Andrew White – Who Got De Fonk?
Given that I’ve only got an hour for “Moods” these days on Artform Radio, as soon as I made the decision to do a show focused on some of the artists we’d lost in 2020, I knew I had have some hard choices in terms of who and what made it in. Though I play the more well known 45 version of “Who Got De Funk?” in the show, this live version recorded in 1979, from his 1981 private press (his own label, Andrew’s Music) release “Fonk Update” is by far my favorite. The problem, at least when you only have 50 minutes to work with of music, is that all three parts together, with the chatter, is a full 15 minutes. But I do love it so. The multiple intros about the band members searching high and low for the “Fonk,” cracked me up, especially when they get to a local safeway and are asked by the manager to spell it, and then how things rhythmically shift so distinctly on the different versions, which, aside from the basic melody, sound nothing like the 1973 original (though there’s an even better open drum break, at least to my ears).
When I close my eyes, I can still see Cool Chris at Groove Merchant playing this in the store the very first time I heard it in the early 2000s. White was a fairly underrated player during his day, and I’ve passed on a fair amount of his self-released records. But this one will always have a special place in my heart. RIP