He got his start at 13 alongside Richie Havens, but it was in the ever-changing jazz, soul and disco group that he made his mark. His legacy pulses through popRonald ‘Khalis’ Bell dies aged 68Ronald “Khalis” Bell was nothing if not an adaptable musician and songwriter. He began his career aged 13, playing jazz in New York’s famous Café Wha? alongside
Singer Richie Havens. A couple of years later, his group the Jazziacs shifted style and became the Motown and Stax-inspired Soul Town Band. By the time they signed a record deal in 1969, they were trading as Kool & the Gang – a name based on his elder brother Robert’s nickname – and playing an instrumental hybrid of jazz and funk. It was a sign of things to come: over their career, Kool & the Gang proved so adaptable that they frequently sounded like a completely different band to the one they had been a few years previously. It would have taken almost superhuman insight to recognise their easy-going, synth-heavy 1984 hit Cherish as the work of the musicians who had made 1973’s tough funk track Jungle Boogie, or 1980’s pop-disco anthem Celebration. Ronald Bell co-wrote all three.
Their eponymous debut was a minor success, but Kool & the Gang had their first big hit by dialling down their jazz influence. Their second album,
music Is the Message, had upped the vocal content of their music although they were still evidently finding their feet on its 1972 successor, Good Times, where lushly orchestrated ballads sat alongside brave attempts to fuse funk and country and western and instrumentals called I Remember John W Coltrane. Wild and Peaceful, released the following year, was more focused, home not just to Jungle Boogie, but a succession of equally strong tracks (Funky Stuff,
Hollywood Swinging). It sold half a million copies, as did its follow-up, Light of Worlds. The latter’s key track was Summer Madness, a flatly brilliant instrumental evocation of a hot afternoon on which electric piano chords shimmered as if emerging through a heat haze and a synthesiser played languidly. The moment 40 seconds in, where the latter instrument hits a succession of long, ascending notes would later become one of the key inspirations for hip-hop producer Dr Dre’s G-funk sound.