The Isley Brothers’ “Summer Breeze” is not a cooling, gentle wind. You feel it in your torso - the rhythm makes you want to roll your shoulders as you lean back with tightened abs to swivel your hips. It’s not an ocean wave crashing to shore, but a rip current tugging you out into deeper water. After that opening minute, however, the Isleys jump right into the chorus, quickening the chorus a touch and finding the funk in the rhythm.įor all the thumb-slap bass in the world, funk is more often about what’s going on just below the surface, like the interplay between an open high-hat and the lazy snare. Even as Ernie’s guitar begins to snarl, it’s seemingly building into a ballad that’s just a more soulful take on the original, much like Al Green’s cover of the Bee Gees’ “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart'' or Aretha Franklin doing Bread’s “Make It With You” on Live at the Fillmore West - opening up the arrangement so they could sing the shit out of the song. The Isleys ease into their cover of the song, with Ronnie’s falsetto riffing on the title, “ah-ha yeah… summer breeze… all in my mind” over Jasper’s tinkling clavinet and quiet piano chords. The song has an easy appeal, with a nicely complex bridge and a simple two-line chorus (“Summer breeze makes me feel fine/Blowin' through the jasmine in my mind”) that adorns the lyrics’ endearing domestic scene with two saleable features of that Southern California lifestyle: good weather and abundant flowering shrubbery.
Their fourth album, Summer Breeze, went Double Platinum thanks to the title song, which was a #6 pop hit as well as #4 on the Adult Contemporary charts. They kicked around in bands for ten years before deciding to strike out as a duo. Jim Seals and Dash Crofts were Texas kids who moved to Los Angeles to join The Champs after that band struck it big with “Tequila,” and followed Glen Campbell when he left the group to form Glen Campbell and the GC’s. Mainly, however, Soft Rock was made up of pop songs played at easy tempos and lavished in the latest studio techniques for a pristine sound - Adult Contemporary music done up in faded denim. The Laurel Canyon scene gave the sound a patina of singer-songwriter sincerity and an idealized sense of the laidback ‘70s California lifestyle. Soft Rock - soft is right there in the name, and there wasn’t a whole lot of rock. The group also spun tough funk-rock out of even more unlikely source material: “Summer Breeze” was a wispy hit the year before by Seals and Crofts, a duo who exemplified one of the era’s dominant radio sounds, California Soft Rock.
Then came their mid-’60s Motown classic, “This Old Heart of Mine (Is Weak for You),” and their funky late-’60s hit for their own label, “It’s Your Thing” - and so on, for the next four decades without resolving into a nostalgia act.Ģ a remake of the group’s 1964 R&B number “Who’s That Lady?,” made the song a top-10 hit. The Isleys’ first hit came in 1959 with their first composition, “Shout,” an ebullient sweet spot between street-corner doo-wop and gospel fervor that can still fill a wedding reception dancefloor. But what of those with a genius for the during, whose talent is to unfailingly hear something of their own in the present moment? That’s the Isley Brothers. It makes sense – music itself is hard to describe, so we default to its impact on the culture.
Now pick any one of your favorites - Duke Ellington, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Prince, whoever - and notice how their greatness is mostly celebrated as a break between times before and after. Take the structure and scale Beethoven brought to composition, or what Charlie Parker did for chord tones, forever influencing jazz improvisation. Musical genius is most often represented by those who could hear something previously undiscovered.
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