The Assanand Music Shop on Nairobi’s Government Road (Moi Avenue) used to be a weekly stop for me back in the mid 1970s.
It was the principal point to check what had just been released by the local companies holding fort for international repertoire owning companies. It was also a usual stop for local and regional musicians in search of brand name musical equipment. A true culture stop for the groove barons.
Just behind the counter stood a soft spoken gentleman called Arun. Behind him were the latest releases from Polydor and CBS and others. So sometime in 1975, I stepped into the shop. He immediately smiled at me and without a word picked an album behind him and told me "You’ll love this!”
It was an odd looking album. The graphics were in monogram. Some afro’ed black cats standing and one or two in various degrees of levitation. The title read “That’s the Way of the World”. The Group’s name was Earth, Wind and Fire. My usual instincts back then were to always sample whatever appeared unfamiliar via a listening booth and headphones. Not this time. I had Arun’s word. That was good enough for me. And boy, was he right!
That was my introduction to Maurice White, his band and their music.
It was much much later that I found out a movie carrying the same name was released in America. Harvey Keitel starred in the story of a hotshot record producer’s struggles with art and mammon. The soundtrack was by Earth, Wind and Fire, who also appear in the movie as the Group, a band with a ground breaking sound but not enough commercial appeal. Keitel is ordered by his music biz bosses, who answer to mob heavies, to concentrate his formidable knob-turning prowess on some Carpenters rip-offs. Aaah. The movie bombed big time. But the music, boy the music. To this day nothing even compares.
So when news of Maurice White's passing last week drifted across the face of the world, the loss to the craft of making beautiful music jolted me in much the same way the passing of Elvis Presley, Curtis Mayfield, James Brown, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston did.
Earth, Wind and Fire have been sampled ad nauseum by the latter day plastic heroes whose creative impulse is augmented by computer software.
So for those who may not know, Maurice White was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1941. He grew up in South Memphis, where he lived with his grandmother in the Foote Homes Projects and was a childhood friend of Booker T Jones, with whom he formed a “cookin’ little band” while attending Booker T. Washington High School. He made frequent trips to Chicago to visit his mother, Edna, and stepfather, Verdine Adams, who was a doctor and occasional saxophonist. In his teenage years, he moved to Chicago and studied at the Chicago Conservatory of Music, and played drums in local nightclubs.
By 1966, he had joined the Ramsey Lewis Trio, replacing Isaac 'Red' Holt as the drummer. In 1969, White left the Trio and joined his two friends, Wade Flemons and Don Whitehead, to form a songwriting team who wrote songs for commercials in the Chicago area. The three friends got a recording contract with Capitol Records and called themselves the Salty Peppers. White then moved from Chicago to Los Angeles, and altered the name of the band to Earth, Wind & Fire, the band’s new name reflecting the elements in his astrological chart.
Maurice developed Parkinson’s disease and stopped touring with the band in the 1990s. His younger brother, Verdine, an original member of Earth, Wind & Fire, still tours with the band as its bassist and a backing vocalist.