The Kofi Burbridge Interview

Music Is People 5/5; expanded 7/7 by Kofi Burbridge † ​My parents were on top of culture, influenced by it, and fired up by it. In 1961 they were already headstrong about receiving any information about Africa, anything that had to do with the influence on African Americans. They wanted to open that up to us, seeing that we were so hyped on music. They wanted to open our minds to the rest of life, besides “this American way.” They wanted to include it, since we are here. They wanted us to have a broader perspective of what we were involved with and who we are. ​My dad was really into collecting records. Music fired him up. I believe he snuck a tape recorder into Birdland at that time. He was that kind of guy. ​By collecting all this music, over time, over time, over time, the way it sunk in was that we started gravitating to these records. They were lined up on the wall, and the album covers were really part of the attraction. There was all kinds of music that he collected, from Fela Kuti, to The Impressions, to Beethoven, to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, back to John Coltrane and we’re bringing on Kool & The Gang. Our dad was the gateway into everything and he made us feel that we could be a part of all of this, which in turn was “Hey, you can be a part of all people, because music is people.” You hear Afro-Cuban music, you’re not thinking Austria, and vice versa. It’s about people—at least to me it is. ​Even though we didn’t know these cultures or many of the people from those cultures at the time, we were hearing the music and it was just draining us and we were in awe of the whole thing. That’s primarily what opened our minds up to pursuing what we wanted to get into. ​I was two years old when I moved out of The Bronx, although I am hip to a lot of the culture that came out of there. One big thing for me was learning about the history of the actual gang life, Robert Moses, the Cross Bronx Expressway, and people dispersing. Then The Bronx went completely down, and the people trying to survive in those conditions afterwards—that was a heavy thing for me to learn. This is pre-Afrika Bambaataa. ​The one thing that stopped the violence was the music. The movie The Warriors from 1979 is based on a true story about gangs and gang violence in The Bronx. There was a guy who came up to give peace talks about stopping all violence and he was killed on the spot. The movie tries to portray this in many different ways. ​What happened after that was that most gangs realized, look, we’re coming down on each other just trying to survive, but we should really be putting our heads together and fighting in a different way. That was one of the most enlightening things I learned about The Bronx. Eventually it led to bringing more people together and one side of the borough able to go visit people on the other side of the borough. ​What opened the door was dancing—street dancing. Twirling on your hands, twirling on your head, which became the new competition along with Kurtis Blow and Afrika Bambaataa and so many others. There were spinners and guys playing records. Dancing was the street thing. You’ll find this a lot in the documentary Rubble Kings (2015), which is so informative about how they got into it, how it changed over time into music, and how the music itself healed that violence.