TROUBLE FUNK: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert

LOVE THIS:

May 30, 2018 | Abby O'Neill -- Go-go — Washington D.C.'s regional twist on funk — reigned in the DMV during the 1980s, and one of the scene's signature acts was Trouble Funk. More than 30 years later, the collective, led by Big Tony Fisher, still fills sold-out venues with heavyweight percussion and call-and-response lyrics. Trouble Funk concerts are bona fide jam sessions, so I was determined to squeeze their unrelenting rhythms behind the Tiny Desk.

With 12 members sandwiched into a cramped space, the electricity was almost tangible as they launched into the 1982 banger "Pump Me Up," a song sampled in Public Enemy's protest anthem "Fight the Power" and M/A/R/R/S's dance classic "Pump Up The Volume." The drum breaks here are definitive go-go and it was hard to discern who was having more fun: the band or the audience. On "Grip It," buoyant and staccato horn melodies propelled the song forward, while "Let's Get Small" featured Trouble Funk's classic call-and-response chants. "Drop the Bomb," another notable gem from their lengthy discography, kept the energy level high and "Don't Touch That Stereo" was all raw, unencumbered funk. To conclude the set, they segued into "E Flat Boogie," their first hit in 1979, with Big Tony's vocals front and center.

While the late Chuck Brown is often acknowledged as the godfather of go-go (and you can see why during his Tiny Desk), Trouble Funk was a key part of the sound's second wave. In a city often interrupted by the transient revolving door of government officials and federal staffers, the funky artform is woven into the fabric of this city and inspires a spirit of dance, rhythm and sheer joy.

SET LIST
"Pump Me Up"
"Grip It"
"Let's Get Small"
"Drop The Bomb"
"It's In The mix" (Don't Touch That Stereo)"
"E-Flat Boogie"

MUSICIANS
Big Tony Fisher (bass), Allyson Johnson (keyboards), James Avery (keyboards), Tony Edwards (drums), Chris Allen (percussion), Larry Blake (percussion), Dean Harris (trumpet), Eric Silvan (saxophone), Paul Phifer (trombone), Derrick Ward (vocals), Keith White (vocals), David Gussom (guitar).

CREDITS
Producers: Abby O'Neill, Morgan Noelle Smith; Creative Director: Bob Boilen; Audio Engineers: Josh Rogosin, James Willetts; Videographers: Morgan Noelle Smith, CJ Riculan, Maia Stern, Dani Lyman; Production Assistant: Joshua Bote; Photo: Eslah Attar/NPR.

Hot Buttered Soul for your saturday

Isaac Hayes - Hot Buttered Soul.
The Book of Moses begins here with Isaac transforming soul music in 1969.
Hitting #1 on the Soul Charts for 10 weeks...
This classic was heavily sampled in the golden years of Hip Hop.

Track List:
Walk on By
Hyperbollicsyllabicequedalymistic
One Woman
By the time I get to Phoenix

LongPlayers Play Longer

Dig It ...

We should celebrate greats like Sly Stone while they're still with us

from The Guardian

The outpouring of grief for Prince and David Bowie was justified – but another rock and funk pioneer languishes ignored by pop culture. Let’s give him his due


Sly Stone: his music still sounds startlingly current. Photograph: David Warner Ellis/Redferns

If you’d had to guess which rock/funk legend was going to die in 2016, Sly Stone would have been much higher up on the list than Prince. Stone, at 73, is 16 years older than Prince, and besides that has been ill for decades. Sly’s career was derailed by addiction in the 1970s, and he never recovered. Comeback effort after comeback effort fizzled, royalty disputes festered, and for a time he was living in a recreational vehicle. Given his lack of public profile and his history of addiction, many people have assumed he died years ago.

Even when Stone does pass on (hopefully many years from now), there’s unlikely to be a Prince or Bowie sized outpouring of grief – and think-pieces. Though Sly’s widely acknowledged as a rock legend, after 40 years out of the spotlight he barely figures in pop culture. You can gauge the extent of Stone’s marginalization by the reaction to the death last year of his collaborator and the mother of one of his children, legendary funk trumpeter and singer Cynthia Robinson. She received brief obituaries, but people on social media hardly noticed.

Stone may not be much thought about, but his music still sounds startlingly current. More than George Clinton, more than James Brown, more even perhaps than Prince, Sly and the Family Stone’s hits foreshadow the bricolage construction and magpie eclecticism of hip-hop. The first track on Sly Stone’s first album, 1967’s A Whole New Thing, opens with what is effectively a proto-sample: a horn riff from, of all things, Frère Jacques.



He continued to use quotations throughout his career – Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) name-drops his own earlier hits; I Don’t Know (Satisfaction) is a stoned, stunned remix of the Stones hit. But even when he was writing entirely new material, his songs sound like they’re built out of bits and pieces glued together; Dylan’s harmonica, Motown grooves, rock guitar sting, Stax horns – everything went into mix, not blended together but turned into a single psychedelic explosion. Sing a Simple Song, perhaps the funkiest track ever recorded, has been sampled hundreds of times, which makes sense since it sounds as though it’s built out of samples. Vocals, horn beats and bass burps zip in and out of the staggering beat, while Sly’s own shouted disembodied cry of ecstasy pans from channel to channel, foreshadowing generations of funk studio trickery to come. You can hear everyone from George Clinton to Public Enemy to De La Soul to Timbaland to FKA twigs to Kendrick Lamar to, of course, Prince taking notes at each “try a little Do! Re! Me!” Sly is the place you go if you want to learn how to smash a song apart and reassemble the broken pieces into something weirder, funkier and better.

Stone’s message also continues to resonate. It’s a cliche by now to talk about the transition from his earlier, optimistic flower power hits to his later downer mumbled grooves. There certainly is a contrast between Everyday People, and 1971’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On, which starts with Sly muttering: “Feel so good, don’t wanna move.” But the truth is Sly always mixed irony, hope and despair, balancing the sunny dynamics of his (pre-Prince) multi-gendered and racially integrated band with his studio play-every-instrument-himself control freak insularity. Thank You For Talking to Me Africa, his ominous, slowed-down, screwed-and-chopped-before-there-was-screwed-and-chopped remix of Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) can be heard either as a statement of black pride and resistance or as a bitter comment on the end of the civil rights movement’s racial idealism, or as both. In any case, “Lookin’ at the devil / grinnin’ at his gun / fingers start shakin’ / I begin to run” could have been written yesterday for the Black Lives Matter movement – as could “If I could do it all over again / I’d be in the same skin I’m in”, from his last classic, 1973’s Fresh.



And then there’s the early, cheerful-sounding Run, Run, Run, where the bright chimes and doo-wop Beach Boy harmonies provide a backdrop for a bleak, blunt assessment of white America. “Don’t try to figure out what’s happenin’ inside their heads / Ain’t too much goin’ on inside the head of the dead.” When Robinson shouts, “People, listen!” it’s part call to party, part warning – the ambivalence only underlined when the rest of the band takes it up in sweet harmonizing. Stone’s mixture of joy and paranoia doesn’t seem too dated for 2016; if anything, it seems too pointed. Prince and Bowie both in their ways took the 60s as a touchstone for eccentric, and erotic, transcendence. Stone, even at his happiest, had an eye on the broken shards lying around on the asphalt after the spaceship cracked.

Maybe Stone would be a little more discussed or acknowledged if his message wasn’t so insistently political and uncomfortable. Still, the real reason there aren’t a bazillion Sly Stone think-pieces whooshing through the net isn’t because of that. It’s just a marketing failure. “Ain’t nobody got the thing I can hear / But if I have to I will yell in your ear,” he sang in one of his 70s tracks, Time for Livin’, but he’s been singularly bad at shouting in anyone’s ear for decades. The media needs a news peg, and when an artist isn’t releasing music, or performing, or maintaining the brand, it’s difficult to generate interest.


Sly & The Family Stone in the early 70s: mixing irony, hope and despair. Photograph: GAB Archives/Redferns

The one exception, of course, is that final news peg, death. If you’re not in the spotlight, nobody looks at you – until you die, at which point think piece writers are all given one last chance to consider your legacy. “You only funky as your last cut / You focus on the past your ass’ll be a has-what”, as Sly-and-Prince-disciple Andre 3000 said, back when he was still relevant and people wrote think pieces about him. Time and the media chug ahead, and Stevie Wonder’s career is less important at the moment than whatever Justin Bieber happened to say yesterday on Twitter. That’s pop, and there’s not much point in being bitter about it. Still, it’s worthwhile to take a moment now and then to think about the legends while they’re here, rather than waiting for that arbitrary online instant when everybody all at once will be allowed to remember, after Sly’s left, how important it was for him to have been here all along.

thanks, Ian Rogers

Rare Beastie Boys and George Clinton from my Instagram

GEORGE CLINTON & BEASTIE BOYS , now thats a funky bunch, back in 1985 or so, at some awards show in NYC... This is before Licensed to ILL was released obviously, so we have no idea what the Beasties were doing there besides goofing with all the music icons. Notice George holding a copy of LL's first album in his hand #beastieBoys #georgeclinton #funkadelic #hiphop #oldschool #NYC #atomicdog #shesonit #cheeseomlette #defjam #backstage #goofing #young #adamhorovitz #adamyauch #michaeldiamond #AdRock #MCA #MikeD #fonky

A photo posted by glen E. friedman Ⓥ (@glenefriedman) on Feb 25, 2016 at 3:30pm PST

James Brown killing it for your Sunday (one 19 minute take of Escape-Ism)

'I Feel Good ’ James Brown's Amazing, CNN Interview,1988

from Dangerous Minds

When former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich was running around before his trial appearing on The Daily Show assuring Jon Stewart that he never, ever did anything wrong, he should have considered adopting the post-arrest media strategy of James Brown, as seen in this incredible interview. Considering that both Blagojevich and Brown ended up going to prison, it couldn’t have hurt! And James Brown is a hell of a lot more popular than Rod Blagojevich.

This interview on CNN’s Sonya Live! in LA occurred in May 1988, after Brown was arrested in Aiken County, South Carolina, on charges of drug possession and fleeing from the police after his wife Adrienne called 911 because he was threatening her safety. Brown was released after paying $24,000 in bail and then went to Atlanta to do this interview.

In the interview, Brown seems only dimly aware of Sonya Friedman’s questions, preferring to shout the lyrics to his songs and talk about how he “smells good ... and makes love good.” (The juxtaposition of Sonya’s “How did all this trouble begin?” and Brown’s non-sequitur answer—“Livin’ in America!”—is resonant in ways that utterly outstrip the meanings Brown may have had in mind.) If you want to see someone on TV being interviewed while high, you can hardly do better than James Brown. As in so many other things. Rod Blagojevich just wouldn’t be in the same league.

Brown’s incredible vitality is such that you’ll be excused for wondering whether this isn’t a concert appearance in addition to an interview. YouTube commenters and the like are given to identifying cocaine as the source of this live-wire act, but it was almost certainly PCP. His arrest was for possession of PCP, a substance Brown was allegedly using a lot at the time.

Just four months later, Brown was arrested again, this time on Interstate 20 (near the Georgia-South Carolina border) for carrying an unlicensed pistol and assaulting a police officer. He was sentenced to six years in prison and ended up serving three years.

To judge by R.J. Smith’s The One, Brown’s erratic conduct in the 1980s was going to land him in prison one way or another. Between 1984 and his September 1988 arrest, Adrienne Brown had to call 911 to report domestic violence a whopping twelve times.

As the undisputed father of funk, James Brown was one of the most important musicians of the twentieth century, and nobody was more electrifying live. This interview manages to be both highly amusing and a harbinger of the troubles that were just around the corner.

Another you should know, if you don't already.

The Jimmy Castor Bunch created a song that is one of the all time funk hip-hop classics, and probably played more often at any break dance battle or authentic hip-hop party than any other song hands down. Not to mention how often it's been sampled! You may not have heard the whole thing, but even if you've seen the most mediocre hip-hop video you've seen some kids getting down to this classic B-Boy break beat of all break beats. Check this live TV appearance from 1972 of the original song "It's Just Begun" (from the album 16 Slabs of Funk) in it's entirety.

and here's the studio version:

THE FABULOUS COUNTS "Get Down People"

...from 1969 LP "jan jan"



(Thanks, Basheer)

from Wikipedia

The Fabulous Counts were an American soul/funk group from Detroit, Michigan. They won local acclaim as an instrumental group and as a backing ensemble for visiting solo acts after their formation in 1968. Working with producer Richard Wylie, they released the instrumental single "Jan, Jan" on Detroit's Moira Records that year, which narrowly missed hitting the US R&B charts that winter. Their second single, "Dirty Red", passed without trace, but the third single, "Get Down People", hit #32 R&B and #88 on the US pop charts. A full-length, Jan, Jan (produced by Ollie McLaughlin), was released in 1969 on Cotillion Records, but the group left the label in 1971.

Signing with Westbound Records that year, the group went through some lineup changes, moved to Atlanta, Georgia, and changed their name simply to The Counts. They released three funk LPs under this name in the 1970s, and all three albums charted before the group called it quits in 1976. in 2009 the fabulous counts reunite back in the line up from 1976

www.thefabulouscounts.com www.myspace.com/thefabulouscounts

some more for you "The Original Jam Master"

Grant Green - Ain't It Funky Now


(thanks, again Basheer)

Another reason I wanted to start this thing...

Sly & The Family Stone wins a $10,000 talent contest back in 1968... 
Sharing stuff like this just makes me happy.