In a career spanning seven decades, New Jersey’s denizens of funk and disco, Kool & the Gang, notched up eight Top 40 albums and 20 Top 40 singles on the US pop charts, alongside a swarm of hits on the US R&B chart. Their best known songs included Ladies Night, Jungle Boogie, Summer Madness, Too Hot, Cherish and, above all, their go-everywhere signature tune, Celebration. All of these were co-written by their drummer, George “Funky” Brown, who has died aged 74 after suffering from lung cancer.
He was one of the band’s founders, and was still behind the drum kit for their most recent album earlier this year, People Just Wanna Have Fun, which he also produced while being one of the main songwriters. In his memoir, Too Hot: Kool & the Gang & Me (2023), Brown wrote: “I didn’t know where the music would lead me, but I knew that if I remained focused and persevered, it would happen as God had intended. And it did.”
He was born in Jersey City. His father, George Sr, was in the coal business, and his mother, Eleanor, worked as a maid in Fort Lee, New Jersey. From an early age, George became fascinated with playing the drums, and first used butter knives as makeshift drumsticks to beat time on household objects.
He bought his first drum kit with money he saved from doing a newspaper round, and paid $3 for a drumming lesson “from a gentleman who used to play with the Shirelles”. He recalled how “all my drum sets came from the pawn shop piece by piece until I got with Kool & the Gang”.
In 1964 he became one of the four founding members of the Jazziacs, having been introduced to the saxophonist Ronald Bell and the trumpeter Robert Mickens by the keyboard player Ricky Westfield, who lived in the same building as Brown.
All of them attended Lincoln high school in Jersey City. Their repertoire was originally jazz, drawing inspiration from artists such as John Coltrane and Charlie Parker. Brown modelled his playing on jazz drummers including Buddy Rich and Art Blakey, and in their formative days the group occasionally played with jazz musicians including McCoy Tyner and Pharoah Sanders.
As the group evolved, playing gigs around the New York area, it added additional members, including Dennis “Dee Tee” Thomas on saxophone, Charles Smith on guitar and Ronald’s brother, Robert “Kool” Bell, on keyboards. The group went through several name changes, including the New Dimensions and the Soul Town Band, before settling on Kool & the Gang in 1969.
That year they signed to De-Lite Records, a label started by their manager Gene Redd, and released their debut album, Kool and the Gang, an all-instrumental affair. It reached 43 on the US R&B chart. The group had been adding vocals and elements of funk and R&B to their sound, and their fourth album, Wild and Peaceful (1973), gave them a pair of big hit singles with Jungle Boogie and Hollywood Swinging. These reached Nos 4 and 6 respectively on the pop chart, with Hollywood Swinging topping the R&B chart.
Follow-up albums, including Love & Understanding and The Force, found them treading water commercially, with the group out of sync with the booming disco craze, though they did contribute the track Open Sesame to the Grammy-winning Saturday Night Fever soundtrack (1977). They took remedial measures by hiring the vocalist James “JT” Taylor and recruiting the Brazilian producer Eumir Deodato, who moved them closer to mainstream pop and dance music.
This paid off spectacularly with the album Ladies Night (1979), which topped the R&B chart and pierced the pop Top 20. The title track and follow-up, Too Hot, were both Top 10 pop hits, with Ladies’ Night also delivering an R&B No 1. The album Celebrate! (1980) cemented the band’s new found prominence by topping the pop and R&B charts and earning them a platinum disc. Its signature track, Celebration, topped the US chart and went Top 10 in the UK, and became Kool & the Gang’s theme tune, an automatic choice for discos, sporting events, weddings and birthday parties.
They scored further big hits with Get Down on It, Joanna and Cherish, but their commercial clout began to wane from the mid-80s onwards, though they enjoyed some belated UK success with the compilation albums The Singles Collection and Celebration: The Best of Kool & the Gang: 1979-1987.
The band’s catalogue of hits was given a flourishing second life with the advent of digital technology and sampling. Not least because of Brown’s punchy, swinging beats, their tracks have been among the most sampled by rap and hip-hop artists (not to mention Madonna and the Killers), and have featured in the work of the Beastie Boys, De La Soul, NWA. and A Tribe Called Quest. One track alone, Summer Madness, has been sampled 250 times. Jungle Boogie appeared on the soundtracks for the films Pulp Fiction (1994) and Undercover Brother (2002), and Summer Madness was used in Rocky (1976).
Kool & the Gang won two Grammy awards and seven American Music awards. In 2018 Brown, the Bell brothers and Taylor were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Brown is survived by his wife, Hanh, and five children.
• George Melvin Brown, musician, songwriter and producer, born 15 January 1949; died 16 November 2023
