“I Don’t Want Nobody To Give Me Nothing (Open Up The Door, I’ll Get It Myself)” is James Brown’s political manifesto, it is why he wasn’t thrilled with affirmative action, with the Democratic party, it manifested a youth of hard work followed by years of deep reaching paranoia that found him burying his money in the backyard because he didn’t trust the banks.
And this deep seated distrust roared out with a “don’t give me integration, give me communication” in 1969 with Maceo Parker on tenor sax and the Collins Brothers on guitar and bass: best Brown band ever. Brown was a man who struggled through ridiculous poverty to get where he went and that sense of struggle to achieve influenced his sense of Black destiny through Black achievement was so powerful even MLK couldn’t bend it.
45 years later, Tomas Doncker introduces his latest signing, the sax maniac himself James Chance, with this terrific cover of the Brown classic. From the opening gong through the battling Saxes and Chances superb vocal dynamic it is a heartfelt tribute to Chance’s biggest influence (Jahn Xavier once told me Chance had the greatest James Brown collection he’d ever seen). This “I Don’t Want Nobody” is a steady groove with skronking in the song break and Chance yelping and sweating through the track; it is the second time Chance has recorded the classic but this latest version is the better of the two; Chance is in tremendous form here on a recording made late last week.
For Doncker and his all stars, the metaphor for their dealings with the music business is self-evident and if this version is anything to go by, it seems to me there is little doubt they’ll be getting it themselves sooner or later. The problem with the music is magnified by the lack of attention the mainstream press gives to what is debatably the best house of funk on the planet right now. If you want further proof, they are performing at the Cutting Room tonight, Tuesday, March 11th, 2014!
Grade: A
