Back to funk, freak the funk, hype the funk, swipe the funk and all that junk
Dr. Dre: "Puffin' On Blunts & Drankin' Tanqueray" (Death Row, 1993)
This long-unreleased video has been floating around for about a week but I'm still trying to process it.
I don't know which is most astonishing to me: that Dre looks even more awkward than his ad-libs sound, that Lady of Rage is wearing jeans at rib-height, that Daz waves around two different guns, that Kurupt looks to be about 15 or the possibility that a lot more stuff like this exists and might actually see a release. (Please, please let there be an unreleased DJ Quik album in better shape than the boot from a few years ago.)
The "Puffin' Blunts" beat always sounded to me like it was a built around an interpolation of this single, although who knows since this track was a little below the radar back then:
Robert Lowe: "Back to Funk" (Eastbound, 1974)
I've embedded the song but not posted a download link because the song is in print on Searching for Soul, the excellent Michigan soul and funk compilation that Scott Craig compiled for Luv 'n Haight a few years ago. The flip side is not commercially available, so you can have that one.
This coming week I'll be in New York-- seeing friends, walking around, buying records and seeing what's really good with the new crop of NYC pizza and fried chicken restaurants (hey, Momofuku! you and your electronic reservations system are playing with my emotions!).
I'll also be DJing a bunch:
Saturday 11/14 at APT for Grand Groove with Chairman Mao Monday 11/16 at 105 Rivington for Good Spot with DJ mOma & Stimulus Tuesday 11/17 at Savalas for Lost & Found with Jared Boxx (who'll be celebrating his birthday!) Thursday 11/19 at Von Kellar for Fam with DJ Eleven Friday 11/20 on East Village Radio from midnight to 2 for Never Not Working with hosts Radio Rios & Oskar Mann
Apropos of not much more than the title, here's a relatively overlooked Larry Mizell production:
After years and years of doing a relatively freeform college radio show, I've been wrestling with how to adapt it to internet radio with my new show, 2 Busy Saying Yeah.
My sense is that you can't really grow an internet audience through serendipity like you can with broadcast radio-- people who happen to be switching the dial, get seduced by a song and stick around to see what else you have. Instead, I think you have to offer something really identifiable and desirable to get them to go out of their way to check you out in the first place and then, if the quality's good, maybe they'll be impressed enough to keep coming back, subscribe, etc.
Last Friday's show is a step in that direction. I wanted to create a mixtape-quality set that would merit repeated listens and hopefully some word-of-mouth. It's a live, two-hour mix of late 70s/early 80s soul music with no back-announcing and minimal talking. The selections are drawn from a bunch of sub-genres-- boogie, modern soul, disco, jazz-funk, etc. Some are obvious, some rare, others just neglected, but it's all great music.
Listen and if you enjoy it, please spread the word.
1. Brief Encounter: Human 2. The Jones Girls: When I'm Gone 3. Jean Terrell: Rising Cost of Love 4. Cream De Coco: Disco Strut 5. Donna McGhee: It Ain't No Big Thing 6. Quietfire: Makes Me Wanna Shout 7. Bill Cosby: You're Driving Me Crazy 8. Breakwater: Work It Out 9. The Sugarhill Gang: Passion Play 10. Carly Simon: Why 11. Sister Sledge: Reach Your Peak 12. Rick James: Moonchild 13. Flowers: For Real 14. Rance Allen Group: Reason to Survive 15. Raw Soul Express: The Way We Live 16. Chocolate Clay: Free (I'll Always Be) 17. Heaven & Earth: Let's Get It Together 18. James Bradley: I Can't Get Enough of Your Love 19. Hunt's Determination Band: No. 1 Lady 20. Stevo: Pay the Price 21. Leon Ware: Can I Touch You There 22. Roy Ayers: Love Will Bring Us Back Together 23. Don Blackman: Heart's Desire 24. Azymuth: Dear Limmertz 25. Junior: I Can't Help It 26. Karin Jones: Here I Go Again 27. Linda Clifford: Runaway Love 28. One Way: Hold It 29. Hipnotic: Are You Lonely? 30. The Strikers: Hold On to This Feeling
I never really got into the well-regarded Starshipz & Rockets, but "My Aura" has been stuck in my head since Southern Hospitality posted the video a few weeks ago.
