Hear your favorite funk music at Macon Pops’ ‘We Got the Funk!’ concert. Here are the details
They say Macon is where soul lives, but Friday it’s funky town.
Macon Pops is presenting “We Got the Funk!” as the second concert of its seventh season at the Grand Opera House and the funk is on.
“Funk is really a great musical genre we haven’t focused on and it’s a fun one, especially for a drummer like myself,” said Steve Moretti, Macon Pops president, CEO and drummer-percussionist for the pops orchestra.
“There’s a resurgence in popularity of funk and it’s near and dear to a lot of people with a lot of memories attached to it,” he said. “We’re looking forward to presenting it in Macon Pops style and pushing the boundaries a little.”
Moretti said Macon Pops style includes making each concert fun for audiences while featuring the best quality musicianship from its 40-piece orchestra and local performers. He said he and others work to give each show “the excitement of a rock concert with the finesse of a world class orchestra.”
Moretti said the show will feature local vocalists Charles Davis and Kim Epps and guest guitarist Zanuck Kapala Lindsey along with Macon Pop’s A-list orchestra members, some of whom will be flying in from across the country.
He said songs have been selected from some of funk’s most memorable performers, such as George Clinton and his Parliament-Funkadelic collective, Tower of Power, Kool and the Gang, Cameo and Stevie Wonder.
“As always, we’re encouraging folks to come, enjoy the music, get up and move if they want to, dance in the aisles or orchestra pit and have a great time,” he said. “No one is doing pops concerts from scratch the way we do them each performance, creating fresh and exciting shows each time. We want to give people the chance to forget everything going on in the world for a couple of hours while hearing hand picked, world class musicians right here in Macon. And right here around the corner from where one of funk music’s biggest influences used to appear regularly, James Brown.”
Brown is seen by music historians as helping create funk music in the early 1960s with a reliance on syncopated bass patterns, drum styles and stressing the first beat of a song’s measure. Later, groups like Clinton’s and Sly and the Family Stone further defined funk by adding the psychedelic sounds and dress of the late 1960s.
Moretti, who lives in Macon, originated Macon Pops along with conductor-arranger Matt Catingub, who scores each performance’s music. Moretti said he and Catingub have known each other for 21 years and worked together and separately as studio musicians, live performers and conductor-arrangers in varieties of bands and orchestras.
Contact Michael W. Pannell at mwpannell@gmail.com.
“We Got The Funk!” Macon Pops concert
Where: Grand Opera House, 651 Mulberry St.
When: 7:30 p.m. Nov. 15
Cost: $25-$35
Information: www.maconpops.com