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For this week’s paper I wrote a Best of Chicago blurb about Dusty Groove, but I didn’t mention that this excellent record store has also become a reissue label. Last month DG released an album I’d never heard before, a recording both bizarre and ultraprescient. Badfoot Brown and the Bunions Bradford Funeral & Marching Band is one of a handful of noncomedy records credited to Bill Cosby over his long career–some of the others were cut with Quincy Jones and with Charles Wright and the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band–and it originally came out on UNI back in 1971.
“Martin’s Funeral” is the track I first heard, and it made me think of an early masterpiece by DJ Shadow, except it was much stranger, a kind of avant-garde trip-hop (except better than such a silly genre name could ever imply). It almost sounds like two different albums playing simultaneously, and the way it overlaps rhythms, melodic lines, and off-kilter harmonies certainly supports Cosby’s claim that he was digging those organic, free-form, episodic Miles classics. “Hybish Shybish” is even odder, dipping into sonic darkness, but its appealing murk is periodically interrupted by a fierce, chugging groove. For 20 minutes the piece keeps cycling through these two patterns, with new and shifting details emerging with each pass.
