The Genius Of

JAMES BROWN

Soul Brother Number One

There is also the problem, that like Bob Dylan, James Brown has experienced a sharp decline in artistic production late in life, so younger listeners are handed the concept of both of these performers as geniuses, without much in the way of current work to back it up. They might as well be stone monuments on a lawn somewhere.
But (to borrow a phrase from the man himself) ‘There Was A Time’, when James Brown and his band cast a shadow on the landscape that was all encompassing. A time when they were the driving force behind a musical change as profound and far reaching as the Be Bop revolution 20 years before – as radically different as the sound of John Lee Hooker’s boogie only a few years after that. It was a sound that harnessed the rhythmic sprawl of modern jazz, the visceral thrust of rock and roll and the entire history of rhythm & blues and saw these seemingly disparate elements distilled through the imagination of one man.

Continued