Owen Valentine

This week my guest is Multi-Instrumentalist, vocalist, composer, personal trainer, naturopath, and martial artist. Owen Valentine. He walks us through the connection between many different paths of music through different voices and the natural world of good health and exercise. He explains how it all comes out in the end to be a single path with many variations.

Theowenvalentine.com
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https://www.instagram.com/theowenvalentine/

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Jazz Alliance of Mid-Michigan J.A.M.M.
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Transcript

Tia Time with Artists, with guest Owen Valentine,  recorded 12/12/2020

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists, the weekly podcast where we discuss the methods, challenges, and real-life experiences of living our creative dreams. What kind of creative warrior are you? Musician? Filmmaker? Painter? Choreographer? Poet? Sculptor? Fashionista? Let’s talk about it right now. I’m your host, Tia Imani Hanna.

Tia Imani Hanna: Welcome to Tia Time with Artists. This week my guest is Owen Valentine. I knew him as “Fiiddla” Owen Brown, Jr., a violinist, a multi-instrumentalist singer, a naturopath, enzyme specialist. You do everything so welcome to the show.

Owen Valentine: Well, I hope all of them that made it with me today.

Tia Imani Hanna: I'm hearing that you are a superhero in the gym. You're doing amazing things. I see your Facebook feed all the time. 

Owen Valentine: Awesome. Hey, I'm trying to encourage my fellow musicians to get it in.

Tia Imani Hanna: Move the body. Move your body and that's something… that's one of the reasons I had you on today. I want to talk about the violin. Why the violin? You play so many different instruments. I want to talk about how you got to where you are now with the health and the naturopath and all the different instruments? And how all of that binds together, how do you get all those things to work together? So, at the beginning… It is a lot.

Owen Valentine: That's a lot, that's a lot. At the very beginning for me starts, I was born in London and the first couple of years of my life, I'm living in London. And from what I understand from my mother, my father used to play Charlie Parker records over the top of the crib. Now my father, interestingly, he didn't tell me that he was like a big jazz aficionado and that he was friends with all these guys. So, I find, yeah. So, I found out later that his buddies are all the buddies that were friends with Trane and with Rollins and all it is… Monk, all these guys… and my father was a dentist. So, he was doing everybody's teeth. And playing the trumpet. He, without ever saying a word, he passed the love of the jazz and all those things to me. My mother was an opera singer. She was accepted to Julliard. Her sister was a piano virtuoso, but of everybody in the entire family, the decision was made that I would be the doctor. So, I was going to get no music lessons. I'm the only person in, like, generations that didn't get music lessons as a child. 

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh. That's not fun.

Owen Valentine: That was no fun. I was like, so y'all gave me all these genes and y'all just decided unanimously that I would be the doctor and not get any piano lessons, no nothing. So, I had to give you that to know that the bug was already planted, but there was no preparation to actually go into it. So, at 16 and a half, just going towards 17, the drive was so strong that I moved out on my own. I would go for everything. As a vocalist, I started, I would go for everything possible. I wanted to learn everything about music possible, and that helped me as a… that helped me to understand the voice in an extreme way. I read entire treatises and books. I went in with a passion. And prior to that, when I was nine, the thing I was allowed to do was the martial arts. So, I took that Shaolin Kung Fu, Jujitsu, Aikido, Shotokan, Tae Kwon Do, all of that, Judo, all of that, and applied it to music. In those later years, people said, how can you do something for three or four hours? I said, have you ever been to a Shaolin Temple? Wash on, wash off for the next four hours. Literally, you're cleaning a floor, cleaning the walls. Now, get over here and do these pushups and then hang upside down and all this kind of stuff. Before you throw a first punch of the day. The Kung Fu, and the athleticism was actually what allowed me to do the music. My first voice teacher was Tony nominee, Gilbert Price, He was the star of a show called “Timbuktu” with Eartha Kitt and Melba Moore. Yeah. He used to say, “Welcome to Timbuktu, starring Eartha Kitt, Gilbert Price, and Melba Moore!” l remember. That was a long time ago, but that was my first voice teacher. Music was not an easy road for me because I couldn't seem to either keep teachers long enough get me through or life couldn't stay simple long enough to get me through. So, I got married early, became a parent, did a whole bunch of things, and I just never gave… the burn was inside me so much. So, I'm going to shorten this story and say that one day while I'm singing and taking dance lessons and doing all this stuff. I actually went and bought a violin for my then young wife, who I was trying to encourage her to start an instrument. She said scrape and put the violin down on the floor and left it there and that was it. But there was a violin in the house now, so I picked it up and I never put it down. That was, wow, that was 37, 38 years ago. I never put it down. It wasn't once I picked it up, it just took, I started… that first year. I learned all my three octave scales on one string, in twelve keys. 

