Showing posts with label funk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label funk. Show all posts
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Earth, Wind & Fire in the late 1970s
Bought this photo back in the day, I am assuming it was in San Diego in the late 1970s. Verdine White (L) is the reason i eventually became a bassist, and I cannot count the hours of joy Maurice White's (C) music has given me. Guitarist Al McKay (R) played some mean rock and rhythm, but he was replaced in the early 80s. If I had to guess I would say this was 1978 or so. Can't say enough about the powerhouse that this band was.
Monday, April 19, 2010
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Marcus Miller throwing down funky bass on French TV
A great example of:
A) How funky Marcus Miller is.
B) How it is easier for someone like Miller to get on TV in France than the USA.
C) How bad camera work in the form of too much editing can detract from great performance.
Découvrez Marcus Miller en live avec "Blast" sur Culturebox !
A) How funky Marcus Miller is.
B) How it is easier for someone like Miller to get on TV in France than the USA.
C) How bad camera work in the form of too much editing can detract from great performance.
Découvrez Marcus Miller en live avec "Blast" sur Culturebox !
Tuesday, June 02, 2009
In Praise of Sly Stone
I'm going through a bit of Sly & the Family Stone revival, mostly due to a surprise interview done on KCRW over Memorial Day weekend. Sly's daughter has been getting him back into things gently, and KCRW's Chris Douridas had the enviable job of speaking with Sly Stone for nearly an hour. You can hear the interview HERE AT KCRW. You can podcast it too.
Sly & the Family Stone TV medley back in the day (check out the priceless reaction shot to Sly's vocal intro at :27-28 [I feel ya, girl!]):
Some interview Sly, guessing mid-80s:
Stand:
1970s rehearsal footage:
I wanna take you higher (on Dick Cavett):
If You Want Me To Stay (solo piano on Mike Douglass show) (sorry about the overdubbed talk)
Sly & the Family Stone TV medley back in the day (check out the priceless reaction shot to Sly's vocal intro at :27-28 [I feel ya, girl!]):
Some interview Sly, guessing mid-80s:
Stand:
1970s rehearsal footage:
I wanna take you higher (on Dick Cavett):
If You Want Me To Stay (solo piano on Mike Douglass show) (sorry about the overdubbed talk)
Thursday, April 02, 2009
NYT profile on drummer Bernard Purdie
NYT
[M&C note: see media samples on original NYT post]
Great anecdotes about recording, Purdie's shuffle, ego...
March 31, 2009
A Signature Shuffle Enjoys a New Life
By DAVID SEGAL
For bowlers the ultimate test is the 7-10 split. For card sharks it’s the hot shot cut. For drummers it’s the funky little miracle of syncopation known as the Purdie Shuffle.
You’ve heard Bernard Purdie — better known as Pretty Purdie — perform his creation on Steely Dan’s “Home at Last,” from the 1977 album “Aja.” And you’ve heard variations on songs by Led Zeppelin (“Fool in the Rain”), Toto (“Rosanna”) and Death Cab for Cutie (“Grapevine Fires”).
Created with six bass, high-hat and snare tones, the Purdie Shuffle is a groove that seems to spin in concentric circles as it lopes forward. The result is a Tilt-a-Whirl of sound, and if you can listen without shaking your hips, you should probably see a doctor.
Now the beat has a whole new life. On YouTube dozens of amateurs, aspiring pros and assorted dilettantes have uploaded videos of their attempts to teach or demonstrate the Purdie Shuffle.
But you post at your peril. A guy identified as BazyBeats was savaged in the comments section of the video he posted of his attempt at “Fool in the Rain.” He slightly bungled the pattern on the snare, and dozens of angry nitpickers let him know it. Eventually he asked them to “go somewhere else with your negative, hateful, blackhearted and useless souls.”
Mr. Purdie can be found these days at the Al Hirschfeld Theater playing for the Broadway revival of “Hair,” which has been in previews since early March and opens Tuesday.
