The Pharoah’s first album The Awakening was originally released on the Chicago based Scarab label in 1971, long considered a grail item among record connoisseurs since the first wave of the Rare Groove scene back in the Early 80s. The Pharaohs only released one studio album before their disbandment in 1973, so for a while it was assumed that the Awakening was the group’s only available recorded music. This was up until In the Basement was discovered by Ubiquity Records founder Michael McFaddin while working with Louis Satterfield on the first reissue of The Awakening. The original master tapes from the studio album also contained live recordings taken from an energetic live performance at the High Chaparral in Chicago in 1972. These live recordings were then issued as a standalone live album in 1996, some 24 years post the initial recording, with the album taking its name from the first track of the set which so happened to be “In the Basement”.
The Luv N’ Haight reissue of In the Basement captures the Pharaohs at their rawest and funkiest. Tough and unrelenting grooves backed up by Afrocentric musical modes and a heady mixture of raw Jazz and nasty, streetwise Funk and Soul ripple throughout the recording, capturing an underground, African tinged and heavily percussive sound akin to some of the Black Fire catalogue and some of the more cutting-edge groups of the day; early Oneness of Juju, Theatre West and Southern Energy Ensemble are certainly artists that you could draw parallels to. The group was formed around the South-Side of Chicago in the shadow of the Afro-Arts Theatre, a community-based venture that offered free concerts, music, dance and art tuition with an afro-centric perspective, garnering plenty of popularity from within the creative arts community and soon becoming a local hub, where the likes of Ramsey Lewis and Maurice White would often pass through on the lookout for the freshest, rawest new talent. Many of the bandmembers would go on to join Earth, Wind & Fire in 1973 after being scouted by Maurice White, soon after forming the Phenix horns—made up of Don Myrick, Ealee Satterfield, Rahm Lee Davis and Michael Harris—which became EWF’s principal horn section in the mid-seventies, cementing their station after recording the hit ‘Reasons’ and going on to have great individual and group success recording for the elements.
Overall, a gritty and raw take on Soul, Funk, Jazz and African themes lifted from the heart of the South Side of Chicago, an unapologetic live performance that boasts softer and tranquil moments as well as more visceral, head rolling funk and frantic percussive suites of west African Drumming. The large sound of the 11-piece group and the variety of instruments that each player gets into—often playing more than one instrument—amplifies the overall sound while resonating with the music of their ancestors, improvised and played in ensemble, a ritual gathering of players that seek to create a sound rooted in past, ancestral musical traditions while looking to contemporary influences such as Funk and Soul, thereby creating a sound authentic and unique to the Afro-American experience in the Chicago’s South Side in the early seventies. To cut a long story short, it’s funky as hell.
