The Incredible Bongo Band - Bongo Rock (1973)

The Incredible Bongo Band was a vanity project of producer Michael Viner. In the downtime between recording sessions at MGM, Viner would grab whatever musicians were around at the time and record upbeat, funky songs that where mostly covers. All of them featured varying amounts of bongo playing. Being recorded in the early 70s the music sounds really clean and is a lovely sort of dated.

To get a clear picture of what a lot of this music sounds like, think of a big band, but a smallish big band, maybe 5 horn players. Add keys and electric guitars. Imagine them playing boppy, funky, elevator-music quality instrumental versions of relatively popular contemporary songs. I'm not trying to be mean. The playing on Bongo Rock is quite good. But their covers aren't particularly imaginative, and the bongos can be pretty annoying after a while, such as on their version of "In A Gadda Da Vida".

Probably the most famous track on Bongo Rock is their cover of Jerry Lordan's "Apache". It's a great track, I love it. My problem is that the track is famous because the extended drum break in the middle of the song (played by Jim Gordon of Derek and the Dominoes fame) is heavily sampled by hip hop artists. I know I complained about that in one of my rap reviews but now I can't find it. I'm positive if you've listened to any amount of rap in your life you've heard a sample off this album. The drum work is quite good.

Anyway, I liked Bongo Rock, and I really like the songs "Apache" and "Bongolia". I also like "Okey Dokey" off the second album. If your high school has a jazz band like my high school did they should probably get themselves a copy of Bongo Rock to get a couple new songs to play. 3 stars.

Addendum- The special edition of the album that appears on Rdio.com comes with a few bonus tracks. Two of them are remixes of the band's songs done by DJ's, one of which is Grandmaster Flash's version of "Apache". Instead of the ultra cool drum lead-in, Grandmaster Flash adds in some scrubbing sounds then a couple of cutoff chunks of notes from the song's mid section. Then he fucks with the melody before the drum break. Then he fucks with the drum break by adding scrubbing and chopped off segments of the opening guitar jangle.

I don't. Fucking. Get it. The only effect of this mix is to make an awesome song sound chopped up like someone threw it in the trash. Is that really what the birth of hip-hop was? Was it a conscious effort to take the best parts of awesome music and make it really shitty? More on that later, I'm sure.

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