(Editors note: El Keter submitted this entry for LAST Friday, his actual birthday, but it didn’t run until today due to the holiday. Happy belated EK!)
In case it’s a mystery to anybody out there in internet-land, my process for these “Records at Random” posts usually involves going into my bedroom every couple of months and grabbing an armful of records out of my collection which I spend the next few weeks writing up every Friday. The last time I did this I added an extra record that was not chosen randomly. It happens to be one of my favorite albums of all time, one I’ve listened to over-and-over again. I pulled it out because I knew that the date of my 30th birthday would coincide with a “Records at Random” post this month, and that this post would also happen to be the 30th, and I wanted to be able to spend my birthday ‘morn listening to an album I’m totally in lvoe with.
The album in question is the self-titled 1976 debut from Bronx-based Disco collective Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band. Founded by Montreal-born, Bronx-raised musician and lyricist August Darnell (a.k.a. Thomas Browder, a.k.a. Kid Creole of Kid Creole and the Coconuts fame) the band, which featured the writing and arranging genius of his brother Stony Browder Jr. and the unforgettable vocals of the beautiful Cory Daye, was based around a concept which juxtaposed the Disco-era of the mid-to-late-’70s, with it’s hedonistic dance culture masking a rising tide of social ills, with the jazzy Big-Band-era and the Great Depression. The group is probably best known for the hit single “Cherchez La Femme,” which was covered to great acclaim by Ghostface Killah, and to a lesser extent “Sunshower,” which has been sampled and interpolated numerous times, most notably by M.I.A. and Ghostface.
The seemingly outdated affectations of Big-Band, Swing and Jazz may have seemed anachronistic in a late-seventies popular music context, but the truth of the matter is the band’s music was unrepentantly soulful and shared much in common with the output of Philadelphia International and the CTI/Kudu labels. And while they may have been looking back to a bygone-era much of the time, some of their musical choices, particularly their inclusion of Caribbean and Afro-Latin vibes, prefigured much that was to come in the future. More than their sound itself though, what’s so attractive (other than Cory Daye’s voice, which makes me melt whenever I hear it) about the group is August Darnell’s songwriting which was both whimsical and unflinchingly honest, particularly about the hardships and difficulties people face, both personally and societally, often in the same breath.
The best illustration of that, and my favorite portion of the disc, is the song-arc that makes up it’s a-side beginning with “I’ll Play the Fool” and ending with “Sunshower.” Both tracks are bittersweet love songs, with a couple bantering back and forth about what they’d do (from “play the fool” to “go to school” in order to got a GED) to maintain a love that’s “better than poison” and “stronger than glue” on the former, and a downtrodden woman pledging a near-Biblical love to a lover whose affections saved her from the dreariness of reality. Sandwiched between them are “Hard Times” and “Cherchez La Femme,” which offer two different takes on the world, one where a couple can “get over” all the “ballots, boxes, bullets and guns,” and “tricks and cheats and dirty lies,” and another where no matter how hard one works, or who one hitches themselves to, misery befalls us all, whether “slut” or “saint.”
This mix of Ecclesiastes-like wisdom, plush musicality, irresistible rhythms, and angelic vocalizing was what made Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band singularly original, and will always be why I love this record so much.
-El Keter
