Sara Stojev //

The jubilee 30th Nišville Jazz Festival officially started its main program on Thursday, July 15th, at Niš Fortress. The lineup of musicians this year has made the crowd super excited. Among the great performers, Brooklyn Funk Essentials took the Earth/Sky main stage.

Brooklyn Funk Essentials has been grooving restlessly for more than three decades. The band’s founders, Arthur Baker and Lati Kronlund, started the group in the early 1990s in Brooklyn, creating a funk fusion of all the genres that the New York scene at that time had to offer. The members of this group have changed over the years, except for Lati, but the sound and its uniqueness have continued to evolve. The band has released seven albums so far, each one different from the last, whether in theme, melody, or genre.

On the day of their performance at the Nišville Jazz Festival, we had the chance to talk with Lati Kronlund (guitar, bass), Desmond Foster (guitar and lead vocals), and Alison Limerick (lead vocals) about their career, albums, creative process, and more.

The band was formed in the early 1990s in New York, at a time when all the genres you incorporate were thriving, and the New York scene was setting those trends. How would you describe that era and music scene? How did Brooklyn Funk Essentials fit into it?

Desmond: A lot of musicians were from all over the radius, so we had a lot of skills from jazz, to funk to R&B, to hip hop, to rap, poets, you know, all their types of cultures. So this was the perfect thing to have, at that time.

With such a fluid lineup over the years, how do you maintain a cohesive sound while incorporating new influences?

Alison: I think the main tie for all that is Lati, It was his original concept along with Arthur Baker. He’s at the center of the writing, and the production, and the choice of musicians even. He’s like the ringmaster in a fantastic cold circus. And he cracks the whip when he needs to, and he trains all the lions and the tigers and the bears. We bring our game of course, but overall it’s all under his tent to continue the analysis, his tent of his idea. I think it’s probably that the concept was very loose at the beginning because it started as a project, a writing project, and then they pulled in all these artists, musicians, and performers. I think then it would have coalesced to what Lati then knew was the sound of the band. And Lati has, through musicians changing and through different times and different influences and that whole period where they made the Turkish album. But it’s still all held together by Lati and his vision.

Has Lati’s role changed over the years, especially as new members have joined?

Alison: I mean, he’s had people that have been musical directors, and they have brought an influence to how songs sound, especially when they’re live. And then for this last iteration of the band, there used to be up to 15 people in the band at one point, and now it’s stripped back to its purest essentials. It is essentially the Brooklyn Funk Essentials. And Lati has still managed through us and through the music to keep the flavor the same. We make sure that we bring the funk, and the musicians are astonishing. I love working with this group of people and everybody that’s had a hand in making the albums. When we play live, we have extra percussion sometimes, and we have extra trumpeters sometimes. But yes, Lati keeps the flavor.

What would you say is unique in your sound that has stood the test of time?

Desmond: I think it’s just the influence of everybody coming from all jaundice. And we bring it all together. We all have experience with lots of stuff. Alison is a singer and a writer, hence the surname. And, most of us, you know, like, we’re singers and players. So Alison leads us, and we sort of bring this cosmopolitan, kind of musical sound that invites reggae, invites punk.

Alison: We could do punk if we want. In fact, there are some songs that we do that get very punky. I think we do. But, yeah, it is the musicians coming together and enjoying each other that makes the audience say that people have said that we always look like we are having fun on stage, and it’s because we are having fun on stage. We really love to see that. It really matters, I think.

Funk is often associated with a powerful live experience. How do you translate the energy of your live performances into your studio recordings?

Alison: We did a lot of our last album live. We got into it. It’s usually that you write the song and then somebody will put down a bit and somebody else will put down a bit and then the song is made. And this time, we need to get that live feel on the record. So we decided to do it in a studio. I mean, I was singing in the control booth because you don’t wanna have the vocals spilling onto drums playing and because everything else can go direct. But having people in the room playing with you, it’s like an orchestra. The feeling changes in the moment. So that take is unique. And everybody feels the dynamics of the song at the same time. You don’t have to apply for it later on. You don’t have to understand it, like, figure out what’s going on and then do it. It just happens organically. And that’s how you get that live feel onto and condense it onto an album.

Desmond: We just came together as musicians. Everybody held their position. And we just decided to groove together.

Alison: That’s how it was written as well. You got into this instead of somebody coming with a song. Well, some songs came on. I’ve got an idea, and then somebody else got an idea. But then you get together and you fine tune it. You work out what the horn parts are gonna be, where the vocals are gonna go, and all of that changes and it influences the song. And then you have something that’s very fresh, but very unique to the band as it is now.

With so many diverse influences in your music, how do you choose which elements to blend into your songs?

Desmond: You don’t really choose. It just happens, actually. Whichever sounds that rise to the top of the soup. If we love that one, that’s it. Alison then writes the lyrics.

Alison: Hux, the drummer, had an idea, and he had this groove. He then presented it to the band, and it started coming together. They decided they needed a vocal on this. It was one of those things where you have that song, you have a rough demo of the song. After the demo, I went to bed one night and I woke up at 3 a.m. with the song going, and it needs to be written now. I had to whisper into my dictaphone right away because we were passionate. We needed to do the song that needed to be written. The band had presented me with the song and there was just very there was no choice. The song had to be written.

Each of your albums has an interesting story behind it. How do you decide on the direction of a new album?

Lati: The first one was interesting because it was an accident. And I think the reason why it happened was because it was always my dream to come to New York and play in a funk band. So I didn’t deliberately try to do that. But since that was in my head, it happened.

In the last album we did, we had a very solid group. Allison was in it. You know, we had Desmond, and we had just found Ebba, who was 23 at the time, and she delivered a youthful source of energy. And it was during the pandemic. So we just played. The gigs are canceled, so let’s just go to the rehearsal room and play. So we played, and we recorded everything. So it just happened. That’s why it’s called Intuition because it happened intuitively.

Out of all your albums, In the Buzzbag really stands out with its Middle Eastern melodies and themes. Can you share with us the process of making this album?

Lati: So we played in Istanbul. We played a festival in Istanbul in 1996. It was called the Istanbul Jazz Festival, sort of similar to this one. Our sound engineer had some Turkish connections. So he suggested that we should do, as an encore, a traditional Turkish song in a funk version. So we did 2 encores, and then we came back for the 3rd because we hadn’t really rehearsed it. But we came back, and we did that. People went nuts for that, absolutely nuts. So after the show, the promoters of the festival said ‘Look. You gotta come back and record that song because it’ll be massive’. So we did. We came back 2 years later, and it wasn’t just one song. It was a whole album. Then they also wanted us to work with this band, with 13 members, and there were 12 of us. So there were 25 people in the studio at the same time. And they didn’t speak any English, and we didn’t speak any Turkish. But we just communicated with music, and that’s how that album happened.

What can fans expect from Brooklyn Funk Essentials in the coming years? Are there any upcoming projects or collaborations you’re particularly excited about?

Lati: Well, we’ve just started to think about going back and recording a new record, so something will come up.