Rux Revue:
"There are two ways to listen to Carl Hancock Rux. With your
headphones on, his lyrics - half-sung, half-spoken word reimaginings
of what blackness means - dazzle with their originality, insight,
humor, and energy. Booming from your stereo speakers, however, the
full scope of Rux's achievement can be measured: With production help
from the guys behind Beck and the Beastie Boys, Rux has made his
social observations and self-examinations truly musical." THE NEW
YORKER
"No poet signed to a major label has ever sounded as comfortable with a band as the 29 year-old, South Bronx bred Carl Hancock Rux...On Rux Revue (he) creates gospel inflected grooves that are both ambient and full of revelation...Though his baritone bends like a willow switch, he remains a verbal artist, one whose voice sometimes reverberates...Rux is coming from a place way beyond anger or regret and from a whole museum full of pop culture's black stereotypes." SPIN
"If Jim Morrison and Gil-Scott Heron were able to have a son, his name would be Carl Hancock Rux. Part preacherman, part poet, Rux infuses his lyrics--delivered in spoken word format--with offbeat statements and a psychedelic sound ; an experimental mix of rock, drum n' bass, soul music, hip-hop, freestyle jazz and funk..." TIME OUT NEW YORK
"The most startling original record for some time, this could herald the arrival of a major new talent. Part scat-poetry in a Saul Williams style, part funky Beck rambling, the sweeping production (courtesy of a Dust Brother and Beck's backroom boys) elevates." MUZIK UK
"Rux himself is a Sunday morning preacher conjuring Saturday night's fever, a pentecostal dadaist who works songs to spasm and collapse. This performance poet with the apellation of either a Roman emporer or late Victorian aesthete is rockin' the minstrelsy-mocking, ghetto-gothic, soul-dandy cool pose with grace right now...Carl and his background singers construct walls of wailing, with their tight Ladysmith Black Mombazo /Joni Mitchell harmonies; these sirens massage rants and their syncopated chain gang harmonizing pushes Carl beyond reason. Keats declared truth is beauty, but there are moments in (The Rux Revue) performance that break through and touch bone. A reminder that truth can be ugly too." VILLAGE VOICE
"There isn't a more beautifully written set of lyrics around than on Rux Revue...while Rux's deep voice will recall Gil Scott-Heron, Rux also evokes Lou Rawls of "Dead End Streets"...elsewhere he connects with the blues, and "Miguel" shows that his use of Latin accents is the product not of faddishness but of affinity. "No Black Male Show"is a great critique of hip-hop that would make Chuck D proud." PLAYBOY
"Rux comes from just about everywhere on "Rux Revue" -- an album that not only digs into deep issues like lust, love, death, poverty and artistic integrity—but it also explores the inescapable connection between music and poetry, going places few artists have gone before. It is a tapestry of grooves and Rux's unique blend of sharp cynical poetry and rap, fortified by trials of his difficult personal history." ROLLING STONE
"This literary young lion found the balance between hip-hop cool and the poetry slam's pretensions on his debut collection of funk-powered, soul searching rants forming a panorama reaching from the neighborhood to the universe.Carl Hancock Rux, the charismatic poet and composer who played at Joe's Pub on Saturday night, deliberately invoked a revival meeting. Flanked by his hot band and three female singers who testified gospel-style, Mr. Rux urged the crowd to open up to his tales of urban blight, moral struggle and black pride...evoking the psychic disorder social justice can cause...his performance may have been the (CMJ Music Festival) weekend's best." NEW YORK TIMES
"Carl Hancock Rux's debut is a fully realized effort to present poetry as musical theater. It's similar in this vein to Charles Mingus' A Modern Symposium of Jazz and Poetry and The Clown, or Wynton Marsalis' Blue Interlude and The Majesty of the Blues, or Stevie Wonder's Living for the City. Backed by a live band and singers, Rux's sound encompasses rock, blues, jazz, funk, and hip hop, the words allowed the most fruitful representation in sound. His voice is a rich baritone; he sometimes shouts, sometimes croons, sometimes whispers. At all times he is insistent, a quality we have come to recognize as the hallmark of performance. His work grapples with recalling his past and creating out of it a self-consciousness that is productive, rather than self-pitying. The production quality is excellent, a testament to both the producers (among them Toshi Reagon) and to Rux's command over his material and his relationship with his band." POP MATTERS
"This disc succeeds on so many levels, it should be a required musical companion for anyone who's read Richard Wright's "Native Son" or Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man." Rux Revue is complex and layered, meriting multiple listens to mine the deep wealth of Carl Hancock Rux's perspective. Rux treats words like communion wafers and wine, slipping them around his mouth, savoring the flavor and the experience, transmogrifying them from simple syllables into messages, explanations, revelations, and observations that elevate the listener to a higher plane. Alliteration, rhyme, repetition, allusion, meter all tricks of the poetic trade that Rux uses with practiced expertise. His voice carries enough cadence that the music could be left off, and the disc would still satisfy. That the music which surrounds his words varies, wandering from soul to hip-hop to Robert Johnson blues, is another reason for awe and immediate purchase. Rux's language varies from street slang to Harvard-educated purity within the track..."Languid Libretto (I Can't Love You Better)" pairs Rux's rich baritone against sweet female backing vocals. As close to a "traditional" song as Rux Revue possesses, it's got an honest sexiness Barry White would envy...Another gem, "Asphalt Yards" trades an uplifting female sung chorus with Rux's words, spoken with alternating machine-gun speed and measured pace. Rux holds up a circle of light on the cover photograph: a beacon of illumination, or a hand held halo. Either or both, it's light well shed on an artist already renowned in his circle and deserving of a much, much wider audience. CDNOW, Inc.
