PLEASURE Appreciation
RAJ
tenacious local 7,783 Posts
I have rarely heard people give love to PLEASURE. I enjoy these dudes a lot and they have relinquished some masterpieces like "Joyous," "Let's Dance," "Bouncy Lady," "Ghettos of the Mind." Cheers to you men of Pleasure. I salute you. 
Comments
redcover I think (the one with Bouncy Lady). ::lildude::edit: I meant blue cover.
cosine on the consine, m'man.
if only because of "Take A Chance," you could spit those lyrics like they were you're own 'game'
'this man don't want, what he already got..'
PLEASURE DISCOG SITE
afrique-czech!
When this played in the club we used to do a slide move when the chorus came on.
I have two 12-inch acetates of some Pleasure material from Accept No Substitutes.
They're Fantasy 12-inch mixes of stuff not originally issued on 12-inch.
They weigh a ton and sound amazing.
i have been wanting to get the one with the camel on it to round out my collection...how does it stack up witht he rest?
dude now you gotta up some mp3s!! i need a ghettos or lets dance club mix in my life..
yes. pleasure. slept on them for a long time and regretted it. i need that bouncy lady in my life again.
I did, too, and I was very happy when I done got woken up. I really dig their brand of jazzydiscoboogiefunstuff.
They've always been an under-the-radar type of group.
Membership for the hell of it: Marlon McClain, Sherman Davis, Michael Hepburn, Donald Hepburn, Bruce Smith, Bruce Carter, and Dennis Springer.
dust yourself is so damn hard to find!!! but so worth it, not just for the ill camel art...i always liked "straight ahead" nice ass song. and the bouncy lady breaak? fuggedabouttit..one of the nicer outro breaks out there
joyous and the one with the sky scrapers on the cover never grabbed me, but maybe i'm a herb. plaese to direct my ear traffic toward plesaurable tracks on those two
Bruce Smith, who founded the NW Afrikan-American Ballet, taught Afrikan dance at the community center a couple of blocks from my house until recently when it was discovered that he was messing with underage girls. I used to watch his classes and was hoping my daughter could take classes from him. Now I think we just work on her moves while listening to "Dust Yourself Off". Sad, very sad.
Here's a nice interview with Bruce before the fall. Talks about his transition to teaching Afrikan dance from Music.
Bruce Smith
A trip to Africa convinced a Jefferson High grad that there was more to his history than seen on television.
On stage, the bald man with the mischievous grin warms up the crowd by explaining that in Africa, people don't dance in front of strangers. So audience members are asked to introduce themselves to seven of their seat mates. For some it's a bit uncomfortable, but in the process, a bit of that wall between performer and observer gets knocked down.
In many ways, removing barriers is what the Northwest Afrikan American Ballet is all about. The 13 young dancers perform Bruce Smith's original choreography, based on traditional African dances, with an energy that is contagious.
Smith founded the company in 1982 using kids from Jefferson High School's arts programs. It was a homecoming of sorts for the 1968 Jefferson graduate. Smith graduated from Lewis & Clark College with a graphics degree, but his first love was drums. He spent six years traveling and recording with the local R&B group Pleasure (on Fantasy Records) before a trip to Senegal got him hooked on the African beat.
Since then his troupe has evolved from a small high-school ensemble to an internationally recognized professional company.
When we called Smith to ask him to be interviewed for our annual Voices cover package, he let out a long sigh before responding.
"You know," he said, "there are only two things I'm afraid of. One is dying. The other is ending up on the cover of Willamette Week."
He eventually agreed to meet dance critic Catherine Thomas and news editor John Schrag in his office, nestled in a corner of the Matt Dishman Community Center in North Portland.
Willamette Week: How does an R&B drummer become the founder of a ballet company?
Bruce Smith: I got a grant to go to Africa to study dance and music, and one of the things I had to do to satisfy the grant was make a little presentation. I called it an experiment at PCC Cascade Auditorium. I picked some dancers from Jefferson and taught them some movements and taught the drummers some rhythms. It just...well, people were dancing in the aisles. It just snowballed from there.
So how did you end up teaching at Jefferson?
