60 Is the New 40: Frankie Beverly
So we're at the Koka Booth Amphitheatre in Cary, North Carolina, a little bedroom community midway between Durham and Raleigh. Nothing but a sea of black folk, all congregating to see Mint Condition and the headliner Maze featuring Frankie Beverly. In many ways the pairing was inspired, much like the tour that sent Earth, Wind & Fire out with Chicago a few years ago (it's about the horn sections, if you been sleeping on '70s-era Chicago). Though Mint Condition and Maze have never achieved the crossover success of EWF, nevertheless both groups are the epitome of the self-contained R&B band - and two of the few examples of such bands to find lasting success since the late 1970s. Both bands are fronted by singular vocalists, Stokley Williams and Frankie Beverley, who in any other universe would have long decided to step out on their own and nobody would begrudge them. But taking a page out of the Levi Stubbs and Joe Ligon books on keeping the band together, Williams and Beverly have remained committed to their bands. For Beverley that's meant 30 years of commitment and add a decade for the years that he toiled with Raw Soul, the precursor to Maze.
Mint Condition dropped The Luxury Brown two years ago and are currently in the studio recording a follow-up. As opening acts go, you'll find few as professional and accomplished as Mint Condition. The audience was clearly excited as the band ran down some of its more well known hits like "Pretty Brown Eyes," "You Send Me Swinging" and "What Kind of Man Would I Be" and a little less enamored with some of the material from Luxury Brown, which comes closer to the avant-garde R&B that some of us thought Mint Condition represented when they first hit in 1991. Good music aside it was clear after about a half-hour that folks were ready to get their Frankie Beverly on.
Now for some perspective; Maze hasn't released any new material since 1993 and have been without a recording contract for more than a decade. Lead singer Frankie Beverly is 60 years old. The group has never had a song that cracked the Top 20 on the Hot 100 charts. And yet the audience that came together on Friday night couldn't wait long enough for the group to hit the stage greeting them with a standing ovation. Maze featuring Frankie Beverly is the closest thing that Black America has to a Grateful Dead and no doubt given the number of women who rushed the stage to get a piece of Beverly--who is attractive in that Ed Bradley vein--Maze likely has its own set of traveling (male and female) groupies.
As such the success of Maze speaks as much about the quality of the music--tracks like "Back in Stride", "Joy and Pain" (which made the group relevant to Generation Hip-hop courtesy of Rob Base) and "Before I Let Go" are simply timeless--as it does the notions of community that undergirded the music in the first place. A Frankie Beverly concert presents more of an integrated class portrait of contemporary Black America than many black churches do as the group appeals to the black middle class's decidedly upscale view of itself as well as the need of working class folk to revisit their humanity The same goes for the intergenerational dynamic--more than a few folks in the house--including my boy Bomani Jones--weren't even born before Maze was discovered by Marvin Gaye in a Bay Area club in 1976. Is Frankie Beverly and Maze a great testament to the genius of black music? Probably not, but Maze is music to "people to"--the kind of music where strangers can "shake a hand, shake a hand" and go home knowing that a good time was had. Here's to hoping that Frankie "60-is-the-new-40" Beverly has more than a few years on stage left in that 60-year-old body.
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Comments
1.
Catrina Evans says:
Will someone please give Frankie an award. He is a legend, and it's sad that not even our black industry folks have nominated him.
06/19/2007 at 9:43 PM