Tia Imani Hanna: On one string.

Owen Valentine: It was crazy. It was absolutely crazy. But when I went in a hundred percent and I met John Blake that same year, the year was 1983. I met John Blake and he was actually the violin soloist on one of his friend's weddings. And I was the vocalist. And so, after I was done singing, he took his solo and then we were scatting back… I was scatting. He was playing the violin. And I was like, when I was done, I was like, “Ah, I found the other thing I'm supposed to do.” And he was like, “Why? What is the other thing you're supposed to do? I said, “I was supposed to play the violin.” He was like, “Really.” “And there's one sitting at home on the floor,” and he looked at me like, “Oh my God. You must be out of your mind. Do you know how hard the violin is? How many kids you got? What?” So that same year my daughter was born. It was like, now you got a violin and a new daughter. And it was like, “Oh, my God. That's a lot.”

Tia Imani Hanna: That's a lot. 

Owen Valentine: The violin is a tough mistress.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yes, it is.

Owen Valentine: She demands that you play with her and talk to her and take her out for lunch. 

Tia Imani Hanna: That’s true. Exactly.

Owen Valentine: I went in with a passion. I was passionate about being a dad. I was passionate about my martial arts. I was passionate about this new instrument and I'll tell you a story. When I was 16, someone gave me a guitar. And I came home and pronounced like, like Eddie Murphy and, uh, what's that thing coming to America, I came home and said with my guitar to my mother, “Now I know I will be, I renounced my throne. I will know a guitarist. I will be the world's greatest guitarist. That will be what I am.” And I held this guitar in my hand. I held it out to her, and I was like, “Yes.” And she's like, “Where'd you get the guitar from? I said, “Somebody told me he was no longer going to be a guitarist and gave it to me.” I set that guitar and I went away for a week or two. When I came home, they were so determined I would be a doctor that I hate to tell you what happened to that guitar. She took that guitar, took all the strings off, painted it with some black latex and hung it on a wall as the ornament. 

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh my gosh. 

Owen Valentine: And I was like, “Oh no, how could they do that?” She kept playing dumb and then finally she said, “We've got enough musicians in this family! You're going to be a doctor and that's it!”

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. 

Owen Valentine: Yeah. But we know that you can't force someone. 

Tia Imani Hanna: No. You really can't. 

Owen Valentine: Yeah. Just cause I was good at bio didn’t mean I wanted to sit through eight years of traditional med school. And there was no naturopath school then. There wasn't no go to school for being a naturopathic doctor in the United States currently available, unless you were maybe an Arizona somewhere. And I was in the city of New York at the time. But the violin starts in Harrisburg, PA the violin. I practiced it. I read every book. No one wanted to teach me, so, I taught myself. And I continued studying. I took the violin with me. As soon as I was done with Army bootcamp, I came all the way back, kissed my kids, grabbed my violin, and then went back to base.

Tia Imani Hanna: Wow.

Owen Valentine: And I soon became known as “Fiddler Brown” on the Army base of San Antonio, Texas. That was Fort Sam, the medical base. So, mom got what she wanted anyway. I don’t think you meant me to be a doctor with a gun, but yeah. But I was the only guy, like everybody would leave the base, and I would be the only one on the whole base just with my violin. Practicing in the barracks. And they used to have little practice rooms there. I would practice in there, no one on the base, just me alone. So, it was pretty nutsy. I would bug violinists from time to time. I followed John Blake like a stalker and he's part of the reason I moved to Philadelphia. And over the years, I was blessed to meet some of the greatest guys of the idiom of jazz violin and of violin itself, right? Francis Fortier came in with his, I think it was a Guarneri he had at the time, from Julliard, he came down. I met Ruggiero Ricci, the great classical Paganini soloist, and I got a chance to watch him for a couple of days. And I got a job cutting grass for the guy who was the head of the American Violin Makers Association. It was like, just one thing after the other, I just was dedicated a hundred percent, I will do what it takes. If it means bleed, I will bleed for this instrument. 

