Biography
Trombonist Fred Wesley joined forces with saxophonist Maceo Parker and trumpeters Richard "Kush" Griffith and Rick Gardner to form Fred Wesley & the Horny Horns, a Parliament/Funkadelic offshoot that drew George Clinton's attention during the late 1970s. At the time the group served as the primary horn section for Parliament/Funkadelic while also supporting other Clinton-linked acts such as Parlet, the Brides of Funkenstein, and Bootsy's Rubber Band under singer Bootsy Collins. Wesley and Parker, the latter handling both tenor and alto saxophone, had already immersed themselves in hardcore funk and soul well before entering Clinton's orbit, having first gained prominence in the 1960s through their work with James Brown, the Godfather of Soul. Like Brown, who hailed from Augusta, Georgia, both musicians came from the Deep South: Wesley was born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1944, and Parker, born a year earlier in North Carolina, entered Brown's horn section alongside him in the early 1960s while still in their twenties. Brown, celebrated as the Hardest Working Man in Show Business, maintained an exacting reputation that placed heavy demands on his players, yet Wesley and Parker met those standards as versatile musicians equally at home with jazz, soul, and funk. Although Brown focused chiefly on R&B, his longstanding affinity for jazz made their jazz proficiency especially valuable to him. Throughout the 1960s and into the early 1970s they contributed to numerous landmark Brown recordings. By 1976, however, they had departed Brown's organization to align with another funk pioneer deeply shaped by Brown's innovations, George Clinton. Clinton himself pushed funk forward, and their arrival in Parliament/Funkadelic's horn section kept them at the genre's forefront. After appearing on the 1976 Parliament albums The Mothership Connection and The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein as well as Bootsy Collins' Stretchin' Out in Bootsy's Rubber Band, Clinton launched the dedicated spin-off project Fred Wesley & the Horny Horns. Clinton and Collins produced the ensemble's debut, A Blow for Me, A Toot for You, issued by Atlantic in 1977; the set blended straight p-funk with jazz-funk instrumentals. The follow-up, Say Blow by Blow Backwards, arrived on the same label in 1979 under the joint production of Wesley, Clinton, and Collins and similarly moved between vocal p-funk and instrumental soul-jazz. Though neither release matched the commercial reach of Parliament and Funkadelic albums, both found favor among committed p-funk enthusiasts. Even after Clinton abandoned the Parliament and Funkadelic names in 1982 to record strictly as a solo artist, followers continued to refer to his horn section as the Horny Horns. In the 1990s Wesley and Parker each issued jazz-focused instrumental albums, Wesley on Antilles and Parker on Verve, while also undertaking session work for assorted artists.
Albums
