Warren Kime

Originating in Chicago, Warren Kime served as orchestra leader, trumpeter, flügelhornist, and arranger before submitting a tape to Command that led to his striking arrival on a major imprint. Three singular and energetic Brass Impact LPs followed—Brass Impact, Explosive Brass Impact, and Goin' Someplace!—each built around three principal horn sections of trumpet, flügelhorn, and trombone. In addition to brass and woodwinds, the sessions featured modern rhythm sections and the wordless choruses identified with Esquivel and Bob Thompson, supplied by three female singers, one of them Warren’s wife, Donna Kime.

Kime’s Brass Choir stood among the earliest, most assured, and representative late-’60s realizations of the mod aesthetic then typified by Bob Crewe’s treatment of Music to Watch Girls By. Remove most Latin ingredients from Herb Alpert, add the perky eccentricity of Esquivel’s chorus, and the resulting sound matches Brass Impact, which indeed carries impact. Certain arrangements of contemporaneous sambas even reach the bombast heard in Quincy Jones’ and Roland Kirk’s classic Soul Bossa Nova, yet without its soul. Kime appears to have found Command in the interval between its stereo and quadrophonic preoccupations, concentrating instead on shaping the now sound as easy listening for parents of the Woodstock generation. ABC/Command issued the two-fer Dynamic Brass Impact in 1973.