Remembering John Forté, and why you should know about this gifted musician’s life journey
A long road of achievement, hardship and love brought the Grammy nominated Forté to Martha’s Vineyard, where I live, and where we were blessed by his presence.
CHILMARK, MA – The road traveled by John Forté delivered him from Brownsville, Brooklyn, where he was born and came of age, to the small island of Martha’s Vineyard, where he died suddenly in his home on Monday.
The news of John’s death has shocked and saddened the music world which remembers him for his legendary contributions to hip hop. It has also left a void in the island’s community where those of us who were lucky enough to count John as a friend are devastated by his untimely death. He was 50 years old.
The road John traveled brought him on an extraordinary, half-century journey. Along the way, he navigated Brownsville’s Pitkin Avenue in one of New York’s toughest neighborhoods. He carved a path as a child prodigy on the violin that would lead him to an elite academic high school in Exeter, New Hampshire which he credited with changing his life. His journey led to a celebrated turn down city streets of hip-hop in its heyday, bringing him to a red-carpet walk at the Grammys. It also sent him on a detour down the corridors of a prison and then to a dramatic exoneration, which led him to an on-ramp back to life’s highway.
Ultimately, the road carried John to the small, rural town of Chilmark on the Island of Martha’s Vineyard, off of Cape Cod in Massachusetts. He first came to the island in 1998 through an invitation from a friend in the music industry: Ben Taylor, son of Carly Simon and James Taylor. Forté was drawn in by the island’s natural beauty, its unique diversity and community spirit.
John deepened his friendship here in the early 2000s with Ben and Carly and their extended family on the Island, and around 2010 he chose to settle here. On Monday, he was found alone and unresponsive in his home in Chilmark and, hours later, was pronounced dead. The precise cause of death remains uncertain, police say, but they add that there is no sign of foul play.
His loved ones fear his sudden death may be connected to a recent diagnosis of seizures that left him hospitalized last year. As we all struggled to take in the news of his death, it seemed John had so much more distance to travel in his life’s journey. He was a dedicated and loving father to his two children: Wren, 8, and Haile, 5, and was raising them with their mother, Lara Fuller, a talented freelance photographer, who lived nearby. Making his loss even more poignant is that he was recently experiencing what he felt was one of the most creative and productive periods of his life as a musician and recording artist.
John fashioned an elaborate recording studio in a home in the woods of Chilmark in an area called Hewing Field. The studio was in the basement of his next-door neighbors and dear friends, Gogo Ferguson, a renowned artist who turns nature into jewelry, and her husband David Sayre, a retired pilot and skilled carpenter. Their Chilmark home, with its welcoming outdoor deck and stone fireplace, became his place of work and a kind of hometown stage for Forté over the past decade, and he often participated in memorable jam sessions there with musicians from across the island and all over the world.
On that porch, he unfailingly brought not only original music but his uniquely generous spirit, his deep love for life — especially anything that he was doing with his two children — and his passion for thoughtful conversations with a close-knit circle of friends. In those conversations, Forté was a consummate listener.
John was known and loved on the Island by many through performances at Island venues with Carly Simon and Ben Taylor, as well as many other musicians well-known to the Vineyard, including the Austin-based songwriter Peter More, who recruited band members from Cuba, Mexico and Spain to join in celebrating music on the porch and mixing songs in the basement studio.
John and More recently collaborated to write the score for a documentary film about the beat writer Jack Kerouac, titled “Kerouac’s Road: The Beat of a Nation.” In 2024, John completed work on the score for a six-part HBO series that revitalized “Eyes on the Prize,” the award-winning documentary series that began on PBS in the ’80s. The series chronicles the Black experience in America in the wake of the civil rights era. Dawn Porter, award winning documentary filmmaker and executive producer of the documentary series, said, “It was a profound experience watching him work. I am gutted at the loss of this beautiful human.”
John’s early days were shaped by life in 1980s Brownsville which was then consumed by the violence that came with the scourge of crack cocaine, but new horizons were opened through an invitation to attend Phillips Exeter Academy on the suggestion of a junior high guidance counselor. Forte loved to tell the story that when he first was asked if he wanted to go to “boarding school,” his answer was, “I didn’t do anything wrong.” He would often laugh relating how he thought it was a reform school for troubled kids until the guidance counselor showed him the beautiful campus and all it offered.
