Daktaris
Let’s Get a Groove On
But Desco’s best records are not merely tributes to Brown–they’re great funk in their own right, extensions of his achievements. The label’s most ingenious stroke so far is Soul Explosion, a mild departure from strict JB orthodoxy that’s designed to look like a reissue of an early-70s funk album from Nigeria–in other words, it fetishizes the replica that’s part of collector culture rather than the unaffordable original artifact. It sounds like it, too, with its African polyrhythms, sour horns, and appropriate covers: “Musicawi Silt,” a mid-70s piece by Ethiopia’s Wallias Band (misidentified as “Musicawa Silt” by the Wallais Band), with an arrangement influenced as much by Fela and (of course) James Brown as by the original, as well as idiomatic versions of Fela’s “Up Side Down” and Brown’s “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose.”
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A third volume, Even More Original Raw Soul, came out last year. It dropped the Hotpie & Candy routine and passed over the Poets of Rhythm collective in favor of other contemporary funk types. But even though some of the musicians (singer Bobby Byrd, saxophonist St. Clair Pinckney) actually played with Brown 30 years ago, Even More sounds slicker, newer, and even less effective than its predecessors. The difference is partly in how it was recorded, but mostly it’s in the musicians’ timing–it just doesn’t have the sucker-punch rhythmic microengineering of Brown and his better imitators.
