Live at the Belly Up: The Motet (Belly Up Productions, San Diego State University, KPBS, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Afterwards Charles and I watched a Live at the Belly Up episode featuring a band called The Motet. Given the rapidly deteriorating state of my eyes, I originally read that on the KPBS Web site as “The Motel” and wondered how they differed from The Motels, the engaging 1980’s band featuring the haunting, beautiful voice of Martha Davis. It turned out the last consonant in this band’s name was ”t,” nto “l,” and The Motet turned out to be an all-out funk band in the style of mid- to late-1970’s bands like Sly and the Family Stone, Parliament/Fuinkadelic (basically the same band, signed to two different labels; the only difference was Parliament had a horn section and Funkadelic didn’t), and Earth, Wind and Fire. According to the Wikipedia page on The Motet, every year from 2000 to 2012 they did a tribute concert on Hallowe’en playing a whole night of music by various other acts: The Beatles in 2000, The Headhunters in 2001, Stevie Wonder in 2002, Tower of Power in 2003, Prince n 2004, Michael Jackson in 2005, Madonna in 2006, Jamiroquai in 2007, Talking Heads in 2008, Sly and the Family Stone in 2009, Earth, Wind and Fire in 2010, the Grateful Dead in 2011 (under the rubric “Funk Is Dead”), and Parliament/Funkadelic in 2012. The Motet was founded in 1998 in Boulder, Colorado (not exactly one of the world’s hotbeds of funk or soul) by drummer Dave Watts, though he’s the only original member left.

The group was formed with the intention of having the personnel be flexible – one reason they picked the name “Motet” instead of “Quartet,” “Quintet,” “Sextet” or “Septet” was to avoid being locked into a particular number of members – and the group’s spokesperson on this 2020 show was lead singer Lyle Divinsky, who left shortly after this show was filmed and took the band’s very interesting Black trumpet player, Parris Fleming, with him. Divinsky turned out to be the hectoring sort of frontman that always puts me off, with his constant exhoirtations to the audience to sing along, dance or just bounce up and down and clap their hands on cue. That can be fun in a live context, but watching a show like that on TV can get annoying and boring very quickly. I think I was especially disappointed in this Live at the Belly Up because last Friday’s show with Samantha Fish was so good. She was an excellent white blues singer, guitarist and songwriter, and her music had real depth and polish to it. She reminded me of Janis Joplin, but her singing and playing had far more discipline (a word I kept thinking of during her performance) and she’d already outlived Janis by at least three years when she did her Live at the Belly Up show.

By contrast, The Motet just droned on through one good but all-too-familiar dance track after another, mostly with pseudo-funk titles like “Highly Compatible,” “Whatcha Gonna Bring?,” “That Dream,” “Keep On Don’t Steppin’” (I defy anyone in The Motet to explain just what that title means!), “The Truth,” “Death or Devotion” (which they introduced as the title track of their next album and said was a departure in that it was more politically and socially conscious than most of their songs, though it didn’t sound different to me either musically or lyrically), and “Get It Right.” By far the best song they played was a cover of Earth, Wind and Fire’s “Serpentine Fire,” a marvelous song in the original version (it and “Shining Star” are easily my two all-time favorite Earth, Wind and Fire songs) and given a pretty good reading featuring guitarist and singer Nick Ciccorini, who was alas listed in the closing credits only as a guest artist instead of a regular band member. I liked his contribution and also the horn solos by trumpeter Fleming and tenor saxophonist Drew Sayers, who managed to sound like John Coltrane would have if instead of venturing into avant-garde jazz in the 1960’s he’d survived the decade and gone into funk.

The problem with The Motet is that they don’t seem to me to add much to the original recipe, despite a claim by the Belly Up’s Chris Goldsmith that they were adding Latin and other elements to it (which I didn’t hear). I couldn’t help but think of all the bands in the 1970’s who did this sort of thing and did it quite a bit better than they did – and not just the big professional bands led by enormous stars like Sly Stone, George Clinton (the P-Funk guy) and Maurice White (the mastermind of Earth, Wind and Fire; when he died on the eve of a Grammy ceremony salute to the band I watched as his two brothers vainly tried to bring the same spark to their music than he had). I had a tape of a purely local band from Berkeley called Elements Precise I recorded at a political rally in 1975 that did this sort of music way better than The Motet did in 2020!