I watched the Neneh Cherry – Natural Skin Deep (Glastonbury 2019) as linked in the Murkey’s Marvellous Mixtape 2020 post. The next vid automatically played on youtube was this one, less than 2 weeks old – 75 minutes of Cory Wong and his fantastic band recording a live album at Paisley Park. Some serious funkateering going on here. The whole band are brilliant but in particular marvel at Prince’s former bassist Sonny T who plays a right-handed 5-string bass upsidedown. A good trick if you can do it
Cory Wong // The Paisley Park Session
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Corey Wong is a fantastic player. Watched the first couple of minutes and will watch the rest later. That is a left-handed bass strung upside down. Have seen this with a few old blues guitarists but never a bass player.
This is great. New to me. Thanks!
Thanks, Vince. Just bought a ticket to see him in London next March on the strength of that.
I have two Cory Wong albums in my Top Ten of the year, but from the look of things they won’t make it into any end of year list as it seems like I’m the only person here who liked them!
Left-handed five string bass hung upside-down you say? Here’s another one:
I think he’s great – plays with all sorts of people on various projects – including jazz smoothie Dave Koz on an album this year and a great ambient-ish set with Jon Batiste in 2020. Like this as well – scratchy funk with the Fearless Flyers featuring the phenomenal drummer Nate Smith – the last 30 secs or so of this are ridiculous.
His latest thing is Cory Wong On Ice!
It’s pretty much as it says on the tin. Wong and his super-tight band (including Prince alumni Sonny T and Michael Nelson) playing on an ice rink. Even the drummer is playing drums in ice skates, which seems pretty impossible to me.
Very proficient indeed but ultimately rather relentlessly dull.
After 2 or 3 songs they all start to sound pretty much identical.
Headbanging funk. I don’t think I’d last a whole album of it.
Hmmm. It’s a point of view, though I think it’s a little bit unfair to describe someone doing a spot-on homage to Jay Graydon’s guitar solo in Peg WHILE SKATING BACKWARDS as “relentlessly dull”.
I was referring to the clip at the top of the thread. I haven’t watched the ice rink clip.