The keyboard player and composer Bernie Worrell, who has died aged 72, came to prominence in the 1970s as a founding member of the musical collective Parliament-Funkadelic, of which he was musical director. In the 80s he was also a regular performer, live and on disc, with Talking Heads, and later collaborated with many other artists while recording a number of solo albums.
A classically trained child prodigy, Worrell delighted in blending and cross-fertilising different musical styles. “I can hear the relationships,” he explained. “I can hear the same scale or mode in a classical piece, you can find the same mode in a gospel hymn. Same mode in an Indian raga, same mode in an Irish ditty.” He played the organ and piano but, partly inspired by Keith Emerson of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, also pioneered innovative electronic sounds through his use of instruments such as the Moog synthesiser, the Hohner Clavinet and the Prophet 5.
His songwriting skills and unique playing style can be heard on such standout Parliament-Funkadelic tracks as Flash Light (which Worrell created using three Minimoog synths), Atomic Dog, Chocolate City, Mothership Connection (Star Child), Aqua Boogie and Red Hot Mama. His work with Talking Heads helped them to evolve from a new wave guitar band into a far more ambitious unit exploring funk, electronica and African music. He made notable contributions to the live album The Name of This Band is Talking Heads (1982), to Speaking in Tongues (1983, a US Top 20 hit) and to Stop Making Sense (1984), the soundtrack album from the Jonathan Demme concert movie of the same name, which spent 118 weeks in the US Billboard 200 chart.
Worrell was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, and when he was eight his family moved to nearby Plainfield. By then he was already well on his way to a musical career. He had been born with perfect pitch, and had begun on the piano at the age of three, playing his first concert a year later. His musical education was closely supervised by his mother, who sang in a Baptist church choir and played the piano at local functions and fashion shows. His father was a truck driver who ran his own business.
When he was eight, Worrell wrote a piano concerto, and at 10 he performed three concertos with members of the Washington Symphony and Plainfield Symphony orchestras. He subsequently studied at the Juilliard School in New York and the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. But the lure of popular music was proving irresistible, and while at the conservatory he began playing with the vocal group Chubby and the Turnpikes, who, as Tavares, later became famous for recording More Than a Woman from the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. “I became their bandleader and that was the rebel part of me, of doing something else besides classical music,” Worrell said.
After leaving college, Worrell became music director for the soul singer Maxine Brown, before teaming up with Parliament-Funkadelic. Their mastermind, George Clinton, had also grown up in Plainfield, where he ran a doo-wop group called the Parliaments based at the barber shop where he worked. Worrell officially joined the crew after playing on their first album, Funkadelic (1970), and left the band in 1981, although he would continue to work with them subsequently. His imaginative musical voicings, from wobbly synthetic basslines to squelches, bleeps and sci-fi wailings, became an intrinsic part of Parliament-Funkadelic’s carnivalesque brew of soul, funk, jazz and acid rock. His distinctive sounds would frequently be sampled in later years by such artists as De La Soul, Dr Dre and Snoop Dogg.
Outside the band, Worrell was also in demand for session work. He played on hits by Chairmen of the Board and on Freda Payne’s Band of Gold (1970), and on Johnny Taylor’s Disco Lady (1978), which he claimed to have co-written with Bootsy Collins and Glenn Goins, although they were not credited.
Worrell had released his first solo album, All the Woo in the World, in 1978, but did not focus fully on solo work until the 90s. He released nine albums of his own between 1990 and 2014, including Funk of Ages in 1990 (featuring such eminences as Keith Richards – Worrell having played on Richards’s 1988 album Talk is Cheap – David Byrne and Herbie Hancock); the experimental Pieces of Woo: The Other Side (1993); the improvisational Improvisczario in 2007; a covers album, Standards, in 2011; and jazz pieces on solo piano on Elevation: the Upper Air (2014). His most recent album, Retrospectives, was released earlier this year.
As well as these, he was involved in countless collaborations. He co-produced and played on the album Fred Schneider and the Shake Society (1984), by the B-52s’ frontman Schneider, as well as working with Bill Laswell on Sly and Robbie’s album Rhythm Killers (1987) and Fela Kuti’s Army Arrangement (1985). He also played in Laswell’s bands Material, Praxis and Method of Defiance. He appeared on several Jack Bruce albums, and on Stolen Moments: Red Hot + Cool (1994), a fundraising project to combat Aids. He joined the rapper Mos Def’s band Black Jack Johnson, and was part of the short-lived experimental group Colonel Claypool’s Bucket of Bernie Brains. In 2011 he formed the Bernie Worrell Orchestra, a live band that featured guest appearances by members of Talking Heads and Parliament-Funkadelic.
In 1997 Worrell was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with Parliament-Funkadelic. In 2005 he was profiled in the documentary film Stranger: Bernie Worrell on Earth.
He is survived by his wife, Judie, who was also his manager, and their son, Bassl.
George Bernard Worrell, musician, born 19 April 1944; died 24 June 2016
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