Live at the Museum of Modern Art

Even by the standards of strange collector archive finds, this is unusual: a previously unreleased, indeed likely previously unknown, live concert from the early 1970s at New York's Museum of Modern Art by an obscure funk band themselves known only to collectors. It's fairly hot, too, and pretty well recorded, the sound falling only the smallest of tads short of ideal. The Pazant Brothers played mostly instrumental soul-funk on this date, with a heavier touch of jazz than most such early-'70s outfits; a couple of them, after all, had done time with Lionel Hampton. There's almost a New Orleans marching band-meets-James Brown tinge to some of the horns, the sassy staccato breaks doing much to set them apart from other groups of the period. The tracks do get a little similar-sounding over the course of this hour-long groovefest, but it's a good blend of original material and eclectic, funkified covers, including the Rascals' "Groovin'," Martha & the Vandellas' "Dancing in the Streets," Nat Adderley's "Work Song," and, in far more of a left-field shot, Melanie's "Momma Momma." Betty Barney takes vocals on the three non-instrumental numbers (one of them being "Momma, Momma"), but she's only an average soul singer, and those tracks are actually less interesting than the instrumental workouts. Strangest of all is hearing the dignified pre-song announcements -- "now we'd like to do another original number of ours, it's a very, as you say, funky thing...it's entitled "'Skunk Juice'" intones one band member with the dignity of an awards presentation, to zero audible audience response. It might have been an odd combination of artist and venue, but it's a good thing the tapes were running. It makes you wonder, too, just how many other unsuspected off-the-wall live tapes of this sort are going to somehow eventually emerge into daylight. ~ Richie Unterberger