Nothing better than gathering the posse on a Saturday lunchtime for some good food and wines to celebrate a birthday… Oh and to spin a few classic hip-hop and modern R&B tunes to get the feet stepping 🙂
Hong Kong Beat mobile disco getting its groove on in a live set from a recent birthday party held at Hong Kong’s Ho Lee Fook Chinese Kitchen, Elgin Street, Hong Kong.
https://www.mixcloud.com/hkbeat/rb-set-from-a-birthday-lunch-party/
I remember the first time I dropped ‘Fame’ at Carriages club, Swindon, not because it was my 20th birthday, not because it segued so well after Stevie Wonder’s ‘Superstition’, but for the number of funk fans who just kept dancing to this great new funky tune… Not that they knew it was Bowie!
I remember even more the astonishment, a few coming to the booth to check the single, when I said “Now THAT was… David Bowie!”.
It was pretty much unheard of me to play anything but R&B artists in those days, and that night we even had a couple of successful UK R&B recording artists in the club who were blown away by the sound coming from a man who, until that moment, had embodied white glam-rock.
Bowie didn’t invent ‘blue-eyed soul’, others like The Righteous Brothers and Frankie Valli had already established that, but the Thin White Duke went on to make the genre his own.
The second part of this tribute shows Bowie in his post Ziggy days, sometimes experimenting with new music scenes, sometimes diving into mainstream dance, but then seemingly just concentrating on his art rather than the showmanship that he had become associated with.
There’s dance; there’s rock; there’s new wave; there’s funk; there’s soul; there’s even a little return to glam-rock; then there’s Lazarus, which surely must be his self-penned epitaph.
So saluté and farewell David Bowie! I hope you all enjoy this fan’s humble thanks for the excitement and delight he’s given over the years.
The 90s brought a lot of change in music, in part due to the availability of electronic means of making music and, in a big part, the ability to sample old tracks. This was especially true in dance and R&B, where sampling older funk tracks in the 80s gave musical life to the street poetry of rappers.
R&B by the 90s had developed into several streams (rather than genres I would say), hip-hop/rap, new jack swing, neosoul, jazz-funk/soul-funk being what I would call the main streams.
Underlying all of these streams though were the funky rhythms and bass licks that the 90s R&B artists had grown up listening to with their parent’s music.
Here’s a little selection of funk infused 90s R&B tracks for Funky Friday.
If, like me, you have a summer birthday, it was often a bummer when you were a kid – school’s out, friends are maybe away on holidays, ice cream melts too quickly and dribbles all over the floor…
But the one thing that makes summer birthday’s better than any those at any other time of the year is when you are at a ‘real’ party age – there are so many great tunes to party or chill-out to 🙂
So, as it’s my birthday on Tuesday Chill-out today, I offer an extended selection of some of my favourite summer chill out songs.
Monday Moods takes the gloomy overcast morning head on with a selection of funky, jazzy and soulful tunes about joy and happiness.
And without having to play ‘that’ song 🙂
There were just too many great soul groups to include in last week’s offering and left out so many great voices like Harold Melvin, Smokey Robinson and Curtis Mayfield, so this week Soulful Saturday continues with Part 2 of the great male vocal soul groups.
Today on 4th July, US Independence Day, and in honour of the diverse range of R&B that the US has given the World over the years, Soulful Saturday grooves through an extended 90 minute set for your party, encompassing blues, soul, funk, Latin soul, hip hop and rap tunes about America.
And yes, Compton squeezes in there 😉
Throw another burger on the grill, would ya?
Continuing the 60s Soulful Saturday theme, this week it’s the turn of the phenomena that was the rise of the R&B girl groups.
Everybody’s heard of Diana Ross & The Supremes, probably Martha Reeves & The Vandellas too, but it wasn’t just about Motown. Phil Spector brought about the Ronettes and the Crystals, while many minor, as well as major soul labels like Chess and Atlantic, had their share of girl groups as well.
Kicking this set off with a cover of a Beatles cover of a Smokey Robinson song by, perhaps, the best known of the girl groups, and finishing with one of the first (credited anyway) successful girl groups, with some well-known and some not-so well-known tracks in between.
Get your beehive on…
Continuing the theme of funky music that I used to play in my residencies during the 70s, this week it’s the turn of the funky soul sisters to grab some dance floor attention.
Last week it was funky soul brothers, this week for Funky Friday it’s the turn of the funky soul bands. 10 smoking tunes that were always on the playlist in my 70s residencies.
Hong Kong Beat 