If you’ve followed the beats of his half-century career, you’ll know Vernon Reid as an artist who paints in every colour. Depending on the era you dive into and the album on your turntable, you’ll find the New York polymath pinballing between jazz, metal, punk, funk, electronica and hip-hop, cutting heads with collaborators as eclectic as Mick Jagger and Public Enemy, endlessly shedding his skin yet always speaking his truth. 

Globally celebrated as a giant of electric guitar (he was recently hailed by Rolling Stone amongst the top 50 players of all-time), Reid’s Grammy Award-winning records with alt-rock trailblazers, Living Colour, still sound as fresh and fierce as when Cult Of Personality hijacked the Billboard chart in the late-’80s. But to take the pulse of the zeitgeist as he sees it – and hear his fearless musicality in microcosm – you need only drop the needle on his acclaimed new solo album, Hoodoo Telemetry, released October 3, 2025 on Artone / The Players Club Records.

“Hoodoo Telemetry,” considers the 66-year-old of this kaleidoscopic 14-track opus, “is like a piece of my all-over-the-place mind. It took me a while to start this record because I was thinking about what I wanted to do next, managing my time with all my other projects. I was also in different spaces with these songs: some are new, others are reclamations of material from a long time ago. But suddenly, I found the focus and it was very clear to me: I gotta do this now.”

Hoodoo Telemetry isn’t a linear piece, but a thrillingly tangled tapestry of genres, collaborators and material from different time periods. Its energy and chaos seems to reflect and challenge what Reid considers the “tumultuous” socio-political backdrop it will soundtrack. “Everything I do,” he points out, “is a protest of one kind or another.”

It’s true: Reid never took the path of least resistance. Born in London on 22 August 1958, to music-loving parents of the Windrush generation, within a year the family had upped and moved to New York City. He remembers the seismic shift of hearing The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 and the moment a guitar called to him. “I heard Carlos Santana’s Black Magic Woman and it entranced me.” 

Yet Reid’s cultural awakening sprawled in every direction. “I loved music at a cellular level. And all kinds of music. James Brown, Hendrix, Band of Gypsys, Sly And The Family Stone, Cream. The psychedelic movement. Miles Davis going electric, y’know, Live-Evil and Bitches Brew. All of those people that went to different places and did different things with their music. I liked the idea of a musician risking it all to change.”

Just as influential were the local musicians on his block (new track Meditation On The Last Time I Saw Arthur Rhames salutes the “otherworldly” multi-instrumentalist from Eternity, who coached his young neighbour but died of AIDS in 1989). 
By his early twenties, and already playing with rare maturity, Reid left an early thumbprint on The Decoding Society, the avant-jazz outfit helmed by charismatic, genre-crossing Texan drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson. “I’d played in cover bands, wedding bands, shit like that,” he recalls. “But that was my first real professional gig, and the first time I toured on an airplane. OrKnot, from Hoodoo Telemetry, is a bit of an homage to my old boss.”

Even then, it was obvious Reid would need other outlets to capture all the ideas ricocheting around his brain. In 1985, he released Smash & Scatteration alongside jazz talisman Bill Frisell and co-founded the Black Rock Coalition with Village Voice writer and lifelong friend Greg Tate, demanding an end to racial glass ceilings in the music business. “There was still a bunch of dudes smoking cigars,” he reflects, “in a room that you’re not allowed to go into.”

Living Colour was formulating around the same time, and Reid’s best-known band burst into bloom on a New York live circuit that was more fluid than ever before or since. “We had an ecology of clubs to play at, from CBGBs to the Cat Club and the Ritz,” he recalls of the first steps of a solidified lineup featuring Corey Glover (vocals), Muzz Skillings (bass) and Will Calhoun (drums).

Carried by word of mouth, the tinderbox was already set to explode when the patronage of Mick Jagger sent the band over the top, the Rolling Stones singer manning the desk for their demos. “He worked on Glamour Boys and Which Way To America?” explains Reid, “and he was a great producer. He really coached Corey along. But it was so fundamentally weird that he entered our lives. I didn’t know where to put my hands.” 

Seizing his opportunity, Reid threw everything on his mental jukebox at Living Colour’s deathless debut, 1988’s Vivid. “You had Broken Hearts on the same album as Cult Of Personality,” he points out of a tracklisting where anything could happen. “We might be playing metal one moment then writing a country song with hip-hop the next. Or Funny Vibe, which is like prog-folk informed by King Crimson.”  
   
Sailing to #6 on the US Billboard chart – and ultimately double-platinum status – Vivid proved adventurous music could still sell by the ton. The following year, a support on the Stones’ Steel Wheels/Urban Jungle tour bumped their profile – and gave Reid a close-up glimpse at the rock ‘n’ roll super-league. “Backstage on that Stones tour they had all the parlour games – I remember Bill Wyman kicking my ass at ping-pong!”    

