Ted Mason

About Ted Mason

Ted Mason is a former member of the multiplatinum British rock/pop band Modern
English. The band has sold over six million records in the United States, with hit songs such as “Melt with you,” “Hands across the Sea,”  “Ricochet Days,” “16 Days,” to name a few. He is the President of Mi5 Recordings Universal Music Group in New York, an award-winning producer, composer (composing, packaging/producing/marketing the EMI/mi5 release and producing/composing the music for the Academy Award winning HBO documentary, Prudence’s Song) as well as a lead guitarist, singer, songwriter.  His own Record Label Mi5 Recordings, which is financed by and part of the Universal Music Group is dedicated to diversity, art and opportunities for all artists (through the constraints of the Universal system). 

In addition to playing in Modern English, Mr. Mason’s versatile music skills has enabled him to work as a producer/musician with a wide range of artists, including AKON, Chris Brown, Mary J Blige, Jeff Beck, Robert Plant, Santana, Pharrell Williams, Common, May j Blige, Dead Prez, Midge Ure, Bob Geldoff, the Verve, Jesus and the Mary Chain, Prince, Papa Wemba, Cheb Khaled, Youssou N’dour , Sandra Bernhard, Real Roxanne, Macy Grey, Thomas Mapfumo, and Peter Gabriel. He has successfully released back catalog and obscure Modern English tracks through his label as well as a huge roster of artists fromHip Hop to Africa Soukous. He now performs as a solo artist in the United States, Europe and Africa, blending British Rock with World, Rai and African music.

Producing and Record Releases:

Mr. Mason has worked as a producer/musician with such artists as AKON, Chris Brown,
Mary J Blige, Common, Pharrell Williams Jeff Beck, Robert Plant, Santana, Dead Prez, Midge Ure,Bob Geldoff, the Verve, Jesus and the Mary Chain, Prince, Papa Wemba, Khaled, Youssou N’dour, Sandra Bernhard, Real Roxanne, Macy Grey, Thomas Mapfumo, and Peter Gabriel. In
2010 he has toured in Central Africa backed by Rwanda's Soukous All Stars and performed a duet with Lokua Kanza. His work in Africa led to his producing the Fes Pad concert series for the country of Rwanda. He is currently producing a new solo album, an album with Hip Hop superstars Mobb Deep, and a duet with Wyclef Jean and Mona Lisa.



Film Production

Mr. Mason has also worked as a composer and film producer on numerous films, including the HBO Academy Award winning Documentary film project Music by Prudence, directed Roger Ross Williams. Past directors he was worked with includes Milos Forman. Mr. Mason collaborated closely with his wife Jennifer Brunetti, (former Partner of of FBi Productions, Inc.) in producing video, film, and live concert events, most notably the award-winning Volvo for Life Awards. For this groundbreaking branding and grassroots initiative, Ted Mason booked and worked with such acts as Sheryl Crow, Ziggy Marley, Avril Lavigne, and Suzanne Vega.

Album The Road to Mecca

The Road to Mecca is a more complex thematically and musically offering than most contemporary rock/pop-oriented projects.
 
Accordingly, when we produce its accompanying videos in late April this year, we must reflect The Road’s core themes and narrative arc: speaking of and about Europeans (and communities dominated by those of European descent) vis-à-vis the changing demographic in contemporary Western societies, and what this entails regarding the historical set of “norms” and the “Other.”  
 
The British (THE RAJ) in subjugated India, which was Britain's “Jewel In the Crown” is what I have loosely based the storyline in “The Road To Mecca,” tying British colonialism to American and American Corporate Colonialism.  This jewel the British burnished through an ideology of racist white superiority, which facilitated the British ((expired link)., English, Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish, and combinations therein) the rather base exploitation of India’s natural resources, its huge labor pool, its captive huge market, and its purpose and ability to absorb Great Britain’s unwanted and less privileged working-classes and middle-classes whereby white colonialist Britons of marginal backgrounds and means could become the ruling elite in India simply by dint of their “superior white” race. Accordingly, the British colonial overseers rendered interracial marriage and cohabitation –– or any other intimate fraternization according equality to the “natives” –– as either illegal or socially taboo. 


Concept of the The Road to Mecca is an extended play upon “First World” unquestioned aspirations and meta-themes, (expired link)., The Road to Happiness (in the United States, “the road to happiness” signifies the means to career success, fame/notoriety, money; “salvation” through a religious doctrine espousing wealth, subordination of the “Other,” violence, and internal and external colonialism; the cult of death through masculine models of militarism, individualized acts of violence, and dominance and power, especially directed toward nonwhites, women, non-Christian (Right-wing, evangelical/fundamentalist variants); the “ freedom to worship” –– but not to disbelieve –– solely at Christian, preferably Protestant Evangelical/Fundamentalist churches and a conservative doctrinaire Catholic Church; the fetishization of nationalist constructs of America, above all pre-Civil War, Southern agrarian, colonial/expansionist, and white-nationalist constructs of “nation” and “people.”).
 
