Will twelve days be long enough to mourn the passing of James Brown, Soul Brother Number One, the original Funky President, the Minister of the New New Super Heavy Funk, the Godfather of Soul, who left this world on Christmas Day?
His impact and legacy are as significant as any musician, artist or performer of the 20th century. I was first bewitched by the James Brown sound as a teenager in the late 1980s: it was like nothing I’d ever heard before. It answered so many questions that were raised during my explorations through early New Orleans jazz, blues, bebop and the hard bop of Cannonball Adderley and Art Blakey. More than any music I’d heard up to that point, it made me want to get up and dance.
The Hardest-Working Man in Show Business was gigging up to the very end, though most would agree that he had left his best days far behind him. I made the pilgrimage to see him performing live at the Masonic Hall in San Francisco and again at Glastonbury the year before last. It was well-rehearsed revue that verged on the circus and lacked the spark, spontaneity and sheer excitement of the now immortal Apollo shows of the 1960s.
Mr Please, Please, Please was never one to pass up a commercial opportunity, even cashing in on Elvis’s death with a truly awful ‘Love Me Tender’ (it is rumored he is one of the very few people to have been granted a private audience with Elvis’s dead body). And so it seems a doubly appropriate moment to post the hokey ‘Soulful Christmas’, sung by a man who was larger than life, badder than the rest and even when he was bad, he was pretty good.
If you believe in an afterlife, you better believe it just got a whole lot more funky now that the King of Soul has donned the cape for the last time…