country blues-jazz-soul-funk proto-disco

Despite the upscale disco-w-strings velvet rope fantasy stereotype, Barry White, "The Hustle," Deodato*, what struck me reviewing '70s disco DJ playlists in The Disco Files was how much gutbucket country blues-jazz-soul-funk gets played in the underground gay discos. The first two tracks following are in that spirit and the other three I'm pretty sure I found in TDFs. 

"That's What Love Will Make You Do," Little Milton (1971): Stax/Volt soul single. A country blues soul workout with a buoyant groove. There's a 21 minute extended mix out there, in case you looking for the full meal disco deal.

"Let My People Go," Darondo (1972): Obscure soul man from the Bay Area. Put out three singles in the early '70s, then got hitched and decamped to Fiji. Slinky funk groove set to beseeching blues plaint. Brings the slow disco heat. 

"Njia (Nija) Walk (Street Walk)," The Fatback Band (1973): Proto-disco and proto-hiphop, The Fatback Band were in the middle of chart R&B and dance music throughout the '70s. TFB's "King Tim III (Personality Jock)" came out a few months before "Rapper's Delight" in '79 and gets mentioned as one of the first commercially released hiphop or rap songs. They are not the JBs, nobody is, or even the Ohio Players, but solid P-Funk approved funk. 

"Soul Turn Around," Blue Mitchell (1973): Jazz trumpeter Mitchell goes way back and is reputably the most recorded trumpeter sideman on soul jazz organ records in the 1950s. Next he played in the Horace Silver Quintet from 1958 to 1964, and appears on an all-time jazz album favorite, "Song for My Father" (1965), and then went on to play in Ray Charles' touring band in the late '60s and early '70s. In short, he was a soul jazz pro's pro from the 1950s through the 1970s. And I have a big weakness for hot instrumental pop like this. Another one of those '90s retrospective series that I love was Rhino's Rock Instrumental Classics, five volumes, which included many jazz-funk and disco classics but not this one, not so much a failing of the series as another indication of what a brilliant period the disco era was for the rock era pop instrumental. 

"Philadelphia," B.B. King (1974): B.B. King made a disco record?! No way, exclaims the disco sucks people. But he did. Here's B.B. King channeling TSOP's funky disco sound. 

*- Brazilian pianist, composer, and jazzy disco record producer Eumir Deodato has a daughter married to actor Stephen Baldwin and a granddaughter married to Justin Bieber. Keeping up the legacy of the '70s disco era's decadence, they're apparently still getting into trouble at nightclubs in the 2020s. 

Tribal Music Inc: Do The Math (1996)

From a compilation of 1990s Seattle hiphop music, that I almost completely missed. I knew a little Source of Labor, not much more. The creative center here is one Vitamin D, impresario over a home studio known as The Pharmacy, and a bunch of alum of Garfield High School, the collective braintrust behind Tribal Music Inc or Tribal Productions. The groups include names like B-Self, Sho Nuff, The Ghetto Children, Samson S & H-Bomb, Union of Opposites, and Phat Mob in the sample track below, and all of them play together like they like making music together. Phat Mob epitomizes the laidback and deep grooves vibe that pervades; first words: "listen to a story of a drum set,"..."tappin' and tappin', ... "first a drum set." It's the Hiphop side of '90s downtempo electronica, as if De La Soul and Native Tongues spawned urban hiphop scenes all over the country and Tribal Productions are the proud Seattle Edition. Also shares that easy going deep grooves vibe with the same late '90s vintage Soulquarians (J. Dilla, Questlove, Erykah Badu, etc) but much more rap-centric; Gang Starr, Blackalicious, and I'm sure many more I don't know. Less celebrated than another local rap comp from around the same time, 14 Fathoms Deep (1996), Do The Math goes down like "butter and chocolate." Night music. Check it out.   

"Wrong Number," Phat Mob (1996):   

Phat Mob are sampling The Stylistics 1972 version of "You'll Never Get To Heaven (If You Break My Heart)": 

Dionne Warwick's original version, written and produced by Hal David and Burt Bacharach, and released in 1964: 

"Baby, You're My Kind," Blossom Dearie (1972)

Reportedly, Blossom was first admired for her piano playing. Bill Evans was a fan. She develops her impossibly sweet and wry vocal style only after she was already playing with the big jazzers. This playfully coy sweetheart number is a little late in her career, she's pushing 50, the 1950s are generally recognized as her prime. It's a duet with Pete Morgan, a British jazz bassist and longtime collaborator. Unassumingly simple romantic joy is Blossom's philosophy; her confidence an expression of her commitment. Sui generis. 

