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“Much to their surprise,” he said, “after the first week they were getting calls from every radio station around the country.I waited until the Ruff Ryders released photos of themselves with 2pac in Los Angles, when Suge Knight flew them out during late 1995.Īt the time, DMX was still an unsigned rookie agent, looking to get his story out to the streets. In the Red Bull Music Academy interview, Mtume recalled that executives at his record label in the early ’80s were skeptical about “Juicy Fruit’s” prospects because they thought the song was too slow. Mtume’s survivors include his wife, Kamili his brother, Jeffrey Forman two sons, four daughters and six grandchildren. Kelly and to work as music supervisor on TV’s “New York Undercover” in 2003, Beyoncé and Luther Vandross recorded a rendition of “ The Closer I Get to You” that won a Grammy for R&B performance.
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The group Mtume scored two more top 10 hits on the R&B chart: 1984’s slinky “ You, Me and He,” which itself was sampled by Aaliyah and Eve, and 1986’s “ Breathless.” James Mtume went on to collaborate with Mary J. (Nas eventually used “Juicy Fruit” for a remix of his song “One Mic.”) It feels human.”īiggie Smalls was just one of countless rap and R&B acts to sample “Juicy Fruit” it’s also been used by Alicia Keys, Warren G, Keyshia Cole, Chris Brown, Jennifer Lopez, the Game, Faith Evans and Nas, who’s said he originally wanted to loop the beat from “Juicy Fruit” for “Life’s a Bitch,” from 1994’s “Illmatic,” before going with a Gap Band sample instead. So if you listen to that beat, it’s slightly off, on purpose.
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“When something’s exact, that’s a drag to me, especially as a drummer,” he told Questlove in a 2021 podcast interview. The group Mtume, with Lucas on guitar and James Mtume and Tawatha Agee as lead singers, released its major-label debut, “Kiss This World Goodbye,” in 1978 a follow-up, “In Search of the Rainbow Seekers,” came out in 1980.įor “Juicy Fruit,” James Mtume said he resisted an engineer’s advice to digitally streamline the beat he’d programmed on a then-novel LinnDrum machine. (Mtume took his stage name from the Swahili word for “messenger” or “apostle.”) After college, he returned to the East Coast and began playing percussion professionally, first with McCoy Tyner and Freddie Hubbard, then with Davis, who wrote in his autobiography that with Mtume, his band “settled down into a deep African thing.” Among the Davis albums Mtume appeared on between 19 were “On the Corner” and “Get Up With It,” densely funky outings that divided audiences at the time but are widely admired today.Īfter their stint with Davis, Lucas and Mtume played in Flack’s band before branching out to write and produce for other acts. Mtume attended Pasadena City College on a swimming scholarship while in California he got involved with the US Organization, a Black empowerment group led by activist Maulana Karenga, who created Kwanzaa. “I never was hip enough to know just how brilliant a situation that was, but what I did know about jazz musicians were they were an extraordinary group,” he said. When he was a kid, famous musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonious Monk would stop by the family’s house for dinner, as Mtume recalled in a 2014 interview with Red Bull Music Academy. His biological father was Jimmy Heath, the jazz saxophonist who died in 2020, though he was raised by James Forman, a pianist who played in Charlie Parker’s band.