He immediately picked up on their sense of possibility and, though inexperienced, offered his services as a manager. When he met the fledgling MC5 in 1966, he was already a poet, jazz reviewer and activist of some repute. Sinclair was, and remains, a believer in the transformative power of what he calls "righteous" music. You had to go out there and find the cool people." They didn't have people like that in the white world. They thought we were crazy, but we were two 23-year-olds hungry for wisdom. "We knocked on Cecil Taylor's door, then we went to Archie Shepp's house and knocked on his door. In 1966, Sinclair and Charles Moore, the jazz trumpeter who helped him found the Detroit Artists Workshop in 1964, headed for New York City. That's where I was coming from, not rock or folk." "Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders. "Man, I worshipped those guys as gods when I was young," he says, relighting his joint. The words are delivered over a soundscape by his musical collaborator Steve Fly that deftly pastiches the original rhythms and swerves of bebop. We could just have hired a Theolonius Monk-style piano trio but that would just have made it an exercise in nostalgia."įor all that, Mohawk, sounds out of time, its free-styled beatnik verse dedicated to Sinclair's musical heroes – Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, – and couched in the language of his other big influence, the Beat poets. "John did all the vocals in one session," elaborates Fly, "and then I spent three months recording and overdubbing the parts. The rhymes, originally written in the early 80s, have been given a kind of post-modern jazz setting by his musical collaborator, Steve Fly, a soft-spoken young producer and multi instrumentalist who hails from Stourbridge, but now resides in Amsterdam, where his day job is managing another coffee shop near Central Station. He has just recorded an album of jazz poetry, Mohawk. Almost 50 years after those culturally heady and politically tumultuous days, when he found himself at the heart of the race riots that raged through Detroit, the 72-year-old now keeps the freak flag flying as best he can in a world that has become more liberal, and paradoxically more conservative, than his younger self could ever have imagined. It is, however, a long way – literally and metaphorically – from Detroit, the city where Sinclair made his name, and that of the rock group he managed, the MC5, in the most dramatic fashion.
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