Keyboardist Bernie Worrell, a founding member of Parliament/Funkadelic and collaborator with Talking Heads, died today after a battle with cancer, according to a Facebook post from his wife.
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She had announced earlier this year that her husband had been diagnosed with stage-four lung cancer.
Bernie Worrell died at his home in Everson, Washington.
He followed Clinton to Detroit, where Funkadelic rewrote the rules of black popular music several times over throughout the 1970s. In 2011, he toured with fellow P-Funk alum Bootsy Collins.
His synth work – he was only the second recipient of the original Moog synthesizer – set him apart from other R&B-based players, and through almost a decade with the group, his unique injections were featured prominently on numerous group’s most popular songs, including “Flash Light” and “Give Up The Funk”. Anything seemed possible when he was on keyboards, conjuring squiggles, squirts, stutters and hiccups on Parliaments Flash Light that sounded like funk as if conceived by Martians. On Funkadelic’s “Atmosphere”, his chatty organ prelude, like a mash-up of Bach and “The Munsters”, set up some of Clinton’s more unprintable lyrics.
WORRELL also released a series of critically acclaimed solo efforts, including “Funk Of Ages”, “Blacktronic Science”, “Pieces Of WOO/The Other Side” and “Free Agent: A Spaced Odyssey”. In 2015, he was a member of Meryl Streep’s backing group in the movie “Ricki and the Flash”.
P-Funk was inducted into the Rock “n” Roll Hall of Fame in 1997.
Although Worrell was ailing, it never stopped him from playing music.
It was Mr. Worrell who provided “oozing, organic textures in the P-Funk groove machine”, New York Times music critic Jon Pareles wrote in 2000, adding: “He can take credit for the slow-bubbling synthesizer bass lines that are still ubiquitous in hip-hop and rhythm-and-blues”.
He would later go on to study classical piano at Juilliard and the New England Conservatory of Music, only to use his talents to further the musical style known as funk.
“I loved the “Tarkus” album”, he told the website MusicRadar in 2013. Keith (Emerson) was the first guy I heard using the Moog.
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Said WORRELL: “When the synthesizers came about, my having been brought up classically and knowing a full range of orchestra, tympanis and everything, I knew how it sounded and what it felt like”. A group that size, and everybodys living together, its just like family. All right, lets do Flash Light..
