Jeff Miers: Sound Check
Jeff Miers’ Soundcheck: In a funk, and proud of it
Local DJs find civic pride in the ‘B-lo boogie’
Who knew? Buffalo isn’t really famous for much, but it’s infamous for plenty. I won’t bother listing the sources of our mainstream name-checks, because we’ve all had them drilled into our heads for years.
Of course, actually spending some time here will erase the tendency to fall back on cliches involving blizzards, cow towns, “wide right” and the like. Just ask the Travel Channel’s “No Reservations” host Anthony Bourdain, who spent a few days here earlier this month to film a segment for his show. Bourdain arrived with preconceptions. He left having abandoned them. Turns out his stay here was nothing like the film “Deliverance” after all.
History, writ large, will have to catch up with us, I guess, because around here, we’re too busy trying to mark our days with meaningful activity to be bothered with it. For Scott Down and DJ Cutler, veterans of the local underground hip-hop/ DJ/mix’n’mash scene, that has meant digging through crate after crate of dusty, musty old vinyl records in search of overlooked gems. What the pair managed to excavate from the archaeological dig is the recorded history of Buffalo funk. It’s a legacy we might not even have known was ours to boast of.
OK, everyone knows who Rick James was, but Buffalo funk goes deeper than that. Most of the folks who made this music never became famous. Most, in fact, toiled in relative obscurity right here in town for the balance of their careers. This fact makes their contributions no less significant.
Last year, the Down/Cutler collaboration released “Blue Collar Funk,” a mix of what they called “B-lo boogie” spanning 20 years of Buffalo funk. Now, “Blue Collar Funk II” is upon us. The fact that two compilations have been culled from the homegrown funk Cutler and Down exhumed speaks volumes.
A brief listen to this new collection’s opening one-two punch of “716 Lesson” and “Lesson 716” should fill you with civic pride. This is our stuff, after all. But Cutler and Down have reimagined it, cut and pasted it into a new, decidedly modern shape. What you end up with is a gritty mash-up of James Brown-like grit and pre-hip-hop beat manipulation. Funk birthed hip-hop, after all, and now, “Blue Collar Funk II” views that earlier form through a hip-hop prism. It’s like the son playing the father’s songs, so to speak.
They aren’t the first to do this — the work the Buffalo duo is doing suggests it is part of a long line that includes the contributions of artists like Cut Chemist and DJ Shadow. These were DJs who helped elevate the role of “turntablists” beyond the simple spinning of records and the occasional breaking up of beats with scratches and the like, toward a more musicianly manipulation of rhythm, time signature and texture.
Cut Chemist worked with Ozomatli — a groundbreaking fusion of Latin grooves with hip-hop — and Jurassic 5. DJ Shadow is widely held to be one of the progenitors of the modern cut-and-paste ethic and turned the manipulation of samples from low-brow thievery to high art.
Now, Down and Cutler are applying this methodology to Buffalo-bred ’70s funk. Guess what? It works, and well. Just as DJ Shadow’s “Endtroducing. . .” album suggested that scouring record bins and composing new collages from these sources was an actual legitimate form of composition, the “Blue Collar Funk” projects have taken pop-culture castaways and given them new homes.
The trick with this sort of thing involves making a convincing mosaic from the preexisting materials. That’s tougher than it sounds, because hip-hop is concerned pretty much exclusively with flow. You can’t just grab pieces and throw them together randomly, a la the William Burroughs methodology, whereby paragraphs of text are cut up into individual words and phrases, tossed into the air, and abstracted randomly from the resulting recombinations. (This method can indeed produce incredibly interesting results, and has been employed extensively by the likes of David Bowie and Brian Eno, among others.)
What Cut Chemist, DJ Shadow, Cutler and Down are doing is more like what producer Teo Macero did with Miles Davis’ avant garde jazz-funk of the late ’60s and early ’70s. On the seminal Davis-Macero collaborations, the producer employed Davis’ performances as raw materials to be manipulated via cut and paste — in those days, quite literally cutting tape with scissors and editing it back together manually — at a later post-production session. Based in part on the work of composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and others, this approach — best exemplified by the Davis albums “On the Corner” and “In a Silent Way” — can be seen as one of the founts from which hip-hop sprung.
Down & Cutler’s work is a love letter to Buffalo funk. It’s also a sterling example of the modern cut-and-paste art form. On both counts, it scores the highest of marks.•
Information on “Blue Collar Funk II” and other Scott Down and DJ Cutler projects can be found at www.myspace.com/scottdownanddjcutler .
jmiers@buffnews.com">e-mailjmiers@buffnews.com
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