Vernon Reid: Crisscrossing the Cultural Boundaries
By JON PARELES
From the NY Times thanks to Garth

Here's a Victorian house on a cul-de-sac in Staten Island that looks a little different from its neighbors.

Flanking the walkway to the front porch are two eyeballs the
size of cantaloupes, and where a picket fence
used to be, there is a sculptural gateway of rusted iron, a
dangling wooden sphere and a shiny aluminum
circle. "Welcome to the Abstract Ranch," said Vernon Reid, the
guitarist and composer who lives and works
there.

Mr. Reid, 40, is one of New York's best-connected musicians.
He is doubtless the only player versatile and
personable enough to have made music with Keith Richards,
Public Enemy, Santana, Hootie and the
Blowfish, Bill Frisell and John Zorn. "He's always doing a
million and three things," said the singer D. K.
Dyson, who is writing songs with him. In a typical week, Mr.
Reid juggles songwriting, recording sessions
and rehearsals; tonight, Friday and Saturday he is to perform
a dance score, "Jazz Train," commissioned by
Donald Byrd and presented by 651: An Arts Center, at the
Majestic Theater in Brooklyn.

In the parlor of the Abstract Ranch, presided over by a
towering painting of Jimi Hendrix, a recording
session was in progress on Thursday afternoon. Stacks of
equipment formed a bunker within the room; in its
center, Mr. Reid took his place at the monitor of a computer
that was capturing the music on its hard drive.

It was just another day of blurring musical borders. A
brooding trip-hop drone wafted from the speakers, shimmering with chords
from
the electrified zither that a musician named Laraaji had set
up in one corner. Hearing the meditative tones, Ms. Dyson started to
make the
Indian devotional hand gestures called mudras. Then she sang
about a woman who says she'll try anything "just because it feels
good/just
because it's wrong."

D.J. Logic's turntable was atop some instrument cases; soon he
would add burbles and video-game noises. Leon Gruenbaum hunched
over a paint-spattered, rewired computer keyboard, a homemade
instrument he called the Samchillian Tip Tip Tip Cheeepeeeee,
improvising a bass line. Between takes, Ms. Dyson spoke up. "I
have a question," she said. "This girl is drinking whisky and driving
over a
cliff. Is she going to survive?"

Mr. Reid replied: "Totally she will survive. Totally! Just
because she says she'll do something doesn't mean she'll do it. It's
just that she's
capable of doing anything."

Mr. Reid has capabilities of his own.

He is both virtuosic and flexible, a guitarist who can deliver bone-crunching power chords and delicate folky traceries, divebombing
lead-guitar solos and clenched funk chords, dissonant
excursions and steadfast reggae. He defies pigeonholes; when he picked
up a visitor
at the Staten Island ferry terminal, the radio in his van was playing Hank Williams.

"I never know what's going to happen next, and that's great,"
Mr. Reid said. "I really like it when I'm able to keep all the different
things
going that I want to do."

When the 1990's began, Mr. Reid was a rock star, the founder
and leader of Living Colour. The band applied the lessons of Hendrix,
Led Zeppelin and Sly Stone to songs with titles like "Cult of
Personality" and "Open Letter to a Landlord," and it played arenas
around the
country. Living Colour won Grammy Awards for best hard-rock performance in 1989 and 1990;
now the Grammy medals hang in Mr. Reid's living room, around the necks of a stuffed two-headed calf.

By 1995 Living Colour had broken up, and since then, Mr. Reid
has had a multifarious solo career. He released a mostly instrumental
album, "Mistaken Identity" (550 Music/ Epic), in 1996. He
toured the United States and abroad with one of his bands, My Science
Project. He also went to Bamako, the capital of Mali, to
produce an album merging funk and African rhythms for the Malian singer
Salif
Keita.

Mr. Reid is on airplanes so often that he has begun to collect
the cards with safety instructions on them. "They're so anti-esthetic
they have
an esthetic all their own," he said.

"I think it's an industrial art, this Dada art expression
that's slipping in completely under our noses.

Duchamp would say, 'That is it! The safety card is the art of
the 20th century.' All of our anxieties, all of our fears are encoded in
the
safety card. I want a complete set."

A Renaissance Cat With Ample Energy

At a rehearsal for "Jazz Train" on Monday afternoon, Mr. Byrd said that he asked Mr. Reid to write music for part
of the piece because "Vernon was going to be my radical." The work is in three
sections; the other two have music by the drummer Max Roach and the
pianist
Geri Allen. "Vernon has an eclectic taste and influences," Mr. Byrd said, "and I thought I was going to get something edgy."

Among his other activities, Mr. Reid is organizing and booking
a month of concerts in December at Tonic on the Lower East Side. The
series may include a show by My Science Project or his other
current band, Guitar Oblique, a trio with the guitarists Elliott Sharp
and
David Torn that recently finished an album.

