Sheila in the Key of E
She lived the The Glamorous Life, now the famed percussionist, singer, composer delivers a new album and a moving memoir
In the 70s, Sheila Escovedo laid down Latin jazz/fusion tracks with the likes of George Duke, Herbie Hancock, Billy Cobham and her father, percussion maestro Pete Escovedo. She logged thousands of touring and recording dates with Quincy Jones, Marvin Gaye, Lionel Richie and Ringo Starr, to name a very select few. But most people know her as Sheila E., the hip, exotic, Prince protégé who lived the “Glamorous Life” and played the hell out the timbales in the following decade.
Her success came with great pain. Though she was raised in a loving, supportive family that was rich in culture and love, she dealt with racism, poverty, sexism and sexual abuse. This summer Escovedo released two major projects: a new CD Icon, her most ambitious work to date, released on her own Stiletto Flats label in June; and a moving memoir, The Beat of My Drum, which debuted in September, revealing what makes her the syncopated soul survivor she is.
“The record is more of who, and where I am now, as a person,” Escovedo says from Boston, where she was teaching a clinic at Berklee College of Music. “I’m glad that I’m continuing to create music.”
The sixteen-track CD, produced, co-written and arranged by Escovedo, is an eclectic yet organic mélange of pop, Latin pop, folkloric, soul and hip-hop influences, supported by her band—her father on percussion, mother Juanita on vocals, and her younger brothers, Juan on saxophone and Peter Michael on percussion, and of course, her powerful drumming. The opening track “Butterfly”—her solo multi-track, supersonic percussion tour-de-force—features congas, djembe and bongos.
“I wanted to open the record for those who didn’t remember that I know how to play,” she says with a sly laugh, “and to play something from the heart and represent the foundation of who I am.”
Icon ranges from Santana-style, uptempo numbers and lush ballads to Caribbean-tinged tracks and R&B style selections. “Mona Lisa” is Escovedo’s reimaging of Leonardo Da Vinci’s enigmatic portrait as a wife who “only wanted to dance.” “Leader of the Band” showcases Prince on piano, and papa Escovedo soloing. “Fiesta” is a reggaeton-ish anthem, and “Girl Like Me” is a song about letting go of baggage featuring neo-soul chanteuse Ledisi. MC Lyte makes returns to the mic on the catchy, head-bobbing “Nasty Thangs.” “Old Skool” is an anti-autotune tribute to her dad’s mainstream and Latin jazz roots, and “Oakland in Da House” pays tribute to Escovedo’s musical and cultural hometown heroes, and is straight outta James Brown and is is the perfect playlist mate to Prince’s “Sexy MF.”
“I hope people understand how important music is to my family,” she says. “The music of the Bay Area—I talk about it on the record and in the book—made me the musician and artist that I am today.”
“My foundation is Latin jazz with my dad. But I was also listening to Sly Stone, Larry Graham, The Pointer Sisters, Tower of Power and The Grateful Dead. There are so many bands and artists that have come from the Bay Area that have influenced me.”
Escovedo’s Northern California origins and the nurturing environment of her talented family form the backbone of her story in her memoir, The Beat of My Drum. She started playing at the age of three and performed in public with her dad two years later. But her magical musical beginnings were shattered when she was raped by a distant relative. Making matters worse, she suffered similar violations from other cousins. “It was my little dirty secret, and I locked it away in the dark where no one could see it,” she writes. “I went from a being a carefree little girl from a happy, loving home to someone who felt scared and anxious all the time.”
It would be decades later when she would deal with her abuse publicly.
“I started talking about it in my early thirties,” she says now. “And once you start sharing, you realize that the things you’ve been holding in and the anger. You start feeling better about yourself [when you learn that] other people have similar stories. You can let those things go, and start living your life, and forgive, and move forward and try to grow.”
