Back in the day R & B and funk bands were common...The Commodores, Ohio Players, Earth Wind & Fire, Frankie Beverly & Maze, Heatwave, The Meters, Rufus and a host of others. One of the advantages of self-contained groups is that the members of a group can sacrifice together because they all have a stake in the group's success. A solo singer, on the other hand, has to use hired guns for musical backng and hired guns need to get paid because a hired gun has no stake in the artist's future. I believe this is a huge factor for the decline of R & B in the past couple of decades, a decline that parallels the decline in self-contained R & B and funk bands. It is hard for an R & B singer to slog it out on the road building an audience the old fashioned way because it costs too much money to hire musicians and pay for their travel & accomodations ( hired guns don't want to sleep in vans or share rooms)--unless a deep-pocketed label will underwrite the touring--a much less likely scenario in these troubled times. Meanwhile, rock bands continue to thrive because rock in general is still dominated by self-contained bands, young musicians who will hop in a van and play anywhere and everywhere for whatever. And there is nothing like slogging it out on the road for developing your chops, vocally or otherwise, not to mention your showmanship.
Which brings us to Marcell & The Truth, a self-contained R & B band out of the Baltimore area. Lead singer Marcell Russell, a 6'3" ex-defensive line-man with a voice and style reminiscent of Luther Vandross, fronted a tight band that wrote, recorded and performed together. They emerged a couple of years ago, playing regional gigs and released a CD that was eminently listenable old school R & B with a couple of twists. That one was not all recorded with live instruments but had an organic feel. There were two clear stand-out tracks: "Hopes Too High", a mid-tempo lilter, and "Your Eyes", a hypnotic,
chant-like reverie. Beautiful!
Now Marcell & The Truth are back with a brand new CD entitled "Symbols." I'm happy to report that it is even better than their first release. On this one, the band laid down all the tracks. The opener,
"Can't Wait", is worth the price of admission alone but the material is consistently good through. Marcell's singing stands out, a great, full-chested masculine voice of the type you don't hear too often
these days, mainly from the likes of Jaheim, and to a degree, Anthony Hamilton. In short, it is a classic soul voice harking back to Teddy Pendergrass and Levi Stubbs.
I read an interview in Echoes magazine in which Marcell says he will be branching out and performing as a solo artist, partly out of necessity it seems, given the realities for even a self-contained band to travel these days. But he says he and the group will continue to collaborate in the studio, so all is not lost. And he didn't rule out performing together. So Marcell & The Truth show that it can be done; you can have a self-contained R & B band these days. Tre & The Revelations are doing the same so hopefully it is a trend. So I say: let a thousand bands bloom!
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