"A second-generation son of the NuYorican poetry movement that originally launched in New York at the beginning of the decade, Carl Hancock Rux's voice is unique even amongst the legions of his local peers. On his debut album, Rux Revue, it's not just his physical voice—a deep-rooted baritone that echoes Gil Scott-Heron with a touch of blunted Jimi Hendrix swagger—that talks loud but also his artistic one, informed by the experience of a turbulent foster-care childhood. Rux doesn't adopt the showy rap cadences preferred by most young "slam" verbalists, opting instead for subversive deliverance that belies the typical "poet" style. It's a moving mix of recitation and singing, sounding, at times, like a booming all-knowing prophet to an old-school funk crooner to a soul-searching evangelist. Indeed, Rux's words could very well be transcribed for the page or be kicked a capella and resonate with convinced fury. But Rux is enamored with the actual performance of his words, resulting in backing musical soundscapes that blend seamlessly amongst cloudy black beats, Funkadelic-like opuses, and lamenting blues. With this album, Rux breaks the conceptions of what a poet is and should be, a remarkable achievement that screams to be heard." CONSUMABLE ONLINE
"Wear headphones to listen to CHR's album...find the big old padded kind, the ones that mat your hair down and suction cup around the edge of your ears...then turn the volume way up. The timbre of Rux's voice is like the distortion of Hendrix's guitar—disconcerting yet exhilarating, demonic, yet seraphic, and ultimately unlike anything you've ever heard before...he's doing what Gil Scott Heron was doing 20 years ago and Michael Franti did with the Disposable Heroes of Hiphophrisy—taking some sharp ass street poetry charged with social relevance and dropping it over funky beats. But Rux (dare I say it?) possesses a lyrical prowess that surpasses Heron. His intonation, his impeccable sense of rhythm, his prodigious grasp of language are astounding, track after track." SAN FRANCISCO GUARDIAN
"Carl Hancock Rux is first and foremost a poet, but don't mistake Rux Review for a "spoken-word" album. The Harlem-born, Columbia-educated writer/performer's recorded debut renders the po-mo-poetry-recitation-over-a-canned-jazzbo-track an embarrassingly one-dimensional cliche. With a silky, yet bracing baritone, Rux's labyrinthine travels through the political, sexual and emotional pathways of his own past is tempered by the learned observations of his present-day mind... Recalling the Afrocentric commentary of Gil-Scott Heron's funk-jazz as well as the gritty observational nature of Lou Reed's downtown art-rock, Rux presents a rarely heard amalgam of spiritualism, music and politics." CMJ NEW MUSIC REPORT
Unlike some multidisciplinary types, Rux understands that a recording needs to stand on its own. "Apothecary RX" is suitably conceptual and literary, but it is above all musical. The album is a canny melange of many traditions, including the politically pointed jazz poetry of Gil Scott-Heron and the Last Poets, the socially conscious pop-funk of early '70s Motown and the moody Brit-hop of Tricky and Massive Attack. Rux and co- producer Stewart Lerman don't consistently rival th shifting textures and intricate layers of Tricky's masterpiece, "Maxinquaye," but they come close with such tracks as "Ground" and "Lamentations." Unlike many poets who find themselves in a recording studio, Rux knows how to boost even his lyrics with insinuating melodies and taut grooves.
