Early career and music In 1981, following an introduction by family friend
Thulani Davis, The following year Tate moved to
New York City, where he developed friendships with other musicians, including
James "Blood" Ulmer and
Vernon Reid. In 1999, Tate established
Burnt Sugar, an
improvisational ensemble that varies in size between 13 and 35 musicians and blended a range of genres including
funk,
free jazz, and
psychedelic rock. described it in 2004 as "a band I wanted to hear but could not find".
Writing Though initially a freelancer, Tate quickly became the leading critic on Black culture for the
Voice and in that position, one of the leading cultural critics in New York City. He developed a reputation for "slangy erudition",
Hua Hsu wrote: "His best paragraphs throbbed like a party and chattered like a salon; they were stylishly jam-packed with names and reference points that shouldn't have got along but did, a trans-everything collision of pop stars, filmmakers, subterranean graffiti artists, Ivory Tower theorists, and Tate's personal buddies, who often came across as the wisest of the bunch." in the essay, he juxtaposed the "somewhat stultified stereotype of the black intellectual as one who operates from a narrow-minded, essentialized notion of black culture" (cultural nationalists, or Cult-Nats) with the freaky "many vibrant colors and dynamics of African American life and art", His work was also published in
The New York Times,
The Washington Post,
Artforum,
DownBeat,
Essence,
JazzTimes,
Rolling Stone, and
VIBE. At
Vibe he became a columnist in 1992, titling his series "Black-Owned". A key contribution was his conceptualisation of hip-hop as existing on a continuum with jazz, In 1992, Tate published
Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America, a collection of 40 essays on culture and politics, drawn from his writing for the
Village Voice. Writing for
Pitchfork, Allison Hussey said, "It became a definitive work for Tate", treating subjects like
Miles Davis,
Public Enemy, and
Jean Michel Basquiat. Tate often had the admiration of the musicians he wrote about, like
David Bowie and
Flea of
Red Hot Chili Peppers; Flea cried in appreciation when Tate reviewed the Peppers' 1999 album
Californication. In 2003, Tate published
Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking From Black Culture, an edited collection of 18 Black writers addressing the topic of white appropriation of Black art. The same year, he published
Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix And The Black Experience, an appraisal of the rock legend as a Black icon. In 2016, Tate published
Flyboy 2. In
The New Yorker, Hua Hsu wrote that this follow-up to his first collection brought "into sharper focus" Tate's interest in what Tate described as “the way Black people ‘think,’ mentally, emotionally, physically,” and “how those ways of thinking and being inform [their] artistic choices." == Personal life ==