FUNK SCHOOL
The Dallas Morning News talks to "Prof." Johnson and Egon: "Houston educator's legend revived for a new audience."
12:00 AM CDT SUNDAY AUGUST 13TH 2006
HOUSTON – Eothen Alapatt still remembers the first time he heard the Kashmere Stage Band.
He was a student at Vanderbilt University when a Houston record collector hipped him to Out of Gas But Still Burning, a 1974 album from the storied Houston high school band. Mr. Alapatt put the needle on the song "Kash Register," a driving funk cut with a deep groove. And a true believer was born."When I first heard that song, I about lost my mind," says Mr. Alapatt. "The guy had told me it was a high school stage band, so I expected it to be like most any other high school stage band I had heard, which was novelty at best."At Vanderbilt, he was a fanatical record collector and host of a radio show on the roots of hip-hop, with a particular interest in regional funk and soul. He wanted the best that Houston had to offer. And he got it with KSB.
"I put 'Kash Register' on, and ... these guys were as good as any band recording funk music in the country. And their average age was 16 years old."
Mr. Alapatt kept his torch burning when he became label head and producer at Now Again, a retro imprint of the hip-hop label Stone's Throw. He knew he wanted to release a CD of KSB's music.
He also knew the man he had to talk to: Conrad O. Johnson, KSB's former bandleader and a storied music educator revered in Houston, a city that has now proclaimed two official Conrad O. Johnson days.
And so, on a muggy day in 2004, the 26-year-old Mr. Alapatt flew from Los Angeles to Houston to visit 88-year-old Mr. Johnson in his Washington Terrace home. The mission: to cut a deal to release a Kashmere compilation on CD. And to convince the old bandleader that he was in good hands.
"He was very resistant at first," says Mr. Alapatt, who also goes by Egon. "It took a long time for him to put trust in the hip-hop generation to be the conduit for his music. He wanted it to happen in a different way. People like Conrad have always believed there's a certain avenue that this music is going to come out with. He wanted it to be released to academia so that bandleaders could understand why these kids were so great and what he accomplished with them."
But Mr. Alapatt's passion and respect won the old man over. Mr. Johnson had heard plenty of pitches from people eager to release the KSB catalog. None, however, seemed as real as this one.
"In dealing with him, I noticed a certain honesty that I hadn't noticed in other people," says Mr. Johnson, now 90, relaxing in the home where he's lived for 45 years. The walls are blanketed with plaques, awards, clippings, even a letter of recognition from then-Gov. George W. Bush. An old piano and drum kit sit in the corner of the room.
"I trusted him," says Mr. Johnson, his hands moving about to punctuate his thoughts. "A lot of guys don't have anything, and they aren't gonna give you anything, either. I came along at a time when all you could get was a nickel for a record. So when this man came and offered me half of all the money this record is going to make, I thought that sounded pretty good."
The resulting CD, Texas Thunder Soul: 1968-1974, was released Tuesday. It's a blistering collection of live and studio funk and jazz tracks, hammered out by teenagers lucky enough to play for one of the most respected and innovative music educators in the country.
The cover songs, including Dave Brubeck's "Take Five," James Brown's "Super Bad," and Bill Withers' "Ain't No Sunshine," are plenty funky. But the original compositions, written by Mr. Johnson and his students, are the real showcases for the band's thundering rhythm section and swirling, punching horns.
All told, Texas Thunder Soul is a sublime merging of old school and new, tradition and flux. It's also a story about musical collaboration, sampling and repurposing that reaches across generational and musical boundaries growing thinner by the year.
As Mr. Alapatt writes in the extensive Texas Thunder Soul liner notes, high school stage bands were once all the rage. In the '60s and '70s, bandleaders immersed in the big band sounds of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Stan Kenton, and Woody Herman found that their students were into a hot new music called funk. So the directors indulged their charges – to a degree.
"A lot of these band directors were like 60-year-old white dudes in the middle of Illinois," says Mr. Alapatt. "Their kids wanted to cover Blood, Sweat and Tears, and the band directors said, 'Whatever, let's do it.' "
Conrad Johnson was as old school as the next guy, but he took a different approach to funk. He saw the connections between Ellington's big band and James Brown's swinging funk ensembles, led by the ferocious JBs horn section. He wrote original funk compositions with his students at Kashmere High School, a predominantly black school in north Houston's Kashmere Gardens neighborhood. He brought his background as a jazz saxophonist and composer to bear.
And so an old jazzman met his students halfway by bringing the funk.
"The music was all right," he shrugs. "I liked the beat. Some musicians hated all of it. I didn't. I liked it. By putting another face on it, and playing it as an instrumental, you could put a whole different sound on it. You didn't have to sing the words or nothing. Just listen to the music."
