This short, sweet piece, which I had to cull from a 2 hour interview with Melvin, ran in the Hartford Advocate the week of September 13th.

Back with the Boogaloo
Funky guitar wizard Melvin Sparks takes his trio to Manchester
By Bill Carbone

The Melvin Sparks Band

"I come from a musical family," says Melvin Sparks, a 40-year veteran of New York's music scene and quite possibly the world's funkiest guitar virtuoso, in a recent interview. "My mother was a gospel singer who loved jazz and both of my older brothers were professional jazz musicians."

In his late teens Sparks beat a path out of his Houston home with the Upsetters, then the backing band to Little Richard and just about everyone else, rode the bus with the opening band's guitarist, Jimi Hendrix, and, in 1967, settled in New York City.

Although he may have shared a bench with Jimi, Sparks didn't follow his musical path. He plays a hollow body straight into his amp, clean and dry. Perched on whatever stool the club rustles up for him, Melvin balances his guitar on his thigh — no strap — and unleashes metronomic runs of 16th note patterns that unfold first into sextuplets and, almost unimaginably, again into 32nd notes. So surgically precise are Sparks' solos that his actual forte, rhythm playing, is overlooked by many. Sparks casts a fishnet over his group with his comping, easing them into his flawless grid and fashioning a collective pocket that is cause for celebration.

"My comping is basically what got me all my work, more than reading and soloing," Sparks remarks. "Whatever I play I get into the rhythm; I can play things way above it but my mind and body never loses the rhythm."

Soon after he relocated to New York, Sparks was playing in the bands of the jazz legends whose albums were his inspiration. "George Benson recommended me for the job with Jack McDuff; then I started making records," recalls Sparks. "The first one was with McDuff and Jimmy Witherspoon, then Dr. Lonnie Smith, but the major stuff was when I started recording with Lou Donaldson and did Everything I Play Going to be Funky. And the big hit for me was Charles Earland's 'Black Talk.' It even crossed over and Caucasians picked up on it. It put me on the map."

During this period Sparks also gigged with an array of musicians including Pharaoh Sanders, Babatunde Olatunji, Sam Rivers and Paul Chambers.

"None of that stuff got recorded," says Sparks chuckling. "Out of the 130 or so records I've made, 95 percent of them are with organ."

The "with organ" music to which Sparks refers is a style now often called "acid jazz" or "boogaloo," but as he recalls, "they used to call that music fusion because it was James Brown rhythms with jazz fused on top."

Sparks' brand of fusion kept him busy touring and recording as both a sideman and a leader until, in what he considers a direct result of the Reagan era, the scene disintegrated in the early '80s. For nearly a decade he worked wedding bands until a friend contacted him upon returning from Europe.

Sparks remembers, "He asked me 'don't you know that your music is just burning up in Europe?' and gave me an imported CD of my music. He said it was selling like hotcakes over there"

Soon after Sparks' tunes and licks began reappearing in the States as well, both via hip-hop sampling of the original records (think early Tribe Called Quest), and by way of a new generation of bands such as the Greyboy Allstars and Soulive. Now Sparks is back too, performing classic tunes from the genre in a trio along with drums and organ.