ya feel me?

IAintTheOne said:

If you're talking about the original done by Rotary Connection....MOST DEFINITELY!!!!

SteamForest said:

then ya feelin me..

You Know I'm right There, Cuz!!!!

and dig Phil Upchurch's spacy guitar weavin' in and out of the background!




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[Edited 1/31/06 11:27am]

I've been granted the opportunity to bask in its warmth.


tA

Tribal Disorder

http://www.soundclick.com...dID=182431

paligap said:

sheeeeeit u know im right there witcha

minnie

paligap said:

It's amazing how many NAMM shows i've strolled by the Vestax booth (he was endorsed by Vestax/D'Angelico guitars) and seen Phil Upchurch just sitting alone playing.
While most folks were trying to glom onto some Eddie Van Halen (or the Rock Guitar God Du Jour) tickets, even if I was hurriedly on my way to an appointment, i'd always stop and marvel at his playing.

In 1993, he put together a Guitar Summit...



Kneeling - Wah Wah Watson, Al McKay, David T. Walker
Sitting - Phil Upchurch
Standing - James Gadson, James Jamerson Jr & Eric Gale.

The guitarist's I wanted for this Summit I felt should also be the ones who represented R&B thru at least the last 3 decades which would include the 60's and 70's. These years represented the time of the metamorphoses of the music from urban blues to R&B. . The music was a hybrid of gospel and blues. Some of the most important recordings in history were made during these decades and I wanted to include in the summit, some of the guitar players that were a prominent part of this development.The players I felt that had the most individual styles in this area were Wah-Wah Watson, David T. Walker, Eric Gale, and Al McKay.

We also had James Jamerson Jr. on bass and James Gadson on drums.

~Phil Upchurch


Spirit Traveler...



...was the resulting album.


tA

Tribal Disorder

http://www.soundclick.com...dID=182431

theAudience said:

Man, I gotta latch onto that!! Those are the KATS!!


...

...







In addition to Phil Upchurch, Rotary Connection sometimes featured the playing of Pete Cosey , who was such a big part of Miles Davis's electric 70's landscapes:




He's also featured in the Dvd, "Miles Electric":





btw, here are some interesting articles on Cosey from Pete Margasak:


June 13, 2003

Building Bridges With an Ax

By Peter Margasak



Pete Cosey has kept a low profile for most of his four-decade career. In fact, in the past ten years it seemed as though the guitarist had vanished completely. "I just go and woodshed," the former Miles Davis sideman told me in 1997. "I disappear from the scene and come back with different stuff." Recently he's come back with several new projects: he's a member of the Electric Mudcats, a Muddy Waters-inspired act organized by Public Enemy's Chuck D; he's the featured soloist on a disc that reinterprets Stravinsky's Le sacre du printemps; and he's formed the Children of Agartha, a band with Davis alums Gary Bartz and John Stubblefield that pays homage to the hard-charging, nonlinear music that Cosey made with the trumpeter in the mid-70s. And recently he got an unexpected dose of mainstream exposure: he appeared as a plaintiff on The People's Court.

Last June, Children of Agartha made their debut at the Village Underground in New York. At the end of the night the club's talent buyer, Steve Weitzman, didn't have enough cash on hand to meet the band's guarantee; Cosey agreed to let him pay the balance of $1350 by August 15. When the date came and went without payment, Cosey filed a suit in New York small-claims court. But before the November court date rolled around he was contacted by representatives of the TV program. Both he and Weitzman agreed to appear; the episode was taped late last fall and ran early this year. Cosey presented the facts, the original contract, and Weitzman's promissory note. After some backpedaling from the promoter, the judge ruled in the guitarist's favor.

As Cosey nears 70 quite a few judgments have gone his way. He made significant contributions to some of the most critically maligned records of the late 60s and early 70s; contemporary critics and musicians have reevaluated those albums and Cosey's performances. "It's not so much people catching up to what I'm doing as it's a matter of rediscovery, or, for some of them, discovery," he says. "My music is light-years from that right now. I'm interested in bridges, not barriers. A lot of the young people aren't familiar with many of our great jazz artists nor our great blues artists, so if we can introduce them through our music that'll be beneficial for everyone."

In 1968 Cosey laid down his trademark swirl of dense wahwah filigree on Electric Mud, Muddy Waters's notorious psychedelic blues record. In its day the record invoked the wrath of blues purists, but today many artists have a different view. In Can't Be Satisfied, Robert Gordon's recent Waters biography, Chuck D says, "To me it's a brilliant record. It took me a while to warm up to traditional blues. A whole new world. But the automatic thing that struck me right away was the Electric Mud thing."