One day I was playing drums for a class and the teacher was doing jazz runs across the floor with students. She says, 'Now this time, let's do it with pulses, and this is ethnic,' and I left thinking, 'These kids don't know what ethnic means. What she's doing is a characteristic of African dance form.' So I went down to the vice principal and said, 'We need a traditional African dance class in the school, to make the program more well-rounded.'
What was the first class like?
I had eight students, and they were the eight students who had the guts to take it. They were really scared because they didn't know what it was going to be like. I'll never forget our first recital. The other classes had 20 to 30 kids leaping across the stage in all these patterns, and here's my little class. Eight kids and three musicians. They were really scared. I said, 'It's just us together on stage. You dance to us. We'll have fun--if we just show we're having fun, we'll bring everybody in.' And they put the African Dance class in between two ballet pieces. Wrong. They should have never done that.
Why not?
The students just went absolutely berserk. The next year I had 16 students, and the next year I had 24. Eventually, I ended up with two beginning dance classes, one advanced dance class. And I was going around to three middle schools three days a week. It just grew. And it was all about giving them the information about what this dance is and how you can trace it back.
Why did a history lesson strike such a chord?
All we knew about Africa is what I call Tarzanism. It's what we saw on TV: the starving kids with flies on their faces, Africans with hardly any clothes jumping around, spitting. We didn't know there's a valid technique and characteristics that contribute to other dance forms. We didn't know that ballet is a French word that means 'a dance that tells a story.' All we know is classical ballet, but there are all kinds of ballet in different cultures.
Was there any resistance from white students to sign up for that class?
For some, yes. But others really like the live feeling. Just like it was with the African American kids, they needed to get the information first. They needed to know, 'It's OK for you to do that.'
Were any of the kids the first year white?
No.
How do you get a bunch of buff young men to sign up for a ballet company?
What gets males coming to me is that African dance is very specifically male and female friendly, in that there are specific masculine men steps, very athletic, gymnastic kinds of things that are different from female things. Still there is a lot of work to be done in this country as far as male dancers are concerned.
I imagine you've been following the problems at Jefferson.
Yeah, I taught there for 12 years, and I saw it coming. It's all about support from the school district, you know. There's a lot said: 'We support Jefferson. We support arts education.' But when you look at the paper, where is the money?
What's your sense of the dance program at Jefferson now?
From what I can see, it's really struggling. When you take a lot of money out of a program, it's hard to just put band-aids on. That's one reason that I stopped teaching. There was a threat of me not having musicians for my class. How can I teach dance without musicians? So I said, if this is going to start happening and you're cutting part of my program, you're cutting me, too.
But if the choice is giving someone money for math class or for someone who wants to have a live drummer, isn't the choice simple?
No, it isn't. I'm a proponent of arts education, and that is still a very new concept for the powers that be. It's been proven that taking dancing and taking music enhances your discipline. It enhances your problem-solving skills. And with that, it enhances holistically every other subject that you touch. So what are we dealing with here? Are we dealing with a situation where it's about the kids? Or is it about numbers?
Did it ever seem weird working in a program that, in effect, was designed to bring white kids to Jefferson?
Well, that's what a magnet school is. But there was a weirdness in the school dance company, the Jefferson Dancers, in that, in auditions there was some weirdness over who to accept and who not to accept.
What got to me was the outside media coverage. Because it was in the neighborhood, because there were a lot of things going on in the neighborhood, they would say the 'Jefferson neighborhood.' But when there was a bomb set off at Benson years ago, no one mentioned the fact that the highest crime rate is in Southeast. So there was a lot of, 'I'm not sending my child to Jefferson becaus e you might get shot in the halls.' There was a different city inside those walls that people didn't know about. Everyone got along with each other. One reason a lot of kids came to Jefferson is because when you are in a school that's very artsy it's more kids-friendly than some other regular kind of subject magnet school. That's what drew a lot of kids. Kids could wear what they wanted. There was a breaking down of cliques. The music department and the dance department and the theater department would get together and do The Wiz. We had a successful program that at one point was one of the top four performing-art high schools in the country--in the country. People don't know that, but it was. All of that stuff was going on inside the school, but outside it was like, 'I'm not sending my child there.' So I saw the made-to-fail thing coming all along. And now there are these dance programs starting up at Parkrose and Beaverton, and Jefferson is failing. Why? I think people really didn't like the structural placement of where that school is.
