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TOWER OF POWER AT PLAYBOY JAZZ FEST: Band's Emilio Castillo talks funk, jazz, and soul.
*Four-decade funkdafied soul band Tower of Power is going Hollywood this summer. The 10-piece band is just one of the legendary acts performing at this year's Playboy Jazz Festival at the Hollywood Bowl June 14-15.
Led by tenor saxophonist and founder Emilio Castillo, this summer the horn-based band will be celebrating their 40th anniversary together, too. The band formed in the 1960s with pretty consistent success and a huge hit in 1973 with "So Very Hard To Go."
Castillo told EUR's Lee Bailey that the band's longevity is based on the passion for their style of music - something he considers a gift, and at times a curse.
"Some people would say that [our] music doesn't change. We make music really selfishly. We make it to please ourselves. We've always had a passion for this style of music; this original soul music, high energy, high emotion. We just try to keep pushing the envelope in our genre. As it turns out, our particular genre kind of thinned out over the years. We outlasted everybody," he said.
"We're quite blessed to be one of the forerunners of this kind of music. We realize it's a blessing so we approach it sort of reverently," he continued, but then talked about how at one point in their career, the record labels wanted the group to change.
"We went through that in the late '70s, early '80s," Castillo said of being pressured by the record label to adapt to music's changes at that time. "Companies were telling us, 'You don't sound like the other bands. Could you give us a record that sounds like some of these other records?' We would try, but what we noticed was even when we tried to sound like others, it would sound like Tower of Power anyway, but sort of a bastardized version."
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Saxaphonist Emilio Castillo & Tower of Power
Castillo said that for a while, the band considered their stylings to be a curse, because things slowed down in their careers and pretty soon, the record label wasn't asking them to make a change - in fact they weren't asked to do anything.
"They didn't want nothing to do with us," Castillo said. "It was at that time we realized that we still had a great big fan base, we were still playing live all the time, and the people that were into the band loved it. So we said, if we're going to make music, we're going to make the kind we like, and we made a rule to be true to ourselves. As soon as we did that, things started to pick up for us again."
Castillo added that new technology also aided in the bands return to the limelight. He explained that with the Internet, ToP realized they had fans all over the world.
"That was a big boom for the band. We got resigned to Sony, did six records for them, started traveling the world and never looked back."
Tower of Power not only made a name for themselves over the years, but the band also gave a hand to quite a few other legendary names. Their signature horns played on a number of records, including those of the Monkees, Santana, Elton John, Rod Stewart, Jefferson Starship, Heart, Huey Lewis and the News, Spyro Gyra, Lyle Lovett, Poison, Toto, Pharoahe Monch, and Aerosmith. Most recently the band worked on a song for Josh Groban's "Awake" album.
With the band's repertoire of soul hits and pop, rock, and hip-hop collaborations, some music fans might wonder how ToP is on a jazz show roster.
"I used to get that a few years back," he said of being questioned about the genre mix, "but a couple of jazz festivals put us on the show and we became the wake-up call. People would be out there passing chicken and sushi and starting to snore and we'd come on and tear the place a part. We've done quite a few jazz festivals now and we've fit in quite well."
Castillo said that the band doesn't make any jazz concessions in their music either.
"There's a lot of jazz in our music. The music doesn't change much. We just dish it up Tower of Power style."
So forty years after it's inception, Tower of Power will be on stage at the Playboy Jazz Festival in June, and will soon be releasing a new disc of reworkings of classic soul hits, including Aretha Franklin's "Baby, Baby, Sweet Baby," the 1972 Billy Paul hit "Me and Mrs. Jones," and a four-song James Brown medley. Castillo describes the forthcoming disc as "old soul music, Tower of Power style."
"I always tell people that it's a soul band. People say, 'No, it's a funk band.' Funk is one aspect of soul music. Soul music covers the whole gamut of music that has energy and emotion. Our up-tempo songs have this tremendous amount of energy; our heart-wrenching ballads have this tremendous emotional energy; and then there are all those songs in between - the shuffles and the medium-tempo stuff - that just warms the heart. But it's all got to do with emotion and energy and that's what soul music is."
Look for the funky, jazzy soul music of Tower of Power at the Playboy Jazz Festival and on their new disc. For more info, check out www.playboyjazzfestival.com or www.towerofpower.com/.
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