Groove Theory

The Blues Foundation of Funk

Tony Bolden

• Editorial: University Press of Mississippi
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781496830616
• Categoría: Media & Performing Arts
• Categoría: Music

Tony Bolden presents an innovative history of funk music focused on the performers, regarding them as intellectuals who fashioned a new aesthetic. Utilizing musicology, literary studies, performance studies, and African American intellectual history, Bolden explores what it means for music, or any cultural artifact, to be funky. Multitudes of African American musicians and dancers created aesthetic frameworks with artistic principles and cultural politics that proved transformative. Bolden approaches the study of funk and black musicians by examining aesthetics, poetics, cultural history, and intellectual history. The study traces the concept of funk from early blues culture to a metamorphosis into a full-fledged artistic framework and a named musical genre in the 1970s, and thereby Bolden presents an alternative reading of the blues tradition. In part one of this two-part book, Bolden undertakes a theoretical examination of the development of funk and the historical conditions in which black artists reimagined their music. In part two, he provides historical and biographical studies of key funk artists, all of whom transfigured elements of blues tradition into new styles and visions. Funk artists, like their blues relatives, tended to contest and contextualize racialized notions of blackness, sexualized notions of gender, and bourgeois notions of artistic value. Funk artists displayed contempt for the status quo and conveyed alternative stylistic concepts and social perspectives through multimedia expression. Bolden argues that on this road to cultural recognition, funk accentuated many of the qualities of black expression that had been stigmatized throughout much of American history.

Side A

Groove Theory

CONCEPTUAL FOUNDATIONS OF BLUE FUNK

Intro

One afternoon many years ago, I stopped by my father’s house for one of our daily listening sessions on jazz. I was fresh out of the Army, and my experiences during my thirteen-month tour in South Korea had transformed my worldview. While overseas I had become fascinated with jazz, literature, and the world of ideas. I was taking classes at Merritt College in Oakland, but my real passion was jazz; and since my father was an aficionado of modern jazz, I shared my new interest with him. Dad regarded Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk as models of intellect, artistic ingenuity, and self-development. So we began our sessions with bebop recordings such as Parker’s “Confirmation,” “Yardbird Suite,” “Scrapple from the Apple”; Gillespie’s “Salt Peanuts”; and Monk’s “In Walked Bud,” and we later discussed the 1949 and 1950 recordings of Miles Davis’s 1957 album Birth of the Cool. But on this particular afternoon, Dad said it was time to focus on the next period. He called it hard bop, and introduced me to Horace Silver. “Horace,” he said, “was a bebopper, but he played funky.” And sure enough, we listened to Silver’s standards like “Opus de Funk” (1953), “Doodlin’” (1954), “Señor Blues” (1956), and “Song for My Father” (1964), arguably the funkiest hard bop composition ever recorded.

Dad’s explanation had a bingo-like effect on me. It was perfectly clear, and we went on listening to the music and talking as we normally did. Many years later, though, I wondered what made Dad feel so confident that I would understand him. Neither of us had ever used “funky” in previous conversations, so why would he think the word would be so clarifying to me? And since I now understood that hard bop was part of the blues tradition, I became curious about the relationship between blues and funk. Silver’s recordings suggested that the concept of funk preceded the musical genre, and that both are related to blues. Yet there was not much scholarship on funk, particularly the concept. Writers as varied as Ralph Ellison and Gayl Jones engaged funk in fiction, but most scholars ignored it. So I read musicians’ memoirs and quickly realized that artists demonstrated tremendous insight on the concept. In retrospect, of course, this makes perfect sense. Since funk is a vernacular concept, who would understand it better than the artists themselves? Groove Theory: The Blues Foundation of Funk represents musicians as organic intellectuals. D’Angelo is a prime example. In an interview with Nelson George a few months before the release of his Grammy Award–winning 2014 album Black Messiah, George asked the virtuoso singer and multi-instrumentalist about his new sound, noting that the music seemed to have “more rock and more funk.” D’Angelo underscored blues in his response:

The thing with me—about rock and all of that … Through years and years of crate digging, listening to old music, you kinda start to connect the dots. And I was seeing the thread that was connecting everything together. Which is pretty much the blues. And everything—soul or funk—kinda starts with that. That’s kinda like the nucleus of everything.¹

