The Jan Diaries — Ten RBMA Lectures You Have to Watch

Red Bull Hrvatska · The Jan Diaries · 7 November 2018

Back from Berlin, Jan Kinčl did the obvious service: out of the hundreds of Red Bull Music Academy lectures — most of which he claims to have seen — he curated ten for Red Bull Croatia, with a note on what each one actually gives you. The list runs from the very first lecture ever recorded to conversations filmed two years before the column.

The ten lectures

The historical bookends first: Jeff Mills, recorded in Berlin in 1998 as the first RBMA lecture of all, covering Underground Resistance, the Axis and Purposemaker labels and his soundtracks for silent films; and Moritz von Oswald (Barcelona, 2008), co-founder of Basic Channel with Mark Ernestus and of the dub project Rhythm & Sound — the man who wired Detroit techno into Berlin after the Wall came down. Theo Parrish (Seattle, 2005) carries the strongest recommendation: two decades of Sound Signature, artistic integrity, the human factor and accepting mistakes — the lecture Kinčl keeps returning to, and the reason people speak of a Church of Theo. Alongside them: Madlib (New York, 2016), the self-described loop hunter behind Madvillain, Quasimoto and Yesterdays New Quintet, and Marshall Allen and Danny Thompson of the Sun Ra Arkestra (Montréal, 2016) — Allen ninety-two at the time, in the band since 1958 — on Sun Ra, discipline and Afrofuturism.

The rest: Susan Rogers (Montréal, 2016), Prince’s engineer for five years and now a Berklee professor, on his secrecy, maniacal tempo and uncompromising vision; François Kevorkian (New York, 2013), who can tell the story of New York nightlife from the seventies onwards and has worked with everyone from Kraftwerk to Depeche Mode; Bernie Worrell (New York, 2013) of Parliament-Funkadelic and Talking Heads, whose absence of ego Kinčl uses, by his own admission, as a corrective; Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto (New York, 2013) on more than fifteen years and six albums built on mutual respect; and Brian Jackson (Paris, 2015), keyboardist and flautist on Gil Scott-Heron’s first ten albums, on the politics that shaped them and the foundations of rap.

The part that stayed

Read as a whole, the list is a self-portrait: practice over talent, ego kept on a leash, history treated as working material rather than nostalgia. For anyone starting out it is also a free education — which is precisely the point Kinčl has been making since the first entry of the series.