Fred Wesley

Trombonist Fred Wesley gained renown as the most visible supporting player anywhere while serving for years as musical director of the J.B.'s, the storied ensemble behind soul icon James Brown, where he shaped elastic rhythms and supplied incisive, meticulously placed solos that helped codify funk itself. He entered the world on July 4, 1943, in Columbus, Georgia, and grew up in Mobile, Alabama. At three he took classical piano lessons from his grandmother, herself a music instructor, yet he gravitated more toward the big-band repertoire favored by his father, Fred Wesley, Sr., who also headed the music department at Mobile Central High School. Wesley, Jr. stayed at the keyboard until middle school, switching first to trumpet and then to trombone. His professional bow came at twelve in a big band directed by school music teacher E.B. Coleman, after which he began sitting in with area R&B groups as well. While enrolled in music studies at Alabama State University, he spent short stints with the Ike & Tina Turner Revue and Hank Ballard & the Midnighters, then entered the U.S. Army, performed with the 55th Army Band, and completed training at the Armed Forces School of Music.

Returning from service in 1967, Wesley launched his own group, the Mastersound, which blended R&B with hard bop. The ensemble dissolved inside a year, and when J.B.'s trumpeter Waymon Reed telephoned to say Brown needed a new trombonist, Wesley took the position. Brown's notoriously controlling methods strained their relationship, producing frequent friction. After recording landmark singles such as "Say It Loud (I'm Black and I'm Proud)," "Licking Stick," and "Mother Popcorn," the trombonist left the J.B.'s at the end of 1969, worked briefly with Sam & the Goodtimers, then rejoined Brown's organization in early 1971 and took over as musical director and arranger. His input on key funk releases including Black Caesar, Slaughter's Big Rip-Off, and The Payback proved essential: together with bandmates such as Maceo Parker and Bootsy Collins, he guided Brown's decisive shift from soul into funk, setting the pattern for the R&B of the coming decade. "I completed [Brown's] creations, I followed his blueprints," Wesley later said. "He would give me horn things to write, but sometimes maybe it would be incoherent musically and I would have to straighten it out, so to speak. When it came out of my brain, it would be a lot of James Brown's ideas and my organization." Wesley also penned several Brown successes such as "Doin' It to Death" and "Papa Don't Take No Mess," and fronted multiple J.B.'s albums including the classic Damn Right I Am Somebody and Breakin' Bread. Persistent creative and monetary disagreements finally ended the partnership in 1975.

Wesley aligned with George Clinton's Parliament-Funkadelic in time for the landmark Mothership Connection LP. Clinton, unlike Brown, actively supported outside ventures by his associates and co-wrote most tracks on Wesley's first official solo effort, the 1977 release A Blow for Me, a Toot for You, issued under the name Fred Wesley & the Horny Horns. Following a second solo album, 1979's Say Blow by Blow Backwards, Wesley departed the P-Funk orbit to revisit jazz, his earliest passion. He entered the Count Basie Orchestra and simultaneously produced the self-titled debut by R&B ensemble Kameleon. After relocating to Hollywood in 1981, he worked as a session player on recordings led by Earth, Wind & Fire, Barry White, and the Gap Band, and supplied arrangements for Curtis Mayfield and Terry Callier. He resumed solo activity with the 1990 jazz album New Friends and issued additional straight-ahead jazz projects through the following decade. As his distinctive syncopated approach became central to hip-hop through repeated sampling of his earlier James Brown sides, Wesley also performed with fellow Brown veterans Maceo Parker and Pee Wee Ellis in the JB Horns before establishing the Fred Wesley Group in 1996. His autobiography, Hit Me, Fred: Recollections of a Sideman, appeared in 2002. He followed with the 2010 album With a Little Help from My Friends on BHM Records and simultaneously taught as an adjunct professor of jazz studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He maintained an active touring schedule through the 2010s and issued the joint album Generations with Leonardo Corradi and Tony Match in 2015.