Tia Imani Hanna: And you did. Sounds like it.

Owen Valentine: And I did, anyway, that kinda brings you up into… that covers the first 25, 26 years of life.

Tia Imani Hanna: Now you do play lots of other instruments too now. So those pop up in the middle or? 

Owen Valentine: Okay, this is going to sound real strange, but at 25, 26, I meet a man named Sun Ra. And Sun Ra stretch the envelope of what I was going to do for the rest of my life, because he was like, you can't just be a violin player. You can't just be a singer. In fact, I was a better singer than a violinist. So, I was like, just let me sing. I don't have to play the violin. He says, “Nope. You need to be up front with the violin.” I said, “No, I would be better in the back. I think back near the trunk.” He said, “You must be in the front.” So, he mentored me. He pushed me, kicked me. And because I was sitting in a band with 16 other instruments, I'm being surrounded by like John Orr from the Thelonious Monk Band and people from the Duke Ellington Orchestra and people from Basie Orchestra, all in one band. And it started to rub off. You start hearing these other instruments and… school made me learn some things, but it didn't really stick because they didn't apply it in a functional way. But once you're in a band consciously watching those other instruments working, you do start to… you start to grow a little bit and you start to have a feeling for what the horns do and the trumpets do, what the saxophones do, and the percussion does, and I started playing percussion…. I had some piano in school, but yeah, I started playing percussion and I found out I was good at it. And I think the next thing I really took to was the bass. Which was the opposite of the violin. It's like, violin players don't play bass.

Tia Imani Hanna: It's upside down and backwards.

Owen Valentine: Exactly. But something weird happened. And I'm going to say, after I'd been playing the violin a good 16, 17 years, something weird happened. And I… the door opened up one day and it just, it was weird. I went from bass. Getting serious about the piano to get more serious about the percussions, the studying Indian music, to sitting on the floor playing the violin in my sock… with the tip of a violin, my sock traditional Carnatic style. I started sitar. I started harmonica. And it was just one instrument after the other and they just kept coming. And before I knew it, I had added another 20 or so instruments in. And people were calling me, “Hey, listen, I need a harmonica player. Hey, listen, I need you to do the whole Indian thing on this concert over here.” And I started appearing on hip hop records, was some of those little weird sounds that you hear like with Talib Kweli, Mos Def, Common, Santana, Parliament Funkadelic. What's that sound? That's me. I was the little weird sound you heard. It was like, yeah. So, if you turn to like Common’s “Sun God” you hear a little weird sound and all this crazy stuff. What instrument is that? It's a violin. Yeah, that's how it started. And I got serious about it. I give credit to cats like Gerald Veasley, who is like a great bass player, but he was the first like bass player that I got, like, really… “Wow. That moves me.” I could feel that in my chest when he would play. I was like, “Man, I want to do that too.” And the people were like, “You’re like a little kid. You don't know what you want to do.” I said, “No, I think I'm supposed to do more than one thing.” So, I had to wrestle with myself because when you feel what everybody's telling you to do one thing and do it well, and your insides are telling you do 20 things and do them well. Someone sent me something recently, a psychological thing, and it said… that they said there are certain people who are meant to do many things, not one thing. And I guess that fit… I fit the profile.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, just knowing that's a possibility because you get told by so many people and I've been guilty of telling people that too, I say, yes, it's good to play lots of different instruments, but I said, try to understand one of them first. And that is what I tell them so that at least you can expand from the one that you know. 

Owen Valentine: Exactly. Exactly. Listen, I will tell you that things cross-pollinate. The violin led me to the bass, but I was doing everything wrong on the bass. Everything. Because I was thinking of it like it was a big violin, like it was just a low violin. No, it's a different function. It's a different instrument. It's a different range, everything about it. So, the bass actually changed how I played the violin.

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. I can see that.

