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RIP P-Funk's Synth Genius Bernie Worrell (1 Viewer)

Bob Magaw

Bob Magaw

Footballguy
Parliament-Funkadelic Co-Founder Bernie Worrell Dies at 72

http://www.msn.com/en-us/music/news/parliament-funkadelic-co-founder-bernie-worrell-dies-at-72/ar-AAhAYfj?ocid=spartanntp

Final passage on the Mothership. Destination - dimensions and realms of previously unknown/unheard funkdom. He was 72. Diagnosed with stage four lung cancer in January. Also played with Talking Heads, Bill Laswell/Bootsy/Buckethead and some outstanding solo work.

Impact on '70s funk and beyond (influences on influences) literally incalculable.

* Lots of Worrell links can be found in the two 5-29-16 posts (mostly the end of the first post, also a few in the shorter second post) from the Jazz thread.

https://forums.footballguys.com/forum/topic/704727-jazz-history-for-dummies-rashaan-roland-kirk-plus-64-jazz-videos/?page=5

P-Funk's keyboard wizard Bernie Worrell renditions of Volunteered Slavery and Sun Ra's Outer Spaceways bookending/sandwiching his instrumental Bern's Blues, from Funk Of Ages (AUDIO 5 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiPQzzYY4gM

Sun Ra's original version of Outer Spaceways (AUDIO 3 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0y0O8tTewE

Say a prayer or send good thoughts to Bernie (stage 4 lung cancer), one of the architects of the original P-Funk sound, with Eddie Hazel and Bootsy Collins

Bootsy interview excerpt from the doc Stranger: Bernie Worrell On Earth (VIDEO 10 minutes) 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoeiaQdSViw

Extended trailer from the above doc (VIDEO 12 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J26P2Y11qyQ

Moon Over Brixton, from Pieces Of Woo: The Other Side (AUDIO 6 minutes), achingly beautiful jazz/classical hybrid instrumental with the inimitable "bone" stylings of Fred Wesley - like Bootsy, an alumni of both James Brown and P-Funk   

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eDxKvymB2k

X-Factor with Tony Williams, ex-Miles drummer and sax titan Maceo Parker of James Brown/P-Funk, from Blacktronic Science (AUDIO 12 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALm9nrIp3Cw  

He also played on Bill Laswell/Material's Hallucination Engine with Bootsy and Wayne Shorter - Weather Report cover Cucumber Slumber Fluxus Mix (AUDIO 7 minutes) 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2kb1QBkbqw

Maggot Brain - Praxis with Buckethead, Worrell and Laswell plus P-Funk violinist (VIDEO 12 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OinI2w3Wg3o

Cosmic Slop, written by George Clinton and Bernie Worrell - Hardcore Jollies album version (AUDIO 6 minutes), from wiki - "This track is a live version of the 1973 song from the Funkadelic album of the same name and it was recorded at a rehearsal for the 1976 P-Funk Earth Tour (see Mothership Connection Newberg Session). This version uses a vocal introduction that was removed from the 1973 studio version, and it features prominent guitar solos by Michael Hampton. This version is widely considered to be the best early example of Hampton's guitar work."  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8i3g9DlDl0

12" extended version of Parliament's Flashlight (AUDIO 10 minutes), in an interview from the Stranger doc noted above, Mos Def talked about how Worrell didn't just create entirely new synthesizer sound worlds, but pioneered a completely different SYNTAX for funk  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fatP7thewQM

Bernie's Interlude/Funkentelechy live concert footage from Montreux '98 - Bootsy and Bernie with other P-Funk alumni like guitarist Gary Shider (VIDEO 8 minutes), BUMPIN!   

