Last-Minute Show Alert: Funk Legend Bernie Worrell Gets a Benefit
At this particular instant the weather is breathtaking, hot, bright, and clear. It’s the perfect backdrop for some serious throwing down and partying, and I’m urging you to go to a show on a Tuesday. Seriously.
Fremont’s Nectar Lounge consistently busts out first-rate funk, soul, and dance bills, but tonight’s show will be something special. It’s a tribute to one of popular music’s most singular and influential instrumentalists, keyboardist Bernie Worrell, AKA the Wizard of Woo. Some first-rate locals will be paying homage, and the man himself’s scheduled to be in attendance.
Cliffs Notes summary: Alongside ringleader George Clinton, guitarist Eddie Hazel, and bassist Bootsy Collins, veteran keyboardist/synth-man Bernie Worrell helped launch American soul music into funk hyperspace as one of the key architects of Parliament–Funkadelic. That’s Worrell’s wildly experimental, sometimes alien, always terminally funky keyboards you hear on classic P-Funk records like Free Your Mind…and Your Ass Will Follow, Cosmic Slop, and Mothership Connection.
Worrell embraced innovations like Moog synthesizers in the mid-to-late ‘70s, influencing post-punks and futuristic funketeers alike. And when Talking Heads got serious about funking up their sound, they enlisted Worrell to add flavor and percolating grooves to their 1983 breakthrough record, Speaking in Tongues (he’s in the Heads’ classic 1984 concert flick, Stop Making Sense, too).
Between his solo records, session work, and P-Funk trailblazing, the Wizard of Woo has wrought an indelible impact on a lot of musicians, including a large contingent in this neck of the woods. Tonight’s bill will include contributions from Eldridge Gravy and the Court Supreme, Marmalade, Tip to Base, The Staxx Brothers, members of informal Seamonster Lounge house band Funky 2 Death, and even prog-dance-indie-psych-rock explorers Midday Veil (who recruited Worrell for session work on their great 2015 long-player, This Wilderness). Worrell himself is scheduled to play with local jazz/funk/traditional native music band Khu Eex.
Seeing Bernie Worrell and all of this wall-to-wall awesomeness live should be incentive enough to brave a weeknight show, but this is also a benefit, with proceeds going to benefit Worrell’s ongoing battle against lung cancer. Free your mind from the stigma of going to a Tuesday night show…and your ass will follow.
Tickets are available at Nectar’s website, or you can try your luck at the door.