Owen Valentine: Harmonica changed the way I played the violin. Both chromatic and diatonic, they changed the way I looked at the instrument. And singing, of course, changes the violet. So yeah, it was like a weird, strange journey. Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, you've gone from being “Fiiddla” to now you are Owen Violin

Owen Valentine: Hey, ‘Owen Violin’ is a good name. Maybe I'll do that next. Yeah. Yeah. But someone said it sounds like a stripper name. I said, “No.” I said, “Yeah, that's my stripper name.” So why do you work out so much? I got to make the money, got to pay the bills. Shout out to all my girls on the pole. [laughter] So, yeah, he said you made that real. Hey! So, listen, I think from the Army calling me Fiddler, the Sun Ra calling me “Fiddla.” He says, “You always say… you always just fiddling around.” He said… and he was from the South, so he would have that ‘Fiddla’ ‘Fiddla’. So, I just put two "i’s in it. For a minute I was called “The Fiddler.” And then everybody else was around me, including some of my ex-students, started adding “Fiddler” to their name. And so that was real common back, you go back about 20 years ago, there was a lot of fiddlers around. Where you all come from? So, I added two I’s to my name and made it “Fiiddla!” And I figured, listen, I gave Fiiddla 20 years. I did. I wore… I have locks down to my butt. Then I cut all the locs off for 10 years. And I did the genie look. I had all kinds of colors in my hair with the locs going down to my butt and throwing them around and all that. Did the muscles and locs kind of thing. 

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. Sure.

Owen Valentine: You know, it was nice. It was cool. But then you get a little older and you want that more refined thing. And I sat down, and I said, “If I was going to choose a new stage name, what would it be?” And I said, “There's not a lot of Owens out there. So, I'm still unique with that. But then Owen means Prince. But I can't use Prince because somebody already used it. 

Tia Imani Hanna: Right. 

Owen Valentine: I thought to myself, I said, what about a last name? Adding Owen something. And I started to look up… I said, what do you represent? I represent exercise and health and diet. I looked these things up and I found the name that means ‘healthy and strong’. And that's what ‘Valentine’ means. 

Tia Imani Hanna: Huh? I did not know that.

Owen Valentine: Yeah, we associate it with Valentine's Day, you know. But, actually, it means healthy and strong, youthful, those kinds of things. So, my first name Owen means Prince. It also means Warrior. It also means Strong. Those kinds of things. So, if you put them together, Owen Valentine means “The Prince of Healthy and Strong.”

Tia Imani Hanna: That's fantastic.

Owen Valentine: I was like, that's me. I got it. I took the name on and I wasn't sure about the name at first. And then I got a gig working with Denise Valentine, who is a fabulous poet. She did historical things and these kinds of things. And she asked me, as a naturopath, to take care of her mother. And I was a part of her mother’s last few years and we got her from… she was supposed to expire in a week or two and we got her a couple of extra years and some quality of life. And at one point, I called Denise up, and I said to me how you feel about having a brother. And she said, “Huh?” I said, “I'm thinking about changing my last name.” She said, “I need a brother. Go ahead. But I should let you know I wasn't born a Valentine either.” I said, “Okay, fine. Either way, we're going to stick with it.” So, I became “Owen Valentine.” It seems to work for me. People liked the name. Owen Brown. I think if you look in history, Owen Brown was a rebel.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. You definitely fit that. 

Owen Valentine: Yeah. You've heard of John Brown’s father was Owen Brown. 

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, I did not know that.

Owen Valentine: And John Brown, his son, was named Owen Brown. 

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. 

Owen Valentine: So, historically, Owen Browns have been the guys you want to hang from a tree. And I was, like, we've got to change that up a little bit.

Tia Imani Hanna: Sure. Sure. 

Owen Valentine: Anyway, that just took you down a whole path of madness with that. Yeah. 

Tia Imani Hanna: It's a good path of madness. What was the “good trouble” John Lewis was talking about, “good trouble.”

Owen Valentine: Good trouble. 

Tia Imani Hanna: So that's another name for your next composition, right? 

Owen Valentine: I'm going to use it right. Good Trouble. I like it though.

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, you know, I got a million of them. Now, when did you become a naturopath? 

