A stylus plunging into the dusty grooves of a vinyl album is the first sound heard on “Urban Hang Suite,” the rapturous new album by 22-year-old Brooklyn native Maxwell. The snap, crackle and pop is music to the ears of a generation of listeners, for whom it conjures up the last great golden era of soul, circa 1968-73.
During that era, the emotional depth implied by the term “soul” was fully realized by sumptuous music and substantive lyrics from a range of African-American artists. It was a time when Isaac Hayes was pouring on the hot-buttered soul while James Brown was doing the popcorn, Sly Stone was taking us higher to meet the Temptations on Cloud Nine, and War was cruising with the low riders while Gladys and the Pips boarded the midnight train to Georgia.
For much of the ’80s, electronic samples of those records became the foundation of hip-hop and R&B, but the artists themselves and their organic approach to musicmaking were made obsolete by a new machine-driven approach. But in recent years, the original “dusties” sound, as soul’s golden oldies are known in Chicago, and the artists who made it have resurfaced. Record labels are scouring their vaults and deluging the CD market with soul compilations and reissues, new artists such as Maxwell, D’Angelo and the Fugees are scoring pop successes with a classic-soul sound, and “old-school” soulsters such as Hayes, the Ohio Players, War, Earth Wind & Fire and the Isley Brothers are recording and touring once again.
“What’s old is new again,” says Hayes, who is bringing a 13-piece band to the Park West on Friday in his first North American tour in more than 10 years. “There has definitely been a resurgence. I’m not knockin’ hip-hop or rap, but people have definitely had their fill of it. Or if not their fill, at least they realize they need some other options.”
Check the charts and the record-store bins, and it’s clear Hayes has a point. Although much of hip-hop and its R&B cousin, new-jack swing–the dominant forms of African-American music in the last 10 years–rely primarily on programmed rhythms and sampled sounds and are inundated with sexually explicit lyrics, a bevy of new artists are taking a more traditional approach to the music and developing more mature themes in their lyrics that take cues from the soul of the ’60s and ’70s.
In Chicago, the “dusties” era began in the ’50s with such homegrown talent as the Dells and the Spaniels, and on through the ’60s and ’70s with the Impressions, Chi-Lites and Donny Hathaway. “Dusties” is an indigenous expression that longtime Chicago R&B deejay Richard Pegue traces back to the ’50s and television host Dave Garroway, who apparently used it to refer to old jazz records. It was appropriated by R&B deejays such as Herb Kent and later Pegue during the ’60s, and they’re now carrying the torch at WGCI-AM 1390, which has been known as Chicago’s “Dusties” station since 1990.
“These songs are like old friends come back to visit,” says WGCI program director Glenn Cosby.
“They’ve been around for three generations,” adds Pegue, “and now we’re working on a fourth.”
From the Sam Cooke and Drifters tunes woven into the fabric of the vocal group Solo’s million-selling 1995 debut, “Solo” (Perspective), to the pungent remake of Roberta Flack’s “Killing Me Softly” that anchors the Fugees’ current hip-hop four-million-seller, “The Score” (Ruffhouse), to the No. 1 hit duet between R. Kelly and Ronald Isley, “Down Low (Nobody Has to Know),” classic soul is burrowing into a new generation’s musical consciousness. The recent debut records of D’Angelo, Tony Rich, Ambersunshower, Omar and Maxwell also artfully blend a ’70s sound into their ’90s street grooves.
“I love it!” Hayes says of Maxwell’s “Urban Hang Suite” (Columbia). “When I first heard it, I went, `Wow!’ Here’s a kid who is sustaining the art form as live music by bringing in people like (guitarist) Wah Wah Watson. It’s gonna need more of that to keep going.”
Besides Watson, Maxwell called upon Marvin Gaye collaborator Leon Ware to co-write a song, and enlisted Sade saxophonist Stuart Matthewman to co-produce the album. Armed with a supple voice, Maxwell explores the bittersweet arc of an adult romance in a song cycle distinguished by its lush, simmering grooves; introspective lyrics and multi-tracked vocal dialogue, not unlike Gaye’s classic break-up album, “Here, My Dear.”
