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6/3/2004

Chris Morris

FUNK IN BLACK AND WHITE

White boys in the fine city of Memphis, Tennessee, have been trying to figure out the funk since the days when Elvis had pimples.

Despite the town’s long history of segregation, black and white musical culture has sloshed back and forth at will in Memphis. The countless hits on Stax Records were produced with a house band featuring a white guitarist and bassist and a black organist and drummer, Booker T. & the M.G.’s. And Hi Records’ later instrumental hits were often cut by Caucasian musicians steeped in the R&B sound.

The Royal Sessions (Yellow Dog), the debut album by new Memphis instrumental quartet the Bo-Keys, draws directly on the work of those Stax and Hi forebears. Too Much Guitar (In the Red), the third album by the Reigning Sound, employs a larger musical palette but still holds to the maxim “If it ain’t got soul, it ain’t worth a fuck.”

The Bo-Keys’ album may be the less successful of the two discs, but it’s also the more interesting. The project is the brainchild of Scott Bomar, formerly the bassist with the solid garage-instro band Impala. This time around, Bomar has bought a ticket to Soulsville, and has enlisted some veteran Bluff City R&B players as his bandmates. Guitarist Skip Pitts’s wah-wah left an imprint on Isaac Hayes’s ’70s Stax singles. Hammond B-3 organist Ronnie Williams has pounded the keys with Rufus and Carla Thomas, the Emotions, the Soul Children, David Porter, and the Sweet Inspirations, among others. And drummer Willie Hall was likewise a Stax session standby.

With trumpeter Marc Franklin and saxophonist Jim Spake standing in for Memphis Horns Wayne Jackson and Andrew Love, the Bo-Keys ramble through just about every imaginable permutation of ’60s and ’70s soul-funk-jazz instrumental styling. Seven of the album’s 10 tracks are originals, and they sound variously like Lee Morgan Blue Note hard bop à la “The Sidewinder,” Booker T. cookers, and early ’70s bedroom-soul workouts.

Two of the covers – “Coming Home Baby,” the Ben Tucker-Bob Dorough soul-jazz standard, and organist Jimmy Smith’s “Back at the Chicken Shack” – are pulled off with panache, but the band stubs its collective toe, hard, on the JBs’ “Doin’ It to Death.” Despite that misstep, The Royal Sessions generally delivers a funky-good, party-ready time.