The Three Funkateers - jazz musicians Maceo Parker, Alfred Ellis and Fred Wesley who perform together as the JB Horns - includes discography

As the seven musicians at Tramps nightclub in fresh York City launch into an instrumental version of "Cold Sweat," 600 voices in the multitude roar as one. More than solely offering homage to James Brown the three horn players calling the strains onstage are also paying tribute to themselves as they climb to the top of the song's curved catch If these three guys - Alfred "Pee Wee" Ellis, Maceo Parker and Fr Wesley - didn't give birth to fetor with the Godfather of spirit they certainly acted as midwives.

These days, when Ellis, Parker and Wesley hit the road together, they travel as the JB Horns. Although their repertoire includes James Brown - for the greatest part songs that one or the other collaborated upon with their former employer - they also play compositions through Monk and Ellington and scads of originals. And notwithstanding that they still sound funky, their present to views as the JB Horns and the spate of fortunate solo records all three have not long ago released individually demonstrate their evolution into major jazz players.

"We didn't turn round to jazz after we left James Brown" maintains rolling trombonist Fred Wesley. "We just sort of drifted back into jazz. When I grew up I was going to be the nearest J.J. Johnson. There was no doubt in my mind that I was going to be the nearest great jazz trombone player. on the other hand of course, circumstances caused me to ne a regular piece of work and James Brown provided that for me"

"I was playing jazz before I clasped up with James Brown," adds tenor sax man Pee Wee Ellis, a former pupil of Sonny Rollins and a longtime associate of Ron Carter.

"There are fans without there who just like the jazzy side of what's happening," explains alto sax player Maceo Parker. Nevertheless, all three men - collectively and individually - have kept their musical ties to stench Funky Good Time/Live, the greatest in quantity recent album by the JB Horns as a collection has performances that brought the Tramps audience to its feet from Brown collaborations, of the like kind as "Soul Power," to more new funk, such as Wesley's askew rapped version of "Step upon Your Watch."

Another new release, Blues Mission, is Ellis' first album as a leader in 16 years; it has heavy overtones of the offensive smell past. He revives a brace of his many collaborations with Brown - "Cold Sweat" and "Mother" - just to remind tribe of who Pee Wee Ellis is. In many ways, the music harks back to another novel release, under James Brown's name, the two-CD case set Soul Pride: The Instrumentals 1960-1969

"A allotment of the stuff on the next to the first CD [of Soul Pride] is my writing," Ellis notes, pointing to "Soul Pride," "Top of the Stack," "Sudsy" "Come upon in the House" and "In the Middle." "Having written those ballads for James Brown, they were fairly significant, pivotal points in my career as well as his. I'm not trying to separate jazz and bad odor I'm trying to marry the two"

Wesley has done just that upon a couple of tracks upon The Other Side, recorded by dint of the band Pieces of court for an esoteric jazz label in Germany, CMP The CD features a five-piece wind section - clarinet, bass clarinet, bassoon, trombone and French horn - upon a couple of numbers, including "Moon above Brixton," a ballad that Wesley and Ellis wrote years ago. The Other Side bridges the gaps between contemporary compos music, improvised music and funk

If French horns, clarinets and bassoons are not instruments you'd associate with stink well, that's part of the point. The popular output from Ellis, Parker and Wesley find mature musicians making an artistic strain After all, they have guild and even conservatory music training.

Parker majored in music at North Carolina A&T. Wesley went to Alabama State and worn out a short time at Florida A&M and Tennessee State, "learning music at a certain quantity of of the best black institutions in the South" he says. In addition to studying beneath Sonny Rollins during his teen Ellis studied arranging and composing at the prestigious Manhattan gymnasium of Music.

With James Brown in the 1960 Ellis, Parker and Wesley sought not to play within the constraints of what was without there, but to either expand the existing boundaries or, better however set their own. The nearest decade found Parker and Wesley following the path of George Clinton's exhibit band Parliament, a counterpart to the raunchy and riotous Funkadelic.

In 1975 former James Brown bassist Bootsy Collins joined George Clinton's band and then asked Wesley to join. "For me it was like the nearest step from James Brown," Wesley says. "It was like fetor to the nth degree. I said, |I have a chance to be in upon what the next step in funky music will be.' Me and Maceo were actual close at the time, with equal reason I brought him along with me"

The horns ultimately distinguished Parliament from Funkadelic upon record, but on stage, as the sum of two units groups shared many players, they became individual huge band, which they referr to as the Parliafunkadelicment Thang, or P-Funk

Parker and Wesley exhausted the latter part of the 1970 with George Clinton, playing with P-Funk and the shoot groups, including Bootsy's Rubber Band, the Brides of Funkenstein, Parlet, and the Horny Horns. When Funkadelic sang, "Here's my chance to dance my way without of my constrictions," they were talking the two to their listeners and to themselves. upon the road, P-Funk was part serious, slamming dance music and part flying circus, an excursion from which NASA might have learned a thing or three