Written by Jesse Serwer

Don Blackman unlocked new realms of funk on his self-titled debut LP for Arista GRP in 1982, but the singer-keyboardist’s career goes much deeper than the eight tracks on his lone major-label release. In a rare interview, the late Godfather of the Jamaica, Queens music scene charts his path from Pentecostal church radio broadcasts and Parliament jam sessions to TV jingles and New York Undercover. 

In July 2006, Don Blackman and I arranged to meet at his home in Jamaica, Queens. The day we’d settled on for our interview, however, turned out to be New York’s hottest in over a decade, the brutal peak of a weeks-long heatwave. In the interest of comfort, we pivoted to a phone call. 

While I regret not making the slog across town that day for an audience with Don, I’m forever grateful for the conversation that followed. It would take only seconds for Don to break the ice, welcoming me into his world of no-nonsense, hardnose-jazz-guy directness and Borscht Belt-by-way-of-Southside-Queens humor with some frankly hilarious remarks that are perhaps better left unprinted. Delirious from the heat, we laughed big belly laughs for what seemed like minutes before proceeding with the business of conducting an interview. Things only got more interesting from there. 

Eighteen years later, with the sun setting on the first hot day of Summer 2024, I’m recounting this story to Don’s daughter, Irene, and his son, Kyle. All around us, in a studio inside Kyle’s Brooklyn apartment, are the artifacts of Don’s life in music. There’s the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer he used on his self-titled 1982 debut LP, widely (but unofficially) known as the “Blackman Album”; the Roland SH-101 he outfitted into a keytar for live shows; a rare Farfisa combo organ he played on tour with Hugh Masekela. Shelves brim with folders stuffed with faxed contracts, studio logs, postcards from overseas fans—and hundreds of dubbed cassettes containing unmixed demos and unheard live recordings. A cabinet in the next room holds similar riches on VHS, including footage shot on an early camcorder documenting every last note and outtake from the “Blackman Album” sessions.

“I document everything I do,” Don had told me on that grueling day in 2006. “I’ve got thousands of video tapes. I just set up my video camera and go for it.”

It’s now been eleven years since Don Blackman passed away at age fifty-nine, following a brief battle with cancer. In the years since, Kyle, a musician and DJ, and Irene, a singer and actress, have made it their mission to catalog their father’s archive of unreleased recordings, contextualizing his prodigious piano and singing talent through social media video snippets pulled from Don’s personal tapes. 

This almost didn’t happen, as Don’s personal collections were nearly lost to a storage-space liquidation stopped thanks to a last-minute proof of executorship. “All of this was a hair away from getting thrown away in the trash,” Kyle says. “Everything was in garbage bags up to the ceiling…”

On a dry erase board hanging above the Farfisa, Kyle has sketched out several years of planned releases through their company, Blackman Music, which is administered by Salaam Remi’s Analog Metaverse. First up is The B Sides, an album of home-studio recordings and other unreleased tracks like “Something About Your Love” and “Fly Away with Me,” a duet with Irene featuring Kyle on bass. 

As Kyle and Irene, who Don often brought to perform with him on overseas dates, weigh options for other projects, including a documentary, awareness of, and reverence for, Don Blackman’s music is at an all-time high. Sampled decades ago by hip-hop acts including Jay-Z (“What The Game Made Me”), L the Head Toucha (“Too Complex”), and Slum Village (“Go Ladies”), Don’s sublime soul ballad “Holding You, Loving You” has been enjoying a renaissance, reaching new listeners through Instagram tutorials and streaming playlists curated by tastemakers like Q-Tip and Anderson Paak. Kaytranada sampled it on “Seemingly,” a highlight of his latest album, Timeless. Willow Smith posted an Instagram video of her playing along with the track on bass, inspiring an all-star cast of commenters including Questlove (“One Of My Fav Songs!!!”), H.E.R. (“Omg love this song”) and Queen Latifah (“My Jawn 🔥🔥🔥”) to testify to its greatness. A Vinyl Me Please reissue of the “Blackman Album” sold out immediately upon its release in May. 

It’s not that the name Don Blackman hasn’t always commanded immense respect. It’s just that the respect has typically come from those within the circle—other musicians, specialist DJs. Now, a broad audience of multi-generational listeners is discovering his music. 

In the early ‘80s, Blackman stood, perhaps, on the precipice of some form of R&B stardom, having signed to Arista GRP, jazzmen Dave Grusin and Larry Rosen’s joint venture with Clive Davis’ Arista Records. It was a great time to be a jazz-funk auteur, Quincy Jones having released The Dude a year earlier, and Arista GRP flush with cash and goodwill for Jamaica, Queens musicians, Tom Browne’s “Funkin’ For Jamaica (N.Y.)” having effectively launched the label in 1979. 

Don would turn in one of the most dynamic albums of its kind in the “Blackman Album,” a masterful blend of raw soul, synth funk, gospel, slapstick humor, hard rock, and sublime, dreamy balladry, backed by his band, the Family Tradition. But, in Don’s telling at least, his refusal to heed Clive Davis’ request to alter the lyrics to lead single “You Ain’t Hip” led to muted label support for the under-promoted project. The “Blackman Album” would be Don’s last for GRP Arista, or any major label. It would be another twenty years before he’d return with his second full-length, 2002’s little-heard (and long-out-of-print) Listen, for U.K. indie Expansion Records. 

Don made his mark in other ways, before and after the “Blackman Album.” As a member of Queens fusion master Lenny White’s funk/R&B outfit Twennynine, he wrote and sang on the band’s signature track, the off-the-wall 1979 hit “Peanut Butter.” The dreamy “Morning Sunrise” (sampled by Just Blaze for “Dear Summer,” a brilliant Jay-Z soliloquy stashed on Memphis Bleek’s 534 album) is among several songs he wrote, played, and sang on for his mentor, Weldon Irvine. In the cooperative spirit of the Jamaica, Queens music community where Blackman, Irvine, and White held court, “Morning Sunrise” was also recorded by Twennynine, for its 1979 album Best of Friends, with Don also on lead.

Continued in Issue 8, Special Collector's Edition