Recent Stories with tag soul

With its hastily-set-up klieg lights, metal foldout chairs, card tables full of food, and a few sheets of white tarp separating the talent from aisles of Flatstock rock poster shoppers, the Fisher Pavilion Hospitality Room feels like a MASH unit, only with nicer catering...and way more stylin' residents.

Two dozen members of the Wheedle's Groove ensemble are converging in this makeshift space, and talking to various factions of broadcast, online, and print media to promote their set that afternoon at Bumbershoot. All of these seasoned singers and players somehow manage to look damned cool even amidst the sub-army-hospital lighting. It's as if a pinata full of sharp-dressed soul men has been burst open.

Happy Wheedle's Groove Day--literally. Mayor McGinn himself will anoint this day (Saturday, September 4, 2010) with that title soon, in honor of this thirty-piece groove collective. In the meantime, though, it's meet, greet, and interview time for these ambassadors of Seattle's golden age of R&B.

In case you've been living in a state of funk depletion for the last five years, here are the Cliffs' Notes: Indie label Light in the Attic Records put out Wheedle's Groove, a CD compilation of long-lost 1960s and '70s Seattle soul and funk singles, in 2005. It was a major revelation for a lot of Northwest music obsessives (yours truly included), unearthing a thriving and fertile R & B scene that all but vanished 'neath the long shadow cast by the Grunge Era.

A terrific documentary of the same name surfaced earlier this year at the Seattle International Film Festival, providing an absorbing, funny, and powerfully inspirational oral history as accompaniment to the music. Since then, members of many of these vintage outfits (Cooking Bag, Black on White Affair, The Overton Berry Trio, and scores of others) have played live gigs around town, busting out originals and covers easily the equal of anything offered by Motown, Stax, or Muscle Shoals back in the day.... (more)

After taking a tour of Columbia City Theater I was itching to hear a band in there, and Abbey told me something called Drew Grow and the Pastors' Wives [Facebook] would be more than worth the trip. They're the eponymous Drew Grow (lead vocals, guitar), Cookie (percussion), Kris Doty (upright bass), and Seth Schaper (keyboards), from Portland, Oregon.

Sound on the Sound has been singing their praises locally, and Seattle Weekly has joined the choir--describing a performance as one of those "rare, game-changing live music experiences, the kind when you're watching a band and your chest swells up big and red and raw like a great frigatebird during mating season...."

I can hardly make my balky fingers type the description of their music, which is: indie folk-rock fired up by gospel and soul. (Try to imagine a Decemberists air floating out of an AME church, I dare you.) It's unusual, is all. But "It All Comes Right" (off their latest album) comes complete with a soul chorus that the 200-odd souls at Columbia City Theater on Saturday night joined into with uninhibited fervency.... (more)