Happy Birthday Charles Stepney!!!
!!! Happy Birthday, Maestro !!!
Charles Stepney
born March 26th, 1931
Celebrate Charles Stepney's birthday today, Tuesday March 26th, with a special conversation hosted by The Stepney Sisters featuring Chicago House music legend Terry Hunter, James Poyser of The Roots, Kitty Haywood and several others. During this virtual event, the family will also be sharing a new track, i.e. once in a lifetime collaboration that merges Stepney’s work with house music! Get ready to tune in at 7pm Chicago time. The link will be shared on Tuesday, stay posted via @stepneysisters on social channels.
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Charles Stepney - Out of the Shadows documentary series
Available via Wax Poetics: Charles Stepney: Out of the Shadows – a four part web series directed by Chicago documentarian Brian Ashby (known for his work on Scrappers, The Area, Hairy Who & The Chicago Imagists, and a forthcoming film about Damon Locks and Black Monument Ensemble).
Episode One shed light on Stepney at work in his basement studio on the Southside of Chicago, Episode Two highlighted the circumstances around Stepney’s death in 1976, and Episode Three looked at the entanglement of Stepney's rights and royalties that his family has inherited and struggled with for decades...
The fourth and final episode "A Rotary Connection" documents the formulation of Rotary Connection 222 - a new large ensemble (led by International Anthem artist Junius Paul, with creative direction from the Stepney Family) that performed the music of Charles Stepney across multiple events in Chicago. The event series, which was lovingly dubbed the "Summer of Stepney," ran concurrently with our album campaign for Step on Step, and culminated with an epic performance by Rotary Connection 222 on the grand stage of Millennium Park's Pritzker Pavilion in Downtown Chicago.
Watch All Four Episodes of
Charles Stepney: Out of the Shadows
"Stepney and the Through Line"
In Vol.1 of our first zine - Tracing the Lines - editor David Brown reflected on Stepney's uncanny ability to guide artists towards fully formed sounds while providing wild arrangements. He also delves into the idea of the "mythical producer" and how Stepney's approach to music differed from that stereotype. Read the article through the link below and/or grab your self a hard copy of the zine via our Bandcamp page.
Have You Heard...
Recorded live in May 2022 at the Summer of Stepney Kickoff Party on the front porch of The Hideout, International Anthem podcast producer/host Ayana Contreras spoke with Charles Stepney's daughters Eibur, Charlene, and Chanté. In an episode dedicated to Step on Step, The Stepney Sisters share personal stories and memories about growing up with the soundtrack of their father working on music at home, as well as what drives them to celebrate their father's legacy.
The episode was supported in part by Dusty Groove, an independent record store and online retailer headquartered in Chicago, Illinois.
IARC0055
Charles Stepney
Step on Step
2xLP, CD, Digital album available now
International Anthem proudly presents Step on Step, a double LP collection of home recordings marking the de-facto eponymous debut album by enigmatic producer, arranger, and composer Charles Stepney (1931-1976). The music that makes up Step on Step was created by Stepney alone, in the basement of his home on the Southside of Chicago, sometime in the late 1960s and early 1970s, before his untimely death in 1976.
In the decades since his passing, the presence of Stepney’s name in liner notes and on vinyl labels has become a seal of quality for record collectors, music historians, and aficionados, while his sound has been used by countless samplers in the hip-hop world including Kanye West, A Tribe Called Quest, The Fugees, MF Doom, and Madlib. A Chicago born and bred arranger, producer, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter, Stepney is known for his work with Earth, Wind & Fire, Deniece Williams, and Ramsey Lewis, and as a staff producer for Chess Records in the 1960s, where he was an essential creative force behind seminal recordings by Rotary Connection, Minnie Riperton, Marlena Shaw, Muddy Waters, Howlin Wolf, Terry Callier, The Dells, The Emotions, and many more. But in comparison to the post-mortem renown of his sound, or the music he created and the artists he supported while he was alive, Stepney is a greatly under-appreciated figure… a genius relegated to the shadows.
Step on Step comes almost 50 years after his passing and features 23 tracks, most of which are original compositions by Stepney that were never again recorded by him or any other artist. It also features prototypical, seedling-style demos of Stepney compositions for Earth, Wind & Fire, including “That’s The Way of The World,” “Imagination,” and “On Your Face,” as well as the original demo version of “Black Gold.”
Step on Step's release brought on excitement from many longtime fans of Stepney’s work, including Tyler The Creator (who played “Daddy’s Diddies” on his NTS Radio show while bantering: “Charles Stepney…Genius!”), Elton John (who told The Guardian: "What he was doing was like nothing else: beautiful string parts, really bold, funky, different… Charles Stepney would have been my arranger of choice, without question”), Chaka Khan (who exclaimed: “Oh my God! That man... Hey Love by Rotary Connection – that’s my frickin’ album”), and Floating Points (who shared: "Stepney’s music is hugely important to me… those arrangements and that recording sound helped shape the way I write music”), among many many others.
*Deluxe Vinyl Package*
Certified Gold color vinyl
Step on Step comes on two 140-gram vinyl LPs (pressed by Pallas in Germany and Smashed Plastic in Chicago) inside a reverse-board gatefold jacket, with IARC obi strip and dome-patterned inner-sleeves.
And, as always, we have a limited edition color vinyl option for the first pressing only, available via our Bandcamp page only, which is 555 copies of *Certified Gold* color vinyl.
SPECIAL OFFER, FOR MARCH 26th ONLY:
get 22.22% off of Step on Step via our Bandcamp page
Distribution via RedEye for US, Canada, North & South America
This album will also be available on CD, Cassette, and Classic Black Vinyl (same package specs as listed above).
Retailers in the United States or Canada or anywhere else inside of North, South and Central America... Please reach out to your sales rep at RedEye Worldwide if you are interested in making wholesale purchases of this album, or any other album in our catalog. Don't yet have a RedEye rep? Please just reach out to us and we'll get you hooked up!
Distribution via !K7 for Europe, UK, Australia, and ROW
This album will be distributed by our good friends at !K7 and their various territory partners in Europe, UK, Australia, and everywhere else in the world outside of North & South America.
If you are a retailer or store with questions about wholesale or are just looking to get some of our records... we'd like to make things as easy for you as possible, please do not hesitate to reach out!!!