“Mecca” is the doctrinal and spiritual center of Islam and its ethos of salvation, and because of this geographical and cultural centrality, “Mecca” has taken, ironically, a universalist meaning in English idioms for describing geographic spaces of importance, (expired link)., Manhattan was the “Mecca” of Bebop; San Francisco was the “Mecca” of the Hippie movement in the mid 1960s; Williamsburg, Brooklyn and Uptown, Oakland are the East and West Coast “Meccas” of hipster culture and communities, etc.
 
But the term “Mecca” serves as another kind of trope for white nationalists in European countries and their (thus far) white-dominated colonial offspring, first and foremost the United States, followed by the likes of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and to a lesser extend, Argentina, Chile, and other South American countries in which the ruling European Spaniards (“whites”) kept le Métissage, or more exactingly, Mestizos, at a minimum. 

Now, the white nationalists –– a group ranging from the quasi-literate, disaffected white working classes to the Ivy and like-positioned school-educated clerisy of such Right-wing media as The National Review, The Forward, Commentary, et al. –– of the United States join their European Right-wing counterparts in bemoaning “Eurabia” (an outright racist conception of Europe falling to the Muslim “hordes”). In this light,   “Mecca” now represents the fount, the breeding ground of a new "Other” –– the supposed “savages,” “terrorists," and “Islamo-Facists” (a fraud of a term, given that Robert Paxton, the dean of Fascism studies, has properly identified Fascism as a Right-wing political/cultural phenomenon whose birth and evolution is largely exclusive to Western democratic nation states). Indeed, “Mecca”now  represents the hive from which emerge the new “Indians,” the new “criminal blacks,” the new East European (Jewish) and Southern European (Italian/Sicilian) “mobs,” “anarchists,” “brigands,” “swarthy beasts,” etc., the new “Yellow Hordes,” and animalistic “Cholos,” et al. 
 
And these new “Others” threatening “Judeo-Christian civilization” and “Our Way of Life” are the Arabs, Algerians, Moroccans, Pakistanis, etc.
 
In vast segments of American society and discourse, but primarily of the conservative culture and discourse espoused and expanded by the so-called Reagan revolution, the new “Others” are all terrorists who must prove their “loyalty” (whiteness), and anyone who displays a sympathy to these “peoples,” or any skepticism about the very construct, of the new “Other” are themselves traitors by way of “PC,” a Right-wing all-purpose epithet cum updating of the terms, “communist,” “socialist,” and “commie.”

 
The Road draws upon popular musical styles emanating from the West over the past six decades –– rock, funk, Jazz, pop, blues, soul, classical, etc. –– and fuses it with idioms from the Muslim and Euro-Muslim and African communities - Rai, Soukous, etc., idioms that are themselves deeply imbued with Western popular exponents, ranging from Jay-Z to the Beatles, and from Timberlake to James Brown and Elvis Presley.
 

Half of the musicians on the album are of Muslim faith and/or from Algeria, a nation intimately shaped and torn asunder through its encounter with Latin-European colonialism (France).

The album begins with intimations of British Colonialism and traces its river to the new Colonialism that is now the American legacy, one imposed by direct military intervention and “other means.” Indeed, the Republic has long extended its cultural and economic colonization via the relentless phalanxes of McDonald’s, Hollywood, and Standard Oil, whose army of cadres both complement and outlast our own Roman centurions of the 3rd Brigade, 1st Cavalry, and the like.  
 
In form and in content, albeit in subtly subversive guise of World Punked Funk groves, The Road invokes Sartre’s notion of Complicity, that is to say, the ways in which even the most culturally aware and “conscientious” of Western Leftists nonetheless enjoy the benefits of Empire, notably the cheap food, the mass of technological toys, the oceans of fossil fuels, and self-enriching economies of scale and near slave labor imposed upon the “Other” in their “undeveloped” Meccas.

The song that really distills the album’s fusion of style, play, and moral outrage is Deep in Your Jungle. Henry Morton Stanley (portrayed in the song) represented the Man Who Would Be King, the less-than-English tribal son of the UK (Stanley was Welsh) who had his lessers strap his boots, as it were.  Stanley reinvented himself as the “American Explorer,” a tried-and-true fiction based on the earlier variants of European “discoverers” of worlds that were, of course, already there, already “discovered,” and already “civilized.” In Stanley-I-Presume’s telling, he discovered Deepest Darkest Africa, bringing to the Other the "light" the British "missed" (Deepest, Darkest Africa was Britain’s racialized trop for Africa, one that had a built-in justification for the British and other European imperialists' appallingly unjustified rule upon the darker "Other").  
 
