47 posts tagged “funk”
UK funk trio the Baker Brothers (Dan Baker, Rich Baker, and non-brother Chris Pedley) are generally a little too close to smooth jazz/disco for me (too much hi-hat, not enough snare), but "Aargh, Aargh-Aargh" would fit right in on my virtual mixtape of Badass Instrumentals:
The Baker Brothers' latest album is Avid Sounds, a collection of covers of 70s funk and soul classics performed with assorted guest vocalists. I especially like their version of "Fly Like An Eagle"; I thought the Neville Brothers had realized that song's fullest funky potential, but I think the Baker Brothers have surpassed them:
Daptone Records of Brooklyn is the acknowledged US leader of the soul-funk revival, and the membership of their bands is so intermingled that I can't keep track of which players are in which bands. The Budos Band mixes together everything great about instrumental music (funk, soul, jazz, reggae, afrobeat, and rock) and plays it with a healthy dose of horns. They released a self-titled EP in June which is a mix of old songs and new ones; Lala.com is the only streaming site that has the whole thing, so I'm using their widget for this entry*. If you had a party and put this album on repeat, you would have no complaints.
From the vaults of Daptone Records, comes a collection of 6 unreleased tracks from the infamous Budos Band. Recorded after the Budos Band I sessions but before those for the second album, this EP is a fascinating glimpse into the group's evolution as musicians and recording artists.
Listeners may be familiar with two songs previously released and universally recognized as “Budos classics.” The Proposition, a hit single released on 7-inch by Daptone Records, incorporates the style now known worldwide as Budos swing responsible for drawing so many a listener onto the sweaty dancefloor. Mas O Menos, included on the band's smash hit album The Budos Band II, exemplifies the group's feel for soul with its infectious bass, tightly intertwined guitar and organ and soaring horns.
Smoke Gets In, created on the anniversary of the six hundred sixty-sixth rotation of the Budonian lunar calendar, finds the band returning to its dusty roots. It is both sonically and literally other-worldly. The psycho-tropic venom found on the Budos Band II may have originated in this very session. Is this actually happening or are your ears melting?
Named for the goddess said to have bestowed powers upon the knights of old Budonia, Ephra incorporates rollicking guitars, juxtaposed with haunting horns and pervasive highlife rhythms. The existence of such complexity within a seemingly simple tune is the truest metaphor for the Budonian knight himself. Nobody's Bulletproof references the ever-evolving relationship of the Budos Band with their ancestors and predecessors. The stabbing horns and break-neck percussive pace hearken back to the band's Afrobeat roots. The near-militaristic cadence is a constant reminder that no one is safe from the scorpion's sting. As the greater warrior has said, “The sword cometh and hath not yet purged the depths of thine soul.”
The Budos Band EP is a must have for Budos and Daptone fans alike. It stands as a vital account of the band's movement between musical styles and records a singular moment in the group's existence. It will indeed stand the test of time and remain a bedrock of Budos lore.
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.
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":
Medium Medium were responsible for what may be the definitive postpunk single, "Hungry, So Angry". Two of their members, Rees Lewis and Nigel Kingston Stone, left the band to form C Cat Trance, a band I hold in such esteem that to even begin to write about them is an overwhelming proposition. They hit upon the perfect combination of rock, funk, skronk, and Middle Eastern music, and while many rock bands who try to incorporate world music into their sound end up with watering down both genres, C Cat Trance kept a sharp edge through the course of several albums and singles. So while I'm still thinking about postpunk bands covering R&B songs, I present C Cat Trance's version of "Hypnotized" from their first EP, a song that I found out just tonight, after 26 years of searching, was originally by The Tymes on their 1976 album Tymes Up. Thank you Google, Discogs, and DISMARC!
More C Cat Trance to come.
My favorite discovery of the last week is the San Francisco band Tussle, whose 2006 album Telescope Mind finally worked its way to my ears. They are solidly in the vein of the great Postpunk Minimal Funk bands from New York in the 80s, Liquid Liquid and ESG, with a bit a 70s Krautrock thrown in. Music critic Sasha Frere-Jones's band Ui, also from New York, purveyed a similar stripped down groove. So I've assembled a little playlist that mixes up Liquid Liquid, Tussle, ESG, Ui, and some vintage British postpunk funk from 23 Skidoo and A Certain Ratio. It all goes together quite nicely, I think.
Unexpected link with a previous post: one of Sasha Frere-Jones's great-grandfaters was Edgar Wallace, the writer whose initials were used as a song title by the Stockholm Monsters.
I almost always have the last.fm app running so I can keep track of what I've listened to, and then tag the songs I love for easy reference. My three top loves of today are available for streaming on Grooveshark, and lo and behold, I can put them all into a single widget. So here are my top loved tracks of today, by Ocote Soul Sounds (a.k.a. Antibalas bandleader Martin Perna) with Adrian Quesada, Fred Wesley and the J.B. Horns, and Sexteto Electronico Moderno (with a swinging cover of "In the Year 2525"!):
Now I just have to figure out how to get the widget not to change colors on me at the last step.
One afternoon in 1981 (roughly) I was transfixed by a blend of hard rock, proggy synths, and funk on WHFS, one of those songs that made me determined to listen through to the next announcement break to find out what it was. The song was "Madness" and the artist sounded like "Go 2," which meant nothing to me. I got a lucky break digging through the bins at the late, great Record and Tape Exchange in College Park: the group was Stomu Yamashta's Go, and the album was Go Too, being the second Go album. Go was a intriguing collaboration masterminded by percussionist/synthesist/composer Yamashta that included Klaus Schulze, Michael Shrieve, and Al DiMeola, among others. Steve Winwood sang and played on the first Go album, which garnered respectable reviews. Jess Roden replaced him on Go Too, and funk rhythms were introduced, leading it to be dismissed as a "disco" album. That's really an insult to the musicians, who created something quite special from disparate musical backgrounds. "Seen You Before," with a great synth hook and some extended interplay between Shrieve and DiMeola, stands out even more than "Madness," so much so that I played it on my very first radio show in 1982:
Johnny Smoke points out that the intro to this song sounds like the intro to K.C. and the Sunshine Band's "Get Down Tonight" -- sure enough!
I finally figured out what Al Ciner's guitar lick in Rufus's version of "You Got the Love" reminded me of: "Rev It Up" by Jerry Harrison from his Casual Gods solo album:
Not the same, but similar. Call me shallow, but I like Harrison's solo material better than late Talking Heads, because it's funkier.
Vintage funk compilations seem to be popping up everywhere, and for the most part they're all good, but they tend to blur together after a while. Every so often, though, a song will really grab me, and the latest one to do so is "The Hawk" by The Soul Rockers, on the Funkaphonix 3 compilation from Australian label Electrostatic. This 1970 track has a bassline that sounds like Bill Laswell at his heaviest, and a slower, steamrolling beat that stands out amongst the mostly faster tracks on the album:
The part that really made me chuckle, though, is when Les Cooper urges the "funky, funky Hawk" to "do it to it--funk is four cans of wet Magic Shave!" There's no record I listened to more in my grade school years than the Ronco hits compilation Get It On!, which introduced me to the Ohio Players via "Funky Worm." How funky is the funky worm? "Like nine cans of shaving powder!"
The lesson here, if you haven't already figured it out, is that shaving powder is funky.
How many cans of shaving powder does it take to reach a critical mass of funk? Could you get by with just two? Would a single can be funky, or just mildly jaunty?
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