LimeWire Music Blog

Brooklyn Funk Essentials, who were mentored early on by legendary producer Arthur Baker, have been mixing funk, jazz, hip-hop, world music, and more into a percolating multi-culti sonic stew since the early ’90s, even though they took a hiatus for a while. These days, the group is back on the beat, still touring in support of their most recent album, 2008’s Watcha Playin’, and burning down the boundaries between musical styles on a mission to get the whole globe on the goodfoot. LWMB got the lowdown from bassist/musical director Lati Kronlund on the history, mystery, and mastery of these irrepressible groovemeisters.

LWMB: How did the group first get together? What was the initial musical philosophy behind it?

Lati Kronlund: It was in the spring of 1993. I was working with Arthur [Baker] in his studio in Jersey on an Al Green album. One day Arthur brought in all these old two-inch tapes with unreleased recordings that he had done in the ’80s with people like Maceo Parker, Tower Of Power, Michigan & Smiley, Dizzy Gilespie, etc. We started cutting them up and turning them into tracks. Then we invited friends from the New York hip-hop, jazz, and poetry scene to come in and jam on these tracks. As the band developed into a unit, that also became the philosophy behind it: people from many different backgrounds, musically and culturally, working together to create a new thing…like a little microcosm of Brooklyn.

What was Arthur Baker’s role in the project? Does he still have any involvement?

We co-produced about half the songs on the first album. He came up with the name. If it wasn’t for Arthur, the band would have never gotten started. He also had the studio, which back in those days, you still needed. When it became clear that BFE was actually going to be a band that played live and toured, Arthur stepped off. I’m actually writing this from Arthur’s flat in London, where we are working together on music for London Fashion Week, so we still work together, but Arthur has not been involved in any of the BFE stuff since the first album.

How did the idea come about to do a funked-up version of Pharoah Sanders’ “The Creator Has A Master Plan,” which became one of your best-known tracks?

Again, this was originally Arthur’s idea. He had started on a version of it which featured Paul Shapiro on sax and flute. We decided to redo his parts, and that’s how Paul got involved. We also asked him to play on other songs. I had invited my friend Papa Dee to come and do some vocals on it…after he did that, I decided I wanted to do the song completely differently, and put together the version which ended up on the album, which Arthur did not work on. My favorite record at the time was Chaka Demus & Pliers’ “Tease Me,” which was where much of the inspiration came from.

The band’s music was first released in the UK — is there a bigger audience for the music in Europe?

In the early ’90s there was a better scene in London for the kind of music we were doing than in the US. We decided to get the record out in the UK and Europe and tour there, and then return to the US with that credit and approach labels. We were lucky to find Brian Bacchus at RCA in New York at a time when there was no president or general manager at the company. They were free to sign whatever they wanted and they really liked us. But as soon as there was a president and general manager…they said, “You need to trim the band down from 12 to five people. Who is not important?” We eventually asked them to let us go. We found that corporate America could not handle a group mixing black and white people and many musical styles.

There are a lot of different stylistic strands to the BFE sound. Who are the biggest influences on the group?

Well, my all-time favorite band is Sly & The Family Stone. They have been a great influence on me and on BFE, not just for the songs and the music, but also in the way they were a mixed band — black, white, male, female — and how they were like an all-star band where singers and musicians took turns carrying the lead.

Can you talk a bit about BFE’s experiences in Turkey

BFE played a big festival in Istanbul in 1996. As an encore we did a funky dancehall version of a famous Turkish song, which brought the house down. After the show we were asked to come back to Turkey and record together with Turkish musicians…we made the whole album in nine days. It was crazy. I didn’t sleep much at all during that time. Since then, BFE has played in Turkey more times than I can remember, and we have a huge following there and are always very well taken care of. We love it. As a matter of fact, our next gig is at a big festival in Istanbul on November 7th.

Why did BFE initially disband, and what made them reform?

After the release of the third album the band did three tours in Europe, which included playing to 80,000 fans at two in the morning in the North of France. But on the 2001 summer tour, so many crazy things happened, including the theft of the band’s money pouch and eventually the theft of the tour bus, that it was just inconceivable to start planning another tour directly after it. Then 9/11 happened, and some members of the band had moved away from New York. It was never a conscious decision to stop playing — it just happened. Some of us got back together to play at Ziggy, the band’s sound engineer’s 40th birthday party. That was the beginning of the reformed BFE.

Last year the band put out a new album, Watcha Playin’. What’s the biggest difference between this and earlier releases?

Despite the fact that the band today is spread out over six cities in five countries, this latest album feels like our most co-created effort. When we first started working on it, we were really into working with computers and coming from more of a techno/electro angle. We even did a tour using a combination of computers and live instruments, but we soon found out that this was going against the spirit of what BFE is all about, so instead we decided to make an album where we put the songs, lyrics, and instrument-playing first, as opposed to basing things on ideas of production and sounds.

What’s coming up in the future for BFE?

We will continue to support the new Watcha Playin’ album by touring around the world and trying to get it out in as many markets as possible. It is a very different world out there today…to a certain extent, it is a relief to be rid of the hyped-up industry people, but it is a very rickety homemade vessel today. Having said that, I think the band sounds better than ever today. We are also looking forward to writing more new songs and making another album in the near future.