The sample's been bugging the shit out of me-- I know I know it, it's just not coming to me. In the process of trying to jog my memory, I dusted off a few old standbys that share a similar vibe.
Love the track, hate the vocal, although I know people who feel differently. This was recently reissued along with a couple of Puthli's previously import-only albums.
Ethel Beatty: "It's Your Love" (Uno Melodic, 1981)
Written and produced by Roy Ayers, who has a gift for grooves that are lush, mellow, spacey and yet somehow kinda unsettling.
Ian Carr was super-underrated, at least in the U.S.
The British trumpeter and composer led two great bands, the Don Rendell/Ian Carr Quintet and Nucleus. With the former, he cut some beautiful and haunting music; the latter band added a backbeat and sometimes upped the tempo but usually retained some of the quintet's brooding lyricism-- I wasn't that surprised to read in obits that Carr had lifelong problems with depression.
It's always been a little surprising to me that he wasn't more popular; his music seemed to me like it could appeal to a lot of audiences that didn't pick up on him. That is, if you like early 70s Miles Davis, Can, Endtroducing-era DJ Shadow, CTI-era Freddie Hubbard, the more droning Black Sabbath material, Marc Moulin's Placebo or anything moody and funky, his music is probably for you.
Just about everything he released is in print on a series of UK twofer reissues. I've heard almost everything he did and I've never heard a bad record from him. On the straight ahead jazz end, Shades of Blue/Dusk Fire is great; for the jazz-rock stuff, maybe start with Solar Plexus/Belladonna or Labyrinth/Roots. This is from the latter:
Organist Lyman Woodard passed away last week. He was a major presence on the Detroit jazz scene for decades, holding down numerous residencies and schooling a lot of younger players.
I first discovered his music via his sublime Saturday Night Special LP, which is one of my favorite jazz LPs. It's a subtle record-- intimate, lo-fi, lightly funky, kind of wistful-- but one that I don't tire of. The songs, all by Woodard or members of his band, are brooding, gorgeous, groovy and a little eerie-- often all at once-- and the arrangements are perfect.
The original album is pretty rare-- it was released on John Sinclair's Strata Records, which didn't have much in the way of distribution. In December I ripped the whole LP and was bugging off the fact that in the reissue glut of the past decade, Saturday Night Special had somehow slipped through the cracks. However before I got around to posting any of the songs here, I learned that Wax Poetics has a reissue in the works with new liner notes and the original, even more gangster cover. It's currently available only in digital form but they're also taking pre-orders on limited edition double vinyl.
Because a legit reissue is available, I've held off on posting anything from Saturday Night Special, but here is an earlier version of a song that appears on that LP:
Lyman Woodard was briefly a member of the 8th Day and on their second album they recorded this song. There's something a little sinister in the bassline but the song has such a groovy pulse that I still reach for it every time I'm DJing on a balmy night.
Bonus random fact I learned while preparing this post that kinda blew me away: the saxophonist on Saturday Night Special is also the singer of this mid-90s house classic.
As I was pulling the Jerry Washington LP to rip yesterday, I also grabbed a couple nearby Grover Washington, Jr. records that I hadn't listened to in a while.
When I started off buying jazz and funk I turned up my nose at Grover Washington records. I associated him with "Just the Two of Us", a song I can kind of ride for now but which I detested as a kid. It took some schooling from Beni B to make me bother to listen to funk stuff like "Mr. Magic", "Knucklehead", etc., but I was glad I did.
Still, some of Washington's music takes mellow over a precipice, followed by a queasy-making drop into smooth jazz territory. This is about as close to the edge as I care to follow him:
The seagull noises sound an alarm right away-- "THIS SHIT IS SMOOTH JAZZ!" If you're tempted to run for cover, wait it out to about the 45 second mark when the the drums and clavinet drop-- it's like an "all clear" as they balance out the new age-y ambience of the rest of the track. (BTW, the song was used well on Siah & Yeshua's "Visualz", a record that was vinyl-only and for a long time hard to track down; it's now in print on CD and mp3.)