The colonialism of which the album addresses of course has a deeply personal point of origin, and one that dovetails personal and historical in the refracting prism of family and the culture from which a particular family arose. My father is a Northern Englishman. The tropes, allegories, and identities that shaped him came to me via him and countless other Britons. But my experience was further complicated ––  or perhaps “ complexioned” –– by the fact that my mother is an “Other,” a Catholic Nicaraguan (the four members of the Beatles share a similar intimate encounter with “whiteness,” in that while they were British, they were never really part of the ruling tribe, The English: the Beatles hail from largely Celtic, Catholic origins, among the defining elements that inform so much of Northern English working-class culture of dissent). 

This distillation of the “norm” (English, Protestant) and the “Other” in the most intimate society (the family) has compelled a decidedly visceral understanding of identity creation and power that burns and seethes in ways that the academic responses can never quite approximate (“Can’t Touch This!”). In other words, Please Mr. Postman kicked out the jams in ways that please Ms. Post-modern, Post-Colonial, Post-Structural, et al, would never do.
 
But both an arch and an academic can discern that the Pax Americana brings light to the dark via the torch of racism, and all of the power, pleasure, purpose, and possibilities such an ideology accords the relatively few at the expense of the many.
 
Because the American population is so militantly insular, and their colonialism exported through major corporations, there is a willful, fundamentalist misunderstanding, charitably put, of other cultures, Unlike Europe, the “Frontier” myth burns brightly, a flame and light that blinds much of the “All American” to the reality of cultural mixing. The American Frontier has its new “savage” to extirpate, those of Muslim faith. However, this trope, this allegory of domination, subjugation, and “civilizing” of the Other has a competing narrative, a counterweight that holds forth in the contemporary and conscious experience in large segments of European society today, a tender irony given that the American spoiling of the Garden, as Fitzgerald so memorably evoked in the denouement of The Great Gatsby, was carried out by the rejected sons and daughters of Europe itself.

Today, Europe grapples with the Right-wing’s racist trope of Euroarabia via an ongoing cultural, social, and political struggle to understand the new Europe of multiracial formation –– not mere “tolerance” –– and that formation is occurring day by day, city by city, and indeed, family by family. 

These consciously articulated encounters have illuminated some questions about “terrorism” (not yet the answers, but possibly a more honest acknowledgement of the history of imperialism in the realms of economics, culture, sexuality, the body and mind of a civilization and its, dare one say it, discontents). Notably, this very dynamic of re-imagining the world is playing out in an arising generation, here and now, in the United States.
 
But the Republic born of the blood of slavery and conquest, fed on the nurture of myths, lies, and hypocrisy, and frightened of uttering any skepticism about a legacy that is but not fixed, can strangely tell Tchaikovsky the News when and where the gavel finds the groove, downloaded, uploaded, Uptown, Downtown, Down and Out, and but not ever Forgotten. 

So there you have it. That is what the album is about.

The Road To Mecca is the first release on the Mi5 Recordings imprint label: Guitar Player Records (Guitar Player Magazine).  It is a Brit Rock, World Music, Rai! fusion album bejeweled and bejangled with Arab percussion, sitars, classical strings, and a quite a bit of virtuoso Guitar (yeah, that IS what you call a guitarist who can master and fuse Bebop, Classical, Shred, World, and anything and everything in between) from the Former Modern English Guitarist/co songwriter/manager. 

Concept Album (cinematic in scope) The Road to Mecca is an extended pun and trop in its own right (write?):  The Road to Happiness; Mecca is the center of Islam and salvation, and the new "Other" for the West is People of Muslim faith, (Persian's and Arabs, Algerians, Moroccans etc.).  Most of the musicians on the album are of Muslim faith or from Francophone Algeria, and all are renowned in their own right –– which amounts to a Little Help from my Friends: U-Cef, Dave Eggars, Rachid Taha, Timmy Allen, Khaled, and Jeff Beck.

The album is about British Colonialism and the new Colonialism, the mission and legacy now in the hands of the American Imperium.

The song that perhaps most succinctly critiques, questions, and articulates the album’s themes is Deep in Your Jungle. Nineteenth-century Henry Morton Stanley reinvented himself as the “American Explorer,” a tried-and-true fiction based on the earlier variants of European “discoverers” of worlds that were, of course, already there, already “discovered,” and already “civilized.”
 
The Road to Mecca explores Stanley and the parent myths that begot him, myths to which he left his improvisations, and for and upon which The Road makes its trip all the more trippy.