In contemporary hip-hop and R&B music, artists such as Cody ChestnuTT, India.Arie and The Roots have been dubbed as innovators who incorporate Black music styles into contemporary formats; artists who stand apart from the mainstream and deliver an original voice. Throughout his career, multi-disciplinary artist Carl Hancock Rux has also borrowed from various traditions in order to offer heartfelt and innovative art, tapping deep into his soul and psyche to bring forth works of art and beauty that are universal in their scope and startling in their intensity and originality. Apothecary Rx is the sophomore CD from Rux, and his full-length debut on leading NYC independent label Giant Step Records. Filled with vision, beats, majesty and memories, the CD encompasses everything from gospel to hip hop, rock to jazz and, as a result, sums up the breadth of Carl's sonic inspirations and possibilities. Featuring contributions from an array of artists - among them Brazilian composer Vinicius Cantuaria; avant-garde jazz violinist Leroy Jenkins; keyboardist/songwriter Rob Hyman (The Hooters, Cyndi Lauper, "Time After Time"); Chocolate Genius, and Carl ís co-producer Stewart Lerman (Dar Williams, Black 47, Jules Shear, Loudon Wainright III) Apothecary Rx is a singular experience. Carl says, "I wanted to make music that reflected my eclectic musical tastes: soul, gospel, blues, rock, hip-hop etc. I wanted to write songs inspired by everyone from Serge Gainsbourg to Coldplay, King Pleasure to 50 Cent, Bill Withers to Arvo P?rt. I wanted the record to be textured, with live instrumentation as well as samples and digital sounds. This album is eclectic because Black music has always been eclectic, has always pushed the envelope of invention, borrowing from everything organic and traditional in the Black experience as well as responding to the multi-cultural experience of living in America. It is a handprint of everything from the storefront Harlem churches around the corner from where I was born, to the South Bronx hip-hop world I grew up in, to my travels as an artist in search of myself throughout Europe, Scandinavia, West Africa, and Southeast Asia. It's like going into a drug store with a million herbs and remedies and potions lining glass shelves--taking from it the ingredients that heal you and restore you to yourself." With Apothercary Rx, Carl takes his inspirations to "a notha level" and in the process inspires us to dream outside the lines. As Carl sees it, the album is about "admitting the state of the soul, requesting some assistance and moving on." That sense of transition leading to completion helped fuel songs such as the insistent, pre-Sept. 11th penned "Eleven More Days," a funky Sly & The Family Stone-like rant that Rux describes as being about "the intangible sense of despair and the need to break free from a continuum of tragedy." "Eleven more days in the city, eleven more miles to roam, eleven more prayers of pity, eleven more stops to home." The notion of home, literal and beyond, flavors "Ground," anchored by sinewy rhythms and bluesy vocals provided by new recording artist Stephanie McKay (Go Beat). Life ís more ephemeral states of being and (un)consciousness make their presence felt in the fever dream that is "Protean Character," a mournful blue light basement doo-wop with horns and dreamy soprano back-up vocals, co-written with friend and neighbor Mark Anthony Thompson a/k/a Chocolate Genius. The haunting song is an admission we may all relate to: "I bleed inside/ I feel inside this spirit of dissension, rides in easy--not loud...I'm a protean character like the ones who live in fantasy." On "Lamentations" (previously released by Giant Step Records on 12 inch as a dance single produced by Ron Trent) Rux remixes the track, blending four- string bluegrass guitar licks with dance beats and Cuban style congas, to play along with his manic preacher vocals. As co-producer of Apothecary, Rux gives us original classical compositions (for cello and viola on the Arvo Part inspired Fanon), combines Tibetan prayer chants with New Orleans style funereal marching drum beats (Trouble), and layers sitar and electronic keyboard samples over 5th Dimension-like backing vocals (Apothecary Song). The result is a record that fits in with artists ranging on pretty wide ground, from Mos Def to Zero 7, Jill Scott to Radiohead, and Cinematic Orchestra to Common. Lofty concepts perhaps, but ones that are transmitted with a soulfulness and substance that is hard to resist or ignore. Beyond his songwriting and co-producing, Carl is also a great singer. "It was important to me to explore the many different sides of myself and my voice, the result of having sung spirituals with The Harlem Boys Choir, gospel with Hezekiah Walker's Love Fellowship Choir and years spent at places like The Nuyorican Poets Cafe. I had no desire to record a spoken word CD, but rather a CD of songs, however alternative the structures might be." Those who have seen Carl perform live are well aware of his power as a vocalist, and his ability to deliver a song. "Rux himself is a Sunday-morning preacher conjuring Saturday night's fever, a Pentecostal dadaist who works songs to spasm and collapse...Rux comes from the tradition of African American crooners like Al and Aretha, who sandblast the line between sexual and religious ecstasy." (Village Voice).Carl Hancock Rux was born, raised and still lives in New York City. His first (unreleased) record, produced by Nona Hendryx, brought him to the attention of Epic/Sony. Rux Revue, his Epic/Sony album was produced by The Dust Brothers and Tom Rothrock/Rob Schnapf (Beck, The Beastie Boys), and was named one of the top ten alternative music CDs of 1999 by the New York Times. Carl is an award winning poet (Pagan Operetta won the Village Voice Literary Prize 1999), novelist (Asphalt is due out in 2004 on Simon & Schuster), playwright (the 2002 Obie winner "Talk"), and essayist. In addition to his headlining projects which currently include a starring role in the forthcoming Robert Wilson/Bernice Johnson Reagon theatrical work "Temptation of St Anthony" - Carl has appeared on and written songs for albums by David Holmes, DJ Spooky & Matthew Shipp, Reg E. Gaines, Yoshihiro Fukotomi and Stephanie McKay.
