Alright, alright. I’ve said my piece about how money I think Thievery Corporation is. They are—after all—headlining the show tomorrow at Kastles Stadium. But they’ve got good company, bringing music from all parts of the over- and underdeveloped worlds.
Eric Hilton, Thievery’s co-founder, is showcasing his side project, reggae/dub band The Arkives. House maestros The Volta Bureau will be there to strut their funky selves, too. But—being a true blue Fela fan—I must admit The Funk Ark has my mouth watering.
Led by keyboardist and producer Will Rast, The Funk Ark mixes African highlife, Latin claves, and American funk into an ensemble that could—at the very least—make the rhythmless homosapien toe-tap. Last month before they set out West to Colorado and Texas, Will and I talked about his passion for afrobeat music and how The Funk Ark came to be.
First off, tell me a little bit about you and the origins of the Funk Ark.
Well, this band is made up of players in the D.C. area music scene that I have played and jammed with with over the years. Many are my good friends, [so] I had this idea a few years back that there should be like a big funk band in D.C. I happened to know all the people that were necessary to make it happen. DC has [an abundance of] natural players , so I was able to put together a group of guys.
We started doing covers of the Greyboy Allstars, James Brown, and stuff like that. We started writing our own stuff that is kind like renditions of Lonnie Liston Smith and The Weeds. So we had that style for a while, and then I kind of started getting more into Afrobeat myself and listening to a lot of the stuff that is not there now being released and also the stuff obviously from Africa in the ‘70s, and I was really inspired by that format of funk. In addition to that, I kind of started getting into like salsa and the Fania All-Stars. I wanted to just play all that stuff.
What’s your musical style like?
I just kind of started writing, and I tried to use people like Fela and Orchestre Poly-Rythmo de Cotonou and Antibalas as kind of as a baseline for the style that we are going to go in for. So, in a nutshell, I mean, we kind of just evolved into this Afrobeat sound, and I would even necessarily pitch in all of these; it is just an Afrobeat sound, and we do a lot of Latin dance stuff as well.
Like the Fania All-Stars?
Definitely.
More about the structure of your music and how it’s composed—do you guys incorporate traditional head arrangements and compositions? Or is the process more experimental?
The songs on the record were kind of purposely made short because we were kind of trying to experiment with this. The ESL [Records] crew takes each of the parts and records them kind of separately—not necessarily the whole group—and then they put it back together in a concise composition; it’s like the way that they do for Thievery Corporation records. We worked with Chris Garrett, Thievery Corporation’s engineer. He had this process down, where we would try to get in the studio and individually revive each of the tracks and add our own pieces, and then once that was all done, he kind of reassembled it to make this whole song, and that is kind of the reason that the album sounds the way it does.
And so, I think, actually for our next record, we are going to actually record it live with everybody in the studio—except the horns. I want to record the whole rhythm section live in one room to give it that live feeling, then make the track a little bit longer because the horns especially tend to blow for, like, anywhere between five to ten minutes on solo. And the song can last for fifteen minutes. We just keep going with it and just ride like a bee, and the soloist steps forward to us.
But the shows are a little bit different [from the recording experience].
A little bit more?
A little bit more ferocious.
What genre would The Funk Ark be categorized as?
I guess we are [more or less] World Funk Dance.
You mentioned Antibalas earlier. Would you compare yourself to Antibalas?
Yeah. I would say that Antibalas has been one of my major influences as far as music that is being released now. No problem. I went to my first Antibalas show about ten years ago now when I was going to Manhattan School of Music in New York, I went to see them at this little club called NoMoore on North Moore Street in Tribeca. They totally blew my head off; people were just dancing. It was just kind of like, really infectious polyrhythmic funk that I, I mean, at that point I hadn’t heard heard of Fela. Since then, I have gotten the amazing opportunities to work with Martin Perna from Antibalas and Marcos Garcia as well, who goes by Chico Mann. They have a project on ESL called Ocote Soul Sounds, and I just made a record with them.
Now, are you the only guy who writes or do you get help from the other band members?
I wrote pretty much all the songs on From the Rooftops but there were some collaborations. I write a lot on the guitar. Then I use Garage Band to build around [the guitar composition] by using my little LED MIDI controller on [the software]. I just make a song and bring it in to our rehearsal, and then we kind of fine tune it and fix it out and strike it out, and that process is very much a collaborative group effort. And since then, people have—like our drum player and our guitarist—specifically have started writing some tunes for the band, and they are going to be featured in our new record.
And then when is the new record coming out?
We are not exactly sure yet. We are recording it in Austin the third week of August, and we are about to go out on this tour, and Austin is the last stop. We are going to stay there for a few days at Zone Studio.
Sweet. Austin is a great town.
Yeah. I love it there.
Does The Ark Funk have a social philosophy? I ask because Afrobeat, particularly, has somewhat of a social mission that breaks the mold, in a sense.
The general trend is anti-establishment, socialist… the kind of a dogma that Afrobeat tends to lean toward. I am pretty much writing in line with that, although it is not the driven purpose for the music. We are trying to make music that people enjoy dancing to. We are more focused on the aesthetic of the sound and the politics just kind of naturally comes along with it because of the type of music that it is and because of the type of man that I say I was and the type of methods that Antibalas as well kind of started.
But it is really nothing that may hurt us, especially because we do not generally have lyrics in our songs. I think that can change, but right now, we are just focused on having people move and the socio-political implications of that, and having music that originated in another country, kind of marriages of music, of funk music, of James Brown… Fela was influenced by James Brown obviously, and so it is kind of a marriage of cultures. I think it signifies what is great about our country, which is that there are so many different perspectives being tossed into the hat, and we are just trying to celebrate that, and that is pretty much what it’s about.
We’re not trying to be particularly edgy.
Give me some names of artists that you have worked with or would love to work with.
Oh, the dream list. I almost had an opportunity this summer to work with some of the guys from the original J.B.’s, and we were going to do a show at D.A.R. Constitution Hall for the Chocolate City Soul Review, and it was—some of the—like three of the original backup singers for James Brown, Marva Whitney, Martha High, and Vicki Anderson…
Really? The J.B’s?
Yeah, so I got the job of directing the J.B.’s [musically] for that show, and then the show actually did not sell enough tickets in Athens, so they got it cancelled the last minute, and I did not get to do it. So, I have to say that working with Fred Thomas and Clyde Stubblefield of the J.B.’s is still at the top of my wishlist. And I guess another person who I would really like to work with is Tony Allen, who is Fela’s drummer. He is one of the most important and influential drummers. I credit him with creating Afrobeat.
So here’s the obligatory question, what advice would you give up and coming big band/groups?
The great thing about Afrobeat—especially right now—is that it’s kind of becoming a novelty. There are Afrobeat parties in almost every major city! Those are the places that you hit because there is a built-in crowd of people who are coming, expecting to see and hear a new Afrobeat band. [The fans] just love this kind of music. They’ll be accepting of it. Knowing this has helped us out. That’s pretty much what [The Funk Ark] has found universally. It’s helped us a lot.
Don’t be scared of the numbers. You can make it, you can make it work. When the idea of touring this band first came into question there were, of course, questions that entered my head like, “How am I gonna get it, all these guys across the country?” and “How am I gonna pay them all?” If you can get your group together in your hometown, and you got all the pieces, just play and play and play in front of many people as you can.
