[Stan Douglas: Channeling Miles Davis]
My first job after high school was as an usher
at the theater.
My second job after high school was as a DJ.
I worked at a club called Faces for about two years.
Back then, DJing was kind of anonymous.
You're in a booth in the back.
People come up and ask you to play Michael Jackson.
And I would go down to a place called Tacoma,
across the border-- which had a nearby base.
So a lot of Black people were at the Army base.
And they had record stores that would have funk and hip hop music
that you couldn't get in Vancouver.
So I would make my pilgrimages down there to get my records.
I was doing tape pause-button remakes on my cassette machine.
And I learned how to do Grandmixer DST's bit,
remixing "The Wildstyle" and "Rockit" by Herbie Hancock.
Nobody knew the music I was remixing,
so they couldn't tell I was doing a remix.
Mixtapes is a loophole to allow people to
go back to what feels like the right thing to do,
which is to use existing cultural media
as raw material for making new work.
"Luanda-Kinshasa" is a video
inspired by what I saw in Miles Davis's work from the 1970s.
One of my favorite records of all time is "On the Corner" by Miles Davis.
He'd already integrated funk and rock into jazz music,
but he was trying to bring in Indian classical music.
And somehow thought this would be a real hit with the kids.
But, of course, it was his worst-selling ever.
But it's a pretty amazing piece of music.
Around the time he made that record,
a song called "Soul Makossa" by Manu Dibango
was a huge hit in the disco underground in New York City.
What if you brought in Afrobeat
as part of that mix he was doing?
And that's what we tried to realize in "Luanda-Kinshasa".
This is a very tenuous connection between two things,
which is really more an aesthetic feeling than anything else.
Selfish reason for "Luanda-Kinshasa"
is that I love this record "On the Corner"
and I wanted to hear more.
The more general reason for it is that
Miles Davis could have made more,
but this was his last studio record in the 1970s.
In my work, I want to go back to these possibilities of
"What if there's another way of considering history?"
But the whole thing, in a way,
is a constructed idea of a utopia.
Utopia means "no place."
It's a place that you may strive to get to,
but you can't necessarily get there.
This utopian moment of all these people from different cultures
is realized out of all these diverse influences.
It looks spontaneous.
It looks live.
It looks like people are looking across the space at each other.
But this only exists in the form of this edit.
"Luanda-Kinshasa" is six hours long,
but if you watch it over time, you'll realize that,
"Oh, I've heard that motif before."
"I've seen exactly that shot before."
Often, musical forms appear in my work,
and this idea of polyphony appears again and again.
Polyphony is like when a DJ plays two records simultaneously.
You have "Song A" and "Song B".
When they play together, they make a third song.
Everyone gets inspiration from somewhere.
Nothing comes out of a void.
Everything comes out of my experience of the world--
what I've read,
where I've gone,
what I've seen, who I've met.
We're always basing it on something.
I'm just being honest of where it came from.