D’Angelo encapsulates my central argument—that blues and funk are not just musical forms; they are interrelated concepts. And blues is “like the nucleus” of rock as well as rhythm and blues, which includes soul and funk. As we’ll see, his statement is evidenced by numerous writers and fellow artists. For instance, Greg Tate, a founding member of the Black Rock Coalition, offers the following perspective on Miles Davis’s forays into funk: “What Miles heard in the musics of P-Funk progenitors, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, and Sly Stone was the blues impulse transferred, masked, and retooled for the Space Age through a lowdown act of possession.”² Similarly, when pioneering funk scholar Rickey Vincent states that “[f]unk is actually the last form of black popular music played by musicians trained in the jazz arena,”³ he situates funk in the blues tradition.

Groove Theory traces the concept of funk from the beginning of the blues era around 1890 to its manifestation as a full-fledged genre in the 1970s. But since “blues” and “funk” also reference dissimilar musical forms, some historical background may be helpful. Beginning in the 1950s, early rhythm and blues musicians began developing cyclical, riff-based styles of music that culminated with funk. Richard J. Ripani writes: “Rhythm and blues … overlaps to a great extent with the blues genre, so much so that the border between the two seems impossible to define exactly.”⁴ Moreover, James Brown’s “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” (1965) “showed the way to a whole generation of R&B artists who wanted to interpret blues in a more modern way.”⁵ Thus Ripani identifies a conceptual relationship between blues and funk. Analyzing Maceo Parker’s saxophone solo on “New Bag,” he asks:

Why would the blues scale be the preferred vehicle for solos of this sort, played over extended cyclic sections of R&B grooves? The answer seems to be that when musicians performing in this style want to communicate a certain “deep-soul,” the blues scale is usually the language used to express it. [Charlie] Parker’s “dirty” tone, like Brown’s vocal timbre, is also part of the style and transmission of a desired feeling.⁶

Ripani’s comments corroborate D’Angelo’s premise while raising an important question: How are blues and funk musically related, especially since they sound so dissimilar? The answer lies in the flexibility of the blues scale. Few saxophonists differ as much as modern jazz musician Charlie Parker and rhythm and blues musician Maceo Parker.⁷ The former played an intricate style known as bebop in the 1940s. The latter achieved notoriety as James Brown’s featured soloist in the 1960s. Yet both saxophonists played variations of the blues scale.

Funk is a percussive form of rhythm and blues that emphasizes the groove. Listeners get in sync with the melody and rhythmic pulse of the music. They become enthralled or immersed psychologically, and express joy through dancing and other forms of body movement. Most discussions of rhythm and blues focus on soul music, which blended elements of blues, gospel, and jazz.⁸ Funk musicians extended this fusion, but changed the overall sound quality by incorporating James Brown’s rhythmic innovations and elements of rock. In Brown’s new concept, the drummer emphasized the first beat in a four-bar measure—generally known as the “One”—whereas rock contributed musical technology, especially electronic devices like amplifiers, wah-wah pedals, synthesizers, and so forth. These changes placed more significance to rhythm players. Previously, bass guitarists were relegated to the background as accompanists for singers and soloists; however, funk bassists Larry Graham and Bootsy Collins whose slap-bass techniques influenced younger musicians, performed in the limelight. Electric guitarists were also important. Guitarist Kelvyn Bell provides a helpful explanation in an interview with Maureen Mahon:

Funk put even more emphasis … on heavy rhythms [than R&B]. … It’s all based on the power of the electric guitar and the overdrive and the distortion. When you get like wah wah wah [he imitates a screaming guitar], you play one note and it’s waaaah. … When you use that kind of sound to create rhythm, especially syncopated rhythm, everything’s exaggerated because of the volume. … You play that rhythm with all the distortion on an electric guitar [and] it’s going to be a much bigger, more powerful rhythm.⁹

At the same time, funk musicians envisioned rock as a new approach to blues. As George Clinton, spokesman for the Parliament-Funkadelic collective, put it, “[W]e saw Cream and Vanilla Fudge and all them take the music that my mother liked, flip it around and make it loud and it became cool,” said Clinton. “We realized that blues was the key to that music. We just speeded blues up and called it ‘funk’ cause we knew it was a bad word to a lot of people.”¹⁰ Clinton’s characterization of blues and rock is nearly identical to D’Angelo’s statement. Equally important, his allusion to funk as a “bad word” highlights the contrarian disposition that funk inherited from blues and rock. The predilection for bohemianism in rock was related to broader social issues, though. As Mahon observes:

The hard rock associated with the 1960s counterculture incorporated calls for social, personal, and sexual liberation with political critique—especially of the war in Vietnam. The presence of these ideas and the challenge that the rock scene presented to the mainstream helped forge a link between rock music and freedom from individually and socially imposed strictures. Performers like Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, and Jimi Hendrix communicated this spirit in their lyrics, music, dress, and performance styles.¹¹

Occasionally called black rock, funk coextensively promoted and implicitly critiqued contradictory aspects of black nationalism. The Black Power Movement provided much of the impetus for funk. Activists encouraged black youth to reexamine their African ancestry, especially stigmas related to skin color, hair texture, and vernacular expressions associated with funkiness that were previously objects of shame. But while radical black writers often represented Africa as an idealized “Motherland,” Brown and other funk artists, including Sly and the Family Stone, played rhythms that didn’t exactly “match those regions of West Africa and the Caribbean for sheer rhythmic complexity, [but did] seem to be following some of the same basic rules of that music, including the dense, overlapping and interlocking rhythms in a setting of limited harmonic functionality in the Western sense.”¹² As such, funk highlighted African-derived aspects of African American culture.

The new form was mostly a black street phenomenon that reflected party themes, social commentary, and vernacular idioms, while projecting cultural values at variance with the status quo. But notably, “street” didn’t mean anti-white. Funk exemplified African-derived concepts of music making without promoting racial exclusion. Greg Errico, the drummer who played “overlapping and interlocking rhythms” for Sly and the Family Stone, is white. So is guitarist Dennis Coffey, one of Motown’s famous Funk Brothers, who introduced the wah-wah pedal into Motown’s sound and thus helped change the direction of its music. Both Rufus and Tower of Power were leading funk bands with interracial lineups, and Average White Band, a stellar band based in Scotland, was quite popular with black audiences. To the extent that funk artists recognized social demarcations at all, they generally cited the groove as a main criterion. Bassist George Porter Jr. of the Meters typified funk artists’ emphasis on performative talent when he said, “We became sort of like musicians’ musicians …”¹³ Clinton was more explicit in a 1978 interview: “The whole black/white thing … it’s all bulls—t put out as propaganda to keep the people away from each other.”¹⁴

Funk also created opportunities for women instrumentalists. Rose Stone played organ and tambourine for Sly and the Family Stone, and singer Maxayn played piano with her husband Mandré (né Michael Andre Lewis) in the eponymous band Maxayn. There was also Klymaxx, an all-women’s band founded by drummer and vocalist Bernadette Cooper. For instance, in 1984 alone Klymaxx released such hits as “The Meeting in the Ladies Room,” “I Miss You,” and “The Men All Pause.” At various points the band included Cooper, keyboardists Lynn Malsby and Robbin Grider, bassist and vocalist Joyce “Fenderella” Irby, guitarist Cheryl Cooley, and vocalist Lorena Porter. And finally, singer and keyboardist Patrice Rushen, who jumpstarted her career as a dancer on Don Cornelius’s nationally syndicated television show Soul Train, wrote and recorded jazz-funk tunes such as “Let There Be Funk” (1976) and “The Funk Won’t Let You Down” (1980).

Yet the construction of funk entailed a fascinating irony. Black radicals expanded the parameters of expression with their strident assertions and celebrations of vernacular culture. The freer atmosphere enabled young dancers and musicians to reimagine “funk” as a metaphor for unapologetic blackness. However, funk artists often interpreted freedom in ways that activists never imagined. As I’ve written elsewhere:

The repositioning of funkiness as a leading cultural aesthetics was coterminous with widespread activism among black youth during the period. Indeed, one could reasonably argue that funk was a discursive child of the Black Power movement; and yet it wasn’t necessarily a reflection of its politics. Since funk [was] suffused with blues, it tended to emphasize independence which was often expressed in irony, alterity, and contrarianism. Thus, while funk was a child of the civil rights movement, it was indubitably a wayward child.¹⁵

