Soul Patroling Houston

While I remain much more comfortable on the interviewer’s side of the tape recorder than the interviewee, I’m honored to have played a roll in today’s story in the Houston Press. Craig D. Lindsey was kind enough to pepper me with question for his article about today’s deejays playing soul music alongside my friend and Fistful of Soul founder Stewart A. Anderson.

“The way I see it is, if I do something, I want to do it right,” says Koshkin. “And I just wanted to know that it’s going to be appreciated. And I know Houstonians, you know, who appreciate that sort of thing. But, at the time, when I started doing it, there was nothing like that going on in town.

“And I was really curious,” he adds. “I mean, it just seems so out of left field, you know. There’s this random white guy playing a bunch of weird, ’60s soul music for people. How are people gonna respond to that?”

You can read the entire story here.

Advertisement

The Kashmere Stage Band

Kashmere Stage Band in Okinawa, Japan 1975

Every now and then, without warning, a human may be struck with a sudden impetus to take stock of what they’re doing with their life. I was interviewing a member of the Kashmere Stage Band for this article last week when I realized just how much I love what I do. At that moment, there was nothing else I’d rather be doing than listening to this grown man tell me how high school kids from poor broken homes, brought the funk to school. That from 1969 to 1977, the Kashmere Stage Band won 42 of 46 local, regional and national competitions. That competing against them was akin to entering a talent show and finding out James Brown had entered the same contest.

The Kashmere Stage Band played nothing short of a vital roll in the history of Bayou City Soul music. These kids helped break the mold for what a school band plays and how they play it to this day. Not to mention, they were like the all-star farm team for Houston’s multitude of musicians to draft from.

Here’s an excerpt from the story I wrote in the Houston Press: