Interview with Yolanda Charles (MamaYo)


Q: Please tell me something about your musical background. Which musicians were influential for you to pick up an instrument and become a musician yourself.

Yolanda Charles: I was raised in a household that really enjoyed music. My mum played 7inch ska and blue beat records and my dad would play a lot of Nat King Cole, Jimmy Smith and Bob Marley. I have 2 brothers older than me, the eldest of which was into soul and hip hop and bought all the latest records and the younger brother was heavily into lovers rock, so I was exposed to a very wide variety of styles, I guess all those tracks with great bass riffs led me directly to wanting to play the bass. I was listening to Marcus Miller a lot through Luther Vandross records and he must have influenced me too.

Q: Why have you decided that just playing bass isn't enough for your creativity and went on with producing the MamaYo project?

Yolanda Charles: I'd always enjoyed writing songs and had loads of cassettes of 4 track ideas, which I'd had every intention of finishing, but I was always away on tour, then I had my 2 children Tait and Carmen and found that between doing sessions and child rearing there wasn't any time left for writing. The change came when I had a studio space built in my garden so that my husband Miles, who is a percussionist/drummer and I, could practice and jam with mates.
I found myself in there at all hours of the night recording ideas onto our 16-track digital recorder. After finishing a particular song, I mentioned to Miles that I'd love to hear it sung by a great singer. He suggested that I ask one of my friends to record it for me, so I asked Katie Kissoon; we were working together on the Robbie Williams gig and had become good friends. Well she did a fantastic job and I continued writing in my spare time, then I asked Shaun Escoffery to record another of my songs. Up until this point I'd been putting down the tracks just to hear what they'd sound like properly recorded, but by now I'd got the bug and found myself enjoying the process more than anything I'd done before, so I decided to go ahead and make an album. I guess I was at a point in my life when I felt that being a session musician wasn't quite enough to satisfy all of the musical creativity I had going on inside my head. As a backing musician you require many skills to hold onto your job, some of which is about fitting in and some of it is about understanding that your contribution is to help others realize their ideas through your ability to play your instrument well. That side of it has it's rewards because there's nothing like finding the perfect riff or doing a good job on another musician's record, but it's now become important for me to express myself in my own way.

Q: You've written, arranged and produced the whole The Game album. Even today it doesn't happen too often that a woman does everything. Especially if you have a closer look at the producers you usually notice males. Why do you think the music biz is still mainly male dominated?

Yolanda Charles: Well there are males present in the production credits! I regard some one who has helped shape the track into what the end result is, as being a "producer" as sorts. I don't mean the guy who makes the tea speaking up and saying what he thinks, but the whole process of making decisions about the feel of the track and editing decisions, arrangements and the overall direction sonically, you know, how to achieve the particular sound you want. The skills and experience of Miles and the engineer Mike Westergaard were a very important part of the whole recording process, which makes them co-producers of the album, but the final say was with me. I think they quite liked being bossed around by a woman!

Q: As a bass player you have appeared on records by Carleen Anderson, Misty Oldland, Urban Species, Aztec Camera, Robbie Williams or Paul Weller to name a few. With whom you enjoyed working the most and why?

Yolanda Charles: I think I had the most fun recently when I worked with Dave Stewart and Mick Jagger on the Alfie soundtrack. We were in the studio for a week and it was the most relaxed I've been on a studio session in a lot of ways. We got a chance to just play without any pressure, we did some jamming and playing songs over in different styles, you know trying to adjust the feel of the music according to the dramatic moment in the film; it had more of band feel about it than a job...and I got to hang out with Jude Law!

Q: Your website says that you're currently recording the sophomore album for your MamaYo project. What can we expect from it and who will help you on the new album?

Yolanda Charles: This album we've started will be very different from The Game. As I mentioned earlier I fell into making the first album rather than having some sort of grand plan, so I invited a lot of guest musicians and vocalists and really had fun, but this one is more of a group effort. We are a four-piece band; Miles Bould on Drums, Scott Firth on Guitar, Pascal Dane on Guitar and I'm singing lead vocals this time.
Writing the first record, I was aware that I was getting other vocalists to sing the songs, so lyrically I restrained myself somewhat from getting too heavy politically, but I've been writing this record with some of the things that bug me about our society very apparent in the lyrics. I haven't actually finished writing it yet, I'm about half way through and we're really excited; the grooves are sounding phat an' heavy.
The bass wasn't very prominent on The Game and I did that purposefully, I really didn't want to make a bass-players' record and do the predictable thing with bass in yer face, but I haven't set any restraints on this one, I don't know what the finished product will be, it's definitely song-based again, but expect some killer riffs.

Q: You're part of Groove4dayz. Please tell me more about the project. Who are the other participants and what's your objective?

