![]() And the bartenders, who were the guys in those days who would hire the musicians, would ask me if I had a band. “When I got there, I was already playing the blues, so I would sit in with the band and play the popular songs. So from there, I learned to play jazz organ.”īirdsong earned his spurs on the organ when he moved to Germany as an army serviceman in his late teens during the Vietnam War. “It was a very rough thing,” he says, “just a group of kids getting together and trying to imitate other people.” But through one of those kids, he was soon to discover a new instrument that would change his creative path: “A friend had taught me how to play a twelve-bar blues in the Jimmy Smith style, on an old Hammond. And because I was left-handed, it was never really difficult for me to play.” At junior high school, he formed his first small band playing piano with a group of friends. I always had that urge to try different things on the piano around the songs I was learning.” While the church would provide his foundation, young Edwin’s ears were opened further to secular music through local radio: “I would hear boogie-woogie tunes, and I noticed that they all had that left-hand movement. At the same time as he was developing his classical piano techniques, he was also beginning his first attempts at composition: “I would improvise and make things up while I was playing at the church. “I started studying classical music when I was about six years of age through a piano teacher who lived a few doors away,” he recalls. “So that’s really where I got started at the Solid Rock Baptist Church, although I didn’t realize at the time how influential it was going to be.” Following his father’s path, he also started singing at the church and as a teenager joined the Los Angeles Community Choir, meeting such luminaries as Merry Clayton and Billy Preston.Īn equally important formative experience for Birdsong came from outside of the church. “I started playing piano in Sunday school when I was about eight or nine, playing simple things like ‘Jesus Keep Me Near the Cross,’ ” he tells me over the phone from L.A. Despite his prescient and unique music being heavily sampled (De La Soul, Gang Starr, Daft Punk, Chemical Brothers, et al.), Edwin Birdsong remains a cultish figure whose genius is shrouded by anonymity.īorn in Los Angeles in 1951, Edwin Birdsong was raised in a religious household where his pastor father, who sang in a church quartet, instilled a love of the spirituals. Here was a keyboardist and songwriter who not only worked as coproducer on those pivotal Ubiquity LPs but also had writing credits on classics like “Running Away” and “Red, Black & Green.” Deeper digging revealed a series of his own experimental cosmic-soul LPs that began in 1971 with the Polydor debut What It Is and ended with his Salsoul outing, Funtaztik, in 1981. When I first saw the credits on those mid-’70s Roy Ayers Ubiquity LPs like Vibrations and Lifeline, I wondered who Edwin Birdsong was. Originally published in Issue 59, Summer 2014 Published online Wednesday, December 9, 2020 Influenced by Larry Levan and the New York club scene, Birdsong’s left-field boogie anthem “Cola Bottle Baby” would become fodder for both Daft Punk and Kanye West, and his bare funk breakbeat track “Rapper Dapper Snapper” would nod hip-hop heads for years, bringing Birdsong’s grooves to a new global audience. Birdsong remained committed to a solo career, releasing a string of records, including two highly influential albums-one on Gamble and Huff’s Philadelphia International and one on Salsoul-whose effects are still reverberating. The relationship would give birth to a funky jazz with commercial leanings that worked both live and on the dance floor. At the dawn of the ’70s the Los Angeles native reconnected with high school acquaintance Roy Ayers in New York, and the two began work on a series of records that would change the course of jazz and popular music at large. ![]() ![]() Producer, songwriter, and organist Edwin Birdsong is the anonymous genius behind some of jazz-funk’s most cosmic moments.
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