(The late Greg Tate’s band Burnt Sugar covered “Mtume” on their 2003 album Black Sex Y’all Liberation & Bloody Random Violets.) In the mid ’70s, Mtume partnered up with Reggie Lucas, another former member of Davis’ band, and they wrote and produced hit songs for Roberta Flack and Stephanie Mills the latter track, “Never Knew Love Like This Before,” won a Grammy in 1980. (He later bestowed Swahili names on the various members of Herbie Hancock’s band Mwandishi.) Mtume recorded and performed with Sonny Rollins, Pharoah Sanders, McCoy Tyner, Freddie Hubbard, Gary Bartz, and others, but his work with Miles Davis is what he’s best known for in jazz circles: He can be heard on On The Corner, Get Up With It, Agharta, Pangaea, Dark Magus, and Big Fun there’s even a track named for him on Get Up With It, as you can hear above. After moving to California for college, he took the name Mtume, which means “messenger” in Swahili. His father was the saxophonist Jimmy Heath, but he was raised by his stepfather, James “Hen Gates” Forman, a pianist who played with Dizzy Gillespie and Dinah Washington.
Best known to some listeners as a percussionist with Miles Davis’ group from 1971 to 1975, and to others as the leader of Mtume, whose hit single “Juicy Fruit” became the foundation of Notorious B.I.G.’s “Juicy,” his creativity carried him throughout Black music for several decades.
The most famous of the recently passed was James Mtume, born James Forman in Philadelphia in 1946.
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