Corinne Bailey Rae: 'Black Rainbows' (Listening Party)

Corinne Bailey Rae
( Photo by Koto Bolofo )

Announcer: Listener-supported WNYC studios.

David: This is All Of It. I'm David Furst, filling in for Alison Stewart. Next Friday, Corinne Bailey Rae will return with her first full-length album since 2016. It's called Black Rainbows, and here's some of the first song, A Spell, A Prayer.

MUSIC - Corinne Bailey Rae: A Spell, A Prayer

David: The album is just a kaleidoscope of free jazz, electronica, and even punk rock. Beyond the album Corinne Bailey Rae plans a book, visual art lectures, and a tour, as part of the multimedia Black Rainbows project. She'll be stopping by the National Jazz Museum in Harlem this Sunday for a performance, but first, she joins us here in the studio to preview some of the tracks before they come out next Friday. Corinne Bailey Rae, welcome to All Of It.

Corinne Bailey Rae: Thank you very much, David. Thanks for having me.

David: Black Rainbows is your fourth album. It explores some really new sonic territory for you, especially for fans of your earlier songs like Put Your Records On. It was inspired by time spent at the Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago. This is a combination community center, art gallery and library dedicated to Black history, located in an old savings and loan bank built exactly 100 years ago. Tell us about this place and how it served as inspiration for you.

Corinne Bailey Rae: I first found out about the Stony Island Arts Bank when I came across a photograph of this artist, a visual artist, this Black man staring at this photograph, surrounded by his contemporary art which was so puzzling to me. He had this expression of self-confidence, and he had this beautiful relaxed expression around him was his art. A pile of bricks on the floor, a goat on these spindly legs going round on a train, circular train track, and then a picture from a chicken shop, Harold's Chicken from Chicago so a man chasing a chicken with a meat cleaver.

He was staring at this photograph, he's represented by White Cube, a really prestigious contemporary art gallery in London. He was staring out sort of saying, "This is my art, this is me." I thought, "Who is this man? Who is this Black man presenting this contemporary art?" He's not a painter and I found out he was called Theaster Gates. I found out part of his practice is saving these buildings from demolition. He works in the south side of Chicago which is an area as you know that has its challenges. There's large unemployment and poverty. There's mental health problems. There's gun violence.

Here is this artist who's investing and involved in rebuilding community. He's walked past regularly this bank. It's a beautiful Gothic Bank and it was going to be torn down. The city wanted to tear it down. He bought it for a couple of dollars from the city. He raised millions of dollars by selling his own art to transform the bank to reclaim it and make it into an art space. It's full of archive. All these different important historic archives. It has all the records from Frankie Knuckles' record collection, massive Chicago House DJ.

It has all the books that were ever submitted to the Johnson family who established Ebony Magazine, Jet Magazine, and Negro Digest. Anyone who was writing about any Black stuff at all, they would send their books to the magazine and hope to get reviewed. There's thousands, and thousands, and thousands of books about everything from Dan's mask drawing architecture film, recipes, yearbooks. Then it has a collection of these problematic objects from America's past. There've been dubbed Negrobilia but they are postcards with derogatory images.

They're photographs, troubling photographs, lynching photographs. They're Black knick-knacks, I guess, that this banker called Edward Williams. He would go round to yard sales and he'd go around to flea markets, and see these objects hanging around and think, "Let me just buy those and take them out of circulation," in the '50s, '60s, and '70s. Who wants to buy the cookie jar shaped like a mummy or these grotesque cartoons or they might be newspaper articles from the Civil War. They might be print adverts from the '50s and he would buy them to take them out for circulation.

David: This is quite an interesting collection you're describing here. This must feel very different than a lot of the other museum spaces that you've encountered in your life.

Corinne Bailey Rae: Absolutely. They pieces that in a way were never meant to be in a museum. They're just most of them ephemeral, obviously, some of them are newspaper articles, some of them are print adverts, adverts for chocolate, and adverts for things that clean your home. They're all specifically orientated around Black people, cartoons, Black people in service, children.

David: How did all of that serve as your fuel?

