Hard to pick a track from Grover Washington, Jr.'s 1975 album Feels So Good. It's incredible and if you only know him from the later, soppier, soft-jazz-ish award-winners, just wait.
"Moonstreams" gets me every time — its opaque prettiness masks, for me, a smothered melancholy just like that behind Kool & The Gang's "Summer Madness" in spite of its cool musk (and, I suppose, the associative overtones of The Fresh Prince and Guru and Digable Planets and everyone else).
Anyway: there's also "Knucklehead", I guess the song I've come back to again and again since first hearing this album years ago. Eric Gale's guitar — the intersect of jazz and blues and funk — is to the song what butcher is to block.
For all that, today it's "Hydra", obviously one of the great ur-beats of hip-hop.
You aren’t going to hear anything funkier which, genre, means it’s more than the sum of its parts. Emergent, etc. But, anyway, here are a few of the parts I love:
- 0:00 the aforementioned boom bap
- 0:00 (and hey throughout) the tone on the bass: blunt, barky, slap
- 0:02 the electric piano just off the beat. By the time you get a minute or two into the song, it’s clear how much float this gives the whole thing. Bob James, as if that needs saying.
- That's Louis Johnson on bass — yes, Brothers Johnson, "Strawberry Letter 23"; "Billie Jean", “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough". He died when he was just 60, terrible.
- 0:17 tambourine
- 0:18 guitar: that rhythmic figure on the sixteenths, we’ll come back to that presently
- 0:38 how the melody seems to precipitate the song out of the cloak of this righteous groove
- 1:02 the song backs off and now mostly it is kick drum
- 1:22 key change at bridge!
- 1:29 that vibrato on Washington’s sax
- 1:45 how that guitar figure has now mutated, with the little melodic lift at the end*
- 2:10 the chorus again, but, with Washington solo’ing further back in the mix, the bass is now swinging the song around
- 2:29 real quick, those descending electric piano block chords
- 2:49 key change at bridge; feels like the raw bracky bottom of the song now
- 3:53 cowbell! For about twenty seconds here — with the cowbell, tambourine, slap bass, and the hard, tight, muted guitar — the song is all pop and crack. If you have good speakers or headphones, crank it.
- 4:18 that harmony in the two soprano sax lines (flugelhorn?)
- 5:00 that little bass run up and down in the middle of the chorus
- 6:06 bass glissando
- 6:23 splashy, splashy cymbals at the top of the song, rangy bass at the bottom
- 6:49 fifteen seconds, sublime, there’s this intricate mix of the glistening higher-register electric piano, a shimmery curtain of reverb, and those tickly guitar licks
- 7:43 choppy, slappy guitar
- This whole thing is just a masterpiece of levelling, mixing. It’s Rudy Van Gelder!
- 8:25 gorgeous vibrato on the sax
- 8:41 and 8:46, like, the definitive offbeat drop of those electric piano chords
- 8:50 this little electric piano melody that tails out the song
* That guitar moment always reminds me of The Detroit Emeralds’ “Baby Let Me Take You”, which you should put on next especially if it’s sunny, or dark, where you are.
A lot of places to go after this, but maybe you want to reflect on how awesome remains Black Moon’s “How Many MC’s”: still, as they say, fresh.
