Brass Construction burst out of Brooklyn in the wake of B.T. Express with a similar recipe of supercharged funk with horns blowing up a storm.
Here’s the third of my weekend warmers – my very own Trunk of Funk (as Craig Charles would call it). Nearly nine minutes of it, in fact, from East Coast funkateers Brass Construction.
That bassline alone should keep out the cold even before the horns come in, carried on a tide of relentless drumming and waka-waka guitar.
And here comes frontman Randy Muller getting himself together before exhorting us to get higher and, as the title suggests, get movin’.
He formed Brass Construction (originally a quartet called Dynamic Soul) in 1968, combining his lead vocals with playing piano, synth and flute.
They became a nine-piece outfit of Muller, drummer Larry Payton, trumpeters Wayne Parris and Morris Price, lead guitarist Joe Arthur Wong, vocalist/conga player Sandy Billups, saxophonists Michael Grudge and Jesse Ward, and bassist Wade Williamston – the man responsible for this killer bassline.
Their first single, Two Timin’ Lady, was released in 1972 on a label owned by Jeff Lane, who had started producing another Brooklyn band. B.T. Express, and asked Muller – studying music theory at NYC’s Hunter College – to provide their string arrangements.
Two of those, Do It (‘Til You’re Satisfied) and Express (which I posted here a couple of days ago), became major hits, encouraging United Artists to sign Brass Construction while Muller was graduating from Hunter with a degree in musical arrangement.
Muller originally intended the group to be instrumental, inspired by the horn sections of Kool & the Gang, Chicago and Blood, Sweat & Tears, but the group’s label insisted on adding lyrics, so he wrote what he described as “some very simple, abstract vocal chants to go with the music.”
Movin’, featuring extra vocals from sisters Delores, Bonnie and Denise Dunning, began life as a 16-minute studio jam and was one of two dancefloor anthems (with the similar but slower paced Changin’) to appear on their 1975 debut, also produced by Lane, and the only one to give them a mainstream hit single, with a remix version charting in the UK in 1988.
The album became a popular import in the UK prior to being given a release here, when it became the first disco album to reach the Top 10 in early 1976, with Movin’ peaking just outside the Top 20 singles chart.
The group had hoped to tour the UK in 1976 after the college terms of all nine members finished, but ran into difficulties when making their applications for travel after Muller realised his mother had never registered him as an American citizen when his family settled there from Guyana.
Muller became their producer in the early ’80s and shifted their style into a heavily synthesized direction, married to socially aware lyrics, but couldn’t regain their past momentum.
The band has been cited as an influence on the Britfunk movement of the late ’70s and early ’80s and they bounced back briefly in 1988 when a club-friendly remix of Movin’ – married to a dance beat – gave them their biggest UK hit.
Lead guitarist Joe Arthur Wong died in 1988 and both sax man Jesse Ward and drummer Larry Payton died in 2016.