The Severed Cortex

I sure love good soul and funk music. This stuff they pass off as R & B today makes me sick. It's all overproduced and it all sounds the same. No one cares about the real rhythm and blues anymore, it's all crooners with great voices. Not that that's bad, it's just overdone. Give me something raw and rough any day instead.

Here's two (somewhat) recent purchases that cater to me.

Betty Davis by Betty Davis

No, not golden girl Betty Davis, but it would be fun to see her sing funk music. This Betty Davis was once the wife of legendary jazz trumpeter and East St. Louis native Miles Davis. Betty is basically credited with introducing Miles to the 70's funk scene as well as I'm sure a few choice packets of heroin on occasion. She was a super model back before the days of super models so you know she had access to the stuff. Couple that with Miles proclivities and I'm sure that my conjecture might be close to the truth. It's the introduction to the former that makes Betty Davis important mainly because without her Bitches Brew may have never been made. Did she help define fusion jazz ... not in my book ... but she sure helped jump starting that genre. She deserves credit for that.
As it turns out though, Betty was more than a pretty face. She could sing, and she could sing with unbridled, funky, passion. So much so that she caused a lot of people to clamor for this album to be banned. Betty was up front with her sexuality and apparently in the early 70's that caused quite a stir. That in your face sexuality is cool and all but it's the musicians on this date that I love: Tower of Power, Sly and the Family Stone's rhythm section, studio legend Merl Saunders, as well as many other notables. Steppin In Her I. Miller Shoes and Walkin Up The Road are two of my favorites, with their totally raw funk groove, but there are a couple of others on here that come close to these two. To me the whole thing is funkier than Parliament. It may be even funkier than the homeless. Judge for yourself.

100 Days 100 Nights by Sharon Jones And The Dap Kings

I hate Amy Winehouse. I shouldn't say hate. I just hate it when someone of minimal talent gets a lot of recognition. I hate it more when they win a grammy, especially when they had little to do with it. Name me one song off Amy Winehouse's release other than the overplayed Rehab. It really grinds my goat when that same person has no idea where the music she's riding the coattails of came from. It's just not fair.
What is fair is that her producer Mark Ronson is a genius. He knew that he could crank out a retro style Stax type record with a young female singer and basically have a license to print money. But in order to add authenticity to the record he needed the missing ingredient otherwise known as The Dap Kings.
Daptone recording artist Sharon Jones has known about her label's house band and they've been pushing the retro style for quite some time. And oh boy does it sound like something out of Stax records circa 1967. And I freakin' love it. On this release the band sounds unbelievably tight. Sharon sounds a little restricted, like one might in a studio recording, but somehow you can listen to this whole record and kind of get a feel for how much these songs would kill in a live setting with Sharon screaming and groaning and moaning. Damn I hate that I missed this show at Blueberry Hill a couple months ago.
Honestly there's not a bad song on here. I like Be Easy, Let Them Knock, and Nobody's Baby the best, but each one of these tunes conjure up Otis, Isaac, Booker T. & his MG's Duck Dunn and Steve Cropper, and of course Wilson Pickett. For me it's like riding in a tractor listening to the AM radio and as far as I'm concerned there is very little in life that's better than that.