"Six long years passed since Rux Revue, the debut album by poet and rapper Carl Hancock Rux, blew people's minds with its long aesthetic, beat-conscious, and literary reach. Six years is an eternity in the world of popular music. It's not only enough time to slip permanently off the mass-culture radar, it's an eternity that can deny you ever were on it to begin with. With Apothecary RX, Rux comes thundering back with one of the most expansive, ambitious, and musical recordings to come down the pipe in a long while. What ties these tracks together besides the musician's lyrical savvy (think scholarly, yet street lean and mean from the Gil Scott-Heron old school) and exceptional ear is almighty rhythm, as a cipher, as a shape-shifting ever-present in a musical meld that touches on everything from the Delta blues and Storyville to vanguard rock, vintage R&B, classic and futuristic pop, tough urban soul, and of course, the rainbow of sounds and beats that is hip-hop. A strange and unwieldy cast of characters were assembled for this set, including guitarist , avant jazz violin legend Leroy Jenkins, Marc Anthony Thompson (aka Chocolate Genius), Brazilian samba guitar genius Vinicius Cantuaria, Rob Hyman from the Hooters (who wrote "Time After Time" for Cyndi Lauper), and backing vocalists such as Irene Datcher, Stephanie McKay, and Helga Davis. Co-produced with help from Stewart Lerman (Black 47, Dar Williams), Rux assembles a montage of sounds that weave through and around one another in a constant effluvium of urban music that continually references and overwrites its history politically, socially, and spiritually. On the opener, "I Got a Name," with its shimmering African juju guitars that open onto a body of dubbed-out, compressed pianos, multi-layered percussion, and throbbing basslines, Rux sings, raps, and chants his way through to establish an identity in the African diaspora as it stands tall as its own signifier, the American urban landscape. On "Eleven More Days," the contrast of generations, religions, races, and social statures is played out on subway platforms, playgrounds, slam apartments, prisons, and in the streets. While Rux iterates the terrain and circumstances in his landscape, a stunning gospel refrain sung by a chorus of female voices emphasizes the place of intersection, the place of hope, the place of loss, and even deliverance while contrasting contrapuntal synthetic rhythms slip around basslines and indeterminate sounds. And while these two selections provide a view, they are by no means the only ones. Everywhere polyrhythmic strategies, multivalent pop textures, and smoky roots musics fold into one another, sometimes clashing but more often just touching and caressing one another before they move on to get Rux's poetic depth of field across, and that field never cancels anything out of its articulation, except perhaps hopelessness. Apothecary RX is indeed a prescription: musically it opens wide the current closed scene of alliteration, endless insider referencing, and production conceits by sounding organic and visceral without ever bogging down in its own ambition. Lyrically, it offers voices, many of them, sometimes speaking simultaneously, sometimes out of the depths of solitude, and they speak from reportorial detachment as well as from pain and joy and the desire to transcend as well as be delivered. Rux has created something off the boards here, unclassifiable, truly beautiful and moving. It is as unrelenting in its excellence as it is in its ambition." ~ ALL MUSIC GUIDE
