New York, NY (Top40 Charts) The music video, ON MY MIND, featuring Marcus Strickland, Bilal, Pharoahe Monch, Greg Tate, Ben Williams, EJ Strickland, and Storyboard P, will world premiere with Afropunk on Friday, June 5. The collaboration between Strickland and Storyboard P marks a historic moment-a bonafide jazz musician working with an established hip hop street dancer.
The latest production by reelblue, LLC, directed/produced by Jennifer Galvin and Petra Richterová, features cinematography by music photographer and first-time filmmaker Richterová. "Making this film was a simple decision: it was all about artists supporting artists," says Galvin. "This was the dream project that I'd been waiting for to start shooting moving imagery. Working with these artists gave me freedom to create," adds Richterová. They filmed on Bronx streets, in Grammy-winning engineer/producer Ben Kane's Electric Garden studio, and at Museum of Art and Origins, a Harlem-based private museum showing African art.
Based on vanguard saxophonist Strickland's latest track "On My Mind remix," ON MY MIND is an abstract, Afro-cosmic film, aesthetically and symbolically grounded in African culture and New York history. Strickland's music is both about freedom and heritage, and the film mirrors this awareness.
The song is a remix of "
On My Mind" from Strickland's album People of the Sun, and composed by Strickland, neo-soul vocalist Bilal, and veteran MC Pharoahe Monch, three mavens who understand the unity of
Black Music, bringing together jazz, hip hop, soul and beyond. "Music is my calling to the diaspora to look past factions and labels—to find oneness. This record reflects that calling through the vastness of
Black Music," says Strickland.
The film grapples with the unmasking of infatuation and love as the building block of the universe, as heard through the words of poet Greg Tate. Flex dancer Storyboard P's brand of contortion place him at the film's center as an ethereal superbeing expressing tensions between love and lust. "Storyboard's footwork is so smooth that he seems to defy the laws of gravity," reflects Strickland.
More information at OnMyMindFilm.com and Blue Note Records.
