Where: https://youtube.com/live/bg-kRLk6dZQ?feature=share  

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http://paypal.me/vancevancevance or https://venmo.com/vancevancevance or VanceFunder P.O. Box 17, Arlington, MA 02476

*PRIVATE COACHING AVAILABLE - Contact me for songwriting, performance, and voice coaching.

***CUSTOM SONGS - Expensive, but sure, you want one about you or your family or something.

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D’ANGELO, ANTHONY JACKSON, BOB FRANKE, AND GROOVE/POCKET TILL YOU DIE OR MY BIRTHDAY

I’m a strange amalgam of musician types and influences. I won’t make your eyes roll with the list from Segovia to Kendrick. OK I bragged right there, but there have been losses in the past week or two that rocked me a bit, and a tradition linking these players that make me want to, well, link these players.

D’ANGELO 2/22/1974 - 10/14/2025 - When I bought his album “Voodoo” in 2000, it was because of his take on Roberta Flack's classic “Feel Like Making Love”. Whilst R&B will never be thought of as a music storytellers genre, his “One Mo Gin” was maybe Strayhornesque, not unlike William Robinson’s clear lyricism (That’s “Smokey" to you...)
But it was the laid back groove he played and insisted on that changed my world.
The drummer’s feel is, as genius drummer and Berklee’s Executive Director Ron Savage calls it, a “lope”. The feel is so far back, almost “late”, nearly dragging, and yet insistent in its bedrock presence. I want everything to sound like that. I even took the recently late Herb Gardner and had him play what i thought were the closest I could get to Roy Hargrove’s groovy trumpet lines on my stuff, just like on D’Angelo’s album.

ANTHONY JACKSON - 6/23/1952 - 10/19/2025 - The bass line to the O’Jays “For The Love Of Money”. You know it. Google it and you’ll say - “Oh yeah, that”, once you stop moving. Jackson played that line with a pick. Why that’s important is that it probably was not how most R&B funky bass players, even Jackson, would have contemplated pulling that off. But to get the sound he wanted, that’s what he did. It’s trebel-y, twangy, and funky, and iconic. I wanted to be that bass line.

BOB FRANKE - 7/25/1947 - 10/16/2025 - The writer of "For Real” and “Hard Love”, songs covered by many - June Tabor, Tony Rice, David Wilcox - songs I have never totally learned because I can never, ever get through them without losing it, is quietly omnipresent as of the most outstanding of the acoustic scene. Yet he never quit his day job at his nearby computer store.

Yet I saw him at a festival at Club Passim where he stepped out and said “all you young players must have the blues in whatever you do today...” and proceeded to make his thumb and first two fingers-styled guitaring sound like he was 150 years old, grooving, with a lope, if you will, a sat-back in the feel that has a little teeny bit of a color line (ok shut up about Paul Brady), where boiled dinner and ambrosia meet collard greens with a pork bone, but mostly does its living where those geniuses that have imbibed and adapted that groove in themselves clearly need to die sometime around my birthday, dammit.

Thanks a lot, gents. I’d be honored to try to get all I do musically to have that feel.

Forever