THE PHARAOHS — The Awakening (review)

THE PHARAOHS — The Awakening album cover Album · 1971 · Funk Jazz Buy this album from MMA partners
4/5 ·
Sean Trane
This is drummer Maurice White’s previous group to the better-known Earth Wind & Fire, and Awakening is their sole album, but this writer finds it superior to anything EW&F ever did. Indeed this excellent fusion of funk and jazz is one of the genre’s best, but it shouldn’t be mixed with stuff like Hancock’s Head Hunters or Miles’ On The Corner album, because Pharaohs’ works is somehow closer to brass funk rock than to real jazz-derived fusion. Well they sound like an ethnic African or world version of Chicago or early Kool & The Gang stuff, but Mombassa albums are not sonically far away either. With as much as eight wind players and some five percussion beaters (some are thankfully combining the two), you’ll easily understand just how rhythmic their 18-men music can be.

Fast and furious percussions, funky bass and enthralling jazzy horns are opening the outstanding 8-mins Damballa, which also features some short tribal chants interventions between spell-binding trumpet and sax solos for added drama. AWESOME!! No less impressive is the almost exclusively percussion track Ibo, but unfortunately the following Tracks Of My Tears is a sappy soul Motown affair ala future Commodores, which is out of the album’s context, if you ask me. The interesting ultra-funky Black Enuff is unfortunately a little short for my tastes, but can these guys rawk, dude!!

On the flipside, only two tracks, the first of which is the 6-mins Freedom Road, which could find space on an early Chicago album, probably where the guitar sweats out most from the group’s pores. The 13-mins+ closer Great House is the second real highlight of the album, a mainly-instrumental funky groove that allows a superb series of interplay between all concerned, but the band is really tightly bound into the given direction.

Sonically, if you can see EW&F’s debut or K&tG’s debut, you won’t be far away from reality, but with a little extra African touch (there are at least five Africans in the group) for added measure. Actually I find Awakening better than both the albums I just mentioned
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