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With a little help from Pee Wee Ellis, JB Horns, P-Funk and Horny Horns member Fred Wesley teaches some folks in Paris what "Funk" means:
Fred Wesley - House Party (live)
by marsof
The last gasp of Rufus and Chacka Khan as a group, 1983's Stompin' at the Savoy, was about as trite as the album's title (how many Stompin' at the Savoy albums are there?) One song on that album had any significant redeeming value: Ain't Nobody. The irony is, on an ostensibly live album (that's the subtitle of the album), this was clearly a studio effort, and Ain't Nodoby, has come to be associated solely with Chaka Khan, complete with a 1984 video you might be able to catch on VH1 (when they're, ghasp!, actually playing music--can you tell I'm in a bit of a mood today?)
So, it's with no small amount of trepidation that I offer up KT Tunstall's cover. As good as KT Tunstall might be, she's not going to match Khan's searing vocal vamps as the background singers offer up the chorus. And, it's a good thing she doesn't try. The result is a credible effort with some interesting instrumentation (a mandolin doing the synthesizer intro?).
Whether you like this or not, it sure beats Sing Around the Campfire, as a song to sing while sitting around a campfire.
It started with the annual Microsoft giving campaign, when some enterprising folks in my group figured out how turn an XBox Rock Band competition into a way to raise funds. Atboth the Redmond campus and the Silicon Valley campus, teams competed against each other with people pledging donations to the charity of the group that won.
Now, of course, we can't really allow for two champions, so, at our annual all-hands meeting last Thursday, the group that won the Silicon Valley competition squared off against the group that won the Redmond competition.
The Redmond group, consisting of members of the Mac Office Art engineering team, decided to do this little mocumentary telling their story: the Art Attax Story, though both the voice over and the recording engineer with the shades are Word testers.
It had us in stitches, so I thought I'd share a bit of the humor.
I guess the only question is, does an XBox Rock Band group count for Sunday Under the Covers? Probably not.
Whatever the case, these guys clearly have too much time on their hands.
The Art Attax Story from Jonathan Holley on Vimeo.
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Comments
You're right on all counts, I think...(I'm not too familiar with Chaka Khan)
but this is a good performance of a nice song. I like the low-fi funk.
Nothing beats the oomph of Chaka in her 80s lamé ;)
I can dig that cover. The song does have a couple of real good hooks in it that sound just fine acoustic. Those 3 sides live records from back in the day did get quite old,didn't they?