Corinne Bailey Rae: Well, when I walked into the bank, I was just amazed. The building is huge. It's this Gothic Bank. You go in into the open space that you look up into the double-height library, where the books are arranged on these beautiful thick wooden shelves. Then you go up into this collection where the objects aren't on show because they're mostly-- they're quite painful and troubling objects. You have to look, you look in a drawer, you unwrap a parcel and you undo the tissue paper here, or you find a song that was written, a lullaby that was written in slavery times.

All of these things, they're sort of they're precious. I feel like they are objects that were made for in many cases amusement, white amusement but they've been brought into this Black care so they're having this new life. In some cases, when you see them all together, you think, "Do we really need these objects around? They're so troubling. They just be on a big bonfire somewhere," but of course, their evidence of a kind of thinking, and I think the evidence of how widespread that thinking was.

David: Well, this new album is called Black Rainbows. That is also the title of the second track. Where did the idea of Black Rainbows come from?

Corinne Bailey Rae: I really liked rainbow as an image. I liked the way that it spectral light hits a prism and it bounces off into all its many colors. That's what I found in the library. I found all these different themes, and all these different types of Black thinking through the years. Instead of thinking of blackness as kind of a homogenous that one single voice, there were all these different voices or these different stories or these different lost, or forgotten, or erased, or hidden stories, that I wanted to bring forward.

Also, the rainbow is significant because I really wanted to approach it with all these wide musical styles. I wanted to not have anything in the way so I would be able to bounce off these objects and just see what came. Originally, it started as a side project. I thought I'm going to call it Black Rainbows, it's not going to be under my name. It won't have my name on the packaging, and whoever finds this weird thing.

David: This found object with these--

Corinne Bailey Rae: Yes, I found object about found objects. Whoever finds it, that's great to them.

David: There is an incredibly wide mix of music and approaches in this collection. Let's hear a little bit of the song we were just talking about. This is Black Rainbows.

MUSIC - Corinne Bailey Rae: Black Rainbows

David: Now, this track Black Rainbows, this one's almost more of a collage than a straightforward song.

Corinne Bailey Rae: Absolutely. I think collage is a good metaphor for the whole record, really. There are so many parts of the record that there's light and there's dark, there are painful things, difficult things, joyous things, resistance, resilience, ebullience, fun, and humor. I wanted to capture that. When I was looking at all these objects, there's so many moments where I thought about the '60s and '70s era in Black music. Bands like Parliament, P-Funk, Funkadelic, Earth, Wind & Fire in the '70s, or Sun Ra much earlier than that of artists who are saying we are in these particular social conditions, but there's so much more. There's Nature, there's The Cosmos, there's The Eternal, there's The Transcendence, there's the playful building a mothership, and sending it on tour or Earth, Wind & Fire spending so much on their outfits that they barely broke even. Looking back to a particular version of Africa, almost imagined Africa as this lush and brilliant place, and also looking to the future and saying, although we're here in these difficult conditions, we're part of something that is eternal and joyful and playful and we really want to celebrate that. I think that balance that I wouldn't describe it as escape, but more a new headspace consciousness--

David: Absolutely. This is a song to me that really tells the listener that we're in a new world now. This is introducing a lot of sounds that are going to be featured on the album.

Corinne Bailey Rae: Absolutely. I really wanted to explore all that. I'm so interested in electronics and wild saxophone playing and drum machines. Mostly, with my previous records, I've sat down and played songs on acoustic guitar. That's how some of these songs did start, but there's also so many more colors to play with and I wanted to do that.

David: So many more colors to play with. Let's hear one of them right now. I want to play the single New York Transit Queen since we're in WNYC.

Corinne Bailey Rae: Absolutely.

David: First of all, where did this song come from? Who is the New York Transit Queen?

Corinne Bailey Rae: The New York Transit queen is Audrey Smaltz, who I found when I opened a copy of Ebony Magazine from 1954 and saw this woman, this 17-year-old woman in a bathing suit hanging off the back of this firetruck with fireman's boots on, with this playful smile on her face. I thought, "Who is she? Who is this young Black woman?" I found out that she had one Miss New York Transit and found out about this beauty competition. It was an answer to Miss Subways, which was a widely celebrated competition. You needed to find a beauty queen every year in the subway but it wasn't at that time open to Black women.

