When Bernie Worrell, who was a founding member of Parliament-Funkadelic and spent a lifetime collaborating across genres with an astonishing number of musicians, passed away in 2016, it closed a chapter of music history. Some years later, former Bernie Worrell Orchestra bandleader Evan Taylor was contacted by Bernie’s family about some tapes and drives they had discovered that they hoped someone might be able to work with towards a posthumous release. Taylor, in the meantime, had been working across genres as a Producer with his own label and studio, Loantaka Sound, as well as working on the musical project Purple Witch of Culver, and he couldn’t have been more surprised by that phone call.
Gathering resources and exploring Bernie’s myriad connections, the project gradually took shape, but the scope of it meant that it spanned two years. Taylor brought in collaborators from Bernie’s vast impact zone in music and their labor or love, titled Bernie Worrell: Wave From the WOOniverse, was released on double vinyl for April’s Record Store Day in 2024. Now, the album has also been made available digitally for the first time and will be arriving on CD in August. The star-studded list of collaborators is gigantic, but includes, among others Bootsy Collins, Sean Ono Lennon, Jerry Harrison (Talking Heads), Leo Nocentelli (The Meters), Fred Schneider (B52s), Miho Hatori (Cibo Matto), Steve Scales, Marc Ribot, and many more. I spoke with Evan Taylor about his journey making Wave From The WOOniverse and the kind of portrait it paints of a beloved musician and friend.
Hannah Means-Shannon: I know that you worked a lot with Bernie Worrell, but how did it come about that you put this album together and produced it at this time? Did something specific prompt that?
Evan Taylor: I released it on my label, in partnership with Org Music, for Record Store Day. I had been Bernie’s musical director, drummer, and co-Producer in the studio for some years. After Bernie’s passing, years went by, and his widow found some tapes that were unfinished. She was trying to find a label that might be able to take it on and organize the particulars. She called me for a reference, and I said that I had a modest label and might be able to help. She said, “That would be really great if you were involved in this.” I thought about it for a moment, because it was hard to get emotionally back into working with Bernie’s music after his passing, which was so abrupt. It was a little difficult. But I took on the project, and that’s where it started. It was a broad project to take on, but I felt like I was ready to venture into it.
I can imagine that’s probably not a phone call that you thought you’d ever get. You were working on your own stuff and had gone a long way down your own road at that point. You had had some closure.
Yes, I thought I had some closure, but I think I didn’t really have it until I finished this project. In a way, I had stepped away from getting involved in any Parliament off-shoots or side-projects. I just wanted to do my own thing, and I started making music with a whole different group of people. I was also doing my own music and Producing other artists in completely different genres. So, yes, it was not a call that I was expecting.
It’s interesting that in the meantime you had so much Production experience, which you could then bring to the table to work on this collection.
I learned a lot about producing with Bernie, but once I set off on my own, I really developed my Production abilities by working with a diverse group of musicians and artists. I think that by the time this project came along, I was really in a position to handle such a widespread production.
It seems like it happened a lot during the pandemic that people rediscovered materials and demos that they had forgotten about and were able to then get them ready to release, but they weren’t always in great shape. Were the materials that you received in a good state to work with? Were they analog tapes?
Yes, they were analog tapes, but they were already digitized. When I received the material, it was on a hard drive, but at my studio I do have complete analog capabilities. I could have worked with two-inch reels, but I would never have risked any problems. I was always hoping that we might find more reels that I could digitize and work with in my studio. Once I got the hard drive, I sat and listened with my long-time engineer, Spencer, and we figured out what was missing. We combed through the material, and what we thought was going to be a project of a few weeks of polishing this and mixing that, we discovered was not complete at all. That instead became a two-year project.
Oh, wow.
Especially with special guests and scheduling. It was a process that had to be scattered. If everyone was available at the same time, it would have been faster, but things never work like that. [Laughs]
No, they rarely work like that in my experience. I’m sure it took a lot of organization and time to work with such a huge cast of people. Two years seems short! One thing I was wondering was what kind of order this material was in. Was it fairly chaotic, and you had to bring order to the bits and pieces? Or was it carefully labeled?