" THE SCENE: Ever ridden the subway in New York? As part of a massive international city New York's subway trains are loaded with folks from different lands and cultures, and if all of the riders of a single subway car decided to play music together during their travel, it might sound like the music of writer Carl Hancock Rux. Rux composes beautiful poems, novels, operettas, plays and songs. In 1998 The New York Times deemed him one of the mostly likely people to artistically influence his generation, an appellation that did not help the sales of his first album Rux Revue, which confounded his label's promo team and flatlined. Five years later he released his followup, 2004's magical Apothecary RX. Rux's restless baritone resonates with tobacco and absinthe, as if he's seen too much and felt not enough, while it steadies and slices through his electronica-enhanced Middle Eastern and Southwestern-tinged songs.The balletic bass and simmering cymbals drive "I Got A Name" into a tapestry of hidden piano and peek-a-boo choirs, where Rux gives thanks to the Lord while riding the beat like Hannibal on an elephant's back. "Me", his ode to his ongoing self-acceptance, jangles with delta-twang and continental buttery piano. Rux clearly has someplace to be, as most of these songs find him mid-journey. Over a whistling percussion engine the church-like "Eleven More Days" eloquently encapsulates the joys of traveling homeward. The arid "Trouble Of This World" moves more like a sprint through the jungle after the firing of a warning shot, as native drums scare away the screaming guitar macaws. He drops the ancient future beats for "Fanon" and kicks it super-old-school with wispy layers of cello, violins and melancholy. It's the perfect song to play when you hear that your new album bricked… " UPPITY MUSIC
Good Bread Alley
"An impassioned poetic incantation with a blues beat, the title song of Carl Hancock Rux's Good Bread Alley, features such lines as "We had found a happiness in a nothingness. We were threatened by the lessons of living" and "We divorce ourselves from spirit and flesh" and "Hypocrisy is our catastrophe." That is not your ordinary popular song. A nearly breathless incantation, "Good Bread Alley" sounds more like a blues-gospel sermon. In "My Brother's Hands (Union Song)," written by Rux and Jaco van Schalkwyk, the music is light, and there is a very feminine chorus, but Rux, who mentions a brother's craftsman hands, recites rather than sings: "If my brother looks just like me, bring him here, let me see" and "Our sister has no breast, bring her water, bring her rest" and "let my father forgive me," lines that also sound like an invocation and make the listener feel as if he has stumbled into a family drama. "A woman without sound cannot be found" and "How can a woman be loud and free?" says Rux in "Thadius Star," co-written by Geoff Barrow and Tim Saul with Rux, a song with a pretty piano opening followed by heavier instrumentation. The piece reminds me of 1970s David Bowie (Heroes, Low) crossed with Broadway music. The line "You'll forget my name" is repeated, something that does not seem likely for Carl Hancock Rux, whose name is memorable and whose voice is deep, heavy, and controlled on "Thadius Star," though on the next piece, "Behind the Curtain," which mentions someone obsessed with sanctity and sounds like an art composition, an art song, Rux's voice may be double-tracked. The piano playing of Kwame Brandt Pierce graces "Behind the Curtain," "Thadius Star," and other songs: charming, delicate, dramatic. Rux has found interesting collaborators. "I don't know the truth, and I don't like the truth, and I wasn't told the truth when I spent my youth, so I'm making my lies," sings Rux in the song he co-wrote with Vernon Reid of the band Living Colour, "Lies." The song has a lazy beat, and a soulful chorus, and Rux's voice seems especially deep. I like the idea of the song—how many songs admit the narrator is a liar? The work of Carl Hancock Rux requires suspension of the usual artistic requirements, and attention to new possibilities, in terms of sound and meaning.
