As an individual who has been playing music my entire life, I’m always on the lookout for something that either touches me or makes me want to move.  I’m a bit of a music snob, kind of a dick about it too.  Although I happen to be married to somebody who doesn’t dance at all, I absolutely LOVE to dance. I’m always dancing, in fact.  I’m the weirdo who dances up and down the aisles at just about every local grocery store I’ve ever set foot in, including here in Japan where it isn’t exactly looked at as something any normal individual might be caught dead doing around here.  But I digress…  At any rate, I drove for Uber & Lyft for about 4 years, and the one thing I was always well reviewed for was my musical selection.  At first I only used my iPod until the doohickey that plugs into the phone-jack broke inside it, losing me my own personal playlist access. Fortunately for me and all my passengers, Uber added Pandora access to the app.  As you may recall from my previous musical post, I’m a big fan of the JB’s.  But here’s the most amazing thing about Pandora, which is also why it is my go to app for listening to music.  I don’t have to work so hard to find some true gems when I use Pandora, as opposed to Spotify, of which I am most certainly not a fan.  I have found some of the absolute most fantastic musicians on Pandora that I might not have found on my own, like this one that I found on my “The JBs radio” station,  Lack of Afro.  A multi-instrumentalist and producer by the name of Adam Gibbons from Exeter, England, going by the performance name of Lack of Afro has captured the full attention and respect of this music snob.  Though it was the track, Rusty, that knocked me for a loop first, this is the track that got me jumping up to dance in my living room like I was at a club.

Lack of Afro is an absolute powerhouse of vintage soul stylings from across the pond.  However, I’ve been saying for years that this world is a ever evolving flow of patterns of energy and information, of which there are vortexes.  Wherever you go, people do music differently.  But there’s just something about musicians in England and their connection with music.  I suspect that it’s a vortex of musical evolution that comes from the fact that the U.K. is a global empire that made its way around the planet, taking on new subjects into the British Commonwealth to further evolve the culture of Great Britain.  This is just my own hypothesis, but one I’ll stick to forever.

Lack of Afro put out his first 12″ single called Wait a Minute back in 2006, followed up by a first album in 2007 (Press On), then My Groove Your Move (2009), This Time (2011), Music For Adverts (2014), all released by Freestyle Records.  Hello Baby (2016), Hello Baby – The Instrumentals (2016), and Jack of All Trades (2018), published by LOA Records.

Any real Soul fan knows about the JB’s and that the JB’s were truly the heart and soul of the Godfather of Soul. But it was Bobby Byrd who was the one who discovered James Brown. This is one of my favorite songs of all time, one of which more than a few rappers ripped off. I never get tired of jamming it!

These guys were before anyone had ever come up with the name for what is considered and now named as the genre of funk. I have been listening to The JB’s station on my Pandora almost exclusively for the past 3 months. I just wanted to share it with y’all, for those of you who get bored of the typical standard Top 40 bullshit that anyone who walks into a retail clothing store hears.

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Prince was my first icon when I was in middle school back in 1983. How in the entire actual sequence of the contemporary historical timeline of actual fucks did I not hear this amazing cut back then??

This would have changed my entire life and my whole musical worldview altogether, swear to God it absolutely would’ve. It would have deterred me from all that heavy metal stuff, because the piano was my first instrument. I haven’t really talked much about this in any of these blog posts that I’d been writing all this time. When I was 4 years old, my parents used to take me and my brother to our Grandparents’ house every Sunday after church. My Grandfather had a nice Cable upright piano that I would plunk around on and they took me to see this psychopathic little globe of a man with a bad toupee and a harsh demeanor that always gave me the good sense that he didn’t like children very much. But although I saw him do some pretty frightening shit to some of the other kids, he was halfway decent to me. Scary AF, but not so bad because according to him, I was a natural. At least that’s what she used to brag to her friends and kinda Mom me with over and over later on in life. But perhaps he was right, because by the time I was 7 years old I had already started taking up the violin. I like the violin, but you know, violin boy doesn’t get the girl. So naturally, by the time I was 13 I had begun teaching myself the guitar. I’m no John McLaughlin or Michael Hedges, but I play it and I subsequently taught myself how to play the bass guitar, the mandolin, the ukulele, and once upon a time I could fake it well enough on a sitar I used to have before I had to sell it to pay a bill once. But Prince was my first icon, and when I say icon, I even picked up a habit of acting a little freaky too. I had my freak flag flyin’ even though it wasn’t a freak flag to me, it was just the 80s, whaddaya want from me, huh? When I heard this one just about a week or so ago, I about lost my shit. I guess we only get what the companies want you to hear. I loved Purple Rain, had it playing ever night on my auto-reverse cassette deck where I could sleep to it every night. I used to alternate between Prince’s Purple Rain cassette or Morris Day and The Time’s Ice Cream Castles cassette, which perhaps might account for my difficulty falling asleep at nights sometimes. It’s hard to sleep to music you could totally get up and dance to, kinda like if I were to attempt sleeping to the JB’s today.

Copyright Disclaimer – Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.

MORE TO COME…