When you’ve played with all-time legends like James Brown and George Clinton and have 23 albums behind your name it is easy to take a lazy route and sleep tight on your former accomplishments. After all, you probably have deserved it, and bass and funk master Bootsy Collins certainly did.
So it might be a bit of boasting and a cop out if for Bootsy Collins to title his latest album (23rd) Album of the Year #1 Funkateer. Yet, he stuffed that album with 18 tracks, immaculately played and produced and stuffed with widespread talent, better and lesser known including Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, Wiz Khalifa, and Dave Stewart, as well as newcomers October London, Harry Mack, Baby Triggy, Fantaazma, and more. He certainly made an attempt to put some musical substance behind that album title.
We just might have to wait and see whether that album of the year thing will materialize coming Christmas time, but Collins not only made an attempt to it, but came up with some serious attempts to achieve it, and both his music and the team he has gathered to do it have come up with some deep funk/R&B that has all the elements of the sound both old and new.
Bootsy Collins goes here by that maxim about funk from his old band leader James Brown: “I taught them all they know but not everything I know,” and comes up with the goods that rarely another artist within the genre can come up with now. Album of the year? Who knows, but it will be on the year-end list, for sure.
