Music / Average White Band
Review: Average White Band + Kokomo, Colston Hall
It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing. Tonight, billed as a Soul Summit, two of the UK’s legendary purveyors of soul and funk from the seventies proved they hadn’t lost their spark to a packed Colston Hall.
With his Joe Cockerish deep gruff vocals, Kokomo’s Tony O’Malley highlighted the essence of this big band with ten members on stage, six of them originals, and their commitment to a soulful funk-edged groove. Their fine, accomplished musicianship did tend to drive down the middle of the road a bit with some notable forays into the fast lane.
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Their cover of Stevie Wonder’s So What the Fuss was a definite fast laner, with O’Malley’s vocals and a great bluesy guitar from Jim Mullen building into a spiritual clapalong boogie. They ended with a rousing note-perfect rendition of Bobby Womack’s I Can Understand It.
The Average White Band were so revered by the cream of funk and soul Stateside in the seventies that James Brown released a song in dedication to their 1975 mega-hit Pick Up The Pieces, called Pick Up The Pieces One By One, under the name AABB (Above Average Black Band).
We have to wait until the encore for Pick Up the Pieces tonight, but not before a good hour and a half of slick funky soul perfectly played by these veterans. The sharp funk chop of Alan Gorie’s guitar introduces them with the jazzy funk of I’m The One, and they’re off.
Gorie and guitarist Onnie McIntyre are the originals left from the band’s formation in 1972, and they’re complimented by a superb line up including bassist / keyboardist Rob Aries and the double sax attack of Fred Vigdor and Cliff Lyons aka The Hungry Horns.
Singer Brent Carter gives the soprano soul treatment to numbers such as Dionne Warwick’s Walk On By and AWB’s own Stop the Rain, giving it the atmosphere of Marvin Gaye era What’s Going On.
While they veer dangerously into saccharine soul territory with A Love Of Your Own and easy listening funk with Atlantic Avenue, good numbers lacking edge, they up the stakes with the energy and sass of The Jugglers and the more soulful Work To Do before arriving at the first of their big three hits with Cut The Cake.
A lovely pitch perfect version of The Isley Brothers’ Harvest For The World then brings us to the number of the night Put It Where You Want It, their very first single from 1973, a slow cooking, or rather, bubbling, funk stew with superb tenor sax from Fred Vigdor.
They encore with the addictively joyous Let’s Go Round Again and their inevitable signature brass brilliance of Pick Up The Pieces. We can safely say that UK soul and funk royalty was in the house.
Photos: Elfyn Griffith
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