That’s where at age 13 he met a classmate named Liz Witham, who is also a documentary film maker living on the Island and a cousin of Ben Taylor. They remained very close friends throughout his life. “For as long as I have known him, everywhere he went, his heart was the center of gravity, pulling people in, even at that young age,” Witham said this week.
After graduating from Exeter, John entered New York University as a music business major, and his roommate was the rapper Talib Kweli. John soon dropped out of NYU to work at Rawkus Records, which signed Kweli and many other hip-hop artists.
From there, he set out on a celebrated career, which began on a professional level when he was introduced to the Fugees by Lauryn Hill in the early 1990s. He co-wrote and produced several songs on the Fugees’ multi-platinum and Grammy-winning 1996 album “The Score.” At 21 years of age, John was nominated for a Grammy for his work on the album.
John went on to tour all over the world with the Fugees, and lent both production and vocal performances to Wyclef Jean’s “The Carnival” in 1997. He also partnered with former Fugee member Pras for the hit single “Avenues” from the 1997 comedy “Money Talks” soundtrack. The following year, John released his debut solo album, “Poly Sci,” produced by Wyclef Jean.
Jean, who remained John’s longtime friend and musical collaborator, posted an attempt to express his sadness over his death on Instagram; a memory captured on video of the two performing together. In the post, he wrote just three words: “This one hurts.”
In the year 2000, John’s life took a dramatic turn when he was arrested at Newark International Airport with liquid cocaine. He was charged with possession and intent to distribute. While awaiting trial in 2001, he recorded the well-received “I, John” album. It featured guest appearances by Herbie Hancock and included a duet with Carly Simon. John was convicted and sentenced to 14 years under the controversial mandatory minimum guidelines. He was incarcerated at a low-security federal prison in central Pennsylvania.
Simon and Taylor championed John in prison, and became fierce advocates on his behalf, believing he did not receive a fair trial. They joined his fight for an appeal of the punitive mandatory minimum drug laws, which advocates for prison reform have long criticized for perpetuating mass incarceration.
In a 2009 profile in New York magazine, John said, “Carly is a mentor to me, a guide, absolutely my spiritual godmother.”
On November 24, 2008 John’s prison sentence was commuted by President George W. Bush and he was released from prison four weeks later, just before Christmas.
The fuel that carried him along through all of his life was music, as well as his love for his family and friends, his clarity of thinking, his curiosity about all things, and his incredible generosity of spirit. John was a consummate innovator, and the advent of applied in AI in mixing music opened doors of creativity for him, as he shared in a 2024 interview with island resident and founding editor of WIRED magazine, John Battelle, for Arts & Ideas magazine which is published by The Martha’s Vineyard Times.
As forward looking as John was, he never forgot where he came from even as he garnered awards, accolades, and fame. He stayed in touch with his old neighborhood in Brooklyn and forged relationships that grew out of his childhood there and he also lovingly cultivated and curated his friends from the island. He maintained these friendships with care even as he counted friendships with some high level chief executives, including the former President of the United States, Barack Obama, who has a summer home on the Island, and another commander in chief of sorts in the jazz world, Herbie Hancock. He was also recently working on a mix with one of the top global diplomats and advocates for civil rights to emerge out of the music industry, the late Harry Belafonte.
His final album, “Vessels, Angels & Ancestors,” was released in 2021, and in the 2024 interview with Arts & Ideas, John was asked about the long journey of his music, and how all of the talented musicians he had had a chance to perform with impacted what he was currently working on. In his response, John’s love for his children shaped his answer.
“It’s mind-blowing. It really is. But the music that I think of most recently, its purpose — it feels like a time capsule for my children. I make music now that I really want my kids to like, when they’re able to receive it,” he said.
Charles Sennott is the publisher of The Martha’s Vineyard Times and lives in Chilmark where he and his wife Julie and their four sons shared many meaningful, and now cherished, moments with John.
Please take a moment to watch this music video filmed at John’s home in Chilmark and in his old Brooklyn neighborhood as it captures the extraordinary breadth of his life.
A GoFundMe was created for help with living expenses and care for Forté’s children as well as unforeseen costs associated with his funeral. It can be found at bit.ly/GFM_ForteFamily.
Powerfully sad to write about losing John. He was a beautiful soul, and a great friend. Thanks for reading about his amazing life.
Beautiful writing about an extraordinary soul.