Pee Wee Ellis created funk sitting on James Brown’s tour bus. As Brown’s musical director and sax player it was Ellis’s task to arrange the music for songs such as Cold Sweat and Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud).
“It was a gruelling schedule, crisscrossing the US on a tour bus, recording, rehearsing every day, playing constantly,” he recalled. “I had my own seat at the back of the bus where I wrote the arrangements. I would rehearse the band on the way to the next gig so they had the tune ready for Mr Brown when we got to the venue and he added the magic of the words.”
Ellis and Brown, who travelled separately by limousine, wrote 26 songs together in such fashion, Ellis’s jazz sensibilities creating a rhythmic dialogue with Brown’s vocal swagger. The songs formed the bedrock of a new, hard-driving style of black music that transformed soul into funk and inspired performers from Sly and the Family Stone to George Clinton’s Funkadelic.
They came up with Say It Loud in the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King in April 1968. One night Brown called Ellis into his dressing room and told him that he had an idea for a powerful song that would speak for the African-American community as a response to King’s murder.
“The song was written the usual way,” Ellis recalled. “I rehearsed the band, getting the horn parts right and guiding the bass player through his lines and the next day Mr Brown showed up. He had the words he’d written on a napkin he’d kept in a brown paper bag. By the time we played it through a couple of times, we knew it was working.”
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As many of Brown’s band did not read music the song was recorded with the musicians facing each other, so they could respond to Ellis’s hand cues. They were joined by a choir of 30 schoolchildren from the Watts ghetto in Los Angeles who were paid $10 each to sing the call-and-response choruses.
Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud) was released in September 1968 and spent six weeks at No 1 on the R&B chart as the song was taken up as the unofficial anthem of the Black Power movement. The reaction when Brown sang it in concert each night sent shivers down Ellis’s spine. “As soon as he shouted ‘Say it loud’, the whole audience chanted back, ‘I’m black and proud’. In weeks it had swept across the country. We were doing three shows a day at the Apollo in Harlem and people queued around the block for every show.”
Ellis left Brown’s employment in 1969 but continued to perform the song with the JB Horns, a group of former Brown sidemen, and with a touring tribute show he put together after Brown’s death in 2006 which he called Still Black, Still Proud.
The song took on a new lease of life after the murder of George Floyd last year and the Black Lives Matter protests that followed. The trade journal Billboard reported a 15,740 per cent jump in streaming of the song in one week. “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud) helped move things forward. It boosted people’s confidence and sense of self,” Ellis said in one of his final interviews. “And it’s serving the same purpose today in the same way.”
Long before King’s assassination, America’s racial conflicts had a direct and tragic personal impact on his life. Alfred James Ellis was born in Bradenton, Florida, in 1941. His father, Garfield Devoe Rogers, left when he was a boy and his mother, Elizabeth, moved to Lubbock, Texas, where she married Ezell Ellis, who managed a local dance band. When Ellis was 12 his stepfather was stabbed to death in a bar for dancing with a white woman. He died in the entrance of a hospital, which would not take him in because he was black. Sixty years later Ellis was asked how it had affected him and replied that he was “still working” it through.
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Nicknamed “Pee Wee” due to his small stature, he played piano and clarinet in a school band. After his stepfather’s death, music became his “best friend, something I could be a part of unconditionally”.
When he was 14 he moved with his mother and his two sisters to Rochester, New York, where he took up the instrument he had wanted to play all along, the saxophone. Two years later he was in New York City having collected his sax from a repair shop when he recognised the jazz musician Sonny Rollins walking down Broadway.
“Being young and cheeky, I asked him if he’d give me a lesson. He said yes and from that moment my life changed for ever,” Ellis recalled. Every Wednesday he flew from Rochester to New York for a lesson with Rollins. “The round fare for the flight was $55 and I was earning $90 a week playing in a local club, so it was worth it,” he reasoned. He enrolled at the Manhattan School of Music and honed his skills in jazz clubs until one day in 1965 he got a call from Waymon Reed, an old friend from Rochester who was playing trumpet in Brown’s band. Reed told him they needed a sax player, Ellis took the gig and within six months had risen to become bandleader. After leaving Brown he worked with various jazz musicians including George Benson.
In 1979 he began a long association with Van Morrison as the singer’s arranger and musical director, appearing on a dozen of his albums. He later moved to Britain, where he lived for three decades with his wife, Charlotte, who acted as his manager and survives him. He enjoyed the British countryside and was an enthusiastic birdwatcher.
Ellis gave his final tour last year just before the first lockdown with a show titled Funk: A Music Revolution, which traced the legacy of the music he created with Brown in the 1960s to contemporary styles such as hip-hop.
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Laid-back and unflappable, Ellis was the perfect foil to Brown and Morrison, two of the most notoriously difficult characters in popular music. How did he cope with the tantrums and the egos? “They were both very demanding artists because they want things to be how they wanted it to be,” he conceded. “But I’m easy.”
Pee Wee Ellis, saxophonist and music director, was born on April 21, 1941. He died of heart complications on September 24, 2021, aged 80