Do you ever have the temptation to use the power of the dance to make political statements? To talk about what happened to African culture when it got here?
I don't mind doing that, when I'm hired to come in and do a lecture. I did for a literature class at Portland State and we talked about a lot of different things. However, on stage, in a performance, I want to stay away from stuff like that. I just want people to be happy...
Do you purposefully change anything from traditional dances? For example, are there any roles, such as drumming, where you'll have women take traditionally male roles?
Well, traditionally, women don't do the South African Boot Dance. But we have women do it. And you will see women drum in the future. One thing that I do leave out is religious things. It's not my place to go into the secret society and do some religious stuff.
What's your ideal vision as a choreographer? What do you really wish you
could do?
I want the whole program to be exposed. I know there are other people doing it in other places in the country, but I don't know that they're doing it the same way that we do it. So my first and foremost vision is to be able to tour this monster and go to the black colleges in the South.
Do you ever feel odd that you perform in one of the whitest big cities in America? Clearly you're providing needed education to white audiences, but don't you ever want to connect with more black people?
Definitely. This society is so dysfunctional that for different reasons we want to connect to both audiences. Obviously I'm trying to deal with history and heritage and with my people, and at the same time, non-African Americans need to realize that we are more than what you see on TV.
Does that make you wish you were based in a bigger, more cosmopolitan city?
You know, I look at being here as kind of a barren ground. There's no other African dance company like this around here, and there are advantages to that. If we were in New York we'd be lost in the shuffle. Companies are a dime a dozen in a place like that. Here, there are less obstacles. It gives us a chance to really concentrate on what we're doing. The disadvantage is we have to go other places for training. That's really the only disadvantage.
Anything else on your wish list?
Artistically, I want to continue to be an institution here. After being together 16 years in Portland, I want the city to acknowledge us as being part of the majors. There is the Big Five here--the symphony, the ballet, the museum and the others that get all the funding. We're part of the smaller arts. We all fight for the last little chunk. Yes, the majors do impact kids. However, we impact kids in a whole different way that is just as beneficial, and maybe even more across this whole state. If the city would acknowledge us and the state would acknowledge us as being one of the majors, we'd have that status, and we'd have our own building.
In Africa, there is the concept of griot. He is the archivist, the drummer, dancer and storyteller. Do you see yourself functioning as a griot?
Yeah. I was told that once by an African. He said that I'm an ambassador. I have a lot of African friends who are really glad that I'm exposing their culture to America. I think one of the most emotional experiences I've had is when we went to Johannesburg in May of last year. We performed for a telecommunications conference and were the only Americans there. After we finished that show there was an African that came backstage, and he said: 'I want to talk to your dancers.' I gathered them around, and he said: 'I don't really care that much for dance, I'm an African and don't laugh at me but what I saw you do tonight touched my spirit.' He poured out all this passion to the dancers, and I just lost it right there. It was something that I always wanted to happen. To be able to take dancers back there and for them to get validated and for us to get validated. And it was a full circle for me.
The Northwest Afrikan American Ballet will hold its annual Heritage Concert on Feb. 12 at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.
this song is heaps yacht rockesque
some of the best boogie modern soul you never heard
Drummer Bruce Carter (not percussionist Bruce Smith) died last year. He was the funkiest drummer I ever saw. In the early 80s as Pleasure was dying he had a jazz group with Marlon McLain (Guitar) and Dennis Springer (sax) and either Lester McFarland or Nate (bass) I think it was Lester who was not in Pleasure. They were called Lights Out and we went to see them a few times. Then they started to have some singers join them and they morphed into Cool'R which was the about the greatest live funk vocal group I ever saw. Unfortunatley their 2 records sucked. Bruce Carter went on to drum for Kenny G, strange.
Nate and Marlon were the core of Wayne Henderson's At Home Productions. All those cool records you have produced by Wayne have Nate and Marlon on them. In the late 80s they worked in LA for A&M and others. In the 90s they were part of the Crusaders and also Herb Alberts band.
So Pleasure went on to become the back up band for the 2 biggest smooth jazz acts of the 90s. They are absolutly loved here in Portland's small Black community and by everyone who knows who they were. Thing is they recorded for a San Francisco label and their fan base was on the East Coast, they rarely played Portland. A roadie told me they were all broke during those hit years of touring the East Coast.