Bill Cosby Presents Badfoot Brown And
The Bunions Bradford Funeral & Marching Band
This album is a lost classic. It's an incredibly underrated very deep jazz-funk
album. Cosby handles keys on this one. The whole album consists of 2 instrumental
tracks, "Martin's Funeral" and "Hybish Shybish", which are both great. The
standout track is "Martin's Funeral", about the death of Martin Luther King,
and it has a very mournful feel that can really touch you. It has a slow
and moody rhythm but kicks in with a great slow groove right from the start,
then builds. Tribe Called Quest sampled "Martin's Funeral" for We Can Get
Down. The bonus is that the second side "Hybish, Shybish" is also good,
with an upbeat trippy kind of psychedelic soul-jazz feel, and provides a
nice contrast to the A-side. The production is really unusual. The whole
album has a very strange off-kilter sound to it, like it was recorded in
a huge hall somewhere. I love it. Unfortunately, this album is very hard
to find these days & has never been on CD. This is worth checking out, and
goes to show that Bill Cosby (who plays electric piano here) was not just
a comedian. This record was dedicated to the late Martin Luther King, Jr.
On the inside cover, there's a long essay about how the assassination of
King affected Cosby and how it eventually led to the title and recording
of this album. This is an original 1971 LP on UNI Records (73080) and is
pristine, STILL FACTORY SEALED!
