The Brothers/Silvetti

Listen/Download The Brothers – Are You Ready For This

Listen/Download Silvetti – Spring Rain

Greetings all

I hope you’re ready to get your groove on this week.

Having done a lot of reading about (and an exponential amount of listening to) the Northern Soul phenomenon over the last decade or so, something that I discovered – along with a grip of amazing music – is that the musical essence of that scene is not at as monolithic as you might think.

Surely there is a “Northern” sound, but if you dig into the annals, especially in the 1970s explosion in the UK, you discover that some of the DJs and the dancers had open minds (and ears).

Here in the US, where exposure to ‘Northern Soul’ is often tied directly to the mod/60s bag (hewing closer to the Manchester-based 60s scene at the Twisted Wheel, which was instrumental in the development of a rare soul scene in the UK), the idea of hearing a Philadelphia International side, or any other disco-identified sound, is all but blasphemous.

However, take a look at the playlists of many of the biggest Northern clubs in the 70s, and you alongside the ultra-rare Motown-influenced ish, you will also see records – then new – that many soul fans today would file off to the side as ‘disco’.

What a lot of people ignore (to their own peril) is that a much of the music associated with early disco culture is by any other name, soul music. Your anoraks/trainspotters/”experts”/killjoys will try to convince you that little after the end of the 60s is worth listening to, but like everyone else, they are wrong from time to time.

When they do that, they forget that Northern Soul was once a vibrant, living, breathing scene, and above all a dancer’s scene and if a record brought people out onto the floor, that’s all that mattered.

Today I bring you two examples of records that were created for disco dance floors and were absorbed into the Northern Soul scene.

The first, ‘Are You Ready For This’ by the Brothers is a solid, four on the floor dancer with the kind of sweeping, melodic string flourished that the soulies really dug.

The Brothers were a New York based studio creation, built around producer Warren Schatz and pianist Bhen Lanzaroni. Their 1975 LP ‘Disco-Soul’ was composed almost entirely of new versions of disco standards by groups like the Ohio Players (the LP features a very cool Hammond driven cover of ‘Fire’), Barry White, Disco Tex, Carol Douglas, and Gloria Gaynor, interspersed with originals by Lanzaroni and Schatz.

‘Are You Ready For This’ was released as a single in the US and the UK, and was picked up by UK DJs where it became a staple at clubs like the Blackpool Mecca (it also seems to have been a minor hit in New York City discos).

The second track I bring you today is ‘Spring Rain’ by Silvetti. Juan Fernando Silvetti Adorno, aka Bebu Silvetti, or just Silvetti, was an Argentinian composer/arranger/producer who had his biggest hit with ‘Spring Rain’ in 1977.

The record was a big hit in US and European discos, but was also brought into the Northern scene (to the consternation of many) by disco-friendly DJs like Ian Levine. Like ‘Are You Ready For This’, ‘Spring Rain’ has a strong beat, and wave upon wave of strings.

As time wore on, and new sounds became popular, and the idea of ‘soul music’ became more expansive – I hesitate to say ‘inclusive’ since there were/are many who would just as soon strangle you than hear a disco record – new terminology was adopted that allowed collectors and DJs to compartmentalize these records into their own genres, like ‘modern soul’, ‘deep funk’, ‘rare groove’ and ‘crossover’. Often times you’ll see announcements for allnighters and weekends in the UK and Europe where these tangential sounds will have separate rooms/dance floors devoted to them.

If you have an open mind policy (like we do here) it’s not at all hard to see the threads that link all of these categories, and to find your way back through their roots, stopping to savor the vast array of records that resist classification (often my favorite kind).

I hope you dig the sounds, and I’ll see you all on Wednesday.

Keep the faith

Larry

 

 

 

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Also, the brand new Funky16Corners ‘Keep Calm and Stay Funky’ stickers have arrived! The stickers are 4″ x 3″ and printed on high quality, glossy stock. They are $2.00 each, with free shipping in the US ($2.00 per order shipping outside of the US). Click here to go to the ordering page.

Also, make sure that you check out the links below to the Be The Match Foundation and POAC (click on the logos for more info).

 

PS Head over to Iron Leg too.

2 Responses to “The Great Disco/Northern Soul Crossover”

1. jb says:

   November 9, 2014 at 3:58 pm

   Your mention of “Are You Ready for This” rang a bell, so I had to go looking: turns out it got some radio play on WNBC in New York in the early summer of 1975, although it doesn’t seem to have charted anywhere else. “Spring Rain” did better on the radio, actually making the Billboard Top 40.

   Thanks for these, sir.

2. Larry says:

   November 9, 2014 at 3:59 pm

   Thanks for the info JB!