Vernon Reid

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

Vernon Reid was born in London in 1958 to parents from Montserrat. A year later the family moved to New York, where he attended Brooklyn Technical High School and New York University. In the 1980s he came to prominence as a guitarist in The Decoding Society, Ronald Shannon Jackson's avant-garde jazz-rock band. In 1984 he made the duo album Smash & Scatteration with Bill Frisell. In 1985, together with the journalist Greg Tate and the producer Konda Mason, he founded the Black Rock Coalition.

Music and breakthrough

That group consisted of Black musicians who felt that rock belonged to them just as much. Reid himself founded Living Colour in 1984, with a stable line-up from 1986. The debut album Vivid from 1988 went double platinum. Time's Up from 1990 went gold, and the band won a Grammy for best hard rock performance two years in a row. Living Colour supported the Rolling Stones in 1989 and played the first Lollapalooza in 1991. The group split up in 1995 and reunited in 2000.

Influence

Reid's guitar playing blends heavy metal and punk with funk, R&B and avant-garde jazz, often with lightning-fast solos. In 1996 he made the solo album Mistaken Identity, worked with choreographers such as Bill T. Jones and produced, among others, Salif Keita and James Blood Ulmer. Rolling Stone ranked him high on its list of the greatest guitarists of all time. For School of Rock he is important above all as a voice in the conversation about who belongs in rock.

Listening

Discography

Studio albums

• 1985Smash & Scatteration
• 1996Mistaken Identity
• 1998GTR OBLQ
• 2025Hoodoo Telemetry
• ?This Little Room

In School of Rock

The chapters, maps and magazine stories of School of Rock are currently available in Dutch only.

• Mixtape 4: When Rock Was Still Pop^NL Reader

Mentioned in other articles

• Funk rock GenreIn Cult of Personality (1988), Living Colour of New York mixed hard rock with funk; the guitarist Vernon Reid was part of the Black Rock Coalition.

See also

• Funk rock