I first heard Carl Hancock Rux's music on Rux Revue, which had crisp production, a soulful sound, and sometimes angelic choruses. It was a work in which he said that the revolution is our evolution, and asked such simple questions as "When was the last time you've eaten?" and "Do you know who your father is?" Facts of life—family, food, sex, and death—were events and themes in his songs. Carl Hancock Rux recited and sang in a voice of seriousness and sexuality, a voice that could be embarrassingly intimate, or incisively rhetorical, or merely polite (when he asks, "Do you want this baby?" it resonates on more than one level). Two of Carl Hancock Rux's antecedents are Gil Scott Heron and Sly Stone. "I can't give you more than I got," Rux sang in Rux Revue's "Languid Libretto (I Can't Love You Better)," which featured Helga Davis's austere voice. Rux also included a song dedicated to poet Miguel Algarin. In "Fall Down" on Rux Revue, Rux conjured a judgmental religion: it is nearly enough to exorcise the appeal of religion. In "No Black Male Show," Rux acknowledges the perplexing centrality of a hip-hop music that offers words and images that do not address significant issues; and he does an extended commentary on the word nigger, now widely referred to as the "n" word—commentary on language, values, cultural choices, social marginality, and social conflict. It is brave to do that among a people who are inclined to interpret cultural criticism as self-hatred, and hatred of others as love of self, but bravery is not enough: to treat one set of values as equal to another suggests a lack of positive discrimination, a false equivocation. Degradation, whether degradation of language, self, or one's relationship to others, is not equal to, better than, or as admirable as education, eloquence, manners, self-respect, and legitimate professional success. Rux has much he wants to say; and, there is, I suspect, a young man's lifetime expressed in Rux Revue, and it remains a work of significant bounty. In the Rux Revue piece "Blue Candy," there are an unkempt boy, grandmother, and railroad apartment; and the little boy is alone with blue candy and his dead, increasingly blue grandmother until the neighbor lady who plays cards and drinks with the grandmother comes by, followed by police and others. Transcendence is not what Rux's music offers: instead, in a world with spirits and no gods, one feels as if one has a companion for one's journey, someone to share the struggles—and some of the pleasures—with...Sometimes Carl Hancock Rux seems to be commenting not on an act or an event but on an interpretation of acts and events, attempting a deep intervention in perception and response and memory. His "Geneva" and "Black of My Shadow" feature women's voices, and "All the Rock Stars (for Kurt Cobain)," co-written by Rux and Stewart Lerman and Rob Hyman, has the soulful sound of ritual and is a high point on the album. Dave Tronzo plays slide guitar on "Geneva" and the song has the auditory vibrations of an old thoughtful blues, and a woman's voice (Marcelle Lashley) sings, and sings "If you wanna catch me, you better run like the wind." (Does that voice represent a particular woman, or the legend of women?) Several spirituals—"Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" and "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot"—are quoted (sung by Helga Davis) as part of Rux's "Black of My Shadow," co-written by Vinicius Cantuaria, and the song could be about the African-American past, a past that is now as much fable as it is history. "All the rock stars walk the fine line and the streets are toward the divine" and "All the great stars are already dead" are two lines, the last possibly a Kurt Cobain quotation, from the piece dedicated to Cobain, a man who embodied some of the anger and anguish and ambition of a generation. (Artists regularly fall in love with the myths of other artists: I think Cobain did, and he, too, has become that kind of mesmerizing myth for others. I still like Cobain and his work, but I prefer my artists breathing, healthy, intelligent.) "Living Room" has a fast pulsating beat, and some drama (it was written by Rux with David Holmes, Phil Mossman, Darren Morris). Rux shouts. The theme of the piece, as I perceive it, is the ways in which music works in people's lives, especially that of families. Rux performs "I Can't Write Left Handed," a song written by Bill Withers about hostilities between people who do not know each other, and the effects of war, featuring a soldier who asks someone to write a letter to his mother with advice for the family lawyer to get a military deferment for the soldier's brother and the soldier's request that the local minister pray for the soldier, before ending Good Bread Alley with Rux and van Schalkwyk's "Better Left Unsaid." The last piece, after a long silent pause, begins with "Old Negro woman done give birth to me. Why you gon' go do that?" and "Old Negro man done give me eyes to see. Why you gon' gon do that?" and then, later, the lines are "Old Negro man done give birth to me, old Negro woman done give me eyes to see. Why you gon' go do that?"
"Poet and spoken word artist Carl Hancock Rux makes his Thirsty Ear
debut with Good Bread Alley. Long considered to be a genre-bending
musician who skirts the boundaries between a variety of styles—new
soul, underground hip-hop, rhythm and blues, electronica, psychedelia,
funk, free jazz, and everything in between—Rux is a natural candidate
for Thirsty Ear's genre-eradicating Blue Series. This third album
features a stripped-down palette with notable special guests,
including slide guitarist Dave Tronzo and violinist Leroy Jenkins,
both of whom appeared on Rux's previous album, Apothecary RX (Giant
Step, 2004). From the soulful crooning of "My Brother's Hands" to the
gospel-inflected anthem "All The Rock Stars," the funky blues groove
of "Lies," the cabaret-styled "Thadius Star" and the anthemic R&B
chorus of "Living Room," Rux traverses musical boundaries like jumping
lines on a map. Accompanied by the vocals of Marcelle Lashley and the
casually plucked slide guitar of Tronzo on "Geneva," Rux delivers a
postmodern blues that is as emotionally raw as its ancestors from the
Delta. Leroy Jenkins contributes a ghostly solo to the experimental
spiritual "Black of My Shadow," while Vinicius Cantuaria plays
acoustic guitar in support.
Rux's lyrics are at once uplifting and forewarning; his cautionary
tales that speak to the optimist in each of us, no matter what our
individual plight may be. Combining political activism with personal
lyrics, Rux states his case with his smooth baritone. His band plays
with a decidedly organic touch and very little electronic
augmentation—a refreshing respite in these days of computerized beats
and Pro Tools tomfoolery.Regularly compared to the Southern Fried Soul
of Bill Withers (whose Vietnam War-era protest ballad "I Can't Write
Left Handed" he covers here), as well as the political activism of Gil
Scott Heron and the psychedelic blues of the Lizard King, Jim
Morrison, Rux weaves these diverse influences together to create a
singular sound.A musical chameleon, Good Bread Alley has enough tastes
to satisfy the most discerning listener. " ALL ABOUT JAZZ
"Working with a smaller set of musicians -- and for a smaller label -- the multi-disciplinary artist Carl Hancock Rux delivers what is arguably his most musical album to date. There are more "songs" on Good Bread Alley than on the poet/author/vocalist's previous efforts, and Rux also uses his deep baritone singing voice more than usual. Hip-hop and electronica make brief appearances, but most of the sounds here are neo-cabaret, neo-classical, or downtown loft blues, played naked and live enough to suggest what a one-man show from Rux might sound like. On the opening title track, Rux drags behind him the faux synthesized orchestra that appears throughout the album. Decidedly fake horns and strings plod out the tune, denying their leader's Gil Scott-Heron-styled tale of "why didn't we see it coming" which fades in and out like a radio station on the edge of reception. From here, Good Bread Alley becomes more approachable, more warm, less produced, but no less evocative. The tales of "wine and war" mentioned on "Thadius Star" -- a song originally written for former Brooklyn Funk Essentials member Stephanie McKay's solo debut -- contrast wealth and poverty, success and failure, hope and disappointment. Rux has a firm grip on his art but he's humbled by the complexity of modern life and doesn't offer answers as much as advocate awareness. He recites his prose if need be, but more often sings his message with the earthy tone that has earned him the experimental blues tag he's been pigeonholed with. The desolate "Thadius Star" adds Brecht and Weill to the jumble of influences, along with Massive Attack, who's spirit is deep in the song's sensual slinking. "Black of My Shadow" puts spirituals and Billie Holiday through William S. Burroughs' cut-up treatment, while the taut "Living Room" unleashes the old-fashioned, straight-ahead R&B, although the "Soul fury!" shouted out in the song speaks to domestic violence instead of Stax. There's also an incredible, heartbreaking cover of Bill Withers' protest song "I Can't Write Left Handed" here to prove Rux is also a gripping performer and interpreter. Still, with all the advancement he has made as a musician, his spellbinding words still offer the richest rewards and are the most responsible element in making Good Bread Alley the potent triumph it is." ALLMUSIC.COM
"Post-poetry slam performers like Ursula Rucker, Saul Williams, and Carl Hancock Rux have faced an uphill battle to define their recorded work. As with Gil Scott Heron before them, audiences embrace their singing and rapping with guarded ears, more comfortable when the artists stick to a traditional poetic cadence. Rux, however, has gone conceptual and created an opus where his voice, both in free verse and crooning, soars to Paul Robeson levels. That might sound like hyperbole, but Good Bread Alley is as satisfying a musical work as it is an intellectual one. The album offers an amalgam of blues, symphonic electronic balladry, scorching soul, and vampy theatrical songs, all welded together by Rux's gentle baritone. Imagine Nick Cave or Paul Simon scoring an album for Isaac Hayes and you'll be close to what tracks like "My Brother's Hands (Union Song)" and "Geneva" achieve. Add to that a Bill Withers cover ("I Can't Write Left Handed") and a tribute to Kurt Cobain, and the result is a thoughtful but approachable avant-soul creation that's uncluttered and full of emotional sincerity." FLAVOR PILL
"The multi-talented, infinitely forward-slashed wunderkind Carl Hancock Rux performs at the PMA as part of the Fifth Annual Art After Five program, which this year is dedicated to the oeuvre of influential Spanish surrealist Joan Miró, whose paintings and sculptures-like Rux's poems, plays and music-often blur the line between the phantasmagorical, primal, preternatural and profane. Rux, 35, has collaborated with some of the most innovative contemporary artists and performers (Miguel Algarin, DJ Spooky, David Holmes, Vernon Reid), and is fresh from reprising the title role in a tour of Bernice Johnson Reagon's opera The Temptation of St. Anthony (based on the Gustave Flaubert novel). He recently released a CD titled Good Bread Alley, which is largely back-to-basics American roots music with a few modern twists of electronica-a blues for the hip-hop generation. In our post-Katrina landscape, Rux says of the blues, "It is the essence of the soul, it's what you've seen, it's what you remember, it's what you know." Miró, whose work was principally drawn from the realm of memory, would surely be pleased. (Maori Karmael Holmes)" PHILADELPHIA CITY PAPER
