Gabriel Teodros | |
---|---|
Background information | |
Born | 1981 (age 42–43) |
Origin | Beacon Hill, Seattle, Washington |
Genres | Hip hop, Northwest hip hop |
Occupation | Rapper |
Years active | 1999–present |
Labels | Independent, Fresh Chopped Beats, MADK, MassLine, Porto Franco Records |
Website | http://www.gabrielteodros.com |
Gabriel Teodros (born 1981) is a hip hop artist and a member of the groups Abyssinian Creole and CopperWire. He was raised on Beacon Hill, Seattle, Washington. Teodros' music often features socially conscious themes, and he was a catalyst in the surge of dynamic underground rap acts from the Pacific Northwest during the first decade of the 2000s. [1]
Teodros was born and raised in Seattle, Washington, to an Ethiopian mother and a father of Scottish, Irish and Native American descent. [2] His parents met through anti-war organizing in the 1970s, and they split up around the time Gabriel was born. He stayed with his mother, and met grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins as they first emigrated to the United States and all stayed in the same house. [3]
Teodros's relationship with hip hop culture began at a young age within the South Seattle neighborhood of Beacon Hill. "A lot of kids in my neighborhood were affected by gang culture. And I kind of had a death wish. I felt like, at an early age, that I wasn’t going to live to 21," he said in an interview with Sheeko Magazine . He spent his high school years in Las Vegas, Nevada where as one out of approximately 30 students of color in a predominantly white school, something within him changed. "It was the first time I understood that there was a system in place that wanted kids like me to want to die. And understanding that in high school made me want to live," he said in the same interview. The former breakdancer, graffiti writer and closet-emcee finally began to take his career path seriously at age 16, using hip hop to both understand and explain his world. [4]
Teodros began his musical career around 1999, when he returned to Seattle and began working with a live band called 500 Years. That same year, he met an MC named Khalil Crisis (better known as Khingz), from the group Maroon Colony. The two groups began sharing bills together all over Seattle and the two MCs also began working with a community organization called Youth Undoing Institutionalized Racism. In 2001, YUIR sent them to a conference in New Orleans, and it was there that Teodros and Khingz saw how much they had in common outside of music. They formed the group Abyssinian Creole to both represent their peoples and the bridges between them. [5]
Also in 2001, Teodros released his first solo album, entitled Sun To A Recycled Soul. [4]
In 2005, Abyssinian Creole released its debut album, Sexy Beast , [5] a record that gives expression to the post-1990s cosmopolitanism thriving in South Seattle. [6] The album's featured guests include Moka Only, Geologic of Blue Scholars and Macklemore. [7] What Sexy Beast made apparent was the diversity of Northwest hiphop: It can come from anywhere (East Africa, Haiti) and be about anything (love, immigration, meditation). [8]
In the spring of 2006, Teodros completed the entire Lovework album with producer Amos Miller, around the same time MassLine Media was being formed with Teodros, Blue Scholars and Common Market. [5] Lovework had additional beat contributions from Sabzi of Blue Scholars, Moka Only, Kitone, and Specs One. Its sound was primarily influenced by Seattle veteran Vitamin D (who also mixed the record) and the late J Dilla. [6] The album title, Lovework was inspired by bell hooks and her book All About Love: New Visions , where hooks insists that to truly know love, one must agree that love is a verb. She goes further to say to truly know love, one must work to undo every system of domination that stops people from truly loving. The title was also inspired by a quote from Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet : "Work is love made visible". [5]
Also in 2006, Good Medicine was formed: a four-person group composed of Teodros, Khingz, Macklemore and Geologic of Blue Scholars. Good Medicine have headlined a handful of shows in the Seattle area but have never released any music as a group. [9] Towards the end of that year, Teodros independently released a mix-tape/CD entitled Westlake: Class of 1999, which was a collection of his unreleased songs recorded in four different cities between 2002 and 2006. [10]
The Lovework album was released on February 27, 2007, on MassLine, to critical acclaim. [11] The album topped the CMJ Hip Hop charts for two weeks and came in at No. 19 for the year 2007. [12] Teodros was also named as one of URB Magazine 's "Next 100". [13]
In the fall of 2009, after being deported from the London-Heathrow Airport and having to cancel a European tour, Teodros found himself in a Brooklyn, New York recording studio with Lovework producer Amos Miller. [14] They spent two weeks together crafting a 12 track album produced using mostly GarageBand, a piano, and the recordings of actual birds. [15] The result was Air 2 A Bird's Crow Hill, released independently in the summer of 2010. [16]
