Grooves On Wax: 12″ inch Singles On The One!

Upon starting this new feature on Andresmusictalk, the subject of 12″ inch singles was something that was always intending to be covered. With their extended,often remixed versions of the original album versions,the 12″ inch single is a format that derived from the disco era. And actually started in it with DJ’s playing the records for dancers as opposed to live bands. It was about a year or so ago that I started collecting these 12″ inch extended/remix singles again. So here is the first ones of this semi regular aspect of this feature. And it actually starts out just as the disco era had peaked.

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On Your Knees (1979) is a very funky Eurodisco number,whose single featured  eye catching cover art by Bronx born art/fashion photographer Richard Bernstein. The B-side “Don’t Mes With The Messer” deals more with the Broadway musical style of theatrical disco Grace was so known for in her 70’s era music. So you hear two sides of Tom Moulton’s late 70’s disco productions for Grace.

Listening to Edgar Winter’s Frankenstein 84 remixes from…1984,it becomes clear just how much this early 70’s glam rock classic makes a lot more sense in a mid 80’s electro funk setting. With the used of sequencers and Vocorders,Winter creates a break beat/hip-hop friendly variation on himself. Especially when his very strong,often outright growling,rap comes in on the “Monster Rap” mix.

1987’s Characters  album is my favorite Stevie Wonder album of the 1980’s. On his 12″ inch single for “Get It”,his duet with Michael Jackson from that album,the drums shuffle more than on the album. And the break beats are re-sampled heavier. This gives it a flavor closer to the then emerging new jack swing variety of funk coming out of people such as Teddy Riley and Chuckii Booker.

The 12″ inch single for “Skeletons” from the same Stevie Wonder album is it’s own matter entirely. The DX-7 synthesizer on the intro is replaced with a thick,funky rhythm guitar for one. Also on the drum and synth bass interludes,Stevie’s call and responses of “hmm hmm hmm” and “oh wow” are set to samples of Ronald Reagan speeches. It really showcases what Stevie means singing”somebody done snitched on the news crew/it’s gettin’ ready to break”.

It was somewhat surprising to find a 12″ inch vinyl single from 1999. But on this set of remixes of Destiny’s Child’s “Say My Name”,you get Rodney Jerkin’s original hip-hop/pop version,a Daddy D remix that has an Afrika Bambaataa style electro funk groove while Maurice’s Last Days Of Disco has a late 70’s dance/early 90’s house flavor. It showcases how the song might’ve sounded in three different eras of time.

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One thing about 12″ inch singles that I’ve forgotten about is how much they bring out that punchy,analog sound that vinyl is so renowned for. Some of these were actually 33 RPM,but the majority were 45 RM so that probably helped out a big in that regard. It also lasted far longer than I knew-about up to the advent of the MP3 and today they are making a comeback with the big vinyl revival. Creatively speaking,they allow remix producers, sometimes even the artists themselves,re-imagining their own work in new,unexpected ways. And this makes the 12″ inch vinyl single a format worth expanding on.

 

 

Anatomy of THE Groove: “My Jamaican Guy” by Grace Jones

Grace Jones is someone who feels a bit like a creative soul sister to me. Despite the 32 year age difference,we were both born on the same day of the year. As Tauruses, both of us very much contradict our supposed astrological traits. It’s kind of fun to think about the fact that both Grace Jones and myself revel in being somewhat daring. Yet both of us exact  strong control over how said daring is projected. So far,she’s really made her controlled sense of performance art really function well for her. That’s made her something of a cultural icon for Afrocentricity from the beginning to the middle of the 1980’s.

Jones recorded three albums during between 1980 and 1982 for Chris Blackwell’s Compass Point studios. All would feature the production and instrumental talents of dub reggae pioneers Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare. These albums  all fashioned a funky,pan ethnic type of new wave dance/rock music. Her final album of this triad was called Living My Life. In many ways,it was the most fully realized of her albums in terms embracing different strains of Afrocentric musicality. And it all started off with a song that really summed this sound up in “My Jamaican Guy”.

Wally Badarou starts out with a synthesizer solo deep in the Asiatic pentatonic scale. Dunbar then comes in with the 8 beat,break heavy jazzy funk/reggae skank throughout the song. On the refrain there are two more layers of keyboard-one is a lower and more bluesy one,the other of is a higher pitched synth brass/horn chart type riff.  Shakespeare’s bass and guitarists Barry Reynonds stay in chunky,syncopated interplay throughout-all the while a round,hiccuping electronic pulse adds a percussive thump. After a bridge that reduces the song back to the drum,the chorus lets the song come to a hand clapping stop.

Instrumentally speaking,this might be the most thoroughly pan ethnic funk jam of 1982. It’s got the Asian style melody,the stripped down dub funk drumming as well as the equally drum like bass/guitar interplay. Everything from Grace and Sly & Robbie’s grunts and calls to the electronic hiccups make this song one big sea of rhythm and movement along with it’s deep reggae melody and lyrics. The “laid back,not layed back” Jamaican guy Jones sings about turned out to be Tyrone Downie of Bob Marley’s Wailers. And this all makes up for one of the best examples of where the funky groove took Miss Grace Jones.

