Stan Douglas: Channeling Miles Davis | Art21 "Extended Play"

[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.