Jive Train by Jive Train

Jive Train has shared the stage with many well known performers including the Temptations, Rockin' Doopsie, Jr, and Charmaine Neville. Jive Train is happy to be sponsored by Budweiser, the king of Beers.

Terms like "funk" and "soul" are overused these days. Here in the still-diapered 21st Century, anyone with a computer can program a "funky" rhythm, maybe one so funky that no human could actually perform it. Countless artists sample soul hits from the past and incorporate them into "new" songs, in an effort to cash in on some of the magic of those original performances. R&B music these days has polarized into two camps: one wants to simultaneously remind you how tough life is on the hip-hop, cracked-up streets and how much you should want all the money and cars the singer has made by contributing to the cracked-up streets. The other functions like Muzak music did for your parents: a soothing, mindless, "quiet-storm" stew of sensuality substituted for substance. With a few exceptions, today's R&B singers have replaced real expression with mere sex appeal and vocal gymnastics.

George Clinton defined funk as "the antithesis of everything sterile, one-dimensional, monochromatic, arrhythmic and otherwise against freedom of bodily expression in the known universe." He was onto something. Back in the day, when Sly Stone made a million dancing feet trample the artificial wall between R&B and Rock, when James Brown brought the intensity of a voodoo loa ceremony onto the dance floor, when Marvin Gaye reminded us that we're all inescapably connected to our bodies, when Stevie Wonder taught us how Cole Porter-level songwriting could be re-imagined with an infectious, down-and-dirty groove, when Otis Redding showed what it meant to reach deep inside, down to the center of the spirit and pull out something raw and magical, "Soul" and "Funk" had meaning. Those artists all got rich playing music, but they are legends today because they didn't do it for the money; they did it because they had something to say. They had something they couldn't not say. They had soul.

Soul isn't about race. It isn't about posing. It isn't about driving a Mercedes. It isn't about following a formula. Soul is self-explanatory; it's about the soul itself. It's what the Spanish poet Lorca called "Duende:" the "mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher explains."

This is what Jive Train is after. Jive Train is four humans caught up in the quest for Soul. A Jive Train show is an invocation of the days when performer and audience worked together to attain an elevated state: a transporting ecstasy; a shared vision of how the world ought to be; an almost spiritual release through the power of funk. It's what Sly Stone was talking about when he sang, "I want to take you higher!"

A Jive Train performance is a theatrical event, filled with "retro" cultural artifacts from the 60's and 70's, but not for the sake of mere nostalgia. The band uses these elements to invoke a time before we lost faith. A time when Blacks and Whites came together in the belief that "Dancin' in the Streets" could change the world that the unifying energy of the party could blow away the barriers we've constructed between races and individuals.

So whether they're pumping out the funk of Curtis Mayfield's "Superfly" or jamming on one of their show-stopping original tunes, these four guys pour everything they have into reminding their audience that each of us carries three "souls": one Soul in the center of our "self," and two soles at the bottoms of our feet. Jive Train works to move all three.

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