Thanks to the vagaries of jet-lag, I'm penning this little missive from Okinawa where it's hotter than July and I'm spending time with my daughter which fills me with glee.
It's been a very hectic few days/weeks and I'm glad to be having a break from music for at least a wee while, but of course I'm coming back to London via Tokyo and I'm relishing the opportunity to be playing at my favourite club once again. I'm a fan of Shibuya's The Room not just because the proprietor, Shuya Okino, is a great friend, but because it really is the best little club in the world, with little being the operative word!
So before bailing out for a break I managed to gather my resources for a tribute to George Duke, who sadly passed away on August 5th. I contemplated for a while whether this selection should take up the whole two hours, or just be a section of the show. However on reflection George Duke has touched me so deeply with some of his music over the years that really it was a no-brainer; yet a tribute to George could easily have been two hours of fusion and synth solos with little to distinguish between one track and the next. So hopefully I've avoided that trap whilst still dishing up plenty of Duke flying free on his ARP Odyssey!
George Duke was perhaps a reluctant fusioneer, and if it wasn't for the influence of the likes of Frank Zappa and Flora Purim he might never have embraced electronic keyboards with such gusto. In fact he once recounted how he was horrified on one occasion in his early career when he turned up for a gig with Jean Luc Ponty to find there was no real piano just a Fender Rhodes. It was an important gig, with many influential peers in attendance, suffice to say that his performance on electric piano on that occasion set him off on that "electric jazz" road, and he barely paused to look back until the latter days of his recording career when his prowess on the piano once again came to the fore.
However as a fully fledged member of a coterie of musicians who really defined the sound of fusion in the early seventies, Duke was a vital force in those experimental, pioneering days and it could easily be argued,(indeed I might even insist!) that his work with Flora Purim and AIrto during this period produced some of the most definitive and enduring music of the era. The fluidity of the Brazilian rhythmic feel and the participation of the likes of Joe Henderson in those recordings stopped the music from keeling over into the kind of hollow bombast that is sometimes the trademark of the kind of fusion which might also be described as Jazz-Rock. To anyone who really listens to Duke's playing they'll know that it is something of a misnomer to apply a term like Jazz-Rock to his work, as his roots are definitely deep within the blues and gospel traditions that informed most jazzers growing up in the sixties, and overall his music is just too soulful to fit such an epithet. However I've heard it said of Duke and really it's just lazy journalism and ignorance that informs such opinions.
George Duke met Airto and Flora Purim whilst with Cannonbal Adderley's band, and was inspired by a trip to Brazil with that ensemble. The resulting album "The Happy People",produced by David Axelrod, is a major disappointment , awful sonically and pretty incoherent musically it's an important record only in that it marks the inception of their relationship that would go on to bloom on albums like Flora's "Stories To Tell", "Moon Dreams" and "That's What She Said", and in turn Flora and Airto would guest on Duke's early solo recordings and be a vital part of his homage "A Brazilian Love Affair", when Duke eventually returned to Brazil to make his own record there and record with the artist whose music had so affected him on his first visit, Milton Nascimento. However that Brazilian influence kept bubbling through Duke's music over the years and though he admitted to also being influenced by Earth Wind and Fire in the late seventies, they themselves had also taken on that same influence. So in some ways it's better to picture their trajectories in parallel as they both found great ways to translate the harmonic and rhythmic wellspring of Brazil into their music. Perhaps there's some poetic justice in the fact that eventually George Duke would produce tunes written by Earth Wind And Fire's keyboard maestro Larry Dunn, (Dee Dee Bridgewater's version of "Tequila Mockingbird" and Dianne Reeves "Sky Islands") such are the similarities between them.
Ironically Duke's biggest hit with Afro American audiences, "Dukey Stick" was the kind of funk workout his consummate band were more than capable of with the mighty Ndugu behind the kit, but it had none of the harmonic sophistication or soulful splendour that is the essence of his music. So here's two hours of George Duke that delves deeply into his lyrical piano playing and his distinctive voice on solo synthesiser as well as his role as producer, arranger and collaborator, a composer of rare power and a musician of infinite grace.
1. George Duke - My Soul
2. The Third Wave - Maiden Voyage
3. George Duke - Jeanine
4. Flora Purim - Casa Forte
5. George Duke - Diamonds
6. Miles Davis - Backyard Ritual
7. George Duke - Let Your Love Shine
8. George Duke - Say That You Will
9. George Duke - Malibu
10. George Duke - Brazilian Sugar
11. George Duke - The Way I Feel
12. George Duke - Dream Weaver
13. George Duke - Feels So Good
14 George Duke - Stones Of Orion
15. George Duke - Feel
16. George Duke - Someday
17. George Duke - Omi (Fresh Water)
18. Dianne Reeves - Sky Islands
19. George Duke - Brazilian Love Affair
20. George Duke - I Want You For Myself