“I was looking at that other stuff and it needs to be out there, it fills a void,” Maxwell says of the begging-for-it bump-and-grind of much ’90s R&B. “But I wanted to take a more realistic approach. I have friends who go to the opera and also go see `Bad Boys.’ I listen to PJ Harvey and Sam Cooke. Nobody is addressing those normal, everyday people.”
It’s a familiar refrain among an older generation of R&B listeners. “A lot of these kids out there are right in your face with it,” says Hayes, 57. “There’s nothing left to the imagination. And once you do that, where else you gonna go?”
Adds WGCI’s Pegue, who is 53, “Once you gain the `w’ word–wisdom–those songs about `stuff’ don’t mean so much. The guys who were making those classic records are going to be looked back upon in the future like the Beethovens of their time, and that’s why young people are starting to discover them now. It’s about wanting something more than the bare instincts.”
In recent months, record labels have begun to recognize some of these deep-soul Beethovens with extensive anthologies such as the three-CD “People Get Ready! The Curtis Mayfield Story” (Rhino), the three-CD “Rockin’ & Driftin’: The Drifters Box” (Rhino) and the four-CD “The King R&B Box Set” (King).
A number of major labels have put out their own series of retrospectives documenting old-school soul acts. Motown has reissued the bulk of Marvin Gaye’s groundbreaking releases, as has Polydor with its James Brown motherlode, while Priority Records’ multivolume “Slow Grind” and “Deep Soul” releases and Rhino’s five-part “Phat Trax: The Best of Old School” collect classic soul singles spanning several decades.
The commercial viability of the old-school sound was demonstrated by the success of the “dusties”-rich soundtrack to the recent hit movie “Dead Presidents,” which includes Hayes’ rapturous versions of “Walk on By” and “The Look of Love.” It sold more than 500,000 copies and spawned a second volume, which has sold more than 50,000 copies.
“It sounds fresh,” Hayes says in explaining the resurgence of classic soul. “In Europe, they have a long history of loving our music and they know that we’re the roots of hip-hop. In America, we’re together yet separated. But the kids are coming around. They’re picking up the D’Angelo and Maxwell records and then they’re finding out about us.”
Maxwell is quite a bit less doctrinaire than some of his old-school models when it comes to record-making. He suggests that his next record may less of a group effort than his debut and employ production techniques closer in feel to hip-hop than ’70s soul. But he’s learned the lessons of his soulful forebears.
“A lot of what you hear on the charts these days is driven by ego and the gotta-get-paid mentality,” Maxwell says. “Soul is not about that. Motown was not about that. You listen to an Otis Redding record and there was a magic about the group chemistry, the interactions between the musicians. There was an energy about those records, a getting-through-to-the-next-day energy, a you-can-be-somebody energy, a falling-deeply-in-love energy. But whether you use samples or not, real instruments or machines, it’s the sentiment behind it that gives the music soul.”
NEW ARTISTS OF THE OLD SCHOOL
The “dusties” sound of old-school soul permeates a number of new records by young artists, among them:
Fugees’ “The Score” (Ruffhouse): A hip-hop group that relies on live instrumentation and vocals as well as raps and sampling, the Fugees bring the music of Roberta Flack and Bob Marley into the ’90s.
Ambersunshower’s “Water T. Smith” (Gee Street): The fanciful name only begins to suggest the keening seductiveness of this artist’s voice.
Maxwell’s “Urban Hang Suite” (Columbia): By fashioning a beguiling smoothness out of the rawest hurt, Maxwell at times sounds like the heir to Marvin Gaye.
Tony Rich’s “Words” (LeFace): Rich produced and played virtually all the instruments, but there’s a surprisingly organic richness to the music.
D’Angelo’s “Brown Sugar” (EMI): This 1995 record is arguably where the current soul revival started; a major R&B hit that evoked the sonic textures of the early ’70s without sounding dated or quaint.
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THE FACTS
Isaac Hayes
When: 10:30 p.m. Friday
Where: Park West, 322 W. Armitage Ave.
Tickets: $40
Call: 312-559-1212
