler, release a sequence of brilliant recordings under the Tackhead ident. A new sound is born that somehow conflates the principles of hip-hop, funk, dub and techno. The connecting factor? The belief, says Sherwood, that there is common ground shared in "the music of Captain Beefheart and Prince Far I, King Tubby and Jimi Hendrix". All you have to do is find it.
This was the thinking and subtle practise that led to such all-time classics of On-U mixology as Bim Sherman's Miracle - in the making of which McDonald played a significant part; to Skip's production and technical work with artists as diverse as African Headcharge, Junior Delgado and Sinead O'Connor; and to the first Little Axe album, 'The Wolf That House Built'. The "House" was Son House (much championed by the White Stripes) and the "Wolf" was of course Howling Wolf! Released on the legendary R'n'B label Okeh, it was a critical success with a single "Ride On" being used by Barclays Bank in a TV campaign.
A decade on, 'The Wolf...' still sounds warm, dark, fresh and deep. It's all of those things because it came from the heart of a real bluesman. "I want to write, record and perform music," he says, "that connects with people - something they can touch."
Touch? Well, yes. The music on The Wolf that House Built and its two successors, Slow Fuse (1996) and Hard Grind (2002), is so dense, weighty and rich in texture you feel that you can touch it, even as it touches you. This is not music you'd want to drop on your foot. And the band have never lost this unique 'touch' in their latest releases on Real World Records.
Skip McDonald is sponsored by Peavey/Trace Elliot www.peavey.com
