Anybody world Health Organization saw James Brown�s victorious 1974 concert appearance in Kinshasa, Zaire - captured in the documentary film �When We Were Kings� about the Muhammad Ali-George Foreman Rumble in the Jungle - has an inkling of how beloved the Godfather of Soul was in Africa.
Brown made numerous visits there, and his longtime musical film director and saxist, Pee Wee Ellis, was on more than than a few of them.
But it took the death of the fabled soulman in 2006 for Ellis to let free with a tribute to his erstwhile boss that no unrivaled else has dared try.
The show, Still Black, Still Proud: An African Tribute to James Brown, comes to the Museum of Fine Arts on Wednesday evening with a lineup the Hardest Working Man in Show Business would have spun and shimmied to all night: Ellis, fellow onetime member of the JBs, trombonist Fred Wesley, Senegalese singer Cheikh Lo and Malian singer/guitarist Vieux Farka Toure, son of the great Ali Farka Toure.
�I�ve been asked to do a luck of James Brown tributes, none of which I felt like doing,� said Ellis - who�s spent a great deal of his latter-day career working with Van Morrison - from his abode in Bath, England. �But this was different.�
That�s an understatement. With Ellis at the helm, a kind of African stars own joined the ensemble at different shows in recent months, including Angelique Kidjo, Manu Dibango, and former Fela drummer Tony Allen.
After he left Brown, for whom he wrote a spate of hits, including �Cold Sweat,� Ellis became one of funk, idle words and pop�s most sought after composers and arrangers, functional with the likes of George Benson as considerably as Morrison.
He also veered into worldly concern music, arrangement and performing with Lo, Mali�s Oumou Sangare, and Cuba�s Cachaito and Miguel �Anga� Diaz.
�That was in reality the spark for this tribute,� Ellis aforesaid. �James Brown was a hero in Africa. He gave back to Africa his way. They say funk came from r & b, which came from gospel singing, which came from the slaves. There�s a whole lineage that started in Africa. The African players I asked to be part of this all said, �Yeah, that sounds like a good theme!� �
What do the Africans bring to this funk party?
�A sense of rhythm that�s unique,� Ellis said. �Their emphasis on the strong beats is different, but it�s the same energy. The show brings out the similarities.�
And it elicits the African performers� take on Brown�s classics.
�Cheikh Lo sings �It�s A Man�s Man�s Man�s World� in a unique manner,� Ellis said with a gag. �Sometimes in Wolof.�
Ellis acknowledges that Brown continues to inspire him.
�A lot of stuff rubbed off on me around how to lead a band,� he said. (Brown) unheeded all kinds of things that I had to learn in school. He said, �If it feels good, do it. If it sounds good, don�t analyze it, just do it. It�s about the groove and the feeling.� �
And this protection feels good.
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