For Mr. Purdie, the “Hair” gig is one of those full-circle experiences that can’t be planned. He worked with the show’s composer, Galt MacDermot, in New York in the early 1960s, when demos of the songs for the show were first recorded. Those tracks were later refined for the musical.
At the time Mr. Purdie was a relative newcomer to the city, having spent most of his life in Elkton, Md., a town near the Delaware border. One of 15 children, he had started by banging on his mother’s pots and pans.
“I knew right away that’s what I wanted to do with the rest of my life,” he said. “No matter what happened, I wanted to play the drums.”
Mr. Purdie, who says he is 68, was sitting at a sushi bar across the street from the theater, dressed in a dark suit and a satiny white tie. He was an hour from changing into Tommy Bahama-style casual wear and climbing onto the rear of a colorful pickup truck stationed onstage, where he drums for the show.
He’s an ample, teddy-bearish guy with a graying mustache, a hearty laugh and an ego that is legendarily large. For years he showed up at sessions with two professionally made signs, which he would place on music stands near his kit. “You done hired the hit maker,” read one. “If you need me, call me, the little old hit maker,” said the other. It was both a gimmick and a calling card, and it would have come across as pure braggadocio except that Mr. Purdie always delivered.
“He was one of the top five drummers in Manhattan back when Atlantic was recording here, when all these great independent labels were recording here,” said Phil Ramone, a producer who worked with Mr. Purdie in the late ’60s and went on to record Paul Simon and Billy Joel. “Purdie just had a way of inspiring confidence in everyone.”
He also had a way of implying that he was finished with a session as soon as he had nailed his part, which was often before anyone else in the room.
“You’d do a first take, and he’d put on his overcoat as if he was about to leave,” said Donald Fagen, the Steely Dan keyboardist. “The problem was that some of the other musicians had just become comfortable with the chords. You had to cajole him to do some other takes so everyone else could polish up their parts a bit.”
Within a few years of arriving in Manhattan Mr. Purdie was touring and recording with the greats of ’60s soul, funk and jazz, including James Brown, Aretha Franklin and Louis Armstrong. He is heard on more than 4,000 records.
Some of the greats, in his telling, were ornery characters. The Godfather of Soul fined him $25 for a mistake he didn’t make, prompting Mr. Purdie to quit. During a concert with Ray Charles in Chicago, when Mr. Purdie started playing a few bars too soon, Charles barked, “Don’t play, drummer,” into the microphone, a rather public embarrassment before a huge crowd.
“He would turn around and look at you — I always thought the guy could see,” Mr. Purdie said. “And he’d say, ‘What is your problem?’ Now, what are you supposed to say to that?”
Before the current “Hair” gig Mr. Purdie spent much of his time in different bands, one of which, the Hudson River Rats, plays a lot of private parties and clubs. He is sampled often, turning up on Beck’s “Devil’s Haircut” and most recently in “Mother of All Funk Chords,” a YouTube mash-up by an Israeli producer known as Kutiman.
A new generation of drummers, meanwhile, is keeping his shuffle alive. Jason McGerr of Death Cab for Cutie says it’s not quite accurate to call the beat on “Grapevine Fires” a Purdie Shuffle.
“It doesn’t matter how much I practice, I will never play that shuffle like Purdie,” Mr. McGerr said. “It’s because he has an attitude that seems to come through every time. He always sounds like he’s completely in charge.”
Mr. Purdie has half a dozen theories about the shuffle’s appeal — the challenge, the energy, the versatility of the rhythm, and on and on. It’s easier for him to pinpoint the beat’s genesis.
“It comes from the train near my house where I grew up,” he said. “When I first started working this out, I was 8 years old, and I called it the locomotion because that’s what I was trying to capture: whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.”
It started as a regular shuffle, but then he began weaving in what are called ghost notes, created by lightly brushing the snare with the fingers or stick. And instead of a straightforward tapping on the high-hat, he moved his right hand up and down so that he was hitting the side of the high-hat, then the top, over and over — creating this tock-tick tock-tick sound.