The broad spectrum of contrarian sensibilities included freakish theatrical styles that represented what Francesca T. Royster calls a resistive “fugitive identity” that responded to “white privilege and power …”¹⁶ We can observe a perfect example Bruce W. Talamon’s classic photo of Bootsy Collins (see fig. 0.1). Performing in full regalia as a member of Parliament-Funkadelic, the acclaimed bassist is knee-deep in the funk as he delights the audience. Such “eccentricity,” “outsized personae … [and] invented characters,”¹⁷ writes Royster, typified a predilection for unconventional expression. Deviating from “respectable” models of blackness, funk encouraged people “to see around corners, push the edges of the present to create … new sounds, new dances, new configurations of self—the makings of a black utopia.”¹⁸

Royster’s notion of a “black utopia” is what political scientist Richard Iton has called the search for the black fantastic. For Iton, the black fantastic references black artistry that “transcend[s] the prevailing notions of the aesthetic and the predominance of the state as the sole frame of subject formation and progressive and transformative discourse and mobilization.”¹⁹ Such expression deviates from prevailing ideologies, values, styles, and sensibilities. The black fantastic reflects cultural standards and perspectives of “minor-key sensibilities generated from the experiences of the underground, the vagabond, and those constituencies marked deviant …”²⁰ Both components of Iton’s two-pronged definition coincide with funk aesthetics. After all, black youth were considered America’s primary deviants. Clinton remarks: “We’re all about opening up people’s minds to what’s going on and through our stage show, we attack a lot of taboos and hang-ups that have been around for years. We teach people that you [shouldn’t] be afraid to be different.”²¹ Jimi Hendrix was a prototypical example. Before he became the famous bandleader of the Jimi Hendrix Experience in 1966, his migratory lifestyle, economic challenges, and bohemian sensibility were legendary among fellow musicians. To cite one of many examples, saxophonist Lonnie Youngblood, who played with Hendrix before he left for Britain, once said, “Jimmy … he was a vagabond, man.”²²

Figure 0.1. Bootsy Collins. The Forum, Inglewood, California, 1978. Photo by Bruce W. Talamon.

In the following chapters, then, we’ll examine the development of blue funk in a multidimensional discussion that will engage songs, fiction, memoirs, interviews, scholarship, and more. The discussion proceeds in two parts. Side A presents a conceptual introduction to funk aesthetics, an historical overview of funk during the blues era, and a chapter on Sly Stone that examines his foundational role as an architect of funk. Side B includes chapters on Chaka Khan, Gil Scott-Heron, and Betty Davis, whose recordings and aesthetics exemplify distinct variations of blue funk and the black fantastic.

Chapter One

Groove Theory

LINER NOTES ON FUNK AESTHETICS

When asked to define funk, George Clinton once said, “If it makes you shake your rump, it’s the funk.”¹ At the most basic level, the term “funk” signifies honesty and beauty of expression at the depths of human emotion. As such, funk comprises the secular counterpart of “the spirit”—what Albert Murray calls “paroxysms of ecstasy”—in black church worship. Writing about James Brown, musicologist Teresa L. Reed makes an observation that’s applicable to funk music generally. She states that the music “captures the soulful spontaneity of the Sanctified church and the animated exhortation of the Sanctified preacher. [The music] also emulates and incites an emotional intensity parallel to the Holy Spirit possession that is a trademark of the Sanctified worship service.”² Teddy Pendergrass makes a similar point in his memoir Truly Blessed. Recalling his childhood experiences in what he described as a “rock-’em, sock-’em, sanctified, feel-the-Spirit church,” Pendergrass said, “We talk today about the innovations in rhythm made by great jazz musicians and pioneers like James Brown, but the truth is, they had nothing on a congregation going full force in praise of the Lord.”³ The musician and musicologist Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr. echoes Pendergrass’s statement in his recollection of his experiences as a member of the Sanctified Band in Chicago in the mid-1980s. According to Ramsey, “Funky was the watchword … God liked funky. Funky ministered to the people.”⁴

Of course, black churches have always functioned as training repositories for black musicians, but the frenzy and kinetic expression associated with holiness churches played a disproportionate role in funk music. These churches emphasized African-derived worship styles, and funk music showcased many of the aesthetic sensibilities and epistemological principles that were central to their worship styles. Hence jazz/funk guitarist James “Blood” Ulmer entitled his 1980 composition “Jazz Is the Teacher (Funk Is ...