Yolanda Charles: Over the years Miles especially had recorded a lot of music, but wasn't keen on trying to get anyone in the music business interested in his ideas. When I recorded The Game I found myself in a similar position, I had a complete lack of faith in the music industry's ability to sell our music. I guessed that most labels would find it not "popular" enough or that it would be too risky to invest in. So we decided to set up Groove4dayz.com as a way for us to sell our music independently and share images, video clips and information about all the other things we do and we wanted to enable people to hear about some of our mates who are all excellent players whom they might never have come across otherwise. I guess our aim is to create an exciting musical community and become successful, whilst remaining independent from outside business interests who might want to control what we do. We've just released some tracks recorded with poet-rapper The Liegeman and a track with Shaun Escoffery. The site has been live since November 2004 and we'll be adding more music and other bits and pieces as time goes on. Miles and I run the show with a company called Ymogen facilitating online payments.

Q: With Groove4Dayz you have taken everything in your own hand from producing and publishing to selling your music. Where do you see the advantages and disadvantages? Isn't the business site something that is time consuming and keeps you away from making music?

Yolanda Charles: One obvious advantage of doing everything yourself is the complete control on schedule, output rate, who you work with, job satisfaction, pushing yourself by having to learn new things all the time; from technical stuff, to how to work with all sorts of people you never had to interact with before. Of course one of the downsides is that you're self-reliant for motivation and there aren't bonuses and pats on the back from anybody, so it really does have to be a labour of love. At the beginning it was rather distracting and really time consuming, taking me away from the studio and everything, but less so now. It has been worth it because when we record, we know that we have a way of getting our music out for others to hear without anyone else's opinion or permission, which probably makes the writing freer and more honest.

Q: One can buy the music from Groove4Dayz on your website, either as CD or as download. How successful is this kind of selling your music compared to looking for a distribution company to get your albums into music stores?

Yolanda Charles: It's very slow selling online compared to stores, but it's mainly about people knowing you're there. Advertising doesn't do a lot unless you're spending something close to a major label's budget for a release, which is unrealistic for us quite frankly, but in terms of slow, and steady sales, hopefully it will go on and on.
I do think there is less of a willingness for people to use unknown sites to make purchases. Internet fraud is a real worry for a lot of people so they tend to want to use brand names they recognize, like Paypal and Barclays merchant accounts, but I'm working with Ymogen, a payment facilities company. They are relatively unknown, but have a brilliant eye for spotting trends and the ways in which people will come to use electronic payment services. Incorporating payment and download by mobile phone is something we're enabling right now which means that you can make instant purchases and listen to the track from wherever you are if that's something that turns you on. I think this sort of technology will become less of a teenage thing and switch over into general use at some point as people are beginning to get used to the idea so before long it will become a more everyday activity.
I may license some of our projects out to other labels or just go for distribution at some point; we go on tour and do gigs so can't take on full "record company" activities. But any licensing etc. will always be after the music has already been recorded so we can maintain full artistic control.

Q: Most download sites use DRM (digital right management) to "protect" the music so they can control on which devices you can listen to the music and to prevent you from copying it. For me this is the reason why I don't use these sites. Another reason for me against commercial downloads is the rather low bitrate of 192kbps or less and the lossy codecs used. What do you think of the practice to include DRM restrictions and in which codec you offer the music on your site (mp3, wma, ogg, flac, ape)?

Yolanda Charles: I understand why control is an issue. There are an awful lot of people who don't see a problem with getting their music for free. They think that they're taking profits away from big business and that it's a two-fingers-up to the record companies. It is in a way, but as record companies keep a share of the profits from music sales (the larger share) and give a share of the profits to the artist (the much smaller share) if profits are down for the company, it reflects in the artists' profits too. It's simple really. No fan of a musician would want to harm the person they admire, but nothing is for free and you can bet that if anyone is paying for the loss of revenue from illegal downloads it's the musician. You can see music industry's fear of smaller profits, reflected in the lack of investment in new music that doesn't follow a formula of repetitive success.
I don't plan to include DRM, most of my sales are CDs, but I regard copying like this...if you buy it and then help to spread the word by file sharing, encourage your mates to make a purchase as well. I remember doing that when friends would make cassettes for me back in the day, if I liked a track I would buy a copy of the record to support the artist. In an ideal world, I'd just love it if everybody had a copy of the album whether for free or otherwise. I think it's great and I want as many people to hear it as possible, but we need to live and we need to pay others to enable us to make more music, (mixing, mastering, pressing etc.) so it follows that we can't be too relaxed about this whole thing or musicians like myself won't be able to record the very music that people want to hear.
The tunes are available to listen and to download as .mp3 files; I've recently changed the format from .m4a or .mp4 files which is video encoding. (Itunes and Quicktime use it as a form of higher quality audio compression) I felt it tied people into having to use certain software that many PC users don't yet have, so it's .mp3 for now, but I will change to better quality compression as soon as it makes sense. [note: if you're having problems with certain audio or video codecs, try the VLC media player. It's free, open source and supports most codecs natively.]
I wanted to be a musician because I had a natural talent for it at school and once I could actually play an instrument I found that I loved it more than anything else I'd tried. The website and our efforts recording our own music is an attempt to retain that spirit and try very hard to keep thoughts of copyright, musical politics and anything that might put the brakes on, out of the party.

For more infos visit groove4dayz.com and read my review of The Game.