16 posts tagged “deep funk”
With an album title like Instrumental Action Soul to announce their intentions, how could I not love the Diplomats of Solid Sound? With a Hammond-centric sound courtesy of Nate Basinger, this band from Iowa City delivers a spot-on mix of Booker T. and the MG's, Isaac Hayes, and Lalo Schifrin. Here's the whole album, but if you only have time for one track, make it "Chinese Connection":
Getting back to this year's bumper crop of deep funk releases, I found that L.A.'s Breakestra has done in one song what I attempted to do in blog posts two years ago: give a worldwide overview of the deep funk scene. Many of the acts name-checked in "No Matter Where You Go" have been featured here; just click the "deep funk" tag bring them up.
I'll make it simpler: deep funk is funk music that pretends P-Funk never happened. There are no vestiges of Bootsy's Mu-Tron-enhanced bass, Bernie Worrell's squiggly synths, or George Clinton's often-comedic lyrics and vocal arrangements. If it reminds you of Parliament or Funkadelic, it's just funk; if it reminds you of James Brown, it's deep funk. Opposing viewpoints are welcomed in the comments.Deep Funk is a genre of funk music which, unlike traditional mainstream funk, has a more soulful, rawer, grittier, and "heavier" sound.
(Yes, I am aware that Bootsy played for both James Brown and P-Funk, but his P-Funk Star Bass style is quite distinct from the plainer JB style.)
Because I couldn't stop at 2! I didn't think the Sound Stylistics were an actual band, just a bunch of British funk and soul hotshots who recorded an album for Bruton Music Library in 2002 as a one-off, which album eventually got a commercial release due to tremendous word-of-mouth. But the core trio of Jay Glover, Dominic Glover, and Gary Crockett has retained the name and put out a new album, Greasin' the Wheels, with a stellar roster of guest musicians. Credits on the individual tracks are sketchy, but I think it's Jim Watson (Brand New Heavies, Zero 7) who plays the juicy Rhodes solo on "Knucklehead":
What, The New Mastersounds Live in San Francisco came out last October and I'm just now getting around to it? Oy vey. They're playing a show in upstate New York soon and another in northern Pennsylvania, both of which I could theoretically get to with a 2-3 hour drive; unfortunately they're both parts of weekend-long music festivals with $150+ ticket prices, so I'll be missing them. Live in San Francisco kicks off with a smokin' rendition of their signature tune, "The Minx":
All this and I'm still not done with the latest batch of deep funk.
Yesterday I wrote that Speedometer was missing from the latest crop of deep funk releases, but... I was wrong! They released a live album, Soul Groovin', in June. Speedometer's live sound is remarkably close to their studio sound (or vice versa); the only differences I can identify are the drums are not as high in the mix, and the rhythms swing a little more. Soul Groovin' is essentially a best-of collection recorded live, and it makes a good case for Speedometer as the best of the modern deep funk bands. Here is the whole album, from Lala.com (if you're logged in to Lala you can listen to the whole song once; otherwise you just get a 30-second sample):
How do these Lala widgets work for you? Let me know in the comments.
It seems like just a few months ago I went on a funk jag, but looking back at the deep funk tags on the blog I see it was in the fall of 2007. Then my interest got sucked into other genres for nearly two years. Last night I started catching up on the new releases I missed, and there are a lot of them; most of the premiere deep funk bands put out an album this year (with the notable exception of Speedometer). The songs that made the biggest impression on first listen are the covers, and while they are not necessarily the best tracks on the albums, they are all worth sharing. I'll start off with one that goes right in the "unlikely covers" category: Australian trio Cookin' On 3 Burners doing a funked-up version of Gary Numan's "Cars":
It is probably an inevitable by-product of listening to the nonpareil sample collages of Girl Talk to think, "Hey, I should sample all my favorite beats and riffs and licks and mix them all together." Actually, I remember thinking the same thing after hearing Paul's Boutique, and De La Soul's first album, and the Dream Warriors. But the difference is that now I actually have the tools to do it. So I've been loading mp3s into Audacity and extracting the juicy bits, using the Repeat effect to finally hear some prime breaks as rhythm tracks, and generally amusing myself. I may never get beyond building a library of snippets, but it's fun. Speedometer albums are especially rich for beat mining; here's a track of all the Speedometer loops I've made, back to back--
The State Theatre of Ithaca has just announced its 2008-09 season schedule, and the big news is, Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings are coming to Ithaca! Yahoo!!! Not until November, though; sigh. But I'm going!
And I bought tickets today to see Nine Inch Nails in Philly! On Mrs. Veneer's birthday...oops.
I've been spending a lot of my listening time lately back in the 80s and neglecting the funk, so I sought to remedy that today. I started listening to Brownout, the Latin funk band from Austin, and as soon as I heard "African Battle" I was hooked. Deep funk beat, extra percussion, horns, and trombone solos? Yes, please!
My grasp of deep funk has always been of the "I can't define it, but I know it when I hear it" variety, but now I have come up with a working definition: deep funk is funk that pretends P-Funk never happened. How's that? Japan's Osaka Monaurail (named after James Brown's "(It's Not the Express) It's the J.B.'s Monaurail") are deep funk veterans by now, having formed in 1992 "to play the late 60's - early 70's funkies," so they're quite good at it by now. Here's a track from their 2004 album, Thankful:
With a name like The Haggis Horns, they'd better be from Scotland, and indeed they are. You can always trust a band with "Horns" in their name; horns make everything better! Rather than paraphrase what little I know about them, I'll just quote from their booking agency:
The Haggis Horns are one of the best live bands in the game; a brass heavy funk powerhouse that has been rocking clubs up and down the country for years, combining breakbeat funk, soul, hip-hop and afrobeat with the virtuosity of trained jazz musicians. Based around the nucleus of Malcolm Strachan (Trumpet), Jason Rae (Alto Sax) & Atholl Ransome (Tenor Sax) the Haggis Horns (yes, they’re from Scotland) extend to an eight-piece live outfit, featuring Joe Tatton on keys, Morgan Pugh on bass, Ben Barker on Guitar, Sam Bell on percussion and drummer Luke Flowers (Cinematic Orchestra). Debut 7’ Hot Damn! was released in 2005 with new single “Traveller (pts 1 & 2)” following late in 2006 to widespread acclaim.
More recently than that, they've released a full-length CD, also called Hot Damn!, on First Word Records. The Haggis's specialty is their Afrobeat angle; "Tribe Vibes" is almost straight-up Afrobeat, while Afrobeat-style guitar lines run through several of the other songs on the album. They also use more wah-wah on the rhythm guitar than other deep funk bands, for that special 70s action movie feel. The track on the album that grabbed me the most is the last one, "Who's Gonna Take the Weight":
It's probably no coincidence that "Weight" is reminiscent of the godfathers of Scottish funk, the Average White Band:
I get jealous when I google Haggis Horns and find someone's blog entry that says "Went to the Jazz Cafe in London last night with my friend Pete. We saw Haggis Horns & Speedometer, both were awesome and some new CDs will be finding there way into my shopping cart soon." I wanna see shows like that! Waaaaa! At least I've got the Rozatones in town, if only they'd play out more.
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