"Once upon a time, music was not only listened to for pleasure, but to find out (in the words of Saint Marvin) "what's goin' on." Whether you think about minstrels in medieval Europe, the traveling country bluesman or Woody Guthrie, singer/songwriters traveled, detailing life itself for an audience and a bit of green.That approach hasn't completely fallen by the wayside. Take Carl Hancock Rux. Poet, author, intellectual bluesman, humanist hip-hoper, a jazz performer using words as riffs (or vice versa), a male heir to the throne of Nina Simone. He is all of these, or most of these, with some handles fitting more than others. He "raps," but his style is closer to Gil-Scott Heron, John Lee Hooker and Jack Kerouac than Dr. Dre. Especially J.L. Hooker if Hooker went to college in a contemporary America and majored in journalism. Rux doesn't "declare" or "tell" the listener what "actions" to take, nor does he glorify material possessions ("bling"). He's more of a vocalized "60 Minutes" accompanied by rhythm-laden soundscapes informed by jazz, blues, funk and gospel. Those seeking an aural compassionate-humanist documentary set to music or simply something unique should visit Good Bread Alley. " JAZZREVIEW
TALK
"Carl Hancock Rux is full of promise and virtuosity . . . a gifted poet who offers up vibrant imagery like a street corner preacher in the midst of a nervous breakdown."--"New York Times""Talk is the most intellectually ambitious play in years. It wins the case for a renewed theatre of ideas."--"Time Out""Mr. Rux has a fertile imagination and exceptional talent."--"WALL STREET JOURNAL
"A dazzling play. Mr. Rux's ideas have the urgency and passion of actions. He draws on satire, rhetoric, naturalism (the kind that Strindberg said 'seeks out the points where great battles take place') and poetry."--NEW YORK TIMES
Asphalt
The return of a club disc jockey to his Brooklyn roots (and a near-future, postapocalyptic New York) sets the scene for this elegiac, moody set piece by playwright and musician Rux. Back from a stint in Paris, reticent Racine finds himself drawn to a dilapidated brownstone filled with eccentric squatters. Dying "Holy Mother" Lucinda and her doting caregiver, Mawepi, let him crash while Manny, a sequin-wearing druggie, and Couchette, a sexy exotic dancer, make him feel welcome. Racine gets busy "spinnin' " at Alibi, the illegal nightclub in the basement, and ends up romancing Couchette, whose mother has absconded to Bali and whose father killed himself in that very brownstone. Everyone is emotionally scarred, but the music they dance to and play (from U.K. trance to rock, blues to jazz) binds them together in a dizzying kaleidoscope of visions and images. Essentially plotless, the novel intersperses surrealistic segments about Racine's turbulent childhood (including a battle with orchitus-he loses his testicles-and mental health problems) that may or may not contain the key to his current manic state. An enormous rave party is planned in an anchorage space, and as Racine, Manny and Couchette arrive, a much-prophesied tragedy spells doom for the attendees. As a shocked Racine recounts his time producing music in Paris with childhood friend Phillipe, more confusion and disappointment settle over the narrative. Lyrically drawn though sometimes muddled escapist fare for the artsy set, this is an elegantly gloomy addition to Rux's artistic achievements." PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Racine, a young man of sparse words and hidden emotions, returns from Paris to an unnamed community in New York that has long been neglected but is now on the radar of developers. Racine is invited to join a group of squatters living in a decaying brownstone; they have created a family of sorts and cobbled together an enterprise--a bootleg party venue--that provides them with meager financial support. Racine is the gifted DJ with a deep sense of how music moves people. Bartender Couchette is a beautiful dancer whose jazz-musician father committed suicide. Manny, who dresses in sarongs but attracts women, is the overseer. Haunted by their pasts, these vulnerable characters live in an atmosphere of ominous despair, with the imminent threat of eviction and demolition and occasional patrols of police and M-16s, in a neighborhood disconnected from the more affluent parts of the city by a bridge raised as part of an urban warfare strategy. Rux's lyrical writing blurs the lines between dreamscape and reality. A dazzling portrait of urban life." BOOKLIST