A Biography of Greg Tate in Three-Four Minutes
By brian g. gilmore
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Cultural Critic, Greg Tate, Photo by Alex Lozupone, February 2013, Fair use, via Creative Commons
“Greg Tate made me want to be a writer. I was amazed that a musician was so fluid and had enough knowledge to describe and analyze other people’s music so well.”
The magnificent cultural critic, Greg Tate died [December 7th, 2021]. It hit hard everywhere. Here’s what I wrote immediately after reading my friend, Jelani Cobb’s post about Tate’s death and art and what it meant:
“Greg Tate is everywhere today. I am glad to say I kept up with his artistic travels as much as I could before he died today. That makes me feel good. He belongs to the universe now, the ages. He made it count. I read a lot of his stuff. Read a lot of his interviews. Make it count is my charge. That’s all you got, as an artist. Make it count. If you putting off some project. Don’t. The world is desperate for high art of humanity. Serious high art. Joel D and I went up to NYC on Amtrak (or we met up) for Cave Canem at 20 I think. And we caught Greg on a panel, on the Lower East Side. Not the last time I was in a space with the bruh, but one of the last times I heard his truth telling. He was what you want, a person of indie thought and living. No surprise he checked out quiet, too. It just kind of trickled out, after coming out of nowhere. The Flyboy was always Fly.”
Others wrote more beautiful things — tweets, posts, notes on the fly, via text, on our Flyboy, Greg Tate. Track it all down. Get to know him that way first, then read his books, and articles if you can find them.
I met Greg years ago though I can’t count him as a close or distant friend. Greg Tate knew and was respected by a multitude of people and artists. When his Village Voice columns began to circulate, and then his book, Flyboy in Buttermilk most of us carried the book around in our bags everywhere.
I am a poet so naturally reading Greg Tate made sense. I knew his brother, Brian Tate, a musician as well, slightly better but both of them were edgy. Cutting edge. Free.
They got that edge from their parents (Florence and Charles E. Tate), and this made me understand Greg’s writings and life. His parents were civil rights activists from Dayton. They were in double deep in the struggle of Black self-determination. When Florence was doing cultural work in Washington D.C., I got to know her best, luckily.
So losing another member of the Tate fam is a big deal from where I stand. Their family, shall we say, stood (and stands) for something, and they stood (and stand) firm, in Babylon, so to speak.
I have spent the day looking for Greg’s words, via interviews. I was lucky to find some. If you want to find out why he was so dope and fly a writer, track down his many writings, especially, Flyboy in Buttermilk, the timeless classic.
Here is Tate from 2013 as interviewed by Camilla Goodson in Callaloo, an African American cultural journal:
TATE: I was born in Dayton, Ohio, and we move to DC when I was about twelve, so that would have been about 1971, 1972, and that was about the same time I really got interested in music, collecting music, really interested in collecting jazz and rock, and reading music criticism too. It kinda all happened at the same time. I had a subscription to Rolling Stone. I was really into Miles Davis. He was like my god in the 1970s. Miles, George Clinton, Sun Ra, and locally we had a serious kind of band scene going on. All the guys in my high school were in a band. you were either in a band or you were just deep into music. That was definitely a major activity that all conversation and passion flowed around. More than sports, more than politics. For our generation it was definitely music and live shows, going to see a lot of live music, and in DC it was pretty much possible to see everything. There were a lot of great venues. Major venues, small venues. I started to do radio too when I was in high school. I actually got opportunities to go on two or three of the local radio stations, and program and announce, and kinda did all that up until I got a to New York. I came to New York in 1982, but I started writing for the Village Voice in 1981, at the invitation of the music editor, Robert Christgau.
Here is Tate, in the same interview, speaking about another great critic, Amiri Baraka, the late, great poet:
TATE: It all starts with him for me. I read his book Black Music when I was about fourteen, and that’s what set me off in terms of reading criticism and writing criticism, and then being a serious jazz head. Every writer can talk about the book that changed their life. That’s the one for me. And, then, I’m just such a huge fan of his poetry too. He’s my favorite American poet of all time. My favorite black poet. One of my favorite twentieth-century poets. And he’s another science fiction comic book fan, because that’s all in his work too.
Greg Tate’s departure has left quite a huge void. The Black cultural critic who called Michael Jackson “another Negro gone mad” in 1987 at the height of his fame had the courage and the creative impulse missing these days. I am hopeful that what he stood for will be firmly upheld by future critics.
I will leave it there.
About the Author
brian g. gilmore is Washington DC Poet, and Senior Lecturer at the University of Maryland. His latest book is come see about me, marvin (Wayne State University Press), a recipient of a Michigan Notable Book Award, 2020.
Medium
Photograph of brian g. gilmore by Steven Cummings.