Andre Torres: Yo! Ain’t he that guy…?

Ricky Powell: OK. Here we go. Finally, the interview with Mr. Andre Torres of Wax Poetics. How are you on this beautiful fall day?
Andre Torres: I’m lovely, very lovely. A little rough around the edges. Long night last night. But yes, I cannot complain.

RP: How would you describe Wax Poetics?
AT: Wax Poetics is a magazine about the history of contemporary music. It puts into context everything that we listen to, coming from a hip-hop perspective. It’s about where the foundations of that came from.
RP: On YouTube the other night I clicked onto a thing on the Village Vanguard, and they were worried that the younger generation is losing touch with jazz as time goes on.
AT: I’d agree. Jazz was some revolutionary shit when it first hit. It was like whorehouse music in New Orleans. But now you need a tuxedo and $120 in order to see some jazz, more than likely, because it’s been canonized as “America’s only true artform.” And with that comes its loss of life, really. There’s nobody breathing anything into the music now. There’s been a thousand other forms that have come since that was the thing. The youth are attracted to the new.
RP: With hip-hop, do you think anyone is doing anything innovative at
this point?
AT: There are very few individuals who are trying to push that artform. Hip-hop, probably even worse than jazz, has had the life sucked out it by everybody jumping in to try and cash in and not really bring creativity to the table. It’s a way out the ’hood, and that’s really all it has become now for anybody trying to get in the game.
RP: Yeah. I lost interest like a decade ago.
AT: [Laughs]

RP: When I was taking a bath today—maybe that’s too much info—I like to leave the oldies station on, and they had Bob Shannon on as a special treat. He was with WCBS-FM 101.1, the oldies station, for decades, and they still got him on like a token old-school dude. He played a string of top-ten hits from 1968. I was living near Union Square park in the late ’60s / early ’70s as a young lad, and it’s still a very strong reference point for me to go to.
AT: I was born in ’69, so it wasn’t like I was at the clubs or even hearing a lot of this stuff on the radio, but my father owned a record store in the Bronx called the Stump. I was surrounded by this music.

Hip-hop fed off all of that music: top 40, funk…whatever it was that was being played on the radio. At the time, the radio was the joint. You heard everything, especially as sounds changed, whether it was yacht rock, classic rock, to some of that stuff coming from the UK in the early ’80s. They could throw it all in the same bag with some regular Smokey Robinson, Motown stuff. You wind up having a wide variety of flavors to draw from, which is what made hip-hop so creative early on—that’s what these kids were growing up
listening to.

Now the music’s been marketed, segmented, and broken down into bite-size capsules. Kids who are listening to hip-hop—even trying to make hip-hop—have got no real reference point. All they’ve listened to is hip-hop. They never got a chance to hear Cindy Lauper, or Culture Club, or Commodores. It’s all regurgitated shit at this point. But I do love that varying amount of sound. I’m really getting into that blue-eyed soul.
RP: Oh shit! I heard that term today on the radio.
AT: It’s all these White cats that were doing that smooth, mellow rock in
the late ’70s, like Benny Mardones and Player.
RP: You know that group Rare Earth? The White group on Motown?
AT: Oh yeah. They even had their own label where they signed a couple other acts.
RP: I like how they had the lead singer playing drums up front.
AT: Yeah, that’s hot.

RP: Do you get some downtime to yourself where you can just go on YouTube? Do you get a kick out of that?
AT: Oh, most definitely. For me it’s a huge resource because I’ll be working on an article on some cat I never really knew much about, and I can’t find a lot of this stuff—I don’t have the album, a lot of it ain’t on iTunes, you might not even be able to cop an illegal download. So sometimes the only way I can hear something is on YouTube. Especially once I get into that little hole and start digging, and then you see all the joints on the side, that’s why you end up on there for two…three hours.
RP: Personally, Andre, if I may, I am a freelance hustler / bohemian, but I never categorize myself into one thing—I never call myself a photographer. I’m an individualist. That’s my title.
AT: I’m right there with you.
RP: I’m just going to stay true to myself. Maybe it’s the way I grew up, being an only child. I had a lot of freedom. My mom kicked me out of the house a lot and I did what I wanted. I don’t really take well to strict authority. I can’t work a regular job. I couldn’t even work being a substitute teacher, a six-hour day. The last job I had was working for a pot delivery service. That gave me freedom.
AT: That’s not a bad gig.
RP: I loved the freedom of riding around, but too many kooks were ordering in. I couldn’t deal with them, being in their house, getting weird looks.
AT: Yeah, that’s gotta be strange.