Owen Valentine: I think I was on my way to being a naturopath from the time I was probably six or seven years old and didn't know it. My grandmother would hold up a leaf and say, “Look at this leaf. See what it looks like? Okay, turn around, look at the back of it. Now, go out and find  this one in the woods.” Now today, that sounds scary. You sent a little black child out into the woods by himself, but times were different. I came back. I survived. I don't know how. Nothing ate me, you know, nobody snatched me. But I would go out in the woods, in the creek, or wherever she told me to look for it, and I would go find her whatever she sent me. So, she was actually teaching me. She said, “Dandelion is very important. If you can learn how to heal and eat this. You can learn what this is and what that is.” And so, by the time I was in my teens, those things were normal to me. Naturopathy starts for me, I think around 28, 29, when I made a serious life change. I gave dairy. I stopped eating meat for a while. I gave up preservatives. I gave up fluoride. I gave up everything and I started to make a complete different lifestyle change. And it led to me studying a lot and eventually going to school for it and apprenticing and studying under people, naturopathic doctors and other people who were herbalists and studying. And what started as a path of self-preservation became people asking me, “Hey, you doing something at 35 that most people only do at 16 and 18. How do you do that?” And there was a naturopathic doctor here in Philly, Dr. Frank Wyatt, who was also one of my Kung Fu brothers. He encouraged me to go back to school again. I was like back to school, not. He encouraged me to go back to school. And I went back to school and got my… it's a naturopathic doctor certificate and I continued studying and apprenticing even after that. And I went to some other schools for nutrition and for enzymes and this and for that and got my personal trainers’ certifications and got my this and got my that. And somewhere in the middle of it, just as a violinist yourself, things start to merge together. 

Tia Imani Hanna: Yes. 

Owen Valentine: So, what you learned from all these different arts start to merge. My calling food background started to make sense now because I had been introduced to all these Chinese herbs when I was like eight or nine years old. So that, my grandmother, all those things came together, and being a medic in the Army taught me to quickly assess a problem and focus on getting a person back up and functional. So, you combine the military assessment training with the biology background, because yes, I did go to school for biology first. With the herbs later, and it all made sense. Now it’s, “God, I just thought this was never going to make sense. All these gifts and things that I'm feeling inside me don't feel like they belong together.

Tia Imani Hanna: Well, of course they do.

Owen Valentine: They do, but I didn't… I was constantly made to feel strange. There's something wrong with you. You don't know if you want to be a doctor or a musician or an athlete, pick something. And then you find out, wow, I'm supposed to be all those things and some mixture of the three. So, when I work with artists as a voice teacher or a coach, I get their bodies ready. I get their diet ready. It gets the nutrition ready, get the this ready, get that ready and then get them out on the road. Get them out and do their thing. And so that… those things all started to merge together, you know. Yeah. What else you want to know?

Tia Imani Hanna: Well, now during the COVID situation, are you not meeting with people personally as much, are you doing a lot of things online or how are you getting people?

Owen Valentine: How am I working or how am I servicing people? 

Tia Imani Hanna: Well, yeah, both. 

Owen Valentine: A very select group of people wanted me to keep them healthy through the middle of all of this. And so, I've been working with those people through the COVID experience. I've had a couple of people who actively call me and say, “Listen, I was just told I have COVID. I'm sick, I'm tired. Save me.” And backtracking, I started making herbal formulas roughly 20 years ago. And there are some things that I had already invented that became useful. And so, I started sending out formulas to people and, thankfully, nobody I've worked with has expired. I got them through their COVID experience, kept their incidents of coughing to a minimum, no mucus issues, nobody choking and dying and all that kind of thing. So, I'm batting a hundred percent right now. Knock on wood. So, COVID has definitely slowed down business as an artist, as a naturopath, as a trainer. I got this beautiful gym here with all these wonderful things in it, but they keep shutting the world down. My take on COVID is they're closing the gyms. They threw gym… they said, “Number one place you're more likely to catch this is the gym”. I said, “Not really.” I disagree with that highly.” They threw the gyms under the bus, but they didn't close the liquor stores. They through the gym under the bus, but they didn't tell people to stop smoking. They threw the gyms under the bus, but they didn't close the candy stores or the pizza shops. And they got people drinking milk and doing lots of dairy and all these other wonderful things. But no, like, they threw fitness under the bus. I have my own personal take on… None of my comments are endorsed by the FDA, if you're listening. And I don't endorse them. So, good, we don’t endorse each other. It's a strange world we live in where health is what's dangerous. What pizza and alcohol and getting drunk is not. I'm like, “Really. Stop.” If you really want to be concerned about people's health, tell them to stop smoking and stop drinking, do this, and do that. But you've got to clean up if you want to make it through this.

Tia Imani Hanna: Exercise. Eat. Drink water.

Owen Valentine: Yes. I've been doing some... Yes. Yes. Come on, say more.

[laughter]

Tia Imani Hanna: And mental health, meditate. 

