"Light Of Worlds" by Kool and the Gang
In which the jazz-funk pioneers use their newfound success to explore a higher plane.
“Light Of Worlds”:
Bobby Bell was a featherweight Southpaw from Youngstown, Ohio. He fought over 100 bouts in his career, most prominently his 1947 Chicago Golden Gloves victory over bantamweight Wash Stover. Although this was the highlight of his pugilistic career, Bell’s contributions to American culture would reach far beyond the canvas.
In 1960, Bell’s wife Aminah, tired of raising the children alone during Bell’s frequent professional absences, moved the family to Jersey City to be closer to her sisters and mother.
“We used to take cans of house paint and empty the paint to use the cans like drums,” their son Robert Bell recalls. “Depending how much paint was left in the bottom of the can determined the sound…Jersey City was great because of access to music in the schools…[I] tried different instruments until eventually I ended up on the bass guitar. Had music education not been there, I would not have been able to do something in music.”
Bell and younger brother Ronald didn’t just have New Jersey public education to thank for their artistic enrichment. In the early Sixties, Bobby Bell would train with his brother Tommy at a gym in Lower Manhattan, the location of which is now home to Lincoln Center. From time to time, an aspiring young featherweight named Miles Davis would come by to spar with the brothers Bell.
“My pops would come out,” Robert recalls, “‘Man, you need to stay out of that ring. Somebody will pop you in your lip, probably mess your career up!” Additionally, Thelonious Monk lived in the same building as Bobby Bell. When Robert Bell was born, it was Monk who was named his Godfather.
“We were brought up in jazz,” Ronald Bell said in 1974. “All the fellows were.”
“Whiting H. and G.”:
The “fellows” referred to are the other young men from the neighborhood, who first coalesced into a working group around 1964: Robert “Spike” Mickens on trumpet, Dennis “D.T.” Thomas on alto saxophone, Ricky West on keyboards, George Brown on drums, and Charles Smith on guitar, in addition to Robert (who’d by now assigned himself the “Kool” nickname) and Ronald Bell, on bass guitar and baritone saxophone, respectively.
Initially known as the Jazziacs, they got their start as the opening act for a weekly jazz night in Jersey City. There they cut their teeth with legends like as Pharoah Sanders and McCoy Tyner. They were playing a gig at The Blue Note Lounge in Newark when a local MC introduced them as “Kool and the Flames”.
Augmenting their sobriquet to Kool And The Gang because, as Robert says, “James Brown had the ‘Famous Flames’ and we didn’t want no problems with the Godfather!”, the band kept grinding, and soon manager Gene Redd signed them De-Lite. Their first album, the all-instrumental Kool & the Gang, arrived in 1969 and put two singles in the R&B Top 20. The subsequent live release Live at the Sex Machine reached #6 on the R&B album charts and remained there for 33 weeks.
Kool and the Gang’s breakthrough came in 1973, with the release of their eternal masterpiece Wild and Peaceful. Its singles “Hollywood Swingin’”(#1 R&B, #6 Pop) and the epochal “Jungle Boogie” (#2 R&B, #4 Pop) launched the group into the upper echelons of American music, and did so without compromising their raw, loose, jazz-influenced style.
After ten years of striving and struggling on the circuit, the boys from Jersey City had made it to the top. There they found themselves faced with the same haunting questions that has corroded many the hopes and dreams of many an overnight success: now what?
Light Of Worlds, released exactly one year after Wild and Peaceful, is a marked departure from its predecessor. Funk remains abundant, as do the jazz influences baked into the groups’ DNA, but the songs are knottier, the arrangements more ambitious. There is no monster hit. Instead, we get what may be the most inventive, sophisticated Kool and the Gang album.
“Street Corner Symphony”:
“Street Corner Symphony” has a crackling funk arrangement which, coupled with a blaring saxophone solo, assures the listener that Kool and the Gang have surrendered none of their power or immediacy. Rick West’s charmingly flat vocals give “Fruitman” the touch of whimsy it requires, while a bouncing Robert Bell bassline ties it to the street where its titular character operates. “Whiting H. & G.” is a synth-tinted, sprightly soul-jazz workout, one of the very best of the many instrumental tracks Kool and the Gang cut.
The spiritual concerns of Light Of Worlds are most apparent on the titular track, with its images of broken people running scared, its flute-forward pop-funk arrangement, and its chorus refrain of “We should try to understand/to help our brothers all we can/ Give us light, give us lots of light/ Yes, we need the light/The light of worlds”. “Rhyme Time People” (#3 R&B) is glossy, punchy funk with the inspired fluff of a lyric admonishing “you should be cool/ when you’re foolin’ with that stuff.”
Light Of Worlds holds its strength in reserve until it nears its conclusion. “Higher Plane” (#1 R&B, #37 Pop) is a strutting dance groove formed into song by augmenting the “Jungle Boogie” formula for Arp synthesizer. The much-sampled “Summer Madness” (#36 R&B, #37 Pop) is the album’s masterstroke. Claydes E. X. Smith’s shimmering guitar and Ronald Bell’s Melotron alchemy craft a smoke-filled room of a jazz-funk groove, building mystery and momentum which suddenly releases in one supersonic synthesizer peal that seems to bust a hole through the heavens themselves. It’s a truly magnificent recording.
“Summer Madness”:
Light Of Worlds captures Kool and the Gang challenging themselves and their newfound success. Here they pursued a softer, more contemplative approach, integrating synthesizers into their brass-forward sound. They would remain at or near the top of the charts for another decade and a half, one of the few 70s bands who actually prospered amid the stylistic shifts of the 1980s. But never again would they cut an album like Light Of Worlds, a modest, intimate work that looks beyond the streets and alleyways of the cities where they were born in search of a greater truth, a truer liberty, far beyond our earthly binds.