put the bow tie on funk<\/a>,\u201d Earth, Wind & Fire slapped the rainbow paisley bell bottoms on it, cranking both the funk engine and the strings-and-horns accoutrements up to 11, while adding a dash of New Age spirituality to the blend. This is funk with elegance, groove and<\/i> raised consciousness.<\/p>\nStill, even \u201cfunk dressed up with horns and strings\u201d barely scratches the surface of the EWF story. This musical collective, often a dozen strong, always masterminded by drummer\/songwriter Maurice White and his brother, bassist and frequent co-writer Verdine White, with Philip Bailey\u2019s smooth and powerful vocals out front, was essentially a soul-funk orchestra. Throughout the group\u2019s lengthy tenure, the White brothers functioned as maestros, producer-arranger-songwriters whose sprawling ensembles played with masterful precision while constructing a groove designed to get the stodgiest hips in the audience moving.<\/p>\n
Greatest Hits<\/i> tells that story as well as any single album could hope to, peppering its track list with radio smashes while chronicling the evolution of the group through its 1974-81 prime. Unlike many similar collections, it\u2019s well and thoughtfully sequenced, not strictly chronological, but in an order that both makes sense and makes for an engaging listen.<\/p>\n
Opening cut \u201cShining Star\u201d (#1 Pop and R&B in 1975) features the ensemble at the peak of their powers, with keys, organ clavinet, bass and drums deep in the celebratory groove, counterpointed on the high end by the horn section and Bailey\u2019s soaring falsetto. In \u201cThe Way Of The World\u201d it\u2019s the slinky seductiveness of the rhythm section that carries the whole song, the little hesitations and advances in Verdine\u2019s bass line telling a whole story in themselves while the vocalists dazzle with low lows and high highs. <\/p>\n
\u201cSeptember\u201d is exuberance in musical form, with the horn section out front while the push exerted by the rest of the group provides drive for days. Then smoldering ballad \u201cCan\u2019t Hide Love\u201d offers a brief respite ahead of the group\u2019s finger-snapping cover of \u201cGot To Get You Into My Life,\u201d which takes the blue-eyed soul of the McCartney original and injects it with giddy funk. The winking \u201cSing A Song\u201d is pure fun, while \u201cGratitude\u201d attempts an easygoing, pleasant funk that makes you think George may have had a point; at times it feels a little too bright and shiny.<\/p>\n
Ah, but then we get to \u201cSerpentine Fire\u201d and whammo, you\u2019re in the grip of one of the standout bass lines of the century\u2014the stops, the starts, the fat plucked notes like exclamation points, the impossibly nimble runs\u2014and the way the different elements of the arrangement intertwine and play off of each other is absolutely serpentine, not to mention brilliant. Another intricate groove fuels \u201cFantasy,\u201d along with some of Philip Bailey’s most memorable falsetto.<\/p>\n
At this point we duck back to catch a pair of (relatively) early hits in \u201cKalimba Story,\u201d Maurice White\u2019s ode to the African percussion instrument, and the horns-and-guitars jam \u201cMighty Mighty,\u201d both deeply funky and driven by the spectacular Maurice-Verdine rhythm section. For the sake of contrast, the funk disappears entirely for the soulful ballad \u201cReasons,\u201d featuring Bailey testing the upper limits as strings and horns provide lift.<\/p>\n
Radio hit \u201cSaturday Nite\u201d (#4 R&B, #21 Pop) is a light-hearted party anthem that\u2019s pop in the sunny melody and pure funk in Verdine White\u2019s ubiquitous bass line. It\u2019s a fun ride\u2026 and then there was disco. \u201cLet\u2019s Groove\u201d embraces the new sound without entirely losing the band\u2019s funk roots; it\u2019s a marriage of the two and Bailey\u2019s stinging falsetto and Verdine\u2019s elastic bass give it just enough grit to work. For \u201cBoogie Wonderland,\u201d EWF collaborated with The Emotions, and the female vocal chorus paired well with the rest of the group, even if the BPM is pure disco. <\/p>\n
On the penultimate track, the group\u2019s pop side is ascendant on the sweeping 1979 David Foster ballad \u201cAfter The Love Is Gone,\u201d which sounds more like Chicago fronted by Philip Bailey, which is less surprising once you notice that Foster\u2019s co-writer here is future Chicago frontman Bill Champlin. To close things out, we jump back to the aptly titled \u201cGetaway,\u201d from the same album that featured \u201cSaturday Nite,\u201d 1976\u2019s Spirit<\/i>. The BPM\u2019s are up, but Verdine\u2019s bass is brilliant as ever, the horns are all over the place, and the group plays with genuine fire. <\/p>\n
One of the issues EWF faced with critics like George Clinton was that they could never satisfy people who were purists about a particular style, because they never stuck to just one\u2014they were constantly combining funk and soul, or funk and pop, or pop and soul, or funk and disco, crossing and blurring genre lines and inventing fresh hybrids. That was always going to be a tough sell for the purists in the crowd, but the evidence\u2014more than a dozen crossover hits ascending the upper reaches of both R&B and Pop charts\u2014demonstrates that they were pretty damned good at what they did.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":35082,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[6073],"rating":[5613],"class_list":["post-46959","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-earth-wind-fire","rating-rating-a-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46959"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46959\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=46959"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=46959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}