The man who changed the beat

RALEIGH -- The day after James Brown died, Gerald Alexander stood on a corner of Fayetteville Street and paid his respects to Soul Brother No. 1.

"The hardest-working man in show business, Mr. Dynamo, is gone!" declared Alexander, a street saxophonist and fixture in downtown Raleigh, in his Tuesday afternoon shout-out. "I've gotta dedicate this to him. Here's what James Brown taught me: 'Maceo, blow your horn!' "

Doing his best impression of Brown's longtime saxophone sidekick, Kinston native Maceo Parker, Alexander blew riffs and paused to call out song titles and catchphrases: "Please Please Please," "I Can't Stand It," "I Feel Good," "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag." Finally he played the dramatically ascending five notes of "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" and hollered, "This is a man's world!"

"Don't be so sure of that," sniffed a woman passing by, and everyone within earshot laughed.

Really, though, this is THE man's world -- the man being James Brown. A few days into the post-James Brown era, the only thing that seems certain is that his legacy will outlast everyone alive today.

Brown, who died early Christmas Day of heart failure, wasn't simply ahead of his time; he transcended time itself. He didn't play instruments; he played time by creating a rhythmic sensibility of enduring power. In his hands, rhythm was less a musical element than an end-all, be-all force of nature. The golden ratio isn't 1.618; it's the endlessly sampled drum breakdown to Brown's "Funky Drummer."

Starting in the early 1960s, Brown took Ray Charles' gospel-derived soul and turned it into funk, which later yielded disco, hip-hop and pretty much every other style of music that moves and grooves. Michael Jackson, Prince and Justin Timberlake, to name just a few, would be nowhere without him.

Brown split the atom by finding the rhythmic undertones of every instrument. That's easy enough when you're talking about drums and bass, but it's less obvious when you take that approach with guitars, voices and other instruments of treble. Jerry Wexler, who produced Charles, Aretha Franklin and other R&B contemporaries of Brown, singles out the Godfather of Soul as one of the greatest.

"James Brown's syncopations, those unexpected beats, paved the way for hip-hop and everything that followed," Wexler said by phone from his home in Florida. "I'm a rhythm freak, and those syncopations all came out of his brain. He set a standard that is still a standard today."

Just as significant, Brown was an iconic cultural figure. In a Rolling Stone magazine profile this year, one of his backup musicians put it in perspective: "It's like [he's] up there with Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse. There's no other comparison."

Indeed, Brown had nobody but himself to compete with. Eddie Huffman, a music journalist in Burlington, interviewed Brown in person 15 years ago. And what was the most memorable part of the experience?

"When he walked into the room," Huffman says. "His charisma and star power just blew me away. It wasn't that he was physically imposing, although he was very well-built. But there was just this feeling of power. The room was suddenly transformed and he was in charge with all this raw power and energy. It was something."

Now he's gone. But his beats will live on, as omnipresent and essential as oxygen.

"It's the soul, man," says Little Brother deejay/producer Pat "9th Wonder" Douthit. "A lot of producers grew up off James Brown. That's the way hip-hop is connected to soul music, through James Brown. He's why you can put De La Soul and Dr. Dre in the same sentence.

"Trying to keep the soul and the funk alive, that's what he did for us -- what he's still doing for us."