Gregory Stephen “Ironman” or “Ionman” Tate, a writer, author, editor with an innovative, influential
Greg Tate, author’s photo from ArtNews
and utterly original critique of American culture as well as one of the founders of the Black Rock Coalition and a musical producer with 20 albums released by the improvisatory ensemble Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber, died in New York City on December 7, at age 64.
With a command of colorful and colloquial language to match broad erudition and insightful opinions, Tate emerged as a freelance contributor to the Village Voice, among many other music publications, in the 1980s. Many of his articles from that period, including breakthrough appreciations of hip-hop, rap, r&b, avant-garde music and Afro-futuristic themes, are collected in Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America, and Flyboy 2: The Greg Tate Reader.
He also wrote Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience and is editor of Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking From Black Culture, which contains his introduction, “Nigs R Us, of How Blackfolk Became Fetish Objects” and his conversation with guitarist Vernon Reid, “Steely Dan: Understood as the Redemption of the White Negro.”
Tate is credited as co-curator of exhibit upon which the book Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation,which he co-edited, is based. After publishing a piece about Basquiat (headlined “Flyboy in the Buttermilk”) in the Voice, he had turned his attention increasingly to the visuals arts, contributing to ArtNews. Tate’s most recently published piece is “Afropessimism and its Discontents,” in the September 27 issue of The Nation. Duke University Press has announced but not yet scheduled the posthumous publication of White Cube Fever: Hella Conjure and Writing on the Black Arts, with Tate’s essays on Carrie Mae Weems, Basquiat, Arthur Jafa, Kerry James Marshall, Sanford Biggers, Lonnie Holley, Ellen Gallagher, and Theaster Gates. He had been a visiting professor at Brown, Columbia, Princeton and Yale universities and Williams College.
Though Greg Tate was not a JJA member, he participated in diverse JJA activities, including panel discussions and playing guitar in the memorable performance of John Zorn’s Cobra at the original Knitting Factory by a Critics’ Band comprising Ira Gitler, Jim Macnie, Kevin Whitehead, Howard Mandel, Suzanne McElfresh, Annie Gosfield and M. Doty (Norman Yamada conducted). No doubt Greg found more satisfaction in his bands such as Women in Love, creative associations with artists including Kip Hanrahan, Lawrence Douglas “Butch” Morris who he credited as a major influence, and Melvin Peebles, among others.
In a conversation last September with JJA president Mandel (for whom he’d written a book introduction), Tate expressed willingness to join the JJA board. He said he’d owed a lot to jazz journalism, having come up through through its platforms in community radio (born in Dayton, Ohio, he had moved with his family in his teens to Washington, D.C., and graduated from Howard University) and alternative weekly newspapers. He asserted that payback was an important aspect of his personal program. Considering the richness Greg Tate brought to music, arts and cultural journalism, the paths he opened for other writers, artists, readers and listeners, and how his perspective as well as sound will live on, his dues are paid in perpetuity.