 

 

 

Anatomy of THE Groove: “Feel Up” by Grace Jones

Grace Jones’ breakthrough album Nighclubbing is celebrating it’s 35 anniversary today. This album came along at a very significant time in the black musical spectrum. In 1981, America was deep in the throws of a radio freeze out of any uptempo music played by black artists. Meanwhile the synth dance/pop scene in England was gobbling up the funk and disco genres that the US was now rejecting. Into that mix came a group of Caribbean based artists who would help usher in a new fusion of world music sounds into that brew. Among them were Eddy Grant and Grace Jones.

Jamaican reggae producers/musicians Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare had produced Jones’ 1980 album Warm Leatherette  at Chris Blackwell’s Compass Point studios in Nassau. So the same group of people and musicians were involved in the creation of the followup. As an album, Nightclubbing  could be best described as an early precursor of the pop/world fusion sound that artists such as Peter Gabriel would pioneer mid decade. The array of styles on this album had a creative and commercial level of success in different areas of the world-not just the US and UK. One standout song on the album for me is “Feel Up”.

This extended mix of the song begins with a melodic pan flute-after which Dunbar’s bass drum comes in with Shakespeare’s thumping bass line. As the song builds, Shakespeare adds an addition layer of funkified slap bass along with a deep,percussive rhythm guitar along with genuine percussion. Wally Badarou’s quiet,high pitched synthesizer accents Jones’ vocal refrains. Towards the middle of the song,her vocals give way to rhythmic  breathing and popping . Her choruses of vocalizing the title heavy with echoplex make up the entire structure of this song as it fades out.

This is the one song Grace Jones herself wrote for this album. What’s so amazing about it is that it sums up not only the album,but the whole of Jones’s musical side. As an actress model,Jones brings out a strong mixture of African percussion rhythms,Jamaican and American funk bass lines. This entire song functions musically as layers of drums and bass-even the guitar. It also brings out Jones’ unique vocal conceptualization-acting out the rhythm of the song theatrically with her voice rather than simply interpreting the melody. So on this song,Grace Jones grew some serious funk of her own.

Anatomy of THE Groove 11/21/2014 Andre’s Pick: “White Collar Crime” by Grace Jones

1986 was a crucially important year for funky music in the decade. The electro/synth based sound that tended to be the dominant force in the music within the past few years were giving way to a sound where electronic instruments were being used as accents to either a fully organic or organic sounding instrumental bed. This came to prominence with songs such as Prince’s “Kiss”,’Duran Duran’s “Notorious” and the  late and  great James Brown’s “Living In America”.  After leaving her original label Island and singing up with Manhattan  Records,she took a stab at co-production with Nile Rodgers for her first album on the label Inside Story. One of the songs on it that always caught my attention was “White Collar Crime”

The song begins with a slow,rolling shuffling beat that’s accompanied by a high pitched digital synthesizer playing a rather Asian style melodic phrase. Grace’s vocals than kick in with Nile’s guitar providing a subtle accent to the lyrics which,through a series of different stories,illustrates the songs chorus of “white collar crime/you don’t have to do time/blue collar crime/you do time every time”-sung to lower volume horn chart/guitar call-and-response playing opposite melodic statements. On the bridge of the song,the horns scale up as grace asks “do they get away with it” before the drum emulator shuffle is let to solo with the horns fanfaring back into the original phrase-after which Nile himself is heard saying “it’s all the same” as Grace responds “it’s a money/power game”

Showcasing Mac Gollehon,Steve Elson and Lenny Pickett on horns and co-writer/instrumentalist Bruce Woolley on synthesizers? This song has a similar quality to Grace’s “Slave To The Rhythm” in the sense that it is what they call a runaway groove. This amounts to a form of dance/funk which has a light and understated instrumental quality-rhythmic enough for a strutting model but un-intrusive enough where it doesn’t interrupt the focus. Of course Grace Jones,being a former model,is a natural to produce a song in such a way. Not only that,but the lightness of the production and arrangement take away from how hard hitting a groove this actually is. And it’s hard hitting in more ways than one.

By this time? The Reaganomics policy of trick down economics and the Wallstreet/Gordon Gekko attitude of “greed is good” was starting to contrast with how American society actually seemed to be functioning. Especially when it came to foreign policy and black Americans. Grace Jones,twice a foreigner as a Jamaican woman having began who career out of Europe,than crossed over in the US,really made her comment very strongly here. Using tabloid/yellow journalistic expletives such as “it’s outrageous nobody cared” and “shocking,it’s all so mocking”? Jones makes lyrical points that would be made in far more direct ways by hip-hoppers such as Public Enemy and NWA in a short two years time. And that was already being explored by hip-hop by KRS-1 and Eric B & Rakim. And that’s basically the treatment of a wealthier criminal versus that of a smaller time hustler. Indeed Grace Jones and Nile Rodgers provide a very stylish groove out of the money/power game.