In 1963 Johnny Pate and Curtis Mayfield were flying from Chicago to New York for a recording session. Pate had already arranged a few tunes for Mayfield’s group the Impressions, beginning a collaboration that would eventually produce some of the greatest soul and R & B ever recorded, but he had doubts about his future in music.
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Hip-hop, rap, and acid-jazz artists have been carrying a torch for Pate for years, though–he’s been sampled or name-checked by everyone from DJ Premier to DJ Shadow–and lately he’s been getting some overdue recognition from music historians and record labels too. This winter Rhino released Mayfield: Remixed, where Pate’s arrangements get the dance-floor treatment from the likes of Grandmaster Flash, Mix Master Mike, and Louie Vega. This spring the Hip-O Select reissue label released Pate’s soul-funk sound track to the 1973 film Shaft in Africa, considered by many to be as good or better than Isaac Hayes’s music for the original, and Pate’s theme song for the movie appeared on the companion CD to Jeff Chang’s recent hip-hop history, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop.
Born and raised in Chicago Heights, Pate took up his first instrument–the tuba–in sixth grade. “I was such a scrawny little kid, my mom had to carry the tuba for me,” he says, laughing. In 1942 he was drafted into the army, where his musical training immediately paid off. “The band at the infantry training center where I was stationed needed a tuba player. When I found that out, I thought, ‘Hell, this looks better than toting a rifle around,’” he says. “So I honed up on it real quick.”
In the late 60s, after more than 40 years in Chicago, Pate moved to New York and returned to his roots in jazz, working for MGM/Verve with artists like Stan Getz, Jimmy Smith, and Phil Woods. MGM’s film studio was producing the “Shaft” series, and the company approached him to do the sound track not just for Shaft in Africa but for a short-lived TV series spun off from the movies. Pate also composed music for several lower-profile blaxploitation films in the 70s, and two of the sound tracks–to Brother on the Run and Bucktown–have been reissued in the past four years.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Iris Dumuk.