Nothing was really labeled correctly. We had to do a lot of organization. There were a lot of working titles where we had to figure out which mixes to work on. The collaborators all worked in different ways. Some people liked to e-mail notes, some people worked through text only, and some were easy phone calls with a remote session. Mostly, I tried to be in the same room with the artist as much as possible, with the exception of people who lived outside of LA and New York.
I did some sessions with people in Charlotte, North Carolina, like Steve Scales, the percussionist from Talking Heads, and many other projects. He lived down there and didn’t really have a remote setup going, and I had played with him before, so we worked in a traditional studio setting and he had a blast. There were certain moments like that where I really wanted to get to know everyone better who’s on the record. With a record like this, it’s so personal that you really want to walk away feeling like it was a collection of friends who made it.
In some ways, it’s kind of an ego-less project. Because it’s in memory and celebrates this person, it’s not really about one’s own creative vision, is it? It sounds like you had to be more adaptive.
Absolutely, and that was our first rule of this project: We’re not going to just do what we want to do. We’re going to do what we think Bernie might have wanted and also throw in some surprises. There were some participants who Bernie had worked with and really wanted to work with again but never got to, like Sean Ono Lennon. Bernie, before his passing, told me that he really wanted to work with Sean.
Bernie had really wanted to work with a member of Cibo Matto again, so we got Miho Hatori. So a lot of the project was thinking of what Bernie would have really been excited about. We had to remove ourselves from making it into our own thing. It starts to come down to that, when you are working with so many people who knew him, they start saying, “He would have wanted this, he would have wanted that.” It just works out that way after a while. It’s different than if it’s just you, and the files, and playing all the instruments yourself. It’s a totally different animal.
It’s like a hivemind of people who knew him comparing notes, which is great. That’s putting more pieces of the puzzle together. Is that part of how you decided which tracks which people should work on? That seems like a big task, too, assigning things.
Everyone had some connection to Bernie, or had worked with him, or was on his wish list of collaborators, but figuring out who belonged on which track was actually fairly simple. Sometimes there might be a missing piece, like a great song missing a bassline. We’d go through our list of bass players who had worked with him, or who he might have worked with, and then we’d narrow it down to who’s available. It wasn’t really a difficult thing for me to match who was on each song, I really enjoy that. I’ve done that with some other records that had special guests, and I’ve honed that ability to figure out whose talents complement a track.
How were the family’s recordings originally made? Were they created under very different circumstances, so the recording quality was different between them?
A lot of it came from the 1990s. We don’t really know which studios they came from, and we’re missing a lot of information on the initial Production of the tapes. The continuity between sonics was pretty good. It was an era when studios were pretty streamlined in terms of what they were using, so everything was pretty consistent. It was a bummer that we didn’t have more information because I would’ve loved to know where they came from. That was definitely a mystery.
I guess Bernie can have his mysteries! It’s great that the sound quality was consistent. Did you play on these songs?
I did. I play various instruments and do vocals on various tracks. I found my role as filling in the gaps in certain places. I’d drop in a little guitar here, or drum part there, or a keyboard line. We had some really great people also join us to complete the tracks, other than the featured artists. We had a great horn arranger, Justin Mullins, and he was in The Bernie Worrell Orchestra, too, as the arranger. I had Jared Samuel Elioseff, who co-produced two tracks and did a lot of writing to finish songs that were missing lyrics or melodies. We did have to do some work like that. Sometimes, we’d have a song that was just Bernie’s keyboards to a drum machine, and that was it. We’d build up the song from the bottom up.
I’m so glad you had so much help and that so many people were able and willing to do this. When you look at the sweep of this project, it’s really obvious how many people he impacted, was friends with, and had relationships with because they all turned up for him. It’s a portrait of those connections.
It’s true. No one declined. Every call was a “Yes.” It would just build. I’d be at a session with Steve Scales in Charlotte, and I’d say, “I really want Fred Schneider on this track.” And he’d say, “He’ll do it.” Steve Scales and Bernie were on Fred’s first solo album. We got his information and it was a “Yes.” We were working on lyrics maybe a week later. It was really special. It really does reflect Bernie’s widespread respect and love from people.
He was such a kind, generous person, and not just to musicians, to everyone. I think his legacy, hopefully, will really live on, because he impacted the history of music in such a profound way, whether people know who he is or not. What they always say is, “You’ve definitely heard him if you’ve put the radio on.” Because he played with so many people. It’s a trip!
