Sly and the Family Stone was an American band from San Francisco. Active from 1967 to 1983, the band was pivotal in the development of soul, funk, and psychedelic music. Headed by singer, songwriter, record producer, and multi-instrumentalist Sly Stone, and containing several of his family members and friends, the band was the first major American rock band to have an “integrated, multi-gender” lineup. They recorded five Billboard Hot 100 hits which reached the top 10, and four ground-breaking albums, which greatly influenced the sound of American pop, soul, R&B, funk, and hip hop music. In the preface of his 1998 book For the Record: Sly and the Family Stone: An Oral History, Joel Selvin sums up the importance of Sly and the Family Stone’s influence on African American music by stating “there are two types of black music: black music before Sly Stone, and black music after Sly Stone”. (More from Wikipedia)
Their opening album, Awake in a Dream (1991) was praised by Alex Henderson in Allmusic: “Eleven was a so-called alternative rock trio of the early 1990’s that drew heavily on the psychedelic rock and soul music of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Awake in a Dream is much too guitar-oriented to have been played on a Black radio station in 1970 or 1973, and yet, enjoyable selections like ‘Before Your Eyes’, ‘All Together’ and ‘Rainbow’s End’ make it clear that singer/guitarist Alain Johannes, bassist/singer/organist Natasha Shneider and drummer Jack Irons have spent a lot of time listening to the likes of Sly and the Family Stone, Ike and Tina Turner and Stevie Wonder. Shneider is also heard on the clavinet, a synthesizer that was prominent in 1970’s soul and funk but was seldom used in the urban contemporary music that followed in the 1980’s and 1990’s.”
(April 2015/1)
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