In December 2009, Teodros released GT's Ethiopium: A Jitter Generation Mixtape. [17] This release shined a light on the realities of Ethiopia, touched on America's own imperfections and stressed the importance of exploring one's own intelligence and spirituality. It was made completely using instrumentals from Oh No's Ethiopium , which was made completely using old-school and rare samples of Ethiopian music. [18]
In January 2012, Teodros released Colored People's Time Machine, his first full-length solo album since Lovework . [19] Colored People's Time Machine was recorded in Seattle and Brooklyn and is a multi-lingual, multi-genre album that featured vocal, instrumental, and production collaborations with 20 different artists. On it, he explored themes of love (Goodnight, a brief interlude on a long-distance relationship), cultural identity (Blossoms of Fire), personal identity (Alien Native, a biographical tale), the concept of home (Diaspora and Beit), loss (Ella Mable Bright, a tribute to his grandmother featuring Meklit Hadero), music (Colored People’s Time Machine, and Sun and Breeze, also featuring Meklit Hadero and Amos Miller), and the music industry (You A Star, on which he warns about the pitfalls of the industry and the danger of buying into the illusion of stardom). [20] Other guests on the album include Mexico City's Bocafloja, Los Angeles emcee SKIM, and Palestinian wordsmith Sabreena Da Witch. [19]
On April 17, 2012, CopperWire's debut album Earthbound was released on Porto Franco Records. [21] CopperWire is a group composed of Teodros, Meklit Hadero and Burntface. All three celebrate their Ethiopian ancestry on the album, but do so through the characters of galactic fugitives aboard a hijacked starship. [22] Earthbound's story, as described in liner notes by award-winning science fiction author Nnedi Okorafor, casts CopperWire members as characters that journey to Earth in the year 2089 to learn what it means to be human. They include mad scientist Scholar Black (Burntface), alien-human hybrid Getazia (Gabriel Teodros) and interstellar telepath Ko Ai (Meklit Hadero). [23] The album uses metaphors of intergalactic distances to talk about diaspora and cultural connection and disconnection. [24] The album also uses sonified light curves (that is the sound of stars, processed through Fourier analysis into frequencies that can be heard by humans) courtesy of SETI Institute researcher and NASA Kepler Labs analyst Jon Jenkins. [23]
On May 7, 2014, Teodros independently released the album Children of the Dragon with Washington, DC–based producer AirMe. Teodros met AirMe in 2011 during a 24-hour layover in Washington, DC while traveling between the cities of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and Seattle, WA. They recorded their first song together that day, before co-creating 20 more tracks together the following month. [25] The title Children of the Dragon is a reference to mythology Teodros first heard of in Haile Gerima's film Teza . [26]
On October 28, 2014, Teodros released the album Evidence of Things Not Seen with Auckland, New Zealand–based producer SoulChef, and featured vocals from Jonathan Emile, Shakiah and Sarah MK. The album and its title were largely inspired by James Baldwin, and it was released within a full-size book of Teodros' lyrics. [27] City Arts Magazine described it as the best album of Teodros' career. [28]
On September 21, 2018, Teodros released his fifth solo album, History Rhymes If It Doesn't Repeat (A Southend Healing Ritual), a concept album about healing from trauma that was partially inspired by Bessel van der Kolk's book The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma . The album's featured guests included Meklit Hadero, Khingz, Nikkita Oliver, Essam, Shakiah, Mikaela Romero, Otieno Terry and it was entirely produced by Moka Only. [29] [30] NPR Music featured the album in a story titled "Beyond Grunge: 15 Artists Redefining Seattle Music" where they declared "Gabriel Teodros is one of the bravest rappers currently working in Seattle." [31]
On June 24, 2020, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and on the 20th anniversary of his first solo show at the Rainier Valley Cultural Center in South Seattle, Teodros released What We Leave Behind, a collection of previously unreleased tracks spanning decades in their creation, along with a few new songs recorded specifically for the release. Some of the track highlights included a Sandra Bland, Angela Davis and James Baldwin-inspired collaboration with Aisha Fukushima titled "If They Come for Me in the Morning...", [32] a DJ B-Girl-produced meditation on the pandemic's early months titled "Listening to Bill Withers", [33] and "Solidarity" an anthem for Black & Asian solidarity with Kimmortal and Wundrkut on production. [34]