This is another one I almost feel uncomfortable about liking-- soprano saxophone is probably the ultimate signifier of smooth jazz:
Not that there's anything so wrong with "smooth" per se. Peep game:
The "Smooth" radio format is some revolutionary (if throwed-back) shit, though. Outside of mixtapes, in how many other contexts do you hear music that's programmed not by its genre and not by the demographics of its listenership but by its abstract aesthetic?
My dad is deep in the Smooth lifestyle (dude was country when country wasn't cool, so to speak: He's been down with the Smoove unit since the mid-eighties when his avuncular cocoa co-worker Greg--he of the late-model zinfandel-colored something with the "LOAFIN" vanity plate--turned him out with some Najee), so whenever we go to visit him, it's wall-to-wall "Wave FM" or whatever--in the crib, in the convertible, while ordering assorted chicken-based wraps named after towns in Arizona, etc.--and I can honestly say that said station will seemingly play anything, by any artist, in any genre, from any time period, as long as it feels smooth. In one weekend, on one station, I heard Bobby Caldwell, late-period Miracles, Beck, Al Green, MacNeal and Niles, Paul Hardcastle, Etta James, The Deele, Dave Brubeck, Steely Dan, Maroon 5, Lee Morgan, Johnny Hammond, Jefferson Starship, Jobim, Talking Heads, and on and on and on.
Regardless of how one feels about the individual artists, where the fuck else do you hear that kind of sensibility in wide public broadcast? Those of you that can't get past the specifics of the playlist ("Fuck a Kenny G, thun!"), think of it this way: Imagine if there was some station that would play anything, by any artist, in any genre, from any time period, as long as it felt hard (settle down, Beavis): MC5, Public Enemy, Metallica, Prince Far I, Funkadelic, Alber Ayler, M.O.P., and on and on and on. Well, that's what's going on with a lot of these "Smooth" stations. You ain't gotta like it, but please recognize this for the soft bomb that it is.
The preceding was posted a few years ago on Soulstrut by james a/k/a James Cavicchia, a guy who ought to be writing for a living. While in general my feeling is that what happens on message boards should stay on message boards, that's one of the best pieces of music writing I've ever read. (For more on James as well as his meditation on summer songs, visit O-Dub's seasonal blog.)
James's reference to M.O.P. reminded me of the following possibly apocryphal exchange between them and a U.K. interviewer (I think this may have been in a Hip-Hop Connection interview, but I've never seen the piece firsthand) that highlights their love for smooth:
BILLY DANZE: Kenny G? He's dope! LIL' FAME: Kenny G is just like "God damn!" John Coltrane's alright but... I would buy a Kenny G CD. Coltrane's not like my era. But Kenny G, he makes music for black people and that shit is so beautiful. It's like the classical soul and the R&B soul when people sing, Kenny G plays that shit and makes it sound like it's singing, nigga! BILLY DANZE: And Phil Collins, that's our homey, though! You don't like Phil Collins? You crazy! Phil Collins is dope, come on! LIL' FAME: I bet if I do a song with Kenny G that shit would be huge. I'll do some brand new shit with Kenny G, and that would fuck everybody up. I would do it and then you'll label it a crossover. For real, I wanna do a song with Kenny G...
But, uh... back to the lecture at hand; here are two really obscure version of Grover Washington's "Mr. Magic":
The way the drums are recorded is crazy-- kind of remind me of Weather Report's "Non-Stop Home". This is from an LP on a mysterious label that I think occupied the same shady tax-dodge territory as Guinness and Tiger Lily.
Johnny Heartsman was a major figure on the Oakland blues & R&B scene from the 50s to mid-60s but then largely disappeared, leading his own trio in the Central Valley and then a band for singer Joe Simon. Around 1990 the blues scene rediscovered him and he cut a couple records; he passed away in 1996.
If you were to rank all of Belgium's cultural products in terms of awesomeness, the late Marc Moulin would rank somewhere between the french fry and Tintin.