Owen Valentine: Yes.

Tia Imani Hanna: Movement

Owen Valentine: Yes. Come on.

Tia Imani Hanna: Stretch. Talk to your family and friends. 

Owen Valentine: Yes. Come on.

Owen Valentine: Yeah. Yeah. You're talking that medicine. Talk to me.

Tia Imani Hanna: All that I have to do more of, cause I still have to go to work too. 

Owen Valentine: It's making a decision. It's making a decision, and then making the decision into a religion. So, my first religion is health and fitness and staying connected. I believe we're given gifts. Take care of them. Life is a gift! Gotta love it. I love my violin and my instruments, and I got some fabulous ones, but at the end of the day, I got to take care of this body or I don't get to play. Yeah. I don't get to play. How is COVID affecting you in your real time? 

Tia Imani Hanna: In my real time, I work for FedEx full time. So, we are just at stress Christmas levels, and we have been that stress Christmas levels since February of last year. 

Owen Valentine: Wow.

Tia Imani Hanna: And it hasn't subsided. So, it's tiring. It's very tiring. 

Owen Valentine: Wow.

Tia Imani Hanna: I'm grateful to have income, but it's tiring. Which… so my outlet was creating this podcast was one of the things, because I was talking to other artists and saying, “Hey, keep doing what you're doing. Cause we need you.”

Owen Valentine: Right. This is a valuable thing. We need outlets and we need ways of expression. We need ways of documentation. It's all very important. Very important, you know. Yeah.

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah. So that's where we're at, but it's all good because things are moving in the right way. I think the stress of the elections has taken this toll on a lot of people. 

Owen Valentine: Yes.

Tia Imani Hanna: Hopefully, that will shift now, a little bit back to a little bit more normal scene in the way of not being so over the edge in one direction.

Owen Valentine: It just feels like… I just heard, they said 17 or 18 states are, like, voting to try and fight the election or something strange. 

Tia Imani Hanna: Yeah, something strange.

Owen Valentine: Of course, the 17 that didn't, that were swung in the other direction. These are truly strange times. Nothing like it. 

Tia Imani Hanna: Did you see that there was a Netflix documentary called the social. …I think it's called the “Social Dilemma” or the social…

Owen Valentine: Yes. Excellent. Excellent.

Tia Imani Hanna: So, that made a lot of sense to me how, if you only see the algorithm that shows you only what you want to see, of course, you're going to all get skewed in one direction and think that your whole world is the only world that there is.

Owen Valentine: Exactly. Exactly. 

Tia Imani Hanna: So that's another reason I have this podcast. 

Owen Valentine: What you're doing will keep a lot of musicians sane, so please don't stop. Keep doing it.

Tia Imani Hanna: I’m just grateful you all are coming on and telling your stories and inciting people to exercise and stuff, like myself.

Owen Valentine: Yeah. Yeah. Well, last week I did 120 pull-ups and 75… 75, 78 pushups and I got that done all within a half an hour and ran up out of here. And so, I'm like, I make sure that I keep moving. You gotta stay strong. You need endurance, not just for the stage, but for life. Keeping my diet clean. This year I planted a garden. And, which makes sense for the old Fiddler to be in the garden and doing his thing. I don't know if you knew this, but ‘Fiddler’ used to be the name that they gave to the plantation fiddler there that was working during the time of indentured servitude, otherwise known as slavery in America and everybody was called by their job. So, they weren't necessarily given a name. So, you were ‘Fiddler’ and the other person over there might be a person who was the person who knitted the cotton together and whatever your job was, you’re given that. The Fiddler title that I used to use was also a tribute to those first musicians. But that's like the first gig in this country, is playing for those kinds of things. I think like I've come full circle because I'm serving my community and working on my health and still able to tell the stories, the connections with the violin and its precursors. How in crossing the oceans and starting with those stringed instruments in Africa and how the instruments come here. By the way, I play Kora now. I had a fine Kora made, I can't think of the brother’s name, but it's a fine instrument. And I just kept developing that thing. But I look at it now. It's like, from wanting to be a musician only to going through the medical and the naturopath thing to getting serious, really seriously thrown in the music, and having to do the teaching and the crafting, working inside the community thing. To writing. I wrote the music for a show called “Transformation,” which premiered at Lincoln Center. And it was all about the transformation of the music, how it transformed from Africa to here. 

