First of 2007: So long James and thanks for all the funk

We lost James Brown on Christmas Day. At the New Year’s Eve party I went to they were playing lame 80s classic soul- the perils of pals that are thirty something soul-heads. But I have always preferred the funk side, the down and dirty, the cri de coeur, the rhythm that drives and drives. Slick leaves me cold (one of the reasons I am bizarrely looking forward to this year’s Whitney Houston album, I have always hated her stuff but that’s a woman that has put herself through the wringer and may focus now more on soul than slick… give me Mary J anyday) Needless to say the party finally started jamming when I Know You Got Soul came on…

Unfortunately I never got to see James Brown live, although I have seen his house band, the JBs, a few times, playing with Maceo Parker. It really was music straight from the source.

And that source was… James Brown. Jason Chervokas, who was lucky enough to interview the great man once, has written an obituary here, which is a great read. Jason of a music critic of no little skill and taste.

Of course James Brown was a titanic musical figure, one of the giants of 20th century music, up there with Louis Armstrong and Igor Stravinsky. He invented funk. It wasn’t a single handed invention–the crackerjack musicians of the James Brown Show had a lot to do with it–and of course funk had roots in hambone blues, the second line rhythms of New Orleans, and the centuries old Yoruban music of West Africa. But in 1965, with the release of “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” Mr. Brown did something new–orchestrating a drum beat across the whole band the way Duke Ellington spread his Debussyan chords across the brass and reeds.

Brown took his role as the hardest working man in music seriously:

And those of us who had the scintillating pleasure of seeing James Brown live will always remember the relentless drive of Brown on stage. George Clinton once said that if you asked James Brown to give you a split, he’d give you five. It was part of Brown’s impossible work ethic–never leave a single customer with his dick hard.

Chervokas continues:

We should have known from the start that Brown’s gift to the world was going to be rhythmic. “Please, Please, Please,” Brown’s first single from 1956, isn’t much of a song–a desperate, almost inarticulate plea not to be abandoned over piano triplets playing a I-IV-V. But in the third verse St. James performs his first miracle–repeating the word “please” nine times in a rhythmic alteration that proceeds from something speech-like to a voice articulating a backbeat. Then he turns around and repeats the trick in the next verse on the word “I.”

It was just a harbinger of things to come–a universe of Africanized music in which rhythmic development through altered repetition would replace melodic, harmonic, and even lyrical variation as the primary element in moving a song from beginning to middle to end.

Jason also points to this recent Rolling Stone profile by one of my favourite novelists, Jonathan Lethem, which is a good read, and points to the religious experience of a Brown show.

To be in the audience when James Brown commences the James Brown Show is to have felt oneself engulfed in a kind of feast of adoration and astonishment, a ritual invocation, one comparable, I’d imagine, to certain ceremonies known to the Mayan peoples, wherein a human person is radiantly costumed and then beheld in lieu of the appearance of a Sun God upon the Earth. For to see James Brown dance and sing, to see him lead his mighty band with the merest glances and tiny flickers of signal from his hands; to see him offer himself to his audience to be adored and enraptured and ravished; to watch him tremble and suffer as he tears his screams and moans of lust, glory and regret from his sweat-drenched body — and is, thereupon, in an act of seeming mercy, draped in the cape of his infirmity; to then see him recover and thrive — shrugging free of the cape — as he basks in the healing regard of an audience now melded into a single passionate body by the stroking and thrumming of his ceaseless cavalcade of impossibly danceable smash Number One hits, is not to see: It is to behold.

Lethem makes an intriguing argument about Brown as a sage, which puts me in mind of the Alan Kay quote, “the best way to predict the future is to invent it”. That’s what James Brown did with his music, which was as influential as any mouse/pointer combo. If anyone deserves a You Got The Funk award its Mr James Brown, the King of Soul and Funk. What a contribution he made. As Chervokas says:

James Brown is gone. But we’re all still living in the musical world he left behind.