Pete Cosey has kept a low profile for most of his four-decade career. In fact, in the past ten years it seemed as though the guitarist had vanished completely. “I just go and woodshed,” the former Miles Davis sideman told me in 1997. “I disappear from the scene and come back with different stuff.” Recently he’s come back with several new projects: he’s a member of the Electric Mudcats, a Muddy Waters-inspired act organized by Public Enemy’s Chuck D; he’s the featured soloist on a disc that reinterprets Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps; and he’s formed the Children of Agartha, a band with Davis alums Gary Bartz and John Stubblefield that pays homage to the hard-charging, nonlinear music that Cosey made with the trumpeter in the mid-70s. And recently he got an unexpected dose of mainstream exposure: he appeared as a plaintiff on The People’s Court.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Last June, Children of Agartha made their debut at the Village Underground in New York. At the end of the night the club’s talent buyer, Steve Weitzman, didn’t have enough cash on hand to meet the band’s guarantee; Cosey agreed to let him pay the balance of $1350 by August 15. When the date came and went without payment, Cosey filed a suit in New York small-claims court. But before the November court date rolled around he was contacted by representatives of the TV program. Both he and Weitzman agreed to appear; the episode was taped late last fall and ran early this year. Cosey presented the facts, the original contract, and Weitzman’s promissory note. After some backpedaling from the promoter, the judge ruled in the guitarist’s favor.
The album meant so much to the rapper that in 2001 he reconvened the surviving musicians from the Mud sessions–Cosey, saxophonist Gene Barge, guitarist Phil Upchurch, bassist Louis Satterfield, and drummer Morris Jennings–added DJ Johnny Juice, and dubbed them the Electric Mudcats. They’re featured prominently in Godfathers and Sons, a film by Marc Levin that will air this fall as part of Martin Scorsese’s seven-part PBS documentary series “The Blues.” (Hip-hop stars like Chuck D, Common, and Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson of the Roots perform with them in the film.) An underrehearsed version of the Electric Mudcats performed on the opening night of the recent Chicago Blues Festival, and only Cosey’s searing, texturally rich solo on an intense reinterpretation of “Mannish Boy” saved the set from being a run-of-the-mill blues blowing session.
