Like Ellington, he presided over a steady cast of players (including, among other greats, bassist Bootsy Collins, saxophonist Maceo Parker, trombonist Fred Wesley, and drummer Clyde Stubblefield), composed to their strengths, and kept pushing the music into new territory. Listening to these hundreds of songs by dozens of artists, it becomes clear that Brown is a bandleader and musical auteur on par with Duke Ellington. Earlier this year, critic and occasional Slate contributor Douglas Wolk gave me an extraordinary collection of MP3s he’d compiled of nearly every single ever produced by James Brown. The relentless groove was Brown’s specialty, and he proved its pleasures were as profound, its mysteries as rich, as any that art has to offer. (Hunt down his 1959 debut Please Please Please.) He recorded jazz standards and gospel testimonials and disco, rap, showtunes, instrumentals, and dozens upon dozens of hilarious numbers like “For Goodness Sake, Look at Those Cakes” and “ Santa Claus Go Straight to the Ghetto”-which I suppose you could call novelty songs, if the grooves weren’t so seriously ferocious. His earliest recordings, from the late 1950s, prove that his raw-throated ballad singing would have made him a legend even if he’d never found the funk. He made at least 70 albums, and there are brilliant moments on all of them. But digging into the Brown discography is the task of a lifetime. That record, by far the best live album ever made, is a good place to begin listening, along with the Star Timebox set, which includes most of the big hits. The world is a quieter and duller place now that Brown will never again stride the boards, although you can relive the excitement by playing the volcanic Live at the Apollo (1963). After Brown, even the whitest white boy felt compelled to shake it a little onstage. He was the model for all pop performers who followed him. Brown’s showmanship merged the fervent emotionalism of the black church with pure showbiz-flashy clothes, vaudevillian theatrics, sweat-drenched movement, and a pompadour flamboyant enough to inspire Al Sharpton (and countless pimps).
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