He was one of those artists who managed to be way ahead of the curve not once, but several times-- first with the moody jazz funk of his early 70s recordings with Placebo, which eerily anticipated the sound of mid-90s NYC rap, and then with his late 70s recording with Telex, which were a big influence on Detroit's techno pioneers. Shit, even what little I've heard of the stuff he released in the last decade was pretty cool.
Over on DJ Day's blog, I read that Jimmy McGriff had passed away.
I can't really speak to his importance as an organ stylist, but throughout the 60s and 70s he was probably the most consistently funky of the many jazz organ players working the R&B crossover market.
Here are a few of my favorites by him. The first four are just solid funk; the last three are winning oddities-- McGriff backing the great soul singer Junior Parker on one of their two full-length collaborations, him playing piano (or simply comping on pedals while someone else does), and him riding a synth bassline, respectively.
Jimmy McGriff: "Charlotte" (Solid State, 1969)
Jimmy McGriff: "Chris Cross" (Solid State, 1969)
Jimmy McGriff: "Fat Cakes" (Capitol, 1971)
Jimmy McGriff: "Super Funk" (Groove Merchant, 1973)
Jimmy McGriff & Junior Parker: "It Ain't What You Got" (Capitol, 1971)
Jimmy McGriff: "Deb Sombo" (Blue Note, 1970)
Jimmy McGriff: "Stump Juice" (Groove Merchant, 1975)
Back when Naughty by Nature's "O.P.P." came out, I remember hearing rumors that they'd stolen the track from a breakbeat album by Tony D, a fellow Jersey guy and producer of the Poor Righteous Teachers and YZ, among many others. I don't think the Tony D record ever got distributed on the West coast, so it wasn't until a few years ago that I found it and finally heard the song. (Weekend Records, NYC, I miss you.)
As for whether Naughty ripped off the beat, I can't say. Sampling an obvious soul classic and putting it over the popular "Substitution" break isn't the most idiosyncratic pairing; the way both tracks use the "come on, come on, come on, let me show you what it's all about" vocal seems less like coincidence. In Naughty's defense, if they did steal it, they stole it from a record prominently labeled:
Thinking about the one Tony D album led me to think about one he released a few years later.
His hand-drawn covers make my eyeballs want to scream, but I always loved this track.
Jimmy McGriff: "Back on the Track" (Blue Note, 1969)
And this:
O.C.: "Ma Dukes" (Wild Pitch, 1994)
"Ma Dukes" is from O.C.'s Word... Life, which just got reissued with the rest of the Wild Pitch catalog; there's also a recent reissue with some bonus tracks. If I remember right, it's titled what it is because his mom sings the hook!
Crap! Last week I learned that my current radio slot has expired and tomorrow afternoon's show will be my last for a while.
KALX has some unusual ways of doing things relative to other radio stations and one of these is that when you are awarded a time slot, it's only yours for a year. When that year is up, you can continue to program the time slot for an additional two months, but then you're off the air for a while. There are some good reasons for the rule but from my perspective it's very frustrating because it makes it difficult to build an audience of regular listeners; by the time I do, it's time to move on again.
Shawn Phillips: "I Don't Want to Leave You, I Just Came to Say Goodbye" (A&M, 1976)
This song is drawn from Shawn Phillips's 1977 album, Spaced, which seems to be a contractual-obligation record-- most of the tracks including this one were leftovers from sessions for previous albums. Phillips wasn't really known for jazz-funk instrumentals, but his backing band on this includes Paul Jackson, Jr. & Mike Clark of the Headhunters (Oakland #1!). The song is almost 17 minutes and never switches up, but for me it doesn't get monotonous.
This one's for my friend DJ Kitty, who just got back from a few months in Brazil. It's the sample to one of her favorite songs. It's also a pretty decent song in its own right.
Massada: "Beautiful Berimbau/Sleep My Love" (Kendari, 1978)
Jan Hammer Group: "Don't You Know" (Nemperor, 1977)
I love this song.
Jan Hammer's a synth-playing jazzman best known for the Miami Vice theme, but this is more airy and soulful than other stuff I've heard by him. Unfortunately, I think the only version that's commercially available is this remake, which has no good reason to exist. There is, however, a cool interpolation by Jel.
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