On September 23, 2023, Teodros released his sixth solo album From the Ashes of Our Homes. The albums themes range from a tragic fire that he and his spouse, Ijeoma Oluo, had to flee from in September 2020, to longtime friends that have passed away, and a shifting landscape wracked by the pandemic, wars, and the climate catastrophe. Alex Ruder at KEXP wrote "From the Ashes of Our Homes finds strength in its honest and reflective lyrics that focus on building and nurturing relationships, both at home and in the community."Ashes also marks Teodros introduction to the world as a beat producer on a majority of the tracks. [35] [36]
On May 31, 2024, Teodros released Embers, a collection of new songs alongside previously unreleased remixes and reimagined songs from past projects. [37]
As a part of Abyssinian Creole, Teodros performed alongside Khingz at the Under the Volcano Festival in North Vancouver, BC in 2003, [38] 2004 [39] and 2009. [40]
Teodros performed at the Bumbershoot Festival in Seattle, Washington in 2006 (with Abyssinian Creole), 2007 (as a solo artist, and with Good Medicine), and in 2010 (with Air 2 A Bird). [41]
In 2007, Teodros toured the Western part of the United States with Blue Scholars and Common Market, [42] for the first and only MassLine Tour. [43] Also in 2007, Teodros performed at the Sasquatch! Music Festival, which was headlined by Björk, and also featured Manu Chao and Ozomatli. [44] Teodros also performed at the Trinity International Hip Hop Festival in Hartford, Connecticut in 2007 (as a solo artist), [45] and in 2008 (as a part of Abyssinian Creole). [46]
In the summer of 2009, Teodros toured in Mexico with Bocafloja, Eternia and Para La Gente. [3] [47]
In 2011, Teodros toured Ethiopia alongside Meklit Hadero and Burntface, [48] where they did 12 shows including the first Hip Hop shows to ever happen in the cities of Harar and Gondar. He recorded an album in Washington, DC inspired by the experience, [49] that was released in May 2014 [50]
Teodros has also performed in the United States alongside the likes of Lupe Fiasco, [51] Black Star, [52] K'naan, [19] Zap Mama, Fishbone, KRS-One and The Coup. [53]
Teodros currently hosts a podcast titled Worldwide Underground focused on the art and politics of storytelling across every medium. [54]
Teodros leads writing workshops with youth, has helped spearhead after-school programs, and organizes all-ages events. [14]
In November 2012, Teodros did a TED Talk about hip hop and science fiction, at TEDxRainier in Seattle, Washington. [55] [56] The Pittsburgh-based artist Alisha Wormsley cites this TED Talk as an inspiration in her afro-futurist project There Are Black People In The Future. [57] [58]
In 2015, Teodros wrote curriculum, taught and helped launch The Residency, a summer program focused on youth development through hip-hop, in partnership with the Museum of Pop Culture, Arts Corps, and Macklemore & Ryan Lewis. [59] [60]
Also in 2015, Teodros made his speculative fiction debut with a time-travel story titled "Lalibela" published in the anthology Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements (AK Press). [61] In 2016 he graduated from the Clarion West Writers Workshop for Speculative Fiction. [62]
From 2017 to 2023 [63] Teodros was a DJ and Host on KEXP 90.3 FM in Seattle, WA. He started with an overnight show, and launched the show Early in the summer of 2020, which aired every weekday from 5–7 a.m., Pacific Time. [64] Teodros also served as Associate Music Director at the station, and he had a hand in bringing in shows like Sounds of Survivance [65] and Overnight Afrobeats [66] to the station.
In 2023, Teodros co-taught an interdisciplinary course in the University of Washington's Honors program called "Lovework: an unfinished syllabus", named for his 2007 LP and inspired by the work of bell hooks. [67]
Common Market is an American hip hop duo based in Seattle, Washington, active from 2005 through 2009 and from 2019 to present. Both members, DJ/Producer Sabzi and MC RA Scion, had been active hip hop artists in the Pacific Northwest for three years before they combined their talents in 2005 to form Common Market. Together they have released two albums, three EPs, and have gone on several tours.
Daniel Denton, better known by his stage name Moka Only, is a Canadian rapper and singer. He has won three JUNO Awards, five MuchMusic Video Awards, and has been nominated for 11 Western Canadian Music Awards. Originally from Langford, British Columbia, near Victoria, he began his musical career in Vancouver. He was previously part of the hip hop group Swollen Members, and was briefly part of the band Len. Moka has released albums through Feelin' Music, Legendary Entertainment, Battleaxe Records, Domination Recordings, Camobear Records, Wandering Worx and URBNET Records.
Abyssinian Creole is a hip hop duo composed of Khingz and Gabriel Teodros.
Northwest hip hop is hip hop or rap music that originates from the Pacific Northwest of North America, encompassing major cities such as Portland (Oregon), Seattle (Washington), and other towns. Northwest hip hop music mixes elements from various genres of music to form a sound different from its southern neighbor, West Coast hip hop. For many years the scene existed mainly as an underground genre, but recently Northwest hip-hop has seen more and more mainstream acceptance, with artists such as Macklemore gaining nationwide attention.
