FSQ and Dolette McDonald’s “I Zimbra” (Midnight Riot Records)
How our group Funk Style Quality (FSQ) and vocalist Dolette McDonald came to cover the Talking Heads’ dadaesque anthem
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We are pleased that Midnight Riot Records is bringing you FSQ and Dolette McDonald’s “I Zimbra” EP.
The EP consists of our FSQ cover of the Talking Heads song “I Zimbra” and remixes of our cover by Soul Clap and Alan Dixon. Dolette McDonald who toured with the Talking Heads for a few years is the featured vocalist on our cover.
Where we went with our cover of an important song…
“I Zimbra” is the lead track of Talking Heads’ 1979 album “Fear of Music”. Before covering the tune, we were not aware the song is viewed as so important to the Talking Heads catalog or highly relevant to late 70s / early 80s music history in general. The tune is the only Talking Heads song featured on David Byrne’s new album and tour “American Utopia”
“I Zimbra” is a very discussed song. For instance, we recently read in Tim Lawrence’s “Hold on to Your Dreams”, his biography of legendary composer Arthur Russell, that Arthur feels he influenced the Talking Heads by pushing them more towards a funk sound. Arthur believes he directly inspired the group to write “I Zimbra”.
Chanteuse Nona Hendryx adds that it’s her favorite Talking Heads track. “That’s a great