An exhibition of Mr. Reid's photographs -- small, driftwood-framed vignettes of everyday Surrealism titled "Fetishes,
Moments,
Mementos" -- is at the Fourth Street Photo Gallery in
Manhattan through Sept. 30.

And Mr. Reid is writing a play, "Waiting for Sly," that takes place in a recording studio.

"The studio is a crucible of complete drama," Mr. Reid said.
"It can be a wonderful place to be and it can be the worst place to be.
There's the pressure of time, there's the pressure of
everyone's temperament, there are a million things that can go wrong.
And it's a place
of real triumph.

"When somebody's gotten their part right after really
struggling with it, it's a victory for everyone in the room. And when
somebody comes
in and does something on the first take, it's awesome. Or when
somebody does something that's magical, and the assistant doesn't have
the machine on record. . . ." He laughed.

Mr. Reid has seen all those things happen in a career that has never followed a standard path. 
He was born in London to parents from Montserrat; the family moved to Brooklyn when he was 2.

He studied jazz guitar with Ted Dunbar and Rodney Jones, and
in the early 1980's he made his reputation as the daredevil guitarist in Ronald Shannon Jackson's Decoding Society,
playing complex and vociferous jazz-rock.

In the mid-1980's, Mr. Reid helped start the Black Rock Coalition. With concerts and manifestoes, the coalition set out to break
down
the stereotypes facing blacks in the music business, and to remind an increasingly segregated audience about rock's
African-American roots. Living Colour, the coalition's flagship band, blasted
its way from the club CBGB to the Lollapalooza tour. With his
blond-tipped
dreadlocks shaking on MTV, Mr. Reid was a celebrity. "I dug
the privilege of it," he said. "But I always felt like, 'This is just
another weird
thing happening to me.' "

Living Colour faltered when grunge took over in the
mid-1990's. And while the band dissolved, Mr. Reid's marriage was
falling apart. He
now lives with Gabri Christa, a dancer and choreographer.

"During the breakup of Living Colour and the breakdown of my marriage, I tried to write songs and they were these screeds,
they were just trash," Mr. Reid said.

"I'm really happy now, but the new songs are all over the map. They're dealing with things that are not sexy and cool and groovy.
Gabri said, 'You can't write about it when you're in it. You can
only write about it when you're out of it, because that's when you can
look at it.'

"There's one song called 'Afflicted,' and the first line is 'Stare at the ceiling, wasting my time about who I'm not being,' " Mr.
Reid
continued. "Sometimes it's a struggle to be not who you want
to be, not who you used to be, not who you're going to be, but just
being
right where you are, who you are."

For Mr. Reid, that doesn't mean ruling out any options. He's
enthusiastic about a show he's planning at Tonic with the guitarist
Ernie
Jackson playing the little-known music of Justin Holland, a
black 19th-century classical guitarist, along with a transcribed hip-hop tune.

At the same time, Mr. Reid wouldn't mind if one of the songs
he's recording with Ms. Dyson became a hit single. "I like hit singles,
I like
pop music," he said. "And Sony Records has shown belief in me because they haven't kicked me to the curb yet."

Much of the windfall from Living Colour was lost as the result
of Mr. Reid's divorce, although royalty checks still arrive. "Everybody stresses about money, but I manage not to allow it to screw up
what I feel about art or music," he added. "If something makes no fiscal sense -- right, I'll go there. The thing that helps is that I
really love all different kinds of music. I'm working all the time, and
I'm making it."

Following Flights of Fancy

Mr. Reid chooses his projects based on "whatever seems like
it's going to be fun," he said.

"When you make contact with music and make contact with the
people pushing the notes forward, there's no judgment. You connect to
it.
Other than that it's like an intellectual exercise. You're
trying to prove something to somebody, you're trying to figure it out, whatever.

What is it supposed to mean, what do you symbolize, what does this moment symbolize? But when you circumvent all that,
you make real contact.

"My life is like all these little jump-cuts," Mr. Reid said. "Being onstage with Carlos Santana -- I wouldn't be playing guitar if it
wasn't for
hearing him. Rehearsing with Ornette Coleman, doing 'Cobra'
with John Zorn, jump-cutting from that to having Maceo Parker come out onstage with Living Colour, or just playing a line with
Buster Williams on the Geri Allen sessions. I mean, how cool is that? Or
running into
Joey Ramone or Lou Reed or Laurie Anderson and them saying,
'Hey man, you want to play on my record?'

"All this stuff sounds like name-dropping, but really, it's
just what happened. And part of me has been very bemused by it and
weirded out
by it. Because I was just a kid in Brooklyn, sitting on his
bed with a guitar in my lap, and listening to Santana records or James
Brown
records or Mahavishnu records or Led Zeppelin records, and
thinking, 'Wow!' And then, you know, I'm meeting Jimmy Page. It is not
lost on me, the fantastic irony of it. Now, I basically want
to be able to just keep going."