Nile Rodgers has hailed Thom Bell as “one of many best musical geniuses of our time”.
The Grammy Award-winning producer – who was finest generally known as one of many Mighty Three co-creators of the Sound of Philadelphia together with Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff – handed away on Thursday (22.12.22) on the age of 79 and the Stylish star has admitted he all the time “worshipped” the songwriter and arranger.
He instructed Rolling Stone journal: I worshipped Thom Bell. He was one of many best musical geniuses of our time. I consider him in the identical manner as Stevie Surprise or Burt Bacharach or Lennon and McCartney. He was on that degree.
“Typically folks take music without any consideration, ‘It’s a pop track.’ However if you dissect it and actually hearken to it and take it aside and perceive it on a granular degree, these data he made have among the finest preparations you may think about, up there with Bacharach, Mancini, and Bach.”
Nile praised Thom for taking his songs away from the “conventional” R’n’B components, which he credited to him being a “significantly schooled musician”.
He added: “By listening to his preparations, instrumentation, and orchestration, you may inform Thom was classically educated, a significantly schooled musician.
“Should you checked out conventional R’n’B data on the time, they had been extra gospel and blues based mostly, if you’ll. That wasn’t the place Thom was coming from. He represented an air of sophistication and magnificence. It was soul music that was orchestral and exquisite.
“At any time when I’d see the identify Thom Bell on the data, I knew the music was going to be stylish and soulful.”
And the 70-year-old musician admitted Thom had a big impact on his personal profession.
He mentioned: “That sound was a lot part of music I cherished and revered that once I lastly shaped my very own band, we believed we had been the following technology of Black upward mobility. We weren’t a gutbucket funk band. We weren’t the Ohio Gamers or Earth, Wind and Hearth. We had been completely Thom Bell-inspired, and that’s why we had strings and Luther Vandross as our background singer.
“It was stylish, which is what Thom represented to me and to lots of different folks. This was not simply hardcore, sweaty funk and R’n’B. This was the start of a shimmery, very elegant kind of R’n’B, which was the inspiration for every thing that I’d do in my band Stylish.”