And his students responded by dominating the stage-band competition circuit. From the time Mr. Johnson started the band in 1969 to the time he retired in 1978, KSB won 42 of 46 national stage-band competitions. Think Larry Bird, who showed up for a three-point shooting contest one year and asked his competitors who would be taking second place.
Joe Carmouche, a KSB alum and a highly respected jazz guitarist in his own right, remembers the gentle rigor with which Mr. Johnson approached his task.
"Prof would be there with the students helping them after classes, on the weekend, at night," says Mr. Carmouche, referring to Mr. Johnson by his nickname. "He would do that not just with the best players, but the weaker, less experienced players. One of his big things was patience. He wasn't a hard teacher. He was real serious about it, but he didn't embarrass you or anything like that."
Instead, he saved the embarrassment for the competition.
Mr. Alapatt and Now Again would seem to be the perfect keepers of the KSB flame. Among the label's other releases: The South Dallas Pop Festival, a recording of a storied funk show at Dallas' Central-Forest Club in 1970.
Mr. Alapatt first arranged to release KSB's signature song, "Kashmere," on Now Again's multi-artist Funky 16 Corners album in 2001, before finally winning consent to bring KSB to a new generation with Texas Thunder Soul.
Mr. Alapatt is hardly the only hardcore KSB fan with a hip-hop pedigree. The band's nasty drum breaks and bass lines are tailor-made for producers on the hunt for the perfect sample, or DJs looking for that one cut to set the party off. KSB's relative obscurity makes it even more appealing to the hip spinner.
"DJs want to find the music that they can sample or play out in a club that's deeper than what the next guy's playing," says Mr. Alapatt. "If one guy's playing Kool and the Gang, and you're playing the KSB, there's no question who has the one up."
DJ Shadow, among the best and brainiest producers around, built his song "Holy Calamity" around the drum line of "Kashmere." DJ Premier, best known as half of the hip-hop duo Gang Starr, knows the value of a funk loop as well. He sampled the old Dallas band Soul Seven's "The Cissy's Thang," from Mr. Alapatt's Cold Heat funk compilation, for Christina Aguilera's new song, "Ain't No Other Man."
In other words, the old music isn't just the old music. It's also raw material for new music.
"Half of the reason why people like me are going out and buying this music is that we hear something immediately appealing to us in a hip-hop sense," says Mr. Alapatt. "We say 'Wow, this can be used for music down the road. We can create music from this.' "
But that's not always music to the old school's ears.
Leon Mitchison is something of a funk hero in Houston, a saxophone player and educator who presided over the regional Mitchitone label and the Eastex Freeway Band. He taught future KSB stars Gerald Calhoun and Earl Spiller at Isaac Elementary School, and later incorporated them into his Eastex band. One of his funk cuts, "Street Scene," can also be found on The Funky 16 Corners.
A gregarious glad-hander with strong opinions about most subjects, Mr. Mitchison is happy to see KSB get its due. But he's not crazy about the whole recycled music business.
"All these guys spinning these wheels knocked the musician out of a job," says Mr. Mitchison. "When we played, it was a band with piano, guitar, bass, drums, horns. The club owners would have to pay for that. Now, when you bring in a DJ to spin, you're missing the real deal. People are missing out with all of this microwave business and trying to zip and zoom it real quick."
The flip side is that DJs, samplers and collectors increase the visibility of bands that may have slipped through the cracks. Mr. Johnson recorded eight KSB LPs, and they've been known to sell over the Internet for hundreds of dollars. If a member of the hip-hop generation, such as Mr. Alapatt, gets jazzed by a KSB album, the results can be beneficial to everyone.
Oliver Wang is another hip-hop fan who fell under the Kashmere spell. A sociology professor at Cal State University-Long Beach, he's also an obsessive record collector and the keeper of the music blog site Soul Sides (www.soul-sides.com). A recent post included three KSB songs under the heading "Not your high school's high school band."
"At the very least, this is the best high school band you're ever going to hear in both quality and consistency," says Mr. Wang by e-mail. "Moreover, their records are very obscure and expensive, and this anthology finally makes this rare material available to anyone who's ever been curious about the hype. And believe me, the group lives up to it."
All of which is fine by Mr. Johnson. He's 90, he's not getting any younger, and he's immensely proud of his work with KSB. Now, with Texas Thunder Soul, his labor of love is available for all to hear.
"Man, that feels good," he says. "But I wasn't thinking about this while I was making the music. I was somebody with his head down, doing the next thing I had to do."
By CHRIS VOGNAR The Dallas Morning News
E-mail cvognar@dallasnews.com
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