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The gospel of funk

Fred Wesley invokes the spirit of James Brown
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By Tony Ozuna
For The Prague Post
May 16th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
The Godfather of Soul may be gone, but his music lives on through Wesley.
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“We speak of love and happiness. To me happiness is Fred Wesley playing his horn,” James Brown said on the introduction to “Damn Right I Am Somebody,” which he recorded with The J.B.’s in 1974.
Fred Wesley & The J.B.'s

When: Monday, May 21 at 9
Where: Lucerna Music Bar
Tickets: 300 Kč, available through Ticketpro and at the venue

In January, the godfather of soul (and funk and jazz-funk for that matter) died. But some of the original musicians from Brown’s best musical years are still preachin’ the gospel of funk as loud as ever. Fred Wesley & The J.B.’s are keeping this jazzy funk and soul train in motion all around the world.
Trombonist and arranger Wesley practically co-invented funk as a core member of Brown’s band, joining in 1967. He quit the band in 1969, and the rest of that group, which included Maceo Parker, all quit in unison shortly afterward because they weren’t getting paid.
In the aftermath, the original J.B.’s were formed with Bootsy Collins, his brother Phelps “Catfish” Collins, and five others who are now long gone. They only managed to play together for a few months. As they were falling apart at the end of 1970, Wesley was called in to direct them. One by one, new players joined some of the originals (like Parker) and started performing as The J.B.’s — James Brown’s most dedicated interpreters to date.
Talking about being director of the band,Wesley says in the liner notes to The J.B.’s anthology, Funky Good Time, “My role was to relate, in musical terms, what James was saying. I knew that if I could make a musician understand what he was talking about, the energy of James Brown would make it work. It’s been my experience that whoever you put James Brown in front of becomes a great band.”
And so, when Wesley resigned from the band, once and for all, on the Fourth of July 1975, in Madison Square Garden, the rest of the J.B.’s jumped ship shortly after. That effectively marked the end of James Brown’s reign on the radio and charts in America.
In addition to his years with James Brown and then The J.B.’s, Wesley also had an important stint leading the horn section known as the Horny Horns (which also included Parker) for George Clinton’s group Parliament-Funkadelic, as well as for Bootsy Collins’s Rubber Band.
Wesley’s recently published memoir, Hit Me Fred: Recollections of a Sideman, candidly tells it like it was — and it wasn’t always pretty working with James Brown. But Wesley still lives and breathes the music they created together, because he understands James Brown’s music better than anyone.
“James’ role was the instigator,” Wesley has said. “I had to free my mind of all the music I knew in order to understand what he was talking about. You can’t relate any of this stuff to anything that was before it — not even his own music. James understood that I understood.”
While the current J.B.’s lineup includes only Wesley from back in the old days, he has been playing with many of the musicians in the band since he began recording without James Brown in the mid-’70s, taking on vocals himself. The current J.B.’s include Ernie Fields Jr. (tenor saxophone), Gary Winters (trumpet), Reggie Ward (guitar), Barnie McAll (keyboards), Dwayne Dolphin (bass) and Bruce Cox (drums).
Compared to other communities around the world, Prague hardly seemed to notice and certainly didn’t honor the passing of James Brown, even though he had a concert scheduled here earlier this year. So a delayed gathering of the tribe is in order, with one of the original funk preachers of the James Brown band still playing with religious fervor.

Tony Ozuna can be reached at features@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (16/05/2007):

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