Common Market is the self-titled debut album from Seattle-based hip-hop duo Common Market consisting of rapper RA Scion and DJ/producer Sabzi. The album was fully produced by Sabzi, who is also a member of another Seattle hip-hop group, Blue Scholars.
Lovework, is the critically acclaimed debut Hiphop album by Gabriel Teodros, released February 27, 2007 on MassLine Media.
David Mazzeo also known as Wizdom, is a hip hop artist based in Seattle, Washington. The emcee has released three studio albums, one mixtape and one EP release. Guests on his music include Brainstorm of Dyme Def, Stef Lang and New Balance(Nate Burleson), and has collaborated with Seattle-based musicians Grynch, Sol and Macklemore.
Meklit Hadero, known simply as Meklit, is an Ethiopian-born American singer and songwriter based in San Francisco, California. She is known for her soulful performing style, and for combining jazz, folk, and East African influences in her music. She sings in her native Amharic, and English.
Sol Alexander Rosenberg, better known as Sol or Solzilla, is an American hip hop artist. In 2012, he released his second studio album Yours Truly, which received critical acclaim and rose to number one on the iTunes U.S. Hip-Hop Albums Chart while also charting on Billboard's Heatseekers Chart. Sol has collaborated with other artists such as Macklemore, Blue Scholars, Grynch, and The Physics.
Benjamin Howard Laub, better known by his stage name Grieves, is an American hip hop artist based in Seattle, Washington. Born in Chicago, Illinois, he has lived in Colorado, San Diego, and New York City. He is signed to Rhymesayers Entertainment.
Mad Rad is a Seattle-based hip hop/electronic music group that consists of five members; three vocalists, a DJ, and a drummer. Four members of Mad Rad have stage names which are as follows; Nathan Quiroga, Peter Robinson, Gregory Smith, Ty Finnan, and their drummer's name is Trent Moorman. Mad Rad formed in 2007 and have released two full-length albums, their most recent in 2010.
Alexei Saba Mohajerjasbi, better known by his stage name Sabzi, is an American hip hop producer and DJ from Seattle, Washington, who is currently based in Los Angeles, California. He is a founding member of indie hip hop groups Blue Scholars, Common Market and Made In Heights.
The Physics is an American hip hop group based in Seattle, Washington. It was created in the late-1990s when its members, Thig Natural, Monk Wordsmith and Just D'Amato were students at O'Dea High School in Seattle. Since 2007, the trio has released three full-length albums, two EPs and several non-album singles.
The Heist is the debut studio album by American hip hop duo Macklemore & Ryan Lewis. It was released on October 9, 2012, by Macklemore LLC, distributed under the Alternative Distribution Alliance. The album was independently self-produced, self-recorded and self-released by the duo, with no mainstream promotion or support. After the album's release, the duo hired Warner Music Group's radio promotion department to help the push with their singles for a small percentage of the sales.
Jonathan Augustavo, better known as Jon Jon or Jon Jon Augustavo, is an American filmmaker, commercial director, and music video director who has written and directed works for artists including Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, Mike Posner, Allen Stone, Vicci Martinez, Nipsey Hussle, Blue Scholars, The Physics, Sammy Adams, among others. He is of mixed Filipino and American ethnicity.
Macklemore & Ryan Lewis were an American hip hop duo from Seattle, Washington, formed in 2009 by rapper Macklemore and record producer Ryan Lewis. In 2009, they released their first collaborative effort, an EP titled VS. EP. They later followed up with VS. Redux (2010), the Grammy Award-winning album The Heist (2012) and This Unruly Mess I've Made (2016).
Andrew Joslyn is an American composer, orchestrator, film scorer, and violinist in various genres.
Michael Sean Martinez, better known by his stage name Onry Ozzborn, is an American rapper and producer from Seattle, Washington. He is a founding member of alternative hip hop groups such as Grayskul, Dark Time Sunshine, and Oldominion, among others.
Jonathan Moore, also known by his stage name, Wordsayer, was a rapper, DJ and producer born in Seattle, Washington. Known as Seattle's "hip-hop ambassador" and "cultural mayor", Moore was influential in the Northwest hip-hop scene and founded the group Source of Labor in 1989.
Joshua Robert Rawlings is an American pianist, songwriter and record producer. His band, The Teaching, wrote and recorded the song "Bom Bom" for the Macklemore album The Heist, which became a multiple GRAMMY winning album.