Billboard Interviews Patrick Patterson and Steve Scipio Of Cymande About North American Film Opening

Many people who know Cymande, the genre-bending British band from the early ’70s, have their own Cymande origin story. For the director Tim MacKenzie-Smith, “it was a mixtape that was passed to me at college, and it had no tracklist. It had 90 minutes of brilliant old American funk on it. Rare groove stuff, soul.”

 

MacKenzie-Smith recognized most of the songs – but not all of them. As a Shazam-less college student in the mid-’90s, he spent the next several years wondering who, exactly, had recorded two tracks that he “absolutely adored.” Eventually, a record-collecting friend threw on Cymande in MacKenzie-Smith’s presence and the director had an epiphany: “Oh my god, that’s those tunes that I’ve been loving for the last five years!”

 

“Why does no one know about this music?” MacKenzie-Smith remembers asking himself. “That started me off on a journey of discovery that carried on for many years, shouting from the rooftops, telling people all about them.”