The album meant so much to the rapper that in 2001 he reconvened the surviving musicians from the Mud sessions -- Cosey, saxophonist Gene Barge, guitarist Phil Upchurch, bassist Louis Satterfield, and drummer Morris Jennings -- added DJ Johnny Juice, and dubbed them the Electric Mudcats. They're featured prominently in Godfathers and Sons, a film by Marc Levin that will air this fall as part of Martin Scorsese's seven-part PBS documentary series "The Blues." (Hip-hop stars like Chuck D, Common, and Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson of the Roots perform with them in the film.)

On the Stravinsky recording, conducted by Lawrence "Butch" Morris, Cosey played with Burnt Sugar, the funky New York outfit led by Greg Tate, a Village Voice cultural critic and author of the new Afrocentric treatise Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience. It was Tate's writing that helped instigate the critical reassessment of Davis's electric band. "I probably know that music as well as anybody knows anything," Tate says. "I spent a lot of my adolescence listening to those things over and over again, and I had an opportunity to see the band when Pete was in it in D.C., around 1974. The music was so debased and lambasted for decades, and just in terms of the way that aesthetics have evolved -- the use of electronics in improvisational situations, technology changing the way music is made -- Miles is still ahead of the curve."

Tate met Cosey in the early 80s, when the guitarist was in New York to guest on Herbie Hancock's crossover hit Future Shock; Cosey subsequently played briefly in Power Tools, the trio led by future Living Colour bassist Melvin Gibbs, an early member of the Black Rock Coalition, the organization started by Tate and guitarist Vernon Reid in 1985 to draw attention to African-American pop and rock musicians. Tate and Cosey maintained a loose correspondence over the years, and when Burnt Sugar made its Chicago debut in the summer of 2001 Cosey came out to hear them at the Empty Bottle. "Afterward he said there were a couple of times when he wanted to jump onstage, but he didn't know the format," recalls Tate. "I said, `Man, you are the format. You're one of the reasons this band exists.' He's the guy who, after Hendrix, showed how out you could go with guitar playing, particularly in the improvised context."

Burnt Sugar, a group with a sprawling, ever changing lineup, mixes funk, soul, rock, electronica, hip-hop, and electric jazz without ever resorting to self-conscious pastiche. Like Davis's electric work, their music ebbs and flows organically, bristling with multilevel detail. "Iwas delighted by them," says Cosey. "I enjoyed the concept, the togetherness, the sound, and I told him anything I could do to help, just let me know." Tate took him up on the offer last fall, when Cosey was in New York to participate in the annual Great Night in Harlem concert at the Apollo Theater with Children of Agartha. (Burnt Sugar also features Gibbs, Johnny Juice, drummer J.T. Lewis, and MC Baba Israel.) On the album they recorded -- which incorporates various motifs from, rather than following, the Stravinsky score -- Cosey's generous sustain, liquid phrasing, and psychedelic tone contribute to the overlapping textures.

Since 2000, when he recorded an album with the Japanese saxophonist Akira Sakata -- Fisherman's.com, which also features bassist Bill Laswell and drummer Hamid Drake -- Cosey has made numerous trips to New York for live gigs and recording dates. He's gone into the studio with DJ Logic and the trio Harriet Tubman, although nothing has yet been released. "Now it looks like it's finally the time," he says. "You can beat your head against the wall and get shut out, or you can bide your time, eke out a living...and then when the cycle comes along again, when those windows and doors of opportunity open up, the key to it is being ready -- have your material ready, have your people ready. And that's what I've tried to do."

from 1997:

Guitarist Pete Cosey's first rehearsal with Miles Davis took place in a Portland hotel room in 1973. Davis would play a bit of a recording of the band's performance the night before in Calgary, and Cosey would listen enough to get the gist of it, ask Davis what key it was in, and then move on to the next part. Cosey had only met Davis briefly before joining the band, and as the men listened to the tape, they made small talk, began to know one another. At one point the conversation turned to food. The legendary trumpeter insisted that fish was all he ate, and it just so happened that Cosey was fresh off the plane from Chicago with a batch of red snapper and perch sandwiches he'd prepared a day earlier. Cosey scampered off to his room to get some for Davis, who took a bite and then asked what he was eating.

"I said, 'Red snapper,'" recalled Cosey on a recent afternoon at his garden apartment on Chicago's south side. But Davis croaked, "No it's not, it's chicken." After arguing for some time with Cosey and even calling in bassist Michael Henderson for his opinion, Davis finally sighed. "Well, I don't know what it is," he said, "but it's gooder than a motherfucker."

