BERNIE WORRELL
Fans and other musicians often said the psychedelic-funk keyboard player Bernie Worrell seemed to be from another planet, but it turns out that planet was New Jersey.
The late Worrell (1944-2016) had seminal roles in the groundbreaking groups Parliament and Funkadelic and the expanded, funk-oriented version of Talking Heads, as well as collaborations with a disparate array of musicians, from Jack Bruce to Gov’t Mule and the CBS Orchestra on “Late Show with David Letterman.”
Now, his legacy continues on a posthumous album, Wave From the WOOniverse, on which several of Worrell’s unfinished songs have been made whole with guest stars from his iconoclastic career.
Worrell’s widow, Judie, approached Evan Taylor with the idea of completing songs that Worrell had begun to create. Taylor, who began working as a drummer and musical director with Worrell in 2010, said he was initially daunted by the project, but then heard the recordings she wanted him to explore.
“When I received the hard drive with the material, I realized that I just had to be part of it,” Taylor said.
While colleagues and even Worrell himself said that he seemed to be from a different place, certainly his career trajectory made him stand apart. Born in Long Branch, he grew up in Plainfield, where he was deemed a piano prodigy at 3. He studied classical music and wrote his first concerto at 8. Although he was closely monitored by his mother, he did sneak out to meet future collaborator George Clinton, who ran a Plainfield barbershop and moonlighted with several friends in a doo-wop group. Later, while he was studying at The New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, he made time to play with a jazz group at a local bar.
Worrell left a classical music career behind and moved with Clinton to Detroit, where they created their own musical genre with Parliament-Funkadelic: The loosely organized collective bridged the gap among funk, soul, rock and jazz. Worrell even used his classical training to add sophisticated harmonies to the sci-fi party music.
Though Clinton’s charismatic and outrageous stage presence drew the spotlight, Worrell’s distinctive keyboard playing was a significant part of the group’s sound, and he became a sought-after session player and producer.
The cover of the posthumous Bernie Worrell album, “Wave From the WOOniverse.”
In the 2005 documentary “Stranger: Bernie Worrell on Earth,” noted musicians praise the late keyboardist’s creativity: “It’s like watching Muhammad Ali fight or Michael Jordan dunk a ball,” says Will Calhoun of Living Colour. Funkadelic bassist Bootsy Collins recalls: “This (was) stuff that no one ever heard before.” And David Byrne says, “To people who don’t know him, they might just think this guy is, like, on drugs all the time.”
On Wave, many of the musicians with whom Worrell worked helped Taylor complete the songs, making the album a career retrospective of sorts.
“There was an attitude of ‘anything for Bernie,’ ” Taylor said. “It was like he was in the room.”
Worrell’s signature squiggly funk was a significant element when Talking Heads broadened their sound in the early 1980s, and the band’s Jerry Harrison is featured on “Distant Star” (listen below), a big-beat dance floor tune that swirls around Worrell’s keyboard, boisterous brass and sweet clouds of vocals.
Worrell’s time with Talking Heads led to his playing with Tom Tom Club, which was formed by drummer Chris Frantz and bassist Tina Weymouth. Here, the lighter-than-air title track (listen below) features Miho Hatori of the band Cibo Matto, rapping against Sarah La Puerta’s girlish vocals, which bring to mind the Caribbean-sunny sounds of Tom Tom Club songs “Genius of Love” and “Wordy Rappinghood.”
Worrell co-produced the 1984 solo album of B-52’s member Fred Schneider, Fred Schneider and the Shake Society. On “The Big Woo,” Worrell is reunited with Schneider (who was raised in Long Branch) in an inspired match-up of slow, deep funk and deadpan, silly vocals.
“Wave From the WOOniverse” producer Evan Taylor.
The sprawling 17-minute cut “Transcendence” evolves through an intricate weave of textures. After an introductory tone poem of colorful sounds, the song switches to a slow-motion space jam that could be vintage Pink Floyd with a bit more of a funky-chunky beat. Marc Ribot’s biting guitar dances with and against the beat and is soon wrapped with Worrell’s playful, spacey keyboards, and the two circle around the central consolidating rhythm. Up they go to a musical metaphor of transcendence, spilling into a sprawling delta of long sheets of fragmented play.
“Greenpoint,” with its muted trumpet and skittering electric piano, could be the soundtrack to a noir film with a smartass gumshoe wisecracking his way through the late-night streets of not-quite-gentrified Brooklyn.
Though Sean Ono Lennon never collaborated with Worrell, Taylor said he had wanted to work with him, so he was invited to play bass on “Re-Enter Black Light (Phase II).” After a soft intro, the tune goes heavy with a thick aggregation of sounds. Worrell’s sweet melodica playing leads the way to another accumulation of horns, percussion and inventive wah-wah keyboard powering the beat.
One cut on the album, “Contusion,” is an unreleased Funkadelic song, and certainly P-Funk fans will find lots to groove to on several tracks. With its swirling Farfisa organ, fuzz-tone guitar and pounding drums, “Contusion” sounds like it could have been part of a 1970s show at The Fillmore with Santana. Another song, “What Have They Done to My Funk,” features bass player Collins, one of the P-Funk universe’s brightest stars.
Taylor said that though Worrell’s contributions to music were not widely recognized by the public, that is changing.
“His legacy is developing right now,” Taylor said. “During his passing, there were little articles on him, and since then, it’s built, and people are giving him recognition.
“He was very reserved, very in tune with nature. His connection to God was nature, birds, sounds of tree branches — all those things, really. That’s what grounded him. He was a lot of fun, but there was an element of melancholy to him: that he was from another planet and was different in many ways.”
For more on the album, visit bernieworrell.com.
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