I have been thinking about my friend Greg Tate since he left this plane a little over a year ago. I haven’t posted anything specifically about him but that’s not for a lack of mourning or of time spent considering the meaning and value to me of our relationship. I mean, nearly 40 years! That’s the vast majority of both of our lifetimes.
We didn’t hang out all the time or even check in every day or every month. We would just pick up wherever we had left off when the opportunity came. Despite that, in a very real way, it was not such a casual association. I remember more things that he said to me than I do words spoken by almost anyone else. I did not always agree with his take on every topic but I give him a great deal of credit for shifting my perspective many times over the years.
I met him, as many of us did, reading his columns in the Village Voice in the early Eighties. I remember the waves of energy that flew off the page and I remember thinking, “Who besides me is getting all these references he’s making?!” I had to meet this guy. When I finally did, at a Living Colour show at CBGB’s, it took quite a while to match up the laconic dude in front of me and the propulsive journalist. I came to value those seeming mismatches and contradictions with Tate. He was large, he contained multitudes. I discovered and appreciated them more and more over the years.
And of course, I can’t think of him without remembering how many moments we had of grokking music and culture together. Tate could go there with me on the esoterica as few do. I can’t begin to count the number of shows we were at together, how much music we turned one another on to (okay, mostly him turning me onto but the flow went both ways at times). I loved the way his mind expanded beyond seeming barriers. One time back in the Eighties, we were waiting for P-Funk to take the stage at The Ritz, watching the video screen (as one did) and both of us were bugging out over the dance of Jimi Hendrix in the act of playing guitar. No one else played like him? No one else MOVED like him! And late one night, driving down from Woodstock, Greg probed deep into my experience with Zulu culture and music— foodways, courtship rituals, spirituality, the hunt— they each have entire genres of music dedicated to them. I don’t think anyone ever pushed into that with me the way he did that night. His interest in the Zulus was secondary; it was me that he was asking about, as no one else ever has.
One thing about Tate was that, no matter what question I might have asked him, he would always have an immediate response ready. It always seemed as if he had given my question a great deal of thought very recently, even if I knew that he couldn’t have.
“Who would be the perfect director for this documentary my friend is pitching?”
“What did you think of Stanley Crouch’s use of this word in that article?”
“Where can we place this recording archive that someone I know is offering?”
Very often, whatever Greg told me was something that I knew on some level but that I would have never come up with in a million years.
And, as I think about it, we worked on a ton of projects together over the years. Some of which we managed to bring to light and some, I am now realizing, will probably never be experienced by anyone but him and me. I made radio shows with Greg, I made an hour-long television show with him about his band Burnt Sugar. We planned concert series together, television series… Ah well.
And one more thing: if for nothing else (and there was obviously plenty else), my admiration for him would be boundless for doing one particular thing that very few others have done. I value the contributions of music journalists greatly (No, really. Some of my best friends are music journalists!) but there are those who would dismiss them as mere carbuncles on the musical corpus. Comments about “frustrated musicians” and the like. Well, Tate was one of the few who actually put down the pen, picked up the guitar (and, later, the baton), and put his money where his mouth was. Long after he had established a global reputation as a music journalist and cultural pundit, Tate started a band. Several of them, in fact. Who does that? Nobody does that. Well, very few do, anyway. And no matter how many do it, it’s always a brazen move. Talk about inviting people to judge you! And Tate’s bands weren’t just any bands. They were agglomerations of vast ambitions, and many of those ambitions were fulfilled. While credit here also goes to Tate’s many Burnt Sugar collaborators, their very significant contributions would not have been without Tate getting that big ball rolling.
I am still gripped by the last time we saw each other, just a few weeks before he died. It was a beautiful Senegalese lunch in Harlem on a Second Summer afternoon that seemed as if it would go on forever (remember that day, JaMiyla Samuel?). Only later did it occur to me that Tate looked a bit wan and his energy was down from where I was used to seeing it, yet he seemed as if he had plenty left in the tank.
His loss was truly shattering. The immediate sense of Greg’s life and work being so grandly unfinished left me feeling as if I was running off a cliff. He seemed to take all of us with him for a long moment, and then was he truly gone? Could that be? Still no answers for so much.
So why now, after 15 months, am I talking about Greg Tate? I wrote earlier about the radio shows that he and I made together; one of those was from my series Deep Focus. Greg chose the band VSOP for that episode and that band included Wayne Shorter. When Covid hit, I started turning archived episodes of the show into a podcast. The one episode for which I do not have a recording was that one. I think there were tech issues at the studio that week (as Phil Schaap used to say, “WKCR: the home of technical difficulties”). It frustrated the hell out of me when I realized it and, needless to say, that only became worse after Greg died. Well, there’s nothing to be done about it now.
But one of the things that Greg said to me in that show that stayed with me I will share with you now. Wayne Shorter, who died last week, was one of the few people whose name was a poem. To wane, of course, means to gradually become smaller. So to “wane shorter” means… I think you get the idea.
So Wayne’s name is really a three-syllable poem about itself. It’s telling you the story of the very thing that it illustrates (even when his playing and writing often didn’t).
I had never thought of that before, and yet, there it is. And it was just sitting there the whole time. Now I think of that almost every time I hear his name.
Did this ever occur to you? If not, then maybe I have just given you a moment of hanging out with Greg Tate.
Photo credit: Mitch Goldman 2022. All rights reserved.