Like in my personal life, what’s covered below avoids any of the predominantly vocal records (Nona Hendryx, Gil Scott Heron, Yoko Ono, PiL, Golden Palominos, etc.). My list only scratches the surface of what Bill Laswell and Bernie Worrell have done together. After touring with the Talking Heads in the early 1980s, Bernie Worrell launched a fairly spotty solo career (with few exceptions, his solo records tend to try to please too many different interests and aren’t consistently interesting as a result) and has gigged with nearly everybody under the sun but has always made time for Bill Laswell’s musical challenges. Even the credits on most P-Funk records don’t properly acknowledge the real contribution Worrell made to all of that music. As a sound progenitor, he is probably responsible for a larger percentage of P-Funk’s music than his co-writer credits could possibly ever indicate. His command of any number of electronic keyboards and innovative ways of layering sound built the church of P-Funk, which the denizens of hip-hop will forever worship within. Classically trained and a gifted musical thinker, Bernie Worrell has provided the electronic backbone to some of the funkiest, rawest music this planet has ever known. It says a lot about both of these towering musical giants that they have worked so frequently over so many years so successfully together.īut Bernie Worrell is also an exceptional musician. Over the years, while Bill Laswell has continually sought out new musical associations and developed ever newer sonic contexts, he calls back any number of old friends to help him pull it all off.
He’ll throw people together that would barely have a reason to share the same room and proves time and again that music is a universal language.
Bill laswell discography how to#
More significantly, he knows how to attract great talent, people with unlimited capacities for confounding expectation and reaching new galaxies of expression. It’s also why huge stars from every side of the music world line up to work with him. More often, it turns into something remarkable and more memorable than mere passing fancy. That’s part of the magic Bill Laswell creates with whatever he touches. As it is so often elsewhere, his participation may be seemingly minimal, but his impact is palpable.
Worrell factors only on two of Nona’s tracks (“Living On The Border,” “Dummy Up”). The Material album, probably one of the very best dance records of the 1980s and one which they pitched as “their first and last pure pop album,” featured Nona Hendryx among others in a pitch-perfect environment that showed her off to better advantage than she’d ever been heard before. The first record of their collaboration that I recall is former LaBelle chanteuse Nona Hendryx’s scintillating Nona (RCA, 1983), which I picked up at the time only because I was in the throws of ecstatic enchantment with the wild and wonderful sounds of Material’s classic One Down (Elektra, 1982). Since the early 1980s, bassist, producer, conceptualist, musical genius and staggeringly uncollectable visionary Bill Laswell has used former P-Funk keyboardist Bernie Worrell, himself an innovative and too little celebrated musical pioneer, on many of his extraordinarily wide-ranging and diverse projects.