RP: Did you play any instruments growing up?
AT: Drums.
RP: Oh yeah? Natural drummer?
AT: Kind of unnatural. I took lessons for a little bit, and I never really got to the point where I had my own drum set and all that. But I can do a little something. Even when I picked them up a couple years ago, I just kinda got on and people were like, “I didn’t know you knew how to play the drums!” And I was like, “I didn’t either!” So it must have been something that stuck. I’m actually trying to get my kid a set so I can get down on them.
RP: That’s cool. Love that.
AT: I used to make a lot of beats—MPC, Roland joint, a lot of keyboards…. I put a couple of records out, actually, back in the mid-’90s…late ’90s. Some stuff on comps.
RP: Some contemporary avant-garde stuff, at the time [laughs]?
AT: Yeah, yeah. I guess that’s probably about the category it would fit in! It was a mess, is what it was. It was basically me and my boy too zooted. I had a bunch of records, he had a sampler, and I’d be like, “Yo, here…sample this. Put this over here.” That really led to the magazine, eventually.
RP: Really?
AT: I came up here to be a painter. I came up to New York to go to grad school. I was working at the Met as a security guard. People coming up to me all day, “Where’s the bathroom…Where’s this…Where’s that?” And everybody was an artist. I just got tired of the whole scene.

At the same time I was digging a lot and trying to make beats with my man. So I kinda faded out of the art thing and moved more into the music side. Then, eventually, when I realized, “I’m not really gonna make beats for a living. I’m no Premo,” I was like, “The hell with all of it,” and I went and worked at the World Trade Center selling software. I cut my dreads off and was wearing a suit and tie every day. I started stacking a little paper, and then I got bored with that. I was still buying a lot of records, and that’s when I got the idea to start Wax Poetics.
RP: What year was that, about?
AT: It started to germinate probably the summer of 2000. By the holidays, I was like, “I’m gonna do this for real.”
RP: And you got investors and whatnot?
AT: Nah, man. I had two partners. I was unemployed. They fired me from the World Trade Center on August fourth, 2001.
RP: Just in time.
AT: I got out, I had some unemployment, I was taking writers out and trying to woo them to write for free, and then I dumped whatever little money I had, and my two partners did, too. They hollered at their pops, moms, maxed credit cards, and we just kind of rolled with it.
RP: And how was the feedback on that first issue?
AT: Oh, man. I had collected all the material by the time I got fired, then the Towers went down, and then I was sitting around for a couple of weeks. I wasn’t sure what to do with it. I was like, “Fuck it. Let’s just put it out. We’ll see what happens. Because I could be dead right now.” I was like, “I’m here for a reason. I’m supposed to put this magazine out.” So we went ahead and popped it off, and just printed like 5,000 copies.

I was dealing with Amir at Fat Beats at the time. He was the only distributor I had. He picked up a couple hundred copies and then he called me a week later like, “Do you got anymore of those magazines?” And next thing you know, it was like every couple days…every week, “Yo, you got more? You got more?” Between what he was doing and what I was doing on my own, driving around and hustling them myself, we sold them out. But then I didn’t realize the game with magazines is you gotta wait like six months before you get your money back.

I was trying to be quarterly, but I had to wait like six months to put the second issue out. We didn’t have any more money. It was like I had to wait till I got all that back to print another one. So we just kind of took it slow like that and got more credit cards, maxed some more joints out, and just tried to push it little by little. We’re going on ten years next year.
RP: I really commend you. The Philly issue, I have that up in my house as an art piece. I love that short period of psychedelic soul. I listen to Jazz 88 a lot and KCR, ’cause I like the jazz shows.

I’ve been on some radio shows. I was on Across 110th Street…KCR. That was a good one.
AT: For me, that was a huge part of getting to this stage with a magazine, because when I came up [to New York] looking for records and coming from Florida where I didn’t really know anybody else who was digging, I’d turn on the radio on a Saturday afternoon, and you’re on the radio. I think [Chairman] Mao was on one.
RP: Oh yeah, I brought him on!
AT: I had that show taped, and I would play it over and over. For me, those were the records that I was trying to get. Y’all already had them, and I was like, “Damn!” So I would be taking notes.


RP: Well, I just want to say, I’ve got a mad love for you.
AT: Thank you, sir. It’s a mutual admiration.