It's A Funky World, Volume 2: Things

Another trip down the digital rabbit hole, as expected while searching for funky places turned up related things... Literally too as Larry Ellis and the Black Hammer did exactly that, spread across both sides of a 45!

Fela Ransome Kuti and his Nigeria 70 (or Africa 70) laid down some wicked instrumental afrobeat courtesy of his horn in LA during the late 1960s. Related to that is KC & The Sunshine Band with their “Sound Your Funky Horn” from 1973.

I knew J. Geils Band did “The Funky Judge”, but I wasn’t familiar with the 1968 original by Bull & The Matadors.  No collection should be without Lee Dorsey’s “Everything I Do Gonh Be Funky (From Now On)” from 1969. 

Not all the tracks here come from a distant and often obscure past as Tone-Lōc proves with his hilarious “Funky Cold Medina” from 1989. We got some heavy jazz-funk too, courtesy of Melvin Jackson with his double blast called “Funky Skull Pt. 1 & 2”. Modern sounds come from Nickodemus with some assistance from Jay Rodriguez & Ticklah, showing that the middle place can be quite cool.

In early 1970 a new dance craze hit the charts thanks to Rufus Thomas’ “Do The Funky Chicken”.  In 1970 Bo Diddley became The Black Gladiator and among others recorded “Funky Fly”.

I never realized that it’s possible to smell funky music, but according to Eric Mercury that’s the case… Another genre is country funk, here represented by Cherokee’s “Funky Business”.

A completely unknown artist to me was Zeph Allen who turned in a groovy “Funky Revolution”.  The same story regarding Moon Taxi, but I was pleasantly surprised by their “Funky Respiration”.

The most recent track comes from Cuban-born pianist/composer Harold López-Nussa with a hard-driving Latin jazz dance track, called (no surprise!) “Funky”, from his Timba a la Americana album, released last year.  Enough scribbling, there are plenty of other tracks (20 in fact), just play this damn collection and enjoy!