The transit workers of New York, the Black transit workers got together, and they made their own competition and it was Miss Transit. I saw a photo of all these four winners, these beautiful Black women, all the crowns on. Audrey Smaltz, I just thought she has this look, she looks like a regular hellraiser. I got to meet her. She's born and raised in Harlem. She's in her 80s now. I interviewed her at the Schomburg Museum and I said, "Do you still live in Harlem?" She said, "Honey, I was born raised, buttered, jellied, and jammed in Harlem." She's just amazing.

David: Can we hear a little bit of her musical?

Corinne Bailey Rae: Yes. This is a song that came up for her. It came out as a punk song because it remind me of those '90s posters that would use '50s images [unintelligible 00:12:25].

David: This is a little bit of New York Transit Queen.

MUSIC - Corinne Bailey Rae: New York Transit Queen

New York transit queen

Little over seventeen

New York transit queen

Little over seventeen

New York transit queen

Beauty is in her possession

David: Songs like New York Transit Queen, this requires a totally different part of your voice from something like some of your former acoustic R&B songs, right?

Corinne Bailey Rae: Absolutely. It really reminds me of my indie band. Before I had my first record out, I was in this indie band called Helen. We were very big in a very quite small town of Leeds in England but I used to love that. I loved being able to shout and wail and jump around the stage and play electric guitar. Now, I always say to people, I got into Billie Holiday and Kurt Cobain exactly the same time. To me, there's so much similarity in their voices and styles of music. It's so conversational, and direct and storytelling. This song, I'm going a little bit back to my punk roots.

David: Now for many people who know you perhaps from your debut that was more of an acoustic R&B singer-songwriter vibe, this is a very different sound, right? How much are you thinking about audience expectation when you're writing and creating this music or heading into the studio?

Corinne Bailey Rae: When I first started making this project, I didn't think of it as my own record. I thought of it as a side project, but there are songs that are more coming from acoustic and soulful kind of origin, some jazz. Things are closer to jazz, ballads on the record as well. I really wanted to show that, show my rainbow, show my diversity, but in many cases, I would have to respond to the particular feeling. Now, when I wrote a song called Put it Down, that came from being at this amazing event in the Arts Bank where people came in, they would write down their woes on a piece of paper and then fold them up and put them in this big vessel that fiesta had made, this big clay vessel.

Then we would all dance to this DJ Duane Powell, who's playing the Frankie Nichols archive and he's playing house music. We were dancing for hours, for hours of solid dancing. Then at the end of the night, these woes are set on fire. I really felt at that event that the thing that I was carrying, I could put my burden down, and it went away. That track came out as it says too much inside, I got a dancer out. That came out in a more banging style. There are other songs that started with my acoustic and ended that way as well.

David: You're going to be at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem on Sunday, this Sunday performing from this album with all of the different sounds on this album. I imagine this could be tricky to convert to the stage.

Corinne Bailey Rae: We've just done a few shows, but I really love it. I love the way it bounces around. Sometimes I've got my electric guitar on and it's distorted. There's other times where all the band leave the stage and it's just myself and the piano player holding people for seven minutes telling the story of Harriet Jacobs who was this incredible woman who escaped slavery in her 20s and she feigned her flight north. She made it seem as though she was going north because she had this master who he was an abusive and violent man.

She knew if she went north, he would find her so she stayed in the crawlspace above her grandmother's storehouse, a free grandmother. She stayed there for seven years. She managed to bore a hole in the side of this building. She had this little loophole that she could look out. Through there, she was able to see her children growing up because her grandmother would allow them to play nearby, and she would overhear things pertaining to her freedom.

After seven years, she was able to go and get free and escape. The song's called Peach Velvet Sky and it's about what the sunset looks like through this loophole and about this containment that she's made in order to finally win her freedom.

David: Let's finish with a little bit of that song right now. Corinne Bailey Rae's new album comes out next Friday. It is called Black Rainbows. I want to play so much more from it because there's so much to listen to. Thank you so much for joining us on All Of It.

Corinne Bailey Rae: Thank you so much, David.

MUSIC - Corinne Bailey Rae: Peach Velvet Sky

We gave ourselves into the night

And we counted time a painted illusion

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