Earth, Wind & Fire

Earth, Wind & Fire were always a fantastic live group and an unstoppable studio act, but this one is where each individual song is as rock-solid as the band's grooves. All of America took notice and this became EWF's first No. 1 pop hit, aided along by such now-classic singles as "Shining Star," "Happy Feelin'" and the gorgeous title ballad. If you need any proof that a solid jazz pulse beats in soul and funk just give this a quick listen -- the Rhodes keyboard work alone is worth the price of admission.

Lousy production works to this LP's detriment -- Maurice White has surprisingly chosen to
have the entire album sound "hot." It easily befits such uptempo numbers as "Happy Feelin'"
and the popular single "Shining Star," helping them glow with an incendiary charge that
once moved record producer Sandy Pearlman to term EW&F "the closest thing to a black
heavy-metal band." But numbers like "Reasons." "All about Love" and the title cut... More >

Trailing Parliament-Funkadelic in my personal post-Sly sweepstakes, but ahead of War (bombastic), Kool and the Gang (culturally deprived), and hosts of others, this unit can do so many things it qualifies as the one-man band of black music even though it has nine members. Here ethnomusicology and colloquial homiletics are tacked onto the funk and soul and doowop and jazz, which makes for an instructive contrast--the taped-in-Africa Matepe Ensemble, whose spontaneous laughter closes out the coda, versus Maurice White, whose humorless platitutdes prove there's more to roots than turning a mbira into an ersatz vibraphone. (Grade: B+)