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sklyJbEXgMY

Funkentelechy - Bernie (VIDEO 12 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPdhrrSQY5I

Low key groove but awesome duet with drummer Steve Jordan (VIDEO 3 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8N4l9XAWQM

Acoustic piano renditions of Come Together and Let It Be 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xd3qNG7Szqg

Shin Terai, featuring Worrell, Laswell and Buckethead   

Unison '99 (AUDIO 50 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQnsVlfmYyI 

Lightyears '07 (AUDIO 1+ hour)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIBTIdL-3lI

 
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He played one of the iconic bass lines of all time on "Flashlight"

Hung with him several times and he was always really cool.

RIP, sir - you didn't fake the funk

 
The Pinocchio Theory by Bootsy's Rubber Band definitely wasn't referring to Bernie.

One of the architects of Funk, maybe not overstating things to liken him to a Bach of the genre (or an Einstein of electronic beats and synthesizer grooves).

* He was a classical prodigy (like Herbie Hancock), which informed his taste, sensibility, style and chops with a rhythmic depth, harmonic range, melodic creativity and musical versatility that was unprecedented and without equal in his idiom.  

** My two favorite jazz organists are Larry Young and Jimmy Smith (in that order), and although they are in different genres and I don't typically think of it that way, in limited crossover examples (where he plays jazz-like material), I'm not sure Bernie wasn't a more naturally gifted and profoundly talented keys player, and that is saying a lot.   

 
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Clinton and Bootsy are better known but you can make the case that Worrell was the most musically important contributor to the P-Funk sound.  Clinton brought the concept of course and Bootsy's outsized personality played Robin to Clinton's Batman but George wasn't a player.  Bootsy was the Player of the Year but he was building on the foundation laid by James Jamerson, Larry Graham, Ernie Isley and others. 

Worrell came along in the early days of synthesizers where there was no pre-existing musical vocabulary.  But where early prog and fusion guys were using synths like extensions of traditional pianos and organs using mainly orchestral sounds, Worrell (perhaps because he didn't have the pure chops) took keyboards in a completely different direction.  He used string synthesizers in a pretty typical way to augment the band's sound but he played synths on top of that like nobody before and few people afterwards.  Worrell played synths like a percussion instrument with short blurts and bleeps instead of long piano runs.  He did some of  that in his solos but the otherworldly sounds that he played during ensemble sections is what jumps out when you listen to their records.  He created noises that weren't like traditional musical instruments and sometimes unlike any sound heard in nature.  If you turn the bass down, it still sounds like P-Funk because of Bernie.  But for God's sake and in memory of Worrell, turn the bass back up and the volume even higher.

 
There was a cool documentary about him that was on Netflix streaming when I caught it a few years ago.  Seems like it is gone now.

Also, people interested in this thread would probably be interested in the Jaco doc, which is now streaming on Netflix.

 
Rolling Stone, including 10 essential songs from his catalog 

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/lists/bernie-worrell-10-essential-tracks-from-the-p-funk-keyboardist-20160624

My favorite album in the P-Funk canon has to be Cosmic Slop (Nappy Dugout, You Can'T Miss What You Can't Measure, the title song, etc.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Slop

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9S-3ukL4KPA&list=PL6F302F6CA24FC1C4

Worrell/Laswell/Kale - Funkronomic '16, five track EP must have been one of the last things he recorded 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0WK9-5bPH0&index=1&list=PLHrr1mFE2NxFTO18N_TGEc64__lmAZmxX

Washington Post obit - Bernie Worrell, keyboardist and songwriter for Parliament-Funkadelic, dies at 72

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/bernie-worrell-keyboardist-and-songwriter-for-parliament-funkadelic-dies-at-72/2016/06/24/b43fe966-056f-11e6-bdcb-0133da18418d_story.html

NY Times obit - Bernie Worrell, Whose Keyboards Left an Imprint on Funk and Hip-Hop, Dies at 72

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/25/arts/music/bernie-worrell-whose-keyboards-left-an-imprint-on-funk-and-hip-hop-dies-at-72.html?_r=0

Bernie Worrell, the keyboardist whose anarchic solos and Moog synthesizer bass lines with Parliament-Funkadelic indelibly changed the sound of funk and hip-hop, died on Friday at his home in Everson, Wash. He was 72.

