Funky Knights

Donald Byrd: The Little Rasti
From: Ethiopian Knights [Blue Note, 1971]

Ok ok, I know I've been on a heavy vibe recently and for that I can offer no real excuse. Maybe it's the fact that it's currently freezing here or belated post-xmas blues or maybe it's just that I'm getting old but I've been really feeling the trips to the dark side. However, I swear that I'll post this one last track up and then get back into the more lively end of the scale - perhaps with a belated nod to International Woman's Day (we don't have half enough female performers on this site as it is).

So, on that note, what better way to get this out of my system than with Ethiopian Knights. There's deep funk, there's deep jazz, and then there's Donald Byrd's Ethiopian Knights LP. Although by no means the most famous album of a career spanning 5 decades, Ethiopian Knights is the album for me where everything came together perfectly. Unfortunately it was also the album that alienated Byrd from jazz purists, their feeling being that he had abandoned his jazz past. It's a bit of a harse judgement as this still feels like it has a jazzy vibe underlying the funk, admittedly it's an aggressively mind blowingly funky jazzy vibe, but a jazzy vibe all the same.

So, post bop and pre pop what you have here is Byrd at his funkiest, beginning to explore his interest in the african roots of jazz. Lasting just under 18 minutes, The Little Rasti is about as sublime as it gets. Byrd uses the extended length of the track to allow the sounds to develop, slowly building on Ed Greene's drumming as Wilton Felder lays down a killer bassline. What takes this track above and beyond is that the extended running time gives each area of the song time to breathe, never losing momentum or the listener's interest. I'm a big fan of the short sharp and sweet funk but sometimes you've just got to let things pan out at their own accord, Byrd waiting three and a half minutes before the track even starts properly, and when it does, it's bliss.

I toyed with the idea of giving you an edited version of this opus but that'd be missing the point - you have to experience the whole track to full appreciate it's genius.