Hot Tub Time Machine: Morning After World Blues Rock

 "Toxika," Plastic People of Universe (1974): I've been thinkin' maybe it's ab time to pull out those Milan Kundera novels again or take another look at that German film The Lives of Others (2006). But some Plastic People will have to do, for now. This track comes off an album called Egon Bondy's Happy Hearts Club Banned. So definitely no "Good Day Sunshine," even if that song comes off Revolver. The Plastic People recorded Egon Bondy in 1974 but the record circulated only by cassette until 1978 because it could not be officially released under the Communist regime of Czechoslovakia. Sometimes in my sampling of their work they sound like musicians trained to play orchestral music trying too hard to play rock music. And then there's "Toxika," where they make rock music with the serious, relentless, rigor of chamber music and it all makes sense. Work it, worry it, grind it, and pound away at it until it feels right again, and then get up and do it again tomorrow. Enduring the wasteland. Jamming as a blues thing, with an Eastern European folk music backbone. Job well done. 

"Engel Der Gegenwart," [Angel of The Present], from a soundtrack to a Werner Herzog film, Heart of Glass (1976). The story is set in an 18th century Bavarian village known for producing brilliant ruby glass. When the master glass blower dies, the secret of the production of the ruby glass is lost. The villagers are driven mad trying to recover the lost secret that provided an identity to their home town, and they more or less took for granted only a short time before. Weirdly, maybe even illegal somewhere, all the acting was performed under hypnosis. The people look like harmless zombies, in my dim memory of seeing the film at Cinema 21 in Portland in the early '80s. Popol Vuh's audio accompaniment is warmer, not quite so austere and melodramatic as the narrative, more bucolic, ritualistic, grieving, slow building acoustic and electric guitar grandeur that promises some spiritual release in little evidence in the story. The music is consummate bluesy ambient folk music with historical gravitas, even if entirely imagined by Florian Fricke in a house in the German country side in the 1970s. BTW, check out the Spaghetti western music allusion in the intro. 

"It ain't easy, it ain't easy, it ain't easy to get to heaven when you're going down." "It Ain't Easy," David Bowie (1972). Gives Three Dog Night song more of an epic blues rock My Generation-feel, the way Bowie gives mythic glitter to everything he touches at this point. Turn it up. 

"I Can Understand It": Bobby Womack Takes It to the Discos

 Kokomo, British soul group. Peaked at 13 on the Disco File Top 20 in 1975. 

New Birth, funky Motown spinoffs. Included Marvin Gaye's buddy Harvey Fuqua. Reached number 4 on R&B chart and number 35 on Hot 100 in 1973. Readymade for the discos. 

Bobby Womack's "I Can Understand It" original, 1972. Proto-jungle-stomp-disco. 

"Only a Fool Would Say That (Dance Video Mix), Steely Dan

 

The Dean of Rock Critics Reviews Dr. Funkenstein's P-Funk Oeuvre

 "Wheeler-dealing entrepreneur, harmonizer turned ace producer-arranger, r&b interlocutor as first rapper in the known universe—if any entertainer ever crossed the American huckster with the African trickster, it’s George Clinton."-- Robert Christgau, 1997

And don't sleep on America Eats It's Young (1972): 

"If You Don't Like the Effects, Don't Produce the Cause"

"Loose Booty"

"Biological Speculation"

"Papa Was A Rollin' Stone," Temptations (1972)

A prototype of the extended play disco mix several years before club DJs prodded the industry into actually producing 12" dance singles. "Papa" doesn't have the love train locomotive drive of the O'Jays proto-disco stereotype but works a slower, simmering, bubbling gumbo funk groove, exquisite in all its musical parts the way Detroit still turned it out in those days. It models the disco song as an epic dramatic journey; churchy handclap breakdowns, doowop vocal group blues choruses, "Papa Was a Rollin' Stone/wherever he hanged his hat was his home," and inadvertently works as a early gay dance club anthem. Early disco DJs wanted longer songs for the dancefloor and Motown and Philly International delivered them. I remember an old rocker friend, a musician, once complaining to me about the monotonous repetition of dance music. I knew what he meant, I mean, I know monotonous examples of dance music, but when dance music works, moves you, the repetition is in fact the essential appeal or hook. It feels like the funky groove line could go on forever and you want that, you never want it to stop. The repetition in the groove is precisely what many people crave most in dance music. TGIDF. 

The seven minute single:  

 Here's the 11 minute album version: 

Remix set to visuals from a film called Wattstax (1972): 

Hot Tub Time Machine

 R.B. Greaves "Always Something There To Remind Me" (1969)

Brewer & Shipley "Witchi-tai-to" (1969)

(Everything is Everything Native American original)

Harry Nilsson "Jump Into The Fire" (1972) (psych video)