His wife, Judie Worrell, confirmed his death. He was told in January that he had late-stage lung cancer.

Mr. Worrell was the kind of sideman who is as influential as some bandleaders. A broadly grounded musician, he grew up playing classical piano and was adept at jazz, rock and R&B.

“I mix musics; I don’t stick to one thing,” Mr. Worrell said in a 2013 interview at the Red Bull Music Academy Festival. “I can hear the same scale or mode in a classical piece; you can find the same mode in a gospel hymn. Same mode in an Indian raga, same mode in a Irish ditty, same mode in a Scottish ditty, or whatever you want to call it. Same mode in Latin music, African. It’s all related. It’s how you hear it.”

His stint in the 1970s as keyboardist and music director in groups led by George Clinton — Parliament, Funkadelic and their eventual merged identity of Parliament-Funkadelic, or P-Funk — taught generations of musicians and listeners that synthetic sounds could be earthy and untamed.


Mr. Worrell reached a new audience in the early 1980s as a member of the expanded Talking Heads, whose 1983 tour was documented in Jonathan Demme’s film “Stop Making Sense.” In the 1990s, Mr. Worrell’s synthesizer lines for P-Funk songs were widely recycled as hip-hop tracks, becoming the foundation for the West Coast rap — sometimes called G-Funk — of Snoop Doggy Dogg and Dr. Dre.


Mr. Worrell was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with Parliament-Funkadelic in 1997.

His inventory of sounds was more like a rain forest than a library. His synthesizer lines whistled, gurgled, cackled, squished, snickered and belched; their pitches might wriggle, and their tones could bristle and bite. There was humor in them, along with ingenuity, defiance, raunch and joy.

Mr. Worrell’s best-known innovation was the bass line he played on three connected Minimoog synthesizers in the 1978 Parliament song “Flash Light.” It had a descending and ascending chromatic line with a meaty tone and a certain swagger, an approach that would spread through funk, new wave, electro, synth-pop and countless other iterations. Many Parliament recordings from the 1970s, like “Aqua Boogie,” another song that would be widely sampled in hip-hop, revolve around the multiple, constantly surprising keyboard parts Mr. Worrell devised.


He played, and played with, whatever technology was available to him at the time: piano, electric piano, clavinet, Hammond organ, as well as Moog, ARP, Yamaha and Prophet synthesizers. What he brought to every piece of technology was a human element: quirks and syncopations, complex structures and outbursts of anarchy. His oft-repeated advice to young musicians was “hands on” — to keep the human touch in music rather than depending on machines.

Mr. Worrell was born on April 19, 1944, in Long Branch, N.J., and grew up in Plainfield, N.J. His father was a truck driver; his mother sang in church choirs and taught him his first scale on the piano. He started classical piano lessons at 3, composed a piano concerto when he was 8 and performed with the Washington Symphony Orchestra of Pennsylvania when he was 10.

He graduated from the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston in 1967. (The conservatory gave him an honorary doctorate in May.) While in college, he played organ in an Episcopal church, backed a local group called Chubby and the Turnpikes (the vocal ensemble that would become the hit disco act Tavares), and accompanied a Jewish men’s chorus.

Mr. Worrell had been the musical director for the R&B singer Maxine Brown when he joined Mr. Clinton, whose doo-*** group, the Parliaments, was originally from Plainfield. The Parliaments had moved to Detroit and were becoming two intertwined acts, Parliament and Funkadelic, recording for different labels.

Mr. Clinton brought in Mr. Worrell as the keyboardist, bandleader and arranger, starting with the debut albums both Funkadelic and Parliament released in 1970. Parliament-Funkadelic and many spinoffs made dozens of albums in the ’70s. Mr. Worrell and Mr. Clinton collaborated on Funkadelic songs, including “Cosmic Slop” and “Lunchmeataphobia (Think! It Ain’t Illegal Yet!),” as well as Parliament songs, including “Do That Stuff” and “Up for the Down Stroke.”

