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Tracking The Odds: Vernon Reid (Audio)

Jan 26, 2020
Produced by Roulette Intermedium.

The guitarist’s Night of Radiance, with Laraaji Venus and Suphala, for acoustic, electric, and electronic guitars, autoharp, and tabla/percussion recorded at Roulette on 28 March 1999. Vernon Reid was born in London and raised in New York City. He first came to prominence in the 1980s in the band of drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson. In 1985, Reid co-founded the Black Rock Coalition with journalist Greg Tate and producer Konda Mason. Reid is best known for leading the band Living Colour. Their debut album Vivid was released in 1988 and sold double Platinum. The band received two consecutive Grammy Awards in the category of Best Hard Rock Performance. They opened for the Rolling Stones' 1989 "Steel Wheels" tour; and appeared on the first Lollapalooza tour in the summer of 1991.

Laraaji is a musician, mystic, and laughter meditation practitioner. Brian Eno invited him to record an album for his seminal Ambient series (1980). In recent years he has had his career celebrated extensively, with two All Saints/Warp retrospectives Celestial Music 1970–2011 and Two Sides of Laraaji. Suphala is a tabla artist, composer, and producer. She is a protégé of tabla players Ustad Alla Rakha and Zakir Hussain and has worked with artists from Yoko Ono to Kelly Clarkson.

Tracking The Odds: The Roulette Concert Archive is a monthly hour-long radio special produced by Roulette Intermedium (roulette.org) and broadcast in partnership with Wave Farm’s WGXC 90.7-FM and Standing Wave Radio. The broadcasts feature selected highlights from Roulette’s New York experimental music space dating from the early 1980s to the present. Thousands of rare, formative, and often unheard recordings by innovators and adventurous musicians populate the archive. Tracking The Odds airs the fourth Monday of the month from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. and is archived at wavefarm.org.