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BILL LASWELL

With over 20 years' experience as a touring musician and composer and nearly 300 albums to his credit, producer and bassist Bill Laswell has collaborated with some of the most illustrious names in music across all genres and boundaries, including Herbie Hancock, Mick Jagger, Laurie Anderson, Pharoah Sanders, Yoko Ono, Iggy Pop, The Last Poets, Buddy Miles, George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, Afrika Bambaataa, Tony Williams, Public Image Ltd., Peter Gabriel and countless others. He has also organized and produced recordings with master musicians from around the world, having logged extensive travel in Morocco and West Africa, India, Japan, Cuba, Australia, Brazil, and numerous other locations throughout Asia, Africa and South America. In the United States and abroad, his name has become synonymous with a commitment to creativity, integrity and daring -- whether in the recording studio or on stage -- that has earned him the respect (and often lifelong friendship) of all the artists with whom he has worked.

Laswell eventually landed in New York in 1979 and almost immediately set out to change the climate of live and recorded music. He became an integral fixture in the growing downtown avant garde scene (dubbed 'no wave' music by the press) with John Zorn, James Blood Ulmer, Fred Frith, Olu Dara, Billy Bang and many others, and launched a recording career that began with Brian Eno's On Land and continued with the Material collective he co-founded with keyboardist Michael Beinhorn and drummer Fred Maher, as well as other groups such as Massacre (with Fred Frith) and Daevid Allen's 'avant-fusion' band Gong. By 1984, after only five years in New York, Laswell had reached the first of many pinnacles in his career by producing the first two of three revolutionary electronic albums for Herbie Hancock -- the hip-hop fusion classic Future Shock, which yielded the worldwide dancefloor and MTV hit 'Rockit,' and the Grammy-winning follow-up Sound System. (Perfect Machine, the third of the triumvirate, would follow in 1988).

Future Shock was a monumental foray into hip-hop, which in 1983 was for the most part a self-contained and even consciously guarded movement. The album featured turntable improvisations by Grandmixer D.ST, who was in on the ground floor of the founding of Afrika Bambaataa's Universal Zulu Nation in the Bronx, and who later that year would perform live with Laswell's group Material at the Montreux Jazz Festival.

Laswell quickly became the most sought-after producer of the moment, but after a string of high-profile albums that included Mick Jagger's She's The Boss, Public Image Ltd's Album and production or mixing work for Yoko Ono, Laurie Anderson, Peter Gabriel, Iggy Pop, Motorhead and many others, he began to move away from 'the business' and the corporate constrictions that come with success in order to explore entirely new musical directions. His work with African musicians for the Celluloid label was one path in evidence here, as was his immersion in reggae rhythms on Sly & Robbie's post-Black Uhuru releases (which include Language Barrier in 1985 and the punk-funk classic Rhythm Killers in 1987) and Yellowman's breakthrough King Yellowman. For projects like these, Laswell was vilified by critics as a 'cultural bandit' and a 'destroyer' of African musical traditions; it was never even acknowledged that artists like Fela Kuti and Manu Dibango wanted to make the leap into Western technologies, and that Laswell was the only producer equipped to provide this access. Years later, computers and drum machines inevitably made their way into numerous African, Jamaican, Middle Eastern and Asian styles like dancehall, soukous, rai and bhangra -- thus answering the 'purist' argument.

In 1990, in a partnership with Island Records founder Chris Blackwell, Laswell created the Axiom label and opened his Greenpoint Studio in Brooklyn (now relocated to Orange Music Sound Studios in New Jersey). Both the imprint and the studio itself have been a magnet for some of the most innovative artists on the planet, including composer/arranger Henry Threadgill, jazz giants and Coltrane acolytes Pharoah Sanders and Elvin Jones, beat godfather William S. Burroughs, Miles Davis alumni Tony Williams, Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock, ex-Cream drummer Ginger Baker, and some of the more illustrious emissaries of funk and hip-hop such as George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, Buddy Miles, Bernie Worrell, the Jungle Brothers, the Bomb Squad (Hank and Keith Shocklee, the production team behind Public Enemy), and Umar Bin Hassan and Abiodun Oyewole of the original Last Poets.

Numerous Axiom projects have been realized with musicians from around the world, including the Master Musicians of Jajouka (Morocco), the Mandinka and Fulani drummers of Gambia, the Gnawa musicians of Essaouira and Marrakesh (Morocco), Carlinhos Brown, the Olodum drumming ensemble (Brazil), and solo artists such as tabla master Zakir Hussain (India), vocalist and composer Liu Sola (China), violinists L. Shankar (India) and Simon Shaheen (Palestine), kora player Foday Musa Suso (Gambia), percussionist Aiyb Dieng (Senegal), and many more. While Laswell has always maintained a keen interest in working with musicians in their own environment -- particularly in Morocco and West Africa -- these are more than mere 'field recordings'. Using state-of-the-art multi-tracking techniques, Laswell is able to capture the live energy of a location and translate it into an even larger sonic experience from behind the mixing board.

In 1997 Laswell furthered his reputation for innovation (and alleged controversy) by exploring the tape vaults of two icons of modern music -- Miles Davis and Bob Marley. Emerging with original source material -- some of it previously unreleased -- he essentially uses the recording studio as an instrument of improvisation to construct radically different remixes of selections from Miles Davis' electric work (originally recorded from 1969 to 1974), and Bob Marley's studio work with the Wailers (from 1973 to 1979). The resulting albums, Panthalassa (Sony/Columbia) and Dreams Of Freedom (Axiom/Island), bring not only a fresh and futuristic perspective to the music of two very important artists, but also represent a new way of experiencing recorded sound in an ambient and almost sanctified environment. Similar remix projects are already planned for the music of Carlos Santana and Tony Williams Lifetime.

The range of Bill Laswell's music has demanded a new openness from musician and listener alike, and through his work points of congruence between genres have become clearer and we now have new hybrid forms to reckon with. Once described as a 'radical' influence in music by the UK journal International Musician and Recording World, the often circumspect producer felt obliged to define the term for them: 'Radical means hitting people on a real level and trying to lift their awareness up a notch or two, to get them to think beyond the conventionally held beliefs that certain musics only work in certain ways. That's the driving force behind most of what I do, and if it means sacrificing notoriety and acceptance for freedom, creativity and integrity, I'll do it every time.'