A COUPLE of years ago, Tower of Power was invited to perform at the prestigious Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. David Sanborn, one of the biggest names in jazz, was opening for Tower and asked the band to back him up during his set, which was based around his take on Ray Charles’ Genius Loves Soul album.
“We rehearsed for nine hours before the gig,” remembers Tower of Power leader and tenor sax Emilio Castillo. “I was amazed at David Sanborn. I mean, even in rehearsal, every time he played, you would think he was playing for kings and queens. It wasn’t like ‘I’m at rehearsal, so I’ll just throw out a few notes here.’ He played his life out, all day long.”
That night was one that no one involved was going to forget.
“David Sanborn comes out, he’s got the Tower of Power horns, [Tower of Power vocalist] Larry Braggs came out and sang, ‘I’ve Got News for You.’ We brought the house down. The crowd was wrung out like a rag,” says Castillo. “And then we were headlining, so right after that, Tower of Power comes out. And we just had one of those nights, man, we were clicking. When it was all done, the guy that runs Montreux Jazz Festival, Claude Nobs, he ran out and hugged me and said, ‘This is one of the best nights of music I’ve ever seen in my life.'”
A jazz-radio saxophonist and a funk band covering a classic R&B album: meet the new jazz festival. Definitely not the same as the old jazz festival. For most of the group’s more than four decades in existence, jazz festivals wouldn’t touch Tower of Power, despite the fact that it had, for many years, maybe the best collection of horn players on the planet.
“For a long time, we were sort of shunned by that community,” says Castillo. “The whole smooth jazz thing sort of took over the airwaves. It became a thing, and it still is, to have a jazz festival and bring the basket of chicken and the brie and the sushi and champagne and wine. And they kind of looked at us like ‘These guys don’t fit.'”
South Bay Shake-up
But no more. The most forward-thinking jazz festivals have come around to the fact that many of the best jazz players of the last 40 years have been hiding out in funk bands. The connection between contemporary jazz music’s booty and its brain is finally being recognized, as prophesied by Parliament-Funkadelic leader George Clinton’s credo: “Free your mind, and your ass will follow.”
Nowhere is this more true than at this year’s San Jose Jazz Festival, Aug. 13–15, which features among its top-billed acts not only Clinton (Aug. 13), but also one of the men responsible for bringing jazz technique to the P-Funk gang, Maceo Parker (Aug. 14). Castillo, who like Clinton came out of the psychedelic sludge of Detroit music to bring the world a new kind of funk-soul ensemble in the 1970s, will also return to San Jose with Tower of Power to headline the festival’s main stage on Aug. 15.
It’s no coincidence that each day at this year’s festival features an iconic funk act. San Jose Jazz’s executive director, Dr. Geoff Roach, says the organization wanted to bring a broad sampling of sounds and a high-energy jolt to the lineup. He knows there are purists who will contend that funk isn’t jazz, but he disagrees.
“The great thing about jazz is it incorporates the influences around it. It’s a growing, evolving music. People who try to put it in a particular box are losing out on a lot,” says Roach.
He sees no disconnect between the dance-floor beat of funk music and the complex abstractions of traditional jazz.
“I don’t think it’s separate at all,” he says. “If you didn’t have Charlie Parker and Herbie Hancock, you wouldn’t have George Clinton.”
As a saxophonist himself, who has tried his hand at funk, he says the jazz world’s appreciation of funk musicianship is long overdue. “It’s virtuoso music,” he says.
Still, Castillo realizes that not everyone understands that. “There’s a certain segment of the public that says, ‘Yeah, yeah, that funk, what are they doing? They’re laying down one chord blah blah blah blah.’ It’s easy for people that don’t play to go ‘They’re not doing nothing.’ Anybody that can play knows the intricacies of how you can subtly change a groove and make it something so inventive that it’s beyond the realm of the most people’s thinking about what you can do with voicings in a horn section, or rhythmically in a rhythm section. … It’s quite a musical process, and over the years, certainly the appreciation for it has grown.”
Jazz Funkenstein
That was George Clinton’s plan all along. “I always said that if R&B, funk, whatever it is, stay around long enough, it becomes jazz,” says the 69-year-old P-Funk leader, who was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997. Recently, Clinton, too, has been getting a lot of invitations to play jazz festivals, especially in Europe. He’s not surprised, since he saw the connection early on. While he was getting his start as a teenager in a doo-wop group (called the Parliaments, which shows just how far back P-Funk’s roots really stretch), he was hearing jazz all around him.
“At the barbershop where I worked, that’s all they ever played on the jukebox. Before Herbie Hancock, the real oldies. Count Basie, and all of that. In the ’50s, jazz music was the Top 40 music.”
In the 1960s, Clinton got the chance to indulge his love of soul music as a staff writer for Motown, which is where he learned to write a hook. At the same time, James Brown was turning listeners on to a new, aggressively angular brand of soul. He also had world-class players backing him. Clinton would adopt three of his best into the Parliament-Funkadelic family: saxophonist Maceo Parker, trombonist Fred Wesley and bassist Bootsy Collins. Along with classically trained and heavily experimental keyboardist Bernie Worrell, Parker and Wesley gave the P-Funk family a huge jolt of jazz.
“Nobody really thought Maceo and them could play the shit that they played, because when they played with James, it was mostly grooves,” remembers Clinton. “But when they started playing with us, they were allowed to clown. Maceo could go as far out in jazz as anybody in the world. Sly [Stone] said he could play more with three notes than anybody else could play with the whole scale.”
Clinton would sometimes team his crew up with musicians like jazz duo the Brecker Brothers, who played on what is arguably Parliament’s masterpiece, the Mothership Connection album. (Dre fans will recognize the title track and “P-Funk (Wants to Get Funked Up),” which are sampled on The Chronic).
“I intentionally let them stretch out, because that was our time. We had made funk commercial, so my thing was to stretch it as far as you can musically, so people could appreciate it even when they wasn’t listening to me talk shit,” says Clinton.
Clinton’s musical vision seemed to expand with every album, possibly because he says he often felt “late” when it came to the music around him. From soul to psychedelic rock, everything was shifting and in trying to keep up, Clinton’s groups stumbled on ideas that had never been done before.
“We actually overpsychedelicized it, ’cause I felt late. I felt late on the feedback and stuff, because Creem and Jimi Hendrix, all them was tapering off. They was already beginning to feel too old to be doing what they thought was bubblegum, and they was getting ready to make it jazz then,” he says. “You had Miles [Davis] ready to play with Jimi and all that. But I was still of the Motown mind, playing to teenyboppers and kids. I didn’t want to leave them, but I knew that I had to change something. So I mixed it all together.”
There was so much of a crossover after a while that it was no longer clear if P-Funk was stealing from jazz, or jazz was stealing from them.
“Bootsy was always worried about be able to play like Stanley Clarke,” says Clinton. “And at the same time, Stanley was playing like him.”
Saving Soul
Still, in the minds of many jazz purists, funk wasn’t “serious” music. Perhaps it didn’t help that Parliament and Funkaedelic records had titles like Maggot Brain and The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein. (Although, really, how could the music that invented cool not embrace albums called One Nation Under a Groove and Standing on the Verge of Getting It On?)
But when the jazz world was ignoring Tower of Power’s Castillo, he wasn’t losing any sleep over it. “I was not and I’m still not a jazz guy,” he says. “I have jazz in my band and in my music because I have great musicians that can infuse that in it. But I’m not the kind of guy who sits and listens to a jazz record. I never was. I got captured by soul music in my teens.”
Last year, the Oakland group released The Great American Soulbook, a collection of classics from songs made famous by Stevie Wonder, James Brown, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin and more. He believe that that period of soul music, from the early ’60s through the ’70s, is what shaped what most of us listen to now, whether or not we realize it.
“I believe it changed the pattern of music profoundly. The pattern of writing, the pattern of production. Even today, when you look at current rock & roll bands, you can see the influence a lot of that music had on the way they approach music—the way they come up with bass lines, the way they come up with rhythm patterns, the type of changes they use,” says Castillo.
His own musical biases make it a lot easier for him to understand the long-standing discord between dance-floor denizens and jazz purists. “The dancers are looking at the purists going, ‘What’s wrong with you people?’ The purists are going, ‘You don’t know nothing!'”
“Sometimes music fans are our own worst enemy,” agrees San Jose Jazz’s Roach. While there’s plenty of straight-ahead jazz to be heard at the festival (not to mention blues, salsa and more), he hopes the funk infusion will add a visceral, playful edge that goes back to the roots of jazz music.
Castillo thinks the two musical worlds have not so much collided as clicked. “What started to happen was a couple of these festivals invited us, and we became, like the wakeup call,” he says. “And they were ready. After a day of ‘Muffy, pass the biscuits!’ all of a sudden it was time to get up and shake your booty.”
THE 2010 SAN JOSE JAZZ FESTIVAL runs Aug. 13–15 at Plaza de Cesar Chavez and other locations around downtown San Jose. Tickets are $15 for general admission each day; other packages can be found at sanjosejazz.org.
