A Love Supreme (Intertwined) 2024 (Photo: MadameFraankie)
Something was missing in MadameFraankie’s photography practice. At least, the artist thought so. She’d been able to capture stories of the Black community; she found that she preferred shooting in black-and-white and in film. “As soon as you are forced to have 36, 24 shots, or now 12 with the new camera I shoot with, you get real intentional,” she says. “I love a good black-and-white image; it stops the distraction.” But, so often behind the camera, she says, “I didn’t really have a way to bring in my own family or even myself.”
Fraankie looked for inspiration in her mother and maternal grandmother, who use their own creative talents for commercial arts and sewing, respectively. Her mom even used to paint in acrylic; the family house still has a painting by her of Fraankie’s older cousin as a “grumpy baby” on a swing. “It’s like they have this thing, this gift,” Fraankie says of her mom and grandma, “and I have decided to accept the gifts that they have.”
With this mindset, Fraankie integrated their crafts into her photography, adding embroidery and painting watercolor elements onto her pictures. “It’s just my first iteration of the mediums sharing space with each other,” she says, “the intertwining of the mediums and the intertwining of the storylines.”
These are the pieces that make up her exhibition “Intertwine,” on display in the Beverly + Sam Ross Gallery at Christian Brothers University. The images she uses are a mixture of her own candid film photographs of her family and those from her family collection that she’s manipulated — the little moments, from relatives doing hair to family gatherings in the living room with pillows on the floor.
“It just felt great to bring life back to them,” she says of the archived photos. “They’re not on anybody’s wall. They’re just kind of tucked away. So, to give a new purpose to the image, it was great.” Most of these have been transferred onto paper using a cyanotype process and toned with black tea. “I think having practices like this really lets you sit with the work,” Fraankie says. “It’s slow work.”
Having spent so much time with the pieces herself, the photographer hopes viewers will do the same. “I hope they physically feel themselves slow down. I’m not asking you to do anything except notice these little moments in between. I’m aware how mundane this is, but it’s like, no, like your family is worthy of existing on a wall. You have a story to tell whether you think it’s slow or not.”
As for the photographer’s family, they’re delighted to be included in the gallery show, most of them traveling from out of town to see the exhibit. “They’re excited about the journey,” Fraankie says.
We all know it takes a village — to raise a child, tend a garden, or create art — but first someone has to make the village. Talibah Safiya, the Memphis singer-songwriter with a recording career now spanning almost a decade, is one of those people, drawing scores of collaborators around her by dint of her vision and voice, pulling disparate threads together to craft her unique neo-soul/trap hybrid music.
That sonic identity seemed to arrive fully formed with her 2015 debut single, “Rise,” and is just as powerful today, her collaborations only growing deeper and wider. Not only does her 2024 album, Black Magic, feature some notable co-producers, she’s worked with even more since its release in February, as several remixes, the latest of which dropped last Friday, have shown.
And, as she points out, she’s been “working mostly with producers who have Memphis roots, even if some of them don’t live here anymore,” proving that you can still go big while going local. One case in point: “I worked with Brandon Deener, who is from Memphis but based in L.A. He’s actually an incredible visual artist who is currently working on a solo show in Paris that’s happening this summer. But he’s a producer as well.” Indeed, his painting was the focus of The Guardian’s profile of Deener last year, where he was called the “former producer for hip-hop and R&B royalty such as Timbaland, Missy Elliott, and Lil Wayne … now known more as a visual artist.”
Black Magic, the latest album by Talibah Safiyah.
Yet the album’s title song proves Deener is still in the music game. A bold opening shot, it builds on a vintage loop of stinging, soul-blues guitar before Safiyah’s voice decries, “We come from a Black-ass city/Black Magic … We said our pledge of allegiance/To the capital of Egypt!” It’s an anthem of sorts for Safiyah’s hometown, and the vintage soul stew loop only puts a finer historical point on it.
Deener also worked on “Jack and Jill” and “Have Mercy” (the latter featuring Marcella Simien), and both also play with locally-derived samples of roots guitar. Those flavors were very intentional, growing, Safiyah explains, from her time as artist-in-residence at the Rudi E. Scheidt School of Music last year. “The Rudi Scheidt School has the High Water Recording Company catalog, and I did a deep dive into some of that music, singing along with my guy Brandon Deener at Ari’s studio.” That would be producer/engineer Ari Morris, profiled in these pages last year as “Memphis music’s secret weapon,” who was also deeply involved in Black Magic.
“That was when I first met Ari, and how Ari and I ended up locking in,” Safiyah adds, “but I found myself really inspired by, firstly, R.L. Burnside’s ‘Bad Luck City.’ That song had me really immersed in the sound of R.L. Burnside’s voice — it sounded to me like he was improvising the song, and I loved that. It sounds like he was just making it up on the spot. And it got me thinking about Memphis. So I was super inspired by ‘Bad Luck City,’ which we sampled for the single ‘Black Magic,’ and that’s how the whole project got that name.”
Another High Water artist that Safiyah found inspiring was Jessie Mae Hemphill, though her music was not sampled for the project. “She was my guiding light for the energy of the composition of music,” Safiyah says. “My husband Bertram and I were at A. Schwab’s and he bought me a book, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, by Angela Y. Davis, which talks about how Black women have freed up the way we tell our stories through the blues.”
Hemphill would be a prime example of that process, but she has modern-day analogs. As part of her village, Safiyah enlisted a current feminist hero of the local neo-soul/hip-hop scene, MadameFraankie, for the track, “Papa Please!” Even that was touched by R.L. Burnside.
“For ‘Papa Please!’ specifically, I played Fraankie ‘Bad Luck City.’ That song is such a huge influence on a lot of the songs on the project, even if everything didn’t sample it. So I told Fraankie about a friend of mine and her relationship with her dad. I gave her a whole visual story and played her ‘Bad Luck City,’ and she went off and made the beat for ‘Papa Please!’ And when sent me that track, I was inspired right away. I wrote the song immediately, sang it for her, and that was the first one that we composed for the project.”
The track features MadameFraankie’s trademark liquid rhythm/solo guitar, but that’s not all. “She played the bass. She played the drums. She did everything on that song, there’s nobody else playing,” Safiyah enthuses.
Meanwhile, there are still more collaborations going down as Safiyah issues remixes of the album’s key tracks. The first was a brilliant reimagining of “Jack and Jill” by another soon-to-be-iconic Memphis figure, Jess Jackson, aka DJ BLINGG, who originally built a name with her sisters in the band JCKSN AVE. And as of Friday we have the album’s closer, “Delicious,” remixed by A.N.T.E. “He plays the keys and he’s done a couple other remixes for me,” notes Safiyah. “It’s really fun, and has a soulful, jazzy kind of vibe. But it feels totally different than the other version.”
True to form, “totally different” is something Safiyah will always be pursuing as she taps into her very disparate networks. “My theme throughout has been genre-bending,” she says. “I grew up listening to a lot of different types of things, and I love a lot of different types of music. I don’t think that they should be separate.”