Alongside Living Colour’s six albums and counting, Reid has worn a thousand different hats since those breakout years, whether producing Grammy-nominated albums for the likes of Salif Keita, composing hit movie scores or lending his guitar skills to a who’s who including Janet Jackson, B.B. King, Tracy Chapman and Mariah Carey. 

No doubt, it’s these competing demands that mean Reid’s solo career (which began with 1996’s Mistaken Identity) has lain dormant since 2004’s Known Unknown. “But with everything that’s been happening, suddenly I had a focus,” he says of the febrile context to Hoodoo Telemetry. “Y’know, the world is a ball on a pendulum. It swings. Right now, we’re living through unprecedented times, and not just in America.”

Inspired, Reid corralled his studio crew, with engineer/co-producer Ivan Julian conjuring a charged atmosphere and Scott Harding’s dynamic mix demanding your full attention. “Ivan became a world-class recording engineer, on top of being a punk guitar icon with Richard Hell And The Voidoids in the heyday of CBGB and the Mudd Club,” explains Reid. “All of this would never have happened without him and his studio Super Giraffe, in both its Williamsburg and Dumbo locations in Brooklyn. As for Scotty Hard, who mixed this album, he was a principal engineer on Mistaken Identity, which is a further personal connection. He did an incredible job. Both times.”

Right from the start, Hoodoo Telemetry telegraphs its bold intentions, with spacey opening improv Door Of No Return exploring the outer reaches while reminding us of Reid’s blistering fretwork and love of sci-fi. “It’s a vibe, it’s a mood,” he says. “I was really feeling some of my mentors, like Sonny Sharrock’s playing with Pharoah Sanders or Pete Cosey with Miles Davis.” 

Fierier still is a rampaging cover of Eddie Harris’s Freedom Jazz Dance. One of three tracks featuring a special lineup of Greg Tate’s famed band, here billed as Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber (Super Giraffe Edition), the ensemble is bolstered by New York vocalist Miss Olithea. “She’s an outstanding natural vocalist with a gift for electronic manipulation of her voice,” explains Reid. “Her voice intrigued me to the point where she appears throughout the album, both with and without electronics.”   

The mood shifts again on Good Afternoon Everyone, with the blissful electronic vibe countered by the gut-punch story behind the cyclical vocal sample. “I was in a subway tunnel and there was a young homeless man repeating the phrase, ‘Good afternoon everyone. Could anybody help me with some food or something to eat today?’ He was unfailingly polite. But his rage at his circumstances was palpable. I took my iPhone and started recording.”

The overdriven funk bassline and glistening soul of The Haunting finds Reid tipping his hat to a fellow chameleon (“I’m a huge Prince fan and there’s some of who he was in that song’s DNA”), before the scratch ‘n’ glitch of the brass-driven Bronx Paradox salutes the New York neighbourhood’s greatest musical export. “I wrote that in tribute to DJ Logic,” he explains. “Everybody considered the Bronx a wasteland, a warzone. But with hip-hop, those kids created the final original music of the 20th century.”
The fluid alto sax lines of Micah Gaugh on OrKnot swerve into a re-recorded take on Edgar Winter’s existential anthem, Dying To Live, augmented by heavenly vocals from the late Miche Fambro and trippy effects by DJ Logic (“At one point, my mix engineer Scott mixed it without the whale sounds and I said, ‘You gotta put them back in!’”). And as a past collaborator of Cream bassist Jack Bruce, a stalking cover of the power trio’s sinister Politician had always been on Reid’s bucketlist. “That’s my favourite Cream song. “I love lines like, ‘I support the left though I’m leaning to the right’ – it’s brilliant.”
Likewise, the full-throttle electro-rock of Black Fathom Five – featuring bullet-belt oration from hip-hop pioneer Beans of Antipop Consortium – was an itch Reid needed to scratch (“I have a ton of quirky electronica demos and the bassline on this one just wouldn’t let go of me”). That song crashes into Beautiful Bastard, one of the oldest tracks here, almost deployed on Reid’s albums with the Yohimbe Brothers back in the ’00s. Reid shrugs: “It’s about when you know a romance is doomed from the first kiss.”

Long-standing fans will be thrilled to hear Reid dig out his old Eko banjo from the Decoding Society years to reboot Bert Williams’ vaudeville number My Little Zulu Babe (featuring Williams’ original vocals from the early-1900s). In Effigy gives both victim and aggressor’s perspectives of warfare over thunderous industrial drums, before the album plays out with Brave New World (Their Not There), featuring spacey soundscapes and Aldous Huxley’s prescient narration. “That audio is from the 1960s and he's talking about oligarchical rule,” points out Reid. “And now we’re living it.”

 In hard times, Hoodoo Telemetry doesn’t have the answers. But to play Vernon Reid’s breathtakingly ambitious new album is to hear every shade of humanity and question where we are headed next. “These songs are looking at the past through a different lens, then looking forward,” he concludes. “Like, ‘Where is this going and how are we getting there? Are we driving the bus or are we passengers in this self-driving vehicle into the future?’ That’s the space that Hoodoo Telemetry is really exploring…”