One of the architects of the Funk music genre that influenced Hip Hop's West Coast sound, has died. Bernie Worrell, composer and keyboardist of Parliament-Funkadelic lost his fight with lung cancer on Friday, June 24. He was 72 years old.
Worrell, whose innovative arrangements and piano work would help the Talking Heads engineer the New Wave sound of the '80's, was most prolifically recognized for his work with both Parliament and Funkadelic, recording for each band respectively before setting on a legendary path with co-founder George Clinton, in his work with the unified Parliament-Funkadelic throughout the 1970's. He was a classically trained musician who started playing piano at age 3 and by age 10 was performing with the National Symphony Orchestra. But it was his work outside of the box, incorporating a futuristic sound as one of the pioneers of the moog synthesizer, that would give P-Funk their futuristic sound and be emulated by the following generation of musicians.
Such heavily sampled classics as "Give Up the Funk", "Mothership Connection", "Flash Light", and "Aqua Boogie," have been credited along with the soul standards of James Brown, as pillars of Hip Hop production. During Parliament's introduction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame they were noted for having "prefigured everything from rap and hip-hop to techno and alternative."
The Wizard of Woo, as Worrell was famously known, passed beside his wife Judie in their Everson, Washington home.
Source: fox61.com
