Skip to main content

Kool & The Gang VibeZ

Twenty tracks from a New Jersey band who started as a jazz group, became one of the great funk outfits, and then wrote the song every wedding on earth plays.

Kool & The Gang

The story of Kool & The Gang has two almost incompatible halves, and this playlist covers both. They formed in Jersey City in the sixties as a jazz outfit built around the brothers Robert "Kool" Bell and Ronald Bell, and spent the first half of the seventies making some of the hardest instrumental funk anyone recorded.

Then, at the end of that decade, they brought in the singer James "J.T." Taylor and the producer Eumir Deodato, and turned into one of the most successful pop groups in the world.

Purists tend to prefer the first half. The honest position is that both are excellent, and that very few bands have managed either — let alone both.

What to listen for

"Summer Madness" is the single best thing here: a 1974 instrumental built around a Moog solo, and one of the most sampled records in hip-hop.

"Jungle Boogie", "Funky Stuff" and "Hollywood Swinging" are the early funk peaks, and all three are band performances rather than productions — horns, real drums, everyone in the room.

"Celebration" is the record that made them globally inescapable, and it is worth listening to properly rather than through the fog of familiarity: the arrangement is immaculate.

"Get Down On It" and "Fresh" are the eighties peaks, and "Joanna" and "Cherish" are the ballads that made them enormous on adult radio.

"Too Hot" is the best-written song of the J.T. Taylor era and considerably sadder than its contemporaries.

"Blowin With The Wind", "Bad Woman" and "Heaven At Once" are the deep cuts, and they turn up on quiet-storm sets far more often than the hits do.

"Funky Granny" and "Soul Vibrations" are for the crate-diggers.

Go deeper

Wild and Peaceful (1973) and Light of Worlds (1974) are the two essential funk albums; Celebrate! (1980) is the pop one.

Ronald Bell, who wrote or co-wrote most of the catalogue under the name Khalis Bayyan, died in 2020. For the wider Jersey and Philadelphia funk world: The Blackbyrds, Brass Construction and Mandrill.

How to hear both halves: play a seventies instrumental straight into one of the eighties pop hits and the continuity is clearer than the reputation suggests — the same horn section, the same bass sensibility, a decade apart. Very few bands managed either kind of record; almost none managed both.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Monty Alexander VibeZ

There is a moment on almost every Monty Alexander record where the jazz piano trio stops behaving like a jazz piano trio and starts behaving like a Kingston sound system. That moment is the whole point. Fifty tracks deep, this is the sound of a man who never asked permission to be two things at once. The pianist who brought Kingston to the Carnegie stage Monty Alexander was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1944, and by his teens he was already gigging around the island — close enough to the birth of ska and rocksteady to have absorbed it in his bones rather than learned it from records. He moved to the United States in 1961, and the origin story that follows is the kind that sounds invented: Frank Sinatra heard him playing in a Miami club, and Jilly Rizzo, Sinatra's friend and club owner, put him behind the piano at Jilly's in New York. From there Alexander fell in with Milt Jackson and Ray Brown, two of the most demanding rhythm partners in the music, and never really ...
Post a Comment
Read more

GuiltyBeatZ VibeZ

If you have danced to anything out of Accra in the last ten years, you have probably danced to GuiltyBeatz without knowing his name. Forty-seven tracks of a producer's fingerprints — and the fingerprints turn out to be the melody. The Ghanaian producer who made Afrobeats swing Ronald Banful, who records as GuiltyBeatz, is a Ghanaian producer and DJ whose sound sits at the crossroads where Ghanaian highlife, Nigerian Afrobeats, amapiano and UK dance music all meet. He came up producing for Mr Eazi — the Banku Music partnership is where a lot of listeners first heard him — and his breakout as a name in his own right came with "Akwaaba," the 2018 track with Mr Eazi, Patapaa and Pappy Kojo that spawned a dance craze and became one of the defining African club records of its year. His reputation went global when he worked on Beyoncé's The Lion King: The Gift , but the more interesting story is the consistency. A GuiltyBeatz beat is usually ide...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kashif VibeZ

Kashif is the reason a lot of 1980s R&B sounds the way it does — and the reason you can hear the difference between a synth bassline played by someone who understood bass and one programmed by someone who didn't. This is a producer's playlist, and the producer is everywhere. The architect of the synthesized soul record Kashif was born Michael Jones in Brooklyn in 1956, raised in foster care, and taught himself music young enough that by his teens he was touring with B.T. Express. What he did next reshaped a decade. In the early 1980s, as a producer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist, he was among the first to build R&B records around programmed synthesizers — the Minimoog bass, the Linn drum machine, the Fairlight — without letting them sound cold. That distinction matters. Plenty of producers adopted the new gear; Kashif made it groove . His basslines are played with the phrasing of a funk bassist, full of slides and ghost notes, which is why rec...
Post a Comment
Read more