Talking storytelling and inspiration with Kevin E Taylor

Kim Pearson — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 00:56:13 -0500

While television is full of "reality" shows, few shows get into the real lives and struggles of prominent people the way that BETJ's Parallel Paths does. The weekly show features conversations between artists, scholars, activists and entrepreneurs about their personal and professional struggles and triumphs.

It's a show where you can hear Broadway and television star Sheryl Lee Ralph and beauty queen Kenya Moore sharing not only their challenges as gorgeous brown-skinned women in a Eurocentric world -- but also compare notes on Ralph's efforts on behalf of women with HIV and Moore's foundation for girls facing academic challenges. Or hear songwriter/peformers Ashford and Simpson and Kindred the Family soul talk about how to balance marriage, an entertainment career and entrepreneurship. It's hard to think of another show where two prominent women in hip-hop reveal how they support each other behind the scenes, but that's what happened in the episode featuring MC Lyte and Yo-Yo.

The unique nature of Parallel Paths owes a great deal to its creator, Kevin E. Taylor, executive producer of TM3 productions. Anyone who has talked to Taylor, or read his inspirational book, Unclutter: Cleanse Your Spirit and Claim Your Stuff, knows that music and popular culture have been a source of profound life lessons, not just entertainment.

Taylor got his start in television in the early 1991, as a researcher for BET. In 1993, his boss asked him to come up with questions for superstar Natalie Cole. His boss knew that Taylor had grown up revering Cole as an artist and role model since he watched a 1970s-era interview with her on the Mike Douglas show in which she talked about going to college. Years later, he recalled the revelation of that moment:

College? Black people didn't go to college, or at least that's what I thought. Then they began to talk about her album. 'It's called 'Inseparable.' What? I never knew that we could go to college or use big words.

Taylor was excited to write the questions for the interview, but when he was told that he would actually be the interviewer, he thought he had died and gone to heaven. After that came interviews with Patti Labelle (at her house, where she cooked), Luther Vandross, and an eventual show, Lyrically Speaking, which ran in 1994. Over the next several years, Taylor worked on several BET shows, including Access Granted and 106 and Park, which brought him into contact with everyone from Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls to Lena Horne and Tina Turner. Working with BET also gave Taylor a chance to start his independent production company producing video biographies for artists' publicity packages.

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His life took a profound turn in August of 2001, when Taylor went to the Bahamas as the lead producer of video project for Aaliyah. At the last minute, he gave up his seat on her charter plane and took a commercial flight back to the US. Little did he know that he had just missed the fatal crash that took the life of the rising singer and actress, along with seven others. Two weeks later, he just missed getting on one of the ill-fated planes involved in the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. For a while, he stepped away from television to concentrate on writing and pastoring Unity Fellowship Church New Brunswick, where I first met him in 2002. (Full disclosure: I was a member of UFCNB from 2003-2006.)

A couple of years ago, Taylor returned to BET as an independent contractor, shooting segments for its gospel programming. Before long, he was pitching show ideas, and soon Parallel Paths was born. "I thought what it would be like to bring people together who do the same thing, but from different perspectives," Taylor said. At first, he was going to call the show Role Model, but that idea proved too limiting.

Parallel Paths comes off as a spontaneous conversation, and that's by Taylor's design. Taylor says he usually looks for points of comparison and contrast in choosing his guests. So for singers Freddie Jackson and Carl Thomas, for example, it mattered that they were both male R&B crooners, but associated with different eras. (Jackson's "You Are My Lady" was an early-80s classic, while Thomas songs such as "I Wish" are hits with the neo-soul generation.)

Taylor sets the interviews up with a few guiding questions, but mostly lets the conversation flow. That's when the surprises come. For example, he didn't realize that Ralph was a judge at one of Moore's beauty pageants. In an upcoming conversation this season between Brenda Russell and Lalah Hathaway, we learn that Russell wrote one of Hathaway's first hit songs. When rapper Talib Kweli met scholar and spoken word artist Cornel West, it emerged that West had worked with Kweli's mother, who is a respected scholar. (Of West, Taylor says, "He's as hip-hop as KRS-One!")

Sometimes the surprise is in setting up the pairing itself. When the opportunity emerged to have Niecy Nash from Reno 911 and Clean House on the show, Taylor looked for someone just as sassy but with a more reserved on-air persona to pair her with. He settled on Keesha Sharp, best known as "Monica" from Girlfriends. He had no idea how to reach he happened to talk to someone who turned out to have worked on the show. The connection to Sharp was made, and the resulting interview is in the lineup for the upcoming season.

In the meantime, Taylor isn't resting on his laurels. A new show profiling aspiring hip-hop artists, Chronicles From the Underground will debut this fall.

in all of his work, Taylor says, it's important to show the world beyond the glitz and glamor of the stage. "I'm thinking of the young person sitting at home who has to know that there's a world outside of the arts, outside of the athletes. You always hear our people say that the only way out of the hood is to be the artist or the athlete. You've got to show them [neurosurgeon] Dr. Ben Carson; you've got to show them [entertainment executive] Sylvia Rhone -- that's our doing."

Even when showcasing entertainers, Taylor says he wants to show, "the journey to the stage."

"I think we live in a time when people are afraid to struggle. They think you stand in a line, sing one song. People actually think that you go from that line to Simon, Paula and Randy!" They don't know that, for example, "Oleta Adams sang in a Holiday Inn in Kansas City for 17 years when a group touring called Tears for Fears just happened to come into the hotel and see the show, heard her sing and took her on the road." During that 17 years she was getting better at her craft, "and she was singing, not talking about it."

Taylor hopes that his programs will not only help viewers better understand that struggle, but find the motivation and inspiration to persevere until, like him they reach their own childhood dreams.

Related link:
You can watch video from the first season of Parallel Paths

Media credits:
Photo of Kevin Taylor: Steven Thomas

Slide show and Parallel Paths flier courtesy of Kevin E Taylor

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Talking storytelling and inspiration with Kevin E Taylor