Tag: Bernie Worrell

Queen City Sounds Podcast S4E38: Evan Taylor

Evan Taylor, photo by Drew

Evan Taylor is the former bandleader of the Bernie Worrell Orchestra as well as a producer and musician of note. He has worked and collaborated with the likes of Mike Watt, King Tuff, members of Talking Heads, members of Black Flag on country-influenced records, Marc Ribot, The Chapin Sisters and Sean Ono Lennon. Worrell is of course the keyboard/synth player who helped put some of the cosmic weirdness into the music of Paliament-Funkadelic as well as a much broader swath of music across decades than may seem obvious and worth exploring. When Worrell passed away in 2016 he left behind a rich legacy of great music including a plethora of unfinished and unreleased projects. Some of those were entrusted to Taylor to complete and bring into the world in a form that one hopes would have made Worrell proud. The first of those is Bernie Worrell: Wave From The WOOniverse which released on vinyl on Bernie’s birthday April 19 on Record Store Day 2024 via Org Music and became available for streaming on June 28. It includes contributions from some of the aforementioned as well as Bootsy Collins and members of TV on the Radio, Fishbone, Living Colour and Cibo Matto and B-52s. The compilation additionally features an unreleased Funkadelic song “Confusion.” Altogether the album is a rich tour through the career of one of popular music’s most beloved and influential figures.

Listen to our interview with Taylor on Bandcamp and follow his musical endeavors at the links below for his own website and that of his record label Loantaka Records.

loantakarecords.com

evantaylormusic.com

Cindy Gravity Celebrates the Soothing Power of Harmless Self-Indulgence on “48h Daydream”

Cindy Gravity, photo courtesy the artists

Cindy Gravity’s “48h Daydream” has a playfully surreal and eclectic aesthetic lends its psychedelic pop a decidedly different flavor from a lot of what passes for psych in the past several years. The spare guitar riff is somehow like an indie folk take on a salsa style, the bass line is subtle but also seems to provide the framework of the song as the minimal percussion is almost more textural than rhythmic and the keyboard work sounds like it came out of something Bernie Worrell might do for one of those New Wave bands with which he worked. The lyrics and the laid back vocal style are not the typical throught process for a song where someone will sing about love they have, wish they had, projected fantasy or the other usual pop and rock song tropes. There are elements of all of that but also a tacit admission of whimsy and self-awareness especially in the line “Everything lines up so well/in the little world I made up for her/She’s snooping around in my head/I may let her and just go to bed.” Maybe the song didn’t intend to shed a light on how daydreams can reinforce wishful thinking and behaviors related to such like texting someone you’re into and not hearing back within, yes, 48 hours, and thinking you did what you could to bring them into your life but there’s always consoling yourself with a daydream as an act of acceptance. The tone of the song is benevolent and self-indulgent rather than suggestive of anything nefarious and who doesn’t enjoy giving in to some harmless daydreaming know it’s just that? Listen to “48h Daydream” on YouTube and follow Berlin’s Cindy Gravity on Instagram.