Saturday Night – Royal Family Presents: Soulive!
Just like keyboardist Neal Evans’ two hands—simultaneously pumping out the low end and reaching for those oscillating high notes—organ trio Soulive has spent the last decade balancing a reverence for the past with a conviction to push music into its own funky future.
When brothers Neal and Alan Evans first invited guitarist Eric Krasno to get down at their Woodstock, NY studio (a session that led to the trio’s break-out record Get Down! in 1999), it was out of mutual love for the great soul-jazz organ trios of the ’60s and ’70s (Jimmy Smith, Groove Holmes, Brother Jack McDuff). Now, a decade into the band’s career, which has seen forays into hip-hop, reggae, R&B, blues, rock and soul, eras featuring horns and a vocalist, and collaborations with artists as diverse as Derek Trucks, Joshua Redman, Robert Randolph and Talib Kweli, it was another shared love that brought the trio to drummer Alan’s Playonbrother Studio to record their latest, Rubber Soulive.
“We’ve always been big Beatles fans,” says Krasno, who had been working on an arrangement of “Get Back” for his recent solo record Reminisce when all those remastered Beatles records came out last year. The stuff was on heavy rotation in the van when the band found itself with four days off mid-tour. For Halloween, they’d made a crazy show at the DC zoo even crazier by trying out an all-Beatles set and decided the material was so fun it had to be put to wax. “We thought about doing all of Rubber Soul,” Krasno says, “but that band has so many great tunes. We picked the ones that lent themselves well to our sound, and others where we could add the Soulive flavor.”
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