We also learn in the book that she dropped out of high school in the tenth grade and started playing professionally with her dad, first in his pioneering jazz-fusion band Azteca, which also featured her uncle, Coke Escovedo. Around the age of nineteen, she fell in love with Carlos Santana, a family friend who employed her dad, only to break off their union when she found out he was married. And of course, there’s her complicated relationship with Prince, who encouraged her to sing co-lead on his “Erotic City” track and morphed her into the flamboyant headliner Sheila E. He signed her to his label and management team. Under his tutelage, she became a pop icon with hits like “The Glamorous Life” and “A Love Bizarre.” She released two more albums under his direction, Romance 1600 and Sex Cymbal.
“I’d gone from wearing tennis shoes and shorts to romantic and beautiful seventeen century-themed swash-buckling costumes,” she recollects in the book. “I was writing songs, making movies performing at [sold out] shows and breaking fashion boundaries.” Her relationship with Prince progressed from friendship to love. But she left him musically and professionally after he refused to give her time off to attend her grandmother’s funeral.
She has since remained friends with both Prince and Santana. “[Carlos and Prince] both released their music to the world at a time when no one heard music like that before,” she says now. “With Carlos, it was rock ‘n’ roll with percussion, it sounded so natural. It was the same with Prince: he listened to, and was heavily influenced by, a lot of Bay Area musicians, [but] he took it to a different place. He said, ‘Hey, I don’t have to use drums. I can have songs with no basslines.’ He wasn’t afraid to experiment. They both came at a time when they both created their own sound.”
The book also details how after years of Escovedo’s grueling tours, gigs and twelve hour rehearsals, her body started to shut down in the 90s, and she suffered a punctured lung from an acupuncture session gone wrong. During that turbulent time she embraced a higher power. “I lay in my bed crying and praying to God for another chance,” she writes. ‘Please Father God. I’ll do whatever you want me to do.’” It was also during this time that she confronted and forgave some of the relatives who abused her.
Escovedo reveals other life challenges in The Beat of My Own Drum. “I was surrounded by lots of amped-up, lusty guys who thought it was just a matter of time before I accepted their advances and slept with them,” she writes. “They couldn’t have been more wrong.” She also had to battle with neighborhood bullies over her racial identity, leading her to briefly join a gang and carry a switchblade for protection.
“Growing up, we had to choose between black and white; good hair, bad hair; it was crazy,” she recalls. “And growing up in the Black Panther movement, there was no middle ground. My family on my mother’s side is from New Orleans. We have dark-skinned Creoles with green eyes, and light-skinned Creoles with green and blue eyes; some that look African-American, but they’re not; some that look white and they’re not. In our family, we marry all ethnicities: we represent the world. We have Filipinos, Asians, Japanese, you name it. Looking at the world now, things have gotten better. And we’ve seen our type of family represented on TV and film. Things have changed a lot.”
She also suffered musical prejudice. When she appeared in the hip-hop movie Krush Groove, some of the cast members gave her the cold shoulder, wrongly perceiving that because she was a musician, she looked down on rap. And even though she was Tito Puente’s goddaughter, many New York-based Latino musicians dissed her and her father because they weren’t Afro-Cuban or Puerto Rican and were from the West Coast.
“Latin jazz and salsa are played differently on the East and West Coasts,” she says. “In the East, you can’t waiver how you played the clave (the Afro-Cuban five-beat rhythmic beat that much of Latin music is based on). But on the West Coast, we played with a little more freedom to express ourselves. There was a rivalry between the coasts that we didn’t know about until my dad and Tito were hanging out in New York. We sat in, and they turned the beat around on us purposely. They did it to make us look bad. Now we’re all friends, and many of those musicians have passed away. But that’s how it was in the beginning.”
No one is dissing Sheila Escovedo now. Healthy and happy, with an engaging new book, a propulsive and poetic CD, and her Elevate Oakland Foundation, which helps victims of child abuse through exposure to the arts, her horizons are limitless. “I’ve always dictated what I want to do. I never took no for an answer,” she says. “And anyone who said no to me, I made sure that I proved them wrong.”
Follow Eugene Holley Jr. on Twitter @eugeneholley
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