When Presupposition Impedes on Praxis: Lessons Learned from James Brown | John Scannell

Summary: Collaborations: creative partnerships in music | John Scannell <strong>When Presupposition Impedes on Praxis: Lessons Learned from James Brown</strong> James Brown’s artistic legacy commands a level of respect reserved for few other popular music artists. Yet his compositional approach was often just as peculiar as it was prescient, and as this paper argues, the inherent radicality of Brown’s funk style is testament to the creative unorthodoxy fostered by the “untrained” musician. Such musical “naivety”, whilst a boon to creative experimentation, would stand in stark contrast to the more orthodox schooling of Brown’s band-leaders, such as Nat Jones, Alfred “Pee Wee” Ellis and Fred Wesley, all of whom were required to translate the boss’ esoteric grunts and groans into musical notation, and all of whom were not only under-appreciated by Brown, but often uncredited for their work. This paper will explore some of the tensions that arose between Brown and his musical collaborators over these relative approaches to compositional praxis. In particular I will focus on how Brown’s relative lack of technical ability was anathema to his “trained” collaborators, all of whom despised their boss’ apparent musical “illiteracy”, yet applauded his capacity for promoting the necessary synthesis of the disparate and often incongruous musical ideas that were so vital to the development of one of the most groundbreaking bodies of work in popular music history.