We had a great long weekend for the holiday, and summer has arrived in full force with the weather up in the 90’s the last few days. Got a bunch of stuff done including working out, skating, sleeping in, some yardwork, finishing the diagrams for my Narwhal, and good progress on the songs Now and Black Swan. Plus we had a great barbecue and I watched the whole first season of Game of Thrones.
Last week a saw an amazing horn section funk band called Funk Nouveau at the Bitter End on Bleeker Street. I went with Erik and Glen, who had recently hired two of the horn players to do some sessions. Here’s a except from their flyer:
“Live Funk Nouveau and pals will be performing classic (and a few unusual) Tower Of Power tunes all re-arranged for 6 horns! Watch us all magically fit onto the deceptively large stage at the Bitter End and knock you into summer properly! This will NOT be youtube-grade cover band non-grooving. This. Will. Be. FUNKY. Personal guarantee. There will be pocket. There will be grease. There will be E9th chords. There will be….. lots of dudes in the audience probably. (Ladies hip to the horn-funk more than welcome, of course.)”
Which is sort of funny, because back when I lived in San Francisco I played sax in a horn section funk band, and it was a much more chick-friendly genre than the prog-rock I’d been doing before then, and we always got lots of ladies turn out to dance. But as predicted, with Funk Nouveau it was mainly dudes, and everyone was there to listen.
And they made good on their guarantee. The players were all top-notch, and six horns (two trumpets, a trombone, two tenors and a bari) deliver a huge amount of power in a smallish club. The music was mainly Tower of Power, along with some James Brown and other stuff. The keyboard player did all the arrangements. One particular highlight was a version of What Is Hip (a tune they claimed to be sick of) re-arranged at a slower tempo, somewhat in the spirit of Clapton’s remake of After Midnight, but, uh, much better done. They were all very impressive, I but found myself listening to the bass player and bari player in particular. To give you an idea of the level these guys were at, when I got to talking to the guitar player after the show I learned I’d seen him back in February, opening of Van Halen in the Garden as part of Kool and the Gang.
Very inspiring. Someday I’m gonna have a horn section like that for Buzzy Tonic.