With Mr. Clinton’s high-concept wordplay, the rhythm section’s deep grooves and Mr. Worrell’s sonic zingers, P-Funk brought Afro-Futurism to dance floors.

While living in Detroit, Mr. Worrell also did studio work with P-Funk’s rivals. He played keyboard on hits like Freda Payne’s “Band of Gold” and Johnnie Taylor’s “Disco Lady.” He also made his first solo album, “All the Woo in the World,” in 1978.

Business disputes led Mr. Worrell to leave Parliament-Funkadelic as the 1970s ended, though in later years he collaborated with various P-Funk associates, including Mr. Clinton’s P-Funk All-Stars.

He and his wife, Judie Worrell, had long contended that he did not receive what he had earned for the songs he wrote in Parliament-Funkadelic and for their later use as samples in hip-hop songs. The publishing rights have been under legal dispute for many years. Besides her, his survivors also include a son, Bassl.

Mr. Worrell had not heard of the Talking Heads when the band’s guitarist and keyboardist, Jerry Harrison, contacted him. But jamming with the Talking Heads convinced him that they made music the way P-Funk had, and he started touring with the band in 1980, appearing on the live album “The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads” and the 1983 studio album “Speaking in Tongues” as well as the concert film and live album “Stop Making Sense.”

After working with P-Funk and the Talking Heads, Mr. Worrell was in demand across the musical spectrum. He worked with the producer Bill Laswell on funk, jazz, African and avant-garde music, and with the bassist and songwriter Jack Bruce of Cream. He sat in with jam bands like Gov’t Mule, and, with Les Claypool of Primus and the guitarist Buckethead, formed the group Colonel Claypool’s Bucket of Bernie Brains.

Mike Gordon of Phish and Warren Haynes of Gov’t Mule appeared on Mr. Worrell’s 2007 solo album, “Improviscario.” Mr. Worrell played on Keith Richards’s first solo album, “Talk Is Cheap,” and toured with the Pretenders. He also joined the rapper Mos Def’s rock band, Black Jack Johnson.

He led his own groups, including the Woo Warriors, the Bernie Worrell Orchestra and Icons of Funk (with Fred Wesley from James Brown’s J.B.’s and Leo Nocentelli from the Meters). He wrote music for film and television and appeared onscreen as the keyboard player in Meryl Streep’s band in Mr. Demme’s 2015 movie “Ricki and the Flash.”

When “Late Show With David Letterman” began its run on CBS, Mr. Worrell was a member of the house band, the CBS Orchestra with Paul Shaffer.

His last solo album, “Retrospectives,” released in 2016, revisited his favorite P-Funk compositions as instrumentals.

After Mr. Worrell learned he had cancer, a benefit and tribute concert was held on April 4 featuring admirers and collaborators from throughout Mr. Worrell’s career. It ran overtime with a P-Funk reunion.

 
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All The Woo NY Benefit 4-16, with Bernie and Bootsy (VIDEO 20 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE5JWAZbtUo

Bernie & Bootsy (VIDEO 12 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tL8shj6yx0 

The Mothership Connection - live concert '76 (VIDEO 80 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiTh8BQ4oVU

One Nation Under A Groove, P-Funk doc (VIDEO 50 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjQ5QcM1SfA

Tales of Dr. Funkenstein BBC doc (VIDEO 1 hour)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKfQRU5KKao

VH1 George Clinton/P-Funk doc (VIDEO 45 minutes)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKt311dlfo4&list=PL9g3dOJxs8B33eVYXwvRLs5bu5xYYgXmZ

Funk doc, parts 6, 7 & 8, Bootsy brings "The One" from James Brown to P-Funk, like Moses and the Ten Commandments (VIDEO 17 minutes combined)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkSZmA1Y6Y4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=275Nvwe0IIQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAFej9pO3BY

 
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