Sunday Music: Soul Sista, Make Me Over, and other Bilal-isms

Whatever journey you're on, you can look back and start thinking of all the dead-ends you walked into along the way. The frustrations, the abruptly halted ideas, and the stuff you left behind. That's life. But, there's music in it.

My wife and I just got back from a music festival and I couldn't stop thinking about a musical moment from 25 years ago and how, it kind of just blinked out of existence for me then, but in hindsight, I can see it's shockwaves still vibing around me today.

Bilal grew up in and around Philly music. He left for college at the New School in New York, met Robert Glasper on his first day (a blind “you two play together in front of the class next” pairing - which, is insane and incredible all at once), and - the rest is pretty much history.

First there was the demo that got him his record deal. Supposedly he was hanging out with the guy from the Spin Doctors one night, they had a bit of a jam session, and that found it's way to Interscope.

You're seeing how this goes, right? All the potential. All the paths and roads unfolding.

I'm thinking about Bilal because seeing Robert Glasper this past weekend reminded me of him. Partly since Bilal wasn't there. Not as a diss or anything like that. It's just an "I know he's still out there, I haven't thought about him much lately, so what's he up to" thing.

These are the guys who were just a few years older than me, but always cropping up in the liner notes and band lineups for so much of the "new" (re: contemporary) music I was buying and going to see in the early 2000s.

So much of it, looking back, looks like little dead ends. Offshoots and projects, lots of stuff I could only download illegally, some of which that isn't really around any more so it's hard to count as difference making. But I know it was there. I know those little expeditions contributed more to where music's moved in the time since.

When I saw Glasper and a million of his other friends this past weekend, I started thinking of all those other little off-ramps, where they led, where some of them are still going, and that's what brought me back to Bilal.

Glasper and Bilal meet at school. Bilal gets his deal and we all get "Soul Sista." That was a jam. I put this on a bunch of mix CDs in the early 2000s. The whole album filled a post-D'Angelo/Musiq Soulchild-adjacent spot in the collection. The liner notes mentioned Glasper and a bunch of music nerds like me and my friends thought it was pretty cool that neo-soul (or whatever we didn't want to call it either) and modern jazz were more connected than people appreciated.

For reference - Glasper was up to stuff like this at almost the exact same time (filling a post-Metheny, but on keys/Brad Mehldau spot):

Music wasn't dead. The cool stuff was just happening further and further from the mainstream. This was the new alternative, as far as I was concerned, and I was there for it. They were in it. They were part of carving it out alongside Questlove and Q-Tip and Dilla and Lauryn Hill (ahem, IYKYK) and Erykah Badu - working out change at the margins. The life in the dead ends.

Bilal was rumored to be taking a big step, kind of like D'Angelo after Brown Sugar, and we were so excited for it. Anything for another Voodoo. Anything from another heir apparent to Prince. Plus, we knew Bilal and Glasper were hanging out with the whole Soulquarians set, so the bar was high.

They went into Electric Lady Studios, started recording, and, reportedly, the label hated it. It never saw the light of day. It saw "internet leaked" daylight but - not more than that. In the Napster/Limewire days, some stuff trickled out and we were so excited. Here's a few cuts from Love for Sale, which in my digging I found is at least on YouTube:

Part of me went digging for this stuff because it was treasure at the end of dead ends. But looking back, after seeing a full festival brought together by Glasper and his many (many!) other collaborators, I'm seeing it differently.

Bilal brought Glasper to the Philly people, who brought him to Dilla, who got him into the studio doing Love for Sale type stuff and - these were paths that needed to be walked along the way.

These aren't really dead ends. They're experiments that weren't quite failures but couldn't claim success by any obvious measure. They're change gathering momentum, waiting for the right moment to break through. They did smaller things in the early 2000s to do bigger things a short decade and change later.

Because if we don't get that, we don't get To Pimp a Butterfly later. We don't get "If These Walls Could Talk" - do you hear it?

We don’t get the Black Radio Experience albums (or festivals). We don’t get stuff like this:

There are a million versions of it taking a village. That's what life is. Play good music with and for good people, it's beautiful what can happen.

And you know what villages are full of? You’re expecting a Slum Village reference here, I know. I am too, but this post will be a million words if I start that now.

Villages are full of main streets, little roads, and yeah, dead ends. But just because the roads stop in those spots, it doesn’t mean they’re dead ends even if they aren't the most celebrated moments. They're where the real work gets done.

It's good to look back on them.

Thanks Bilal.

(ps. my wife and I are coming to see you soon, it's overdue. Kind cul-de-sac hang, if you will. Nothing wrong with a quiet corner of the neighborhood, after all)

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