In hindsight, it seems Davis approached his food much the same way he did his music: no matter how anyone criticized or pigeonholed his work, he followed his own gut. While his classic recordings with Charlie Parker and the quintets he led stand as some of the most enduring and influential jazz ever recorded, by the early 70s Davis had busted the music wide open with his lean and gritty fusion of jazz improvisation and hard-rock rhythms--much to the dismay of the head-scratching jazz establishment and reactionary critics. Last month Columbia reissued five double CDs of live recordings made by Davis and his band between 1970 and 1974, and they demonstrate just how prophetic his vision was. More than two decades later his nonchalant scrambling of styles, his sophisticated rhythmic ideas, and his surging, nonlinear structures--once considered radically extreme--are commonplace in electronica, experimental jazz, and rock. Prior to the six-year hiatus Davis began in 1975, the band he was leading may have expressed the pure rhythmic joy and dazzling ebb-and-flow dynamics of his music better than any other, and one of that group's crucial components was Pete Cosey.

Cosey's searing, wah-wahing psychedelic leads on 1974's Dark Magus (as well as on already available gems Agharta and Pangaea) sound like the bastard spawn of Funkadelic's Eddie Hazel and free-jazz string mangler Sonny Sharrock. Cosey says he employs over 30 distinct musical "systems," including some based on modes and Indian ragas. His work with Davis actually represents but a sliver of the guitarist's range, but Cosey's own labyrinthine career mirrors Davis's disregard for jazz orthodoxy.

"My music has always been all-inclusive," says Cosey. "That's what my father taught me." Antonio Maceo Cosey was a versatile musician who worked with popular Chicago bandleader Red Saunders and wrote the Louis Jordan hit "The Ration Blues" with Cosey's mother, Collenane. Cosey was born in Chicago, but when he was a teenager his family moved to Phoenix, which he hated. "I always tell people I 'did' ten years out there," he says.

After he made his way back, in 1965, he started making up for lost time: A partial list of the blues, soul, and rock heavies he played with includes Chuck Berry, Billy Stewart, Fontella Bass, the Soul Stirrers, Jerry Butler, the Dells, Etta James, and the Rotary Connection. He can be heard on popular recordings by Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf. He helped found both the Pharaohs and Earth, Wind and Fire and was an early member of the AACM, playing in a trio with organist Amina Claudine Myers and drummer Ajaramu and in Group For, a quartet with saxophonist Kalaparusha Maurice McIntyre and Art Ensemble of Chicago drummer and bassist Don Moye and Malachi Favors. He spent several years as the guitarist in the Gene Ammons Trio, and was a longtime member of Phil Cohran's Artistic Heritage Ensemble. At one point, he was jobbing in Chess Records' house band by day and jamming with Muhal Richard Abrams's Experimental Big Band by night.

"There was a great division in those days, I'm sorry to say," says Cosey. "The blues people and the jazz people did not get along. I don't know whether it was jealousy or not, but it wasn't like it is now where people have an appreciation for all styles of music." Cosey, who's also played rock at frat parties and country and western at dives in Phoenix, rarely imposes any sort of hierarchy on all his experience. It's clear from my conversation with him, however, that his affiliation with Miles Davis, which included some informal jamming during the trumpeter's six-year hiatus, was his most profound musical experience.

"I've never seen anyone better at utilizing the elements around him," says Cosey of Davis. "That music was about life. It dealt with cleansing. It dealt with rising and falling. It was extremely cerebral, but it was earthy at the same time. We were into creating moods, taking people through different experiences, and both projecting and receiving thoughts from the audience." Cosey says he hasn't played jazz standards for almost 24 years, since about the time he fully settled into Davis's group. "My head isn't there now. Miles was very encouraging--he told me that I wrote differently than anyone he'd heard."

For a guy whose histories come tumbling out in such vivid detail, Cosey is a little vague about what he's been doing more recently--and for someone fluent in so many musical languages, the lack of high-profile activity is rather astonishing. He played on Herbie Hancock's 1983 crossover hit Future Shock, and briefly replaced Bill Frisell as the guitarist in Power Tools (a trio with bassist Melvin Gibbs and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson), but hasn't worked much as a sideman since he left Miles. And although he's performed as a leader, both here and in New York, mostly he says he's been busy with production and arranging work for "more commercial stuff," including some gospel, Latin, and R & B projects. (He's also been giving guitar lessons to legendary DJ Herb Kent.)

Cosey says he hopes to work with Gibbs again this year, and that a recording he made with trumpeter Billy Brimfield, saxophonist Carter Jefferson, and drummer Doni Hagen early this decade will see release soon. But though Hagen's current illness and Jefferson's death seem to have affected him deeply, hampering his efforts to put together a suitable working group, he appears unfazed by the reduced pace of his career. "I just go and woodshed," he says with a determined nod. "I disappear from the scene and come back with different stuff."





...
[Edited 2/2/06 8:52am]

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theAudience said:

U KNOW I'm hip to this pic. I've known Gadson damn near all my life and my dad had the pleasure of having Jamerson play on some songs of his. Very cool. That's a lineup right there. All of those cats.