Bill Bernstein/via Facebook

​Guitarist Vernon Reid is best known as the leader of the hard rock/metal band Living Colour. Before that, though, he was a fixture on the New York avant-garde scene, blending rock, jazz and noise as a member of drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson's Decoding Society, duetting with Bill Frisell on the album Smash & Scatteration, and co-founding the Black Rock Coalition, among many other things. He's released multiple solo albums (the first of which, 1996's Mistaken Identity, is the only album to credit both Teo Macero and Prince Paul as producers), and, this month, is premiering a multimedia performance piece, Artificial Afrika: A Tale of Lost Cities, at Dixon Place. The piece combines music and videos by Reid with contributions from DJ Leon Lamont and African vocalist Akim Funk Buddha.

In late January, I got Reid on the phone to ask about the project, its inspirations, and more.

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