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, fantastic. When was that? 

Owen Valentine: This was 2014. 

Tia Imani Hanna: Okay. 

Owen Valentine: Yeah, 2014, and we had a standing room only audience and standing ovations at the end of the show. It was wonderful.

Tia Imani Hanna: Now is any of this available for sale anywhere? 

Owen Valentine: It's not. This was a project I shared with Jason Samuel Smith, who is a fabulous dancer and an amazing talent. “Bring in The Noise, Bring in The Funk” and numerous other things since. He's in that company with… may have seen him dance at the White House with Savion Glover and a lot of other things. But we did this project together and we took him to the ? Vineyard and stayed there for a week and I did a residency, and we did a bunch of wonderful things, but it's not available. He and I need to do the whole show and get a fine taping of the whole thing and put it out. I'll take your idea. That's your second one. You’re batting two and two. 

Tia Imani Hanna: Told ya. They come, they come. That's part of my thing. I just pull them down and say them, no matter who it’s for.

Owen Valentine: I don't know why we didn't. Why did we do… we just did the live thing and left it there. But no, it needs to be a recorded show that you can watch. 

Tia Imani Hanna: That’s right.

Owen Valentine: Cause it had music. It had… there was an intensity. There was a storytelling. Onaje Allen Gumbs was a part of the last production that we did. We had some wonderful players. Tyrone Brown was the first bassist on the show. Bill Meeks was on keys in the beginning. Harry Butch Reed later on. We had Shima Moja on bass. Wonderful, just wonderful folks, wonderful folks. And I look at it and I go, yeah, I've gone full circle with the historical thing. That was a part of my initial identification. Through the music, through the health, through the teaching, and back to history again. Yeah. So yeah, it's been a good thing. 

Tia Imani Hanna: I just the pleasure and the honor of playing at the Detroit Jazz Festival, the virtual one, this year with my aunt Naima. Thank you. Naima Shamborguer, who is a vocalist in Detroit. It was called Sister Strings: Roots, Voice, and Drums. And we did the same thing. We took music from different periods and we put our spin on them and did original works. It was wonderful. Hopefully, soon, the videos will be out, cause they're working on that right now.

Owen Valentine: Awesome. Awesome. I look forward to hearing it and seeing it myself. This sounds awesome. The project I did with Denise Valentine, we did… the last thing…. this is after we did our initial thing at the Philadelphia Museum. She called. She put my name in and they called me up for this project for Fairmont Park, where they walk these trails. And there's some… she's like the voice of culture and speaking about what each trail meant. And they had me come through and I played like a good ten instruments on this thing. And so, if you go to Fairmont Park and go through the trails, you'll hear all of these sounds and violin and background vocals and harmonica and drums. I'm playing a Cajon and a bunch of other things on there. And I'm like, yeah, that's nice to leave a little piece of  history from your talent, you know, so please continue to do just what you're doing. Keep recording and submitting more stuff so we get more, you know.

Tia Imani Hanna: Like I say on almost every show, I've talked to people, people say, what do we do surviving this whole time, period. I say, “Make Art.” That's what we do. 

Owen Valentine: That's what we do. We make art. Yeah. We make art. Yep.

Tia Imani Hanna: So where can we find you? The best places to find you online. 

Owen Valentine: Okay. Let's talk about a few things. Okay. I'll put out a love song back at the beginning of this year. I should have put out a horror soundtrack, then I would have been in touch with 2020. It was like, “I put out a love song. Ain’t nobody want to hear no love song right after that.” That was back in February. So, I got a song out called “Valentine” by Owen Valentine. If you go on all of the social media platforms, from Apple Music, to Spotify, or YouTube, wherever you go out. There’s a video out there. There's a bunch of things out there. Owen Valentine. And the song is called “Valentine.” And I put a little love song for Valentine's Day for the lovers and for people to enjoy. 

[“Valentine” by Owen Valentine plays here] 

Owen Valentine: I have a lot of music sitting in a can, just waiting for the right moment where I feel like it's time to give it a push, but I want to start the year off with a bang and start doing a bunch of songs. Just do a bunch of things. I'd like to see that and see guys stop by Instagram. I'm pretty active on there. And that is “The Owen Valentine,” T H E O W E N Valentine. Also, on Facebook. Also, on Twitter. There's an “Owen Valentine… “theowenvalentine.com” And, yeah, just stay tuned for lots of great music cause that's… I've got some wonderful stuff in the can. Like I listen to it and go ‘this is amazing’. I'm singing and playing percussions, on harmonica and keys and bass and all this stuff on these tracks and I'm listening to it. It's great. And the guy who's producer on a lot of these tracks used to be an engineer for Prince. 

Tia Imani Hanna: Oh, fantastic.

Owen Valentine: Yep. So, it all came around again and he was like, “You are doing that thing?” He said, “And you've got…”, it's not like some guys when they play everything, they sound like the same person on everything. I have different personalities. I don't know how to explain that one, but it's like different parts. Wow. Completely different attitude as a bass player than I do as a violinist. Completely different on keys than on percussions, versus harmonica, they're like, they're all different. I'm thankful for the ability to be able to do that. But I think you'll enjoy the work. Look on… just for a little taste. The love song takes you back to the kind of stuff that came out in the seventies and eighties, but something good for your heart. And that's called “Valentine.” Look for that one first and then expect to see a lot of stuff coming out, from Jazz, to R & B, to Reggae to World Music. For a discography of… take a listen to Talib Kwali's “Four Women,” it's called. Yeah. And that was on Reflections Eternal. “For Love, part one,” which was on Rawkus Records. Santana’s song called “After Supernatural.” Common's “Sun God.”  There's the Little Kim “La Bella Mafia” album. There’s quite a few things out there. Something with Mary .J Blige, a bunch of stuff out there. I'm just glad for the opportunity to have a chance to make music and keep going. And if I'm blessed to do that another 60, 70 years, I'll be happy.

Tia Imani Hanna: I'm happy you're doing it. And, if I go on your Facebook feed, that you're always working out. So, it's get up and move. You're telling everybody, “Get up and move!” I'm like, “Yes. Okay. Okay. I'm doing it.”

Owen Valentine: Yay! I'm going to give you a shout out, like I give everybody a shout in between working out. I'll give you a shout. Let me ask you a question. I got a violin joke for you, or it's a violin funny. I was at a John Blake concert and I want to say that this was around 2007…8, somewhere in and around there. And John is playing, and I'm sitting in the front row, and I don't think he knew I was there. And at some point, he looks down, the lights must have went through, and his eyes get real wide. He goes, “Wow!” Into the mic, and he said, “Owen Brown.” I was like, oh man, “Fiiddla.” Oh God, he's about to give it to me. Because Johnny had a big sense of humor. I'll tell you another one called Fiddler Williams had a big sense of humor. So, John looks down at me and he goes, “Owen Brown used to be one of my students years ago. Now he takes his shirt off and plays the violin.” He said,  “I would take my shirt off, but y'all might run about here.” [laughter] I'm so grateful to all of the violinists, including yourself. Because we are part of the community. These new guys, I look at them as people who followed in 15, 20, 25, 30 years ago, I was running around on stage or rolling on the floor with the violin, flexing my muscles for the ladies and all that kind of stuff back in the eighties. And now they've got Damien Escobar and Lee England and all of the younger cats flexing and licking their lips while they played the violin. Nothing but strings and all that. But then we got the more tasteful people like Tia Hanna.

Tia Imani Hanna: I was never going to do the take off my shirt and play, but there you go. 

Owen Valentine: Oh, no, you do that. You gonna create a new trend. Actually, I'll pay extra for that one. Remember Tia Hanna. She's the first woman to take her shirt off and play the violin. Yeah, I remember her. That was my idea. You said you got a lot of ideas. This is my idea. Thank you for the opportunity to do this. 

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you. So, it was really great talking with you and thanks for being on Tia Time today.

Owen Valentine: Awesome. Awesome.

Tia Imani Hanna: Thank you for joining us this week on Tia Time with Artists. Make sure to visit our website, tiaviolin.com, where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes and never miss an episode. Please leave us a rating wherever you listen to podcasts. We really appreciate your comments, and we'll mine them to bring you more amazing episodes. 

I’d like to thank this inaugural season's sponsors: The folks at Jazz Alliance of Mid-Michigan or JAMM, Michigan ArtShare, a program of Michigan State University Extension is a partner in supporting the Tia Time podcast, and Shambones Music. Without their support this podcast would not be possible. Thank you so much. If you would also like to contribute to the show, you can find us on https://www.patreon.com/TiaTime1.

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