As buoyant as the beat is, it can convey a lot of different emotions, as Steely Dan figured out during the recording of “Babylon Sisters,” from the 1980 album “Gaucho.”
“I guess we expected more of a regular shuffle, and he started playing something very complex,” Mr. Fagen recalled. “We were amazed, because it was perfect for the tune. ‘Babylon Sisters’ has this dark mood to it, and the beat seemed to accentuate the floating dark mood that the song required.”
Mr. Purdie said he was flattered by the versions he has heard by other bands, though if you want to hear the real thing live, you’ll have to come to “Hair.” The shuffle turns up at least half a dozen times during the show.
“You’ll know it when you hear it,” he said, “because when you do, you’ll have to move your feet.”
[M&C note: see media samples on original NYT post]
Great anecdotes about recording, Purdie's shuffle, ego...
March 31, 2009
A Signature Shuffle Enjoys a New Life
By DAVID SEGAL
For bowlers the ultimate test is the 7-10 split. For card sharks it’s the hot shot cut. For drummers it’s the funky little miracle of syncopation known as the Purdie Shuffle.
You’ve heard Bernard Purdie — better known as Pretty Purdie — perform his creation on Steely Dan’s “Home at Last,” from the 1977 album “Aja.” And you’ve heard variations on songs by Led Zeppelin (“Fool in the Rain”), Toto (“Rosanna”) and Death Cab for Cutie (“Grapevine Fires”).
Created with six bass, high-hat and snare tones, the Purdie Shuffle is a groove that seems to spin in concentric circles as it lopes forward. The result is a Tilt-a-Whirl of sound, and if you can listen without shaking your hips, you should probably see a doctor.
Now the beat has a whole new life. On YouTube dozens of amateurs, aspiring pros and assorted dilettantes have uploaded videos of their attempts to teach or demonstrate the Purdie Shuffle.
But you post at your peril. A guy identified as BazyBeats was savaged in the comments section of the video he posted of his attempt at “Fool in the Rain.” He slightly bungled the pattern on the snare, and dozens of angry nitpickers let him know it. Eventually he asked them to “go somewhere else with your negative, hateful, blackhearted and useless souls.”
Mr. Purdie can be found these days at the Al Hirschfeld Theater playing for the Broadway revival of “Hair,” which has been in previews since early March and opens Tuesday.
For Mr. Purdie, the “Hair” gig is one of those full-circle experiences that can’t be planned. He worked with the show’s composer, Galt MacDermot, in New York in the early 1960s, when demos of the songs for the show were first recorded. Those tracks were later refined for the musical.
At the time Mr. Purdie was a relative newcomer to the city, having spent most of his life in Elkton, Md., a town near the Delaware border. One of 15 children, he had started by banging on his mother’s pots and pans.
“I knew right away that’s what I wanted to do with the rest of my life,” he said. “No matter what happened, I wanted to play the drums.”
Mr. Purdie, who says he is 68, was sitting at a sushi bar across the street from the theater, dressed in a dark suit and a satiny white tie. He was an hour from changing into Tommy Bahama-style casual wear and climbing onto the rear of a colorful pickup truck stationed onstage, where he drums for the show.
He’s an ample, teddy-bearish guy with a graying mustache, a hearty laugh and an ego that is legendarily large. For years he showed up at sessions with two professionally made signs, which he would place on music stands near his kit. “You done hired the hit maker,” read one. “If you need me, call me, the little old hit maker,” said the other. It was both a gimmick and a calling card, and it would have come across as pure braggadocio except that Mr. Purdie always delivered.
“He was one of the top five drummers in Manhattan back when Atlantic was recording here, when all these great independent labels were recording here,” said Phil Ramone, a producer who worked with Mr. Purdie in the late ’60s and went on to record Paul Simon and Billy Joel. “Purdie just had a way of inspiring confidence in everyone.”
He also had a way of implying that he was finished with a session as soon as he had nailed his part, which was often before anyone else in the room.
“You’d do a first take, and he’d put on his overcoat as if he was about to leave,” said Donald Fagen, the Steely Dan keyboardist. “The problem was that some of the other musicians had just become comfortable with the chords. You had to cajole him to do some other takes so everyone else could polish up their parts a bit.”
Within a few years of arriving in Manhattan Mr. Purdie was touring and recording with the greats of ’60s soul, funk and jazz, including James Brown, Aretha Franklin and Louis Armstrong. He is heard on more than 4,000 records.
Some of the greats, in his telling, were ornery characters. The Godfather of Soul fined him $25 for a mistake he didn’t make, prompting Mr. Purdie to quit. During a concert with Ray Charles in Chicago, when Mr. Purdie started playing a few bars too soon, Charles barked, “Don’t play, drummer,” into the microphone, a rather public embarrassment before a huge crowd.
“He would turn around and look at you — I always thought the guy could see,” Mr. Purdie said. “And he’d say, ‘What is your problem?’ Now, what are you supposed to say to that?”
Before the current “Hair” gig Mr. Purdie spent much of his time in different bands, one of which, the Hudson River Rats, plays a lot of private parties and clubs. He is sampled often, turning up on Beck’s “Devil’s Haircut” and most recently in “Mother of All Funk Chords,” a YouTube mash-up by an Israeli producer known as Kutiman.
A new generation of drummers, meanwhile, is keeping his shuffle alive. Jason McGerr of Death Cab for Cutie says it’s not quite accurate to call the beat on “Grapevine Fires” a Purdie Shuffle.
“It doesn’t matter how much I practice, I will never play that shuffle like Purdie,” Mr. McGerr said. “It’s because he has an attitude that seems to come through every time. He always sounds like he’s completely in charge.”
Mr. Purdie has half a dozen theories about the shuffle’s appeal — the challenge, the energy, the versatility of the rhythm, and on and on. It’s easier for him to pinpoint the beat’s genesis.
“It comes from the train near my house where I grew up,” he said. “When I first started working this out, I was 8 years old, and I called it the locomotion because that’s what I was trying to capture: whoosh, whoosh, whoosh.”
It started as a regular shuffle, but then he began weaving in what are called ghost notes, created by lightly brushing the snare with the fingers or stick. And instead of a straightforward tapping on the high-hat, he moved his right hand up and down so that he was hitting the side of the high-hat, then the top, over and over — creating this tock-tick tock-tick sound.
As buoyant as the beat is, it can convey a lot of different emotions, as Steely Dan figured out during the recording of “Babylon Sisters,” from the 1980 album “Gaucho.”
“I guess we expected more of a regular shuffle, and he started playing something very complex,” Mr. Fagen recalled. “We were amazed, because it was perfect for the tune. ‘Babylon Sisters’ has this dark mood to it, and the beat seemed to accentuate the floating dark mood that the song required.”
Mr. Purdie said he was flattered by the versions he has heard by other bands, though if you want to hear the real thing live, you’ll have to come to “Hair.” The shuffle turns up at least half a dozen times during the show.
“You’ll know it when you hear it,” he said, “because when you do, you’ll have to move your feet.”
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Heatwave Live on German TV circa 1977
A rare video that makes me thankful for YouTube. A ridiculous live performance by Heatwave, one of the funkiest bands of the disco era (at least for their first two albums). How ridiculous? Well, it ends with the bass player and guitar player grooving while sitting on the shoulders of the two lead singers. If you can get past the common YouTube sound sync problems, it's one hell of a show.
As an aside, I would love to write an article on Rod Temperton and the disco funk sound, so if anyone knows contact info for him I would be grateful.
Looking back, it is sad to see Johnnie Wilder (he's the lead singer on the right) so energetic and vital knowing what happened to him in 1979. He died in 2006; you can read Johnnie Wilder's obituary in Billboard here.
As an aside, I would love to write an article on Rod Temperton and the disco funk sound, so if anyone knows contact info for him I would be grateful.
Looking back, it is sad to see Johnnie Wilder (he's the lead singer on the right) so energetic and vital knowing what happened to him in 1979. He died in 2006; you can read Johnnie Wilder's obituary in Billboard here.
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