funk Archives - Eli Moore

Eli Reviews: TomCat – Tom Scott and the L.A. Express (1974)

Tom Scott is THE session musician. If you’ve heard saxophone in the 1970s, you’ve heard him. When he was only 20 years old, Quincy Jones was already talking about him, how he could ‘play any idiom’. He’s the Jazz Man on Carole King’s classic paean, and the horn section arranger on Steely Dan’s Aja, even the funny electronic sounding melody that turns out is a Lyricon on Billie Jean.

I was excited to see some of his records are on Spotify. Sometimes Spotify has gaps – also depending on country – and I’m sure at one point I couldn’t access one of his records with his own band The L.A. Express. This one has cool cover art that I also find funny because I’ve had a recent run of jazz fusion discoveries, all with humanoid animals on the cover, that have turned out to be AI created. Tom Scott was an early adopter of the electronic wind instrument, the afore-mentioned Lyricon, but is all real. Guy can play anything.

TomCat is a solid jazz funk fusion record. It goes around rock and bop and blues and shuffle elements and features great playing all-round – I like this keyboard player a lot, Larry Nash – but I can’t say I really loved it. Usually I’m out and about or at the gym when taking in my album listening and will be regularly checking my phone for track titles if I’m digging it. I didn’t do that until the ballad “Love Poem”, which features Scott as the entire horn and woodwind section. I also did go back and saved “Day Way” before it to my Transcription playlist for the really cool, angular language of the melody, but I think the more interesting stuff is in the latter half, with a rock-edge TV news intro sort of track, “Good Evening Mr. & Mrs. America & All The Ships” that Robben Ford really tears up.

“Backfence Cattin’” is mostly a cool funk groove in 3/4 that then pulls some clever metric switches. “Mondo” is pretty heavy, and Scott switches back to the synthesizer-sounding Lyricon for a rip. The last tune, “Refried”, is probably my favorite, at least for the intro groove, which I’m sure must have been sampled many a time. It’s a mostly dark tune and full of all that 1970s recording grit and richness I love so much. Unfortunately this is the only 70s from him available on Spotify, but I’m definitely going to hear him pop up soon enough in my music listening explorations – the guy really was on everything.

1970s, 1974, funk, jazz, Larry Nash, Tom Scott

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Eli Reviews: First Cuckoo – Deodato (1975)

I haven’t been mentioning that I also love Deodato’s album covers. I didn’t even see the figure of the woman with baby carriage until blowing it up big here.

This one’s a real mix and not such a clear concept, also with a lot more cover songs than the two others I’ve listened to – four out of the seven tracks, in fact. I like this one more than Knights of Fantasy and less than Love Island, and it’s again testament of how much Deodato can do as a musician. Steve Gadd is the only other musician on the record I know and he of course lays down the faultless grooves throughout.

“Funk Yourself” is a fun enough funk bash, probably great to kick your time on the treadmill off with. For me though, nothing beats Herbie Hancock’s “Hang Up Your Hang Ups”. It’s the next gamble that really pays off though: Zeppelin’s “Black Dog”. Deodato’s band actually delivers a metrically better performance, not rushing that one bit of the riff…it’s got enough gnarl to it that it comes off really well when it might not have.

The next track is to be one of my all-time favorite Deodato tracks, I’m sure: “Crabwalk”. Arranging and conducting your own stuff becomes a really amazing credit when there’s such large instrumentation like this. What a great writer. Great composition. There’s a tolerable dub element with the delays on the trumpet lead, but the lush 70s orchestration style is the real star here.

“Adam’s Hotel” is a super fun tune that were it recorded a little different would fit in some scenes of Napoleon Dynamite. I don’t know if I’m trying too hard to self-promote here but it’s a vibe I was going for with my track (as EM/FM) “Into Atlantis”. What I really want to take from Deodato is his deft management of composition and arrangement. His tunes develop and lengthen without feeling either convoluted (like Bob James for me) or uninteresting (like the Jazz Crusaders for me).

The funky boogaloo version of Duke Ellington’s “Caravan” isn’t bad but I don’t need to ever hear it again. This guy really likes doing covers. I love his version of “Speak Low” though – another jazz standard – and I about hiccuped reading in the credits that the lyricist for the tune was actually Ogden Nash, my favorite poet.

The album ends with a classical piece by Delius, the title track basically, but I don’t know what Deodato did to it as it’s un-jazzified. He would have been pushing even his luck trying to make Cuckoo into a funk.

1970s, 1975, Deodato, funk, jazz, Steve Gadd, synthesizers

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Eli Reviews – Knights Of Fantasy – Deodato (1979)

Deodato does disco! I’m maybe four albums into his discography and I already know this one will be one of my least favorites. It doesn’t seem quite as inspired as a few of his others from this era but it still has plenty for the brain and the booty, with tight grooves and great synth-ing over jazz chord progressions. It just seems like an odd choice to me to go full disco towards the end of that craze, but some 80s sounds have entered here with what seem like synth drums and the very 80s hand claps.

There’s only five tracks on this one, but they’re almost all around seven minutes. It doesn’t really make any of the tunes more memorable and I found myself thinking as great as the players are (I don’t recognize any of the names on this one) between solos songs like the title track are almost muzak. There’s some really nice brass somewhere on the album, and the last track, “Lovely Lady”, sounds a lot like the Japanese jazz fusion I love from the same era.

Funnily the part I enjoy most is just an intro, and in fact the intro to the most questionable track: a disco version of Bach’s “Jesu, Joy Of Man’s Desiring”. It’s reminiscent of the Star Wars disco medley, but then this one steps outside of any logic and goes into “Love Is Blue”. I won’t say it doesn’t work. Then it gest funky in a disco way before going back to Bach.

But anyway, the intro is very cool and it reminds me a little of one of my own tunes as EM/FM “The One”!

1970s, 1979, album review, Deodato, EM/FM, funk, jazz fusion, review

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Eli Reviews: Love Island – Deodato (1978)

I’m on a fanatic run of Deodato. I exercised a lot of musical fanaticism last year when I had resolved to listen to album a day, falling even more in love with Herbie Hancock, George Duke and discovering then obsessing over Japanese artists Masayoshi Takanaka and Casiopea.

Eumir Deodato is blowing me away – composer, arranger and killer keyboardist. My only exposure to him before somehow coming across this album was through his famous funk rendition of Also Sprach Zarathustra, which I think I first heard in the Peter Sellers movie Being There. It seems to have been a habit of his to include at least one unusual cover on his albums. On this one, it’s a surprisingly tasty lounge funk version of Take the “A” Train.

This one and an Edwin Starr tune called “Chariot of the Gods” are sort of disruptive inclusions as it’s otherwise a concept album of island-themed music, almost more in the 60s lounge music/jet-setter/exotica trend but with 70s hallmarks like Rhodes keyboard, synthesizer, funk guitar, drums and farty bass (that’s a good thing). It’s lush with soft brass on two of my favorite tunes, “Tahiti Hut” and “Love Island”, and funks hard on the two intro tracks, and then “Pina Colada” later one – there’s some funky jazzy legends across the record, including Harvey Mason, Larry Carlton, George Benson and even Maurice White and Philip Bailey.

The writing is just so good across the record. All the songs are deftly written, with really engaging arrangements and expert solos. Deodato uses a crazy trombone sounding vocal effect (listed as ‘vocalanger’ on one set of credits) for a solo on “Love Island” and elsewhere takes super interesting Rhodes solos.

I’m super-inspired by this guy – stay tuned for more Deodato!

1970s, 1978, Deodato, funk, jazz