Zen Sounds 055: McNeal and Niles

Obscure lo-fi jazz-funk from Ohio with a touch of proto-Balearic vibes

May 6, 2023

Wilbur Niles (seated) with Thrust, around 1980

Prologue

Spring has finally arrived here in the back country. We’ve been working in our garden, and my wife repaired our outhouse’s roof, while I was staying on the ground, sawing wood pieces and cutting shingles. We’ve become a great handicraft team over the past few months.

I’ve also been taking up running and skateboarding again. It feels good to spend more time outside. Living more in tune with the seasons out here has definitely made us feel grateful about these changes.

Musically, I’ve been opening up to more upbeat and sun-drenched sounds. As some of you know, my musical roots lie in hip-hop and genres that were heavily sampled in 1990’s hip-hop productions, like jazz, funk and soul. That area has been the start of my journey digging for music, and over the years I’ve found myself going down more ‘experimental’ rabbit-holes like ambient, industrial, early electronic music or even electro-acoustic composition.

I still love listening to the more adventurous sides of hip-hop, jazz and funk though, and this 1979 album by McNeal and Niles, freshly re-released in March, definitely ticks all of the boxes for me to get excited about a record from that musical realm.

McNeal and Niles – »Thrust«

(We Are Busy Bodies, 1979 / 2023)

McNeal and Niles’ »Thrust« clearly belongs to a canon of mythical, but largely underrated albums. Privately pressed in a capacity of 500, this lo-fi jazz-funk masterpiece wasn’t even available outside of Ohio, the home state of musicians Machelle McNeal and Wilbur Niles. The album has been in high demand since the early 2000’s, as it was constantly praised by hip-hop luminaries such as J Dilla and Pete Rock. An original copy of »Thrust« in good condition will cost you around $1.000 to $1.500 these days, but luckily, the folks at Toronto-based label We Are Busy Bodies have now re-issued the record.

Wilbur Niles had grown up playing the guitar in various bands in his native Akron, a mid-size city in Ohio, south of Cleveland. Akron would later become known as the hometown of post-punk heroes Devo. Their road crew ran Manray Studio, a local facility where »Thrust« was recorded. It was located in the back room of a car wash that was also used for storing the soap. That loose Devo connection might actually be the reason why one song on »Thrust« is called »Punk Funk«.

When recording this album, Wilbur Niles had been working as a professional musician for more than a decade, mainly playing on the Chitlin’ Circuit, a touring route through performance venues in the Midwest that were mainly frequented by African-American musicians and crowds since the 1930’s. He had also written many songs on the road.

When he finally started playing some of his own tunes, with his brother Darryl on drums and his girlfriend at the time, Machelle McNeal, on vocals and piano, it worked out magically. They recruited local session musicians to fill in on some of the demo tracks and recorded them at Manray Studio, essentially producing an album. Recordings were held at night, so that the noise from the car wash wouldn’t disturb them.

Wilbur and Machelle were clearly influenced by Herbie Hancock’s electric period at that point – after all, they named their debut album after the Headhunters jazz-funk milestone from 1974. Like Herbie, Machelle played many different analog synthesizers, keyboards and organs on the record, including the Arp Odyssey, Minimoog, Polymoog, EML 500, Fender Rhodes, Wurlitzer, and a Hammond B3. In that sense, it reminds me of some of the better library records from that era, which were usually played by top notch session musicians on high end studio equipment.

What makes this half-hour session outstanding and therefore worth rediscovering, is a sun-drenched, proto-Balearic flavour – think 1970’s album cuts by Marvin Gaye, George Benson or Maze & Frankie Beverly that Club Amnesia’s Alfredo Fiorito would sprinkle into his sets. »Ja Ja«’s opening chords spread a lavish Yacht soul vibe, and the peaceful ambient jazz of »Quiet Isle« wouldn’t sound out of place at Café del Mar’s famous sundown terrace. It is that unexpected combination of raw fusion grooves, crisp drum tracks and Wilbur Niles’ hazy, dreamy guitar lines that makes »Thrust« such a pleasurable listen.

Despite its quality, »Thrust« didn’t exactly make a splash in the industry. It was released on Tinkertoo, a small local folk label. The 500 copies weren’t even distributed outside of Ohio, and due to its initial lukewarm reception, the album wasn’t repressed for 25 years. But through flea markets and private collection sales, copies of »Thrust« did end up in the hands of knowledgeable record diggers who celebrated its lo-fi feel – that raw type of music has been rediscovered since the early 1990’s in the acid jazz and deep funk movement.

What’s super weird is that »Thrust« hasn’t actually been sampled more. Dan Snaith alias Caribou/Daphni sampled »Summer Fun«, and the late hip-hop producer genius J Dilla sampled another song by McNeal and Niles – not from »Thrust« though, but from the follow-up »Thrust Too«, produced in 1980. (It was released under the group name »Wilbur Niles and Thrust«, see the image at the top, and just got re-issued by We Are Busy Bodies as well – it’s a good record, but it sounds substantially more muscular and less chilled.)

It seems like we’ve heard portions of »Thrust« here and there – maybe not in actual samples, but as part of diggers folklore, nerds raving about super rare private press records. Hip-hop legend Pete Rock apparently sent his social media followers to »Ja Ja« on Youtube a while ago. It’s that type of record that will get discovered by generations to come, part of a semi-secret pool of obscure albums that were saved from oblivion – an off-the-beaten-track canon of great music unnoticed by the mainstream. Exactly the type of music I live for.

As for Machelle’s and Wilbur’s personal story – they married sometime during their collaboration, but separated later. Machelle was still heard singing and playing on »Thrust Too«, but she stopped doing music altogether shortly after the release. Wilbur kept on putting out many more albums over the course of the next decades; most of those are now digitally available through We Are Busy Bodies. In some interviews he gave around his catalogue re-release, Wilbur seems genuinely happy and thankful for the rediscovery of his early music by a new audience.

One more thing

I’ve already recommended this through Notes, but I can’t stress enough how fantastic this three-hour mix by Tarotplane is: »Deep Head Scene – Unsettled Ambience From The Industrial Era« compiles around 100 tracks from the post-punk era when DIY musicians were experimenting with tape loops, synthesizers and field recordings to create a dark and unsettling antithesis to the blissful ambience of new-age music, loosely continuing a thread from 1970’s kosmische and predating 1990’s isolationism.

I love immersing myself in these weird sounds – they don’t sound depressing at all to me, it’s more that these artists were working in a depressing political climate (Thatcher/Reagan era, Cold War, Nuclear threats). They managed to express extremely creative ideas on very simple technical equipment, and they empowered themselves through building small tape distribution networks and artistic communities around local venues. We can learn a lot from that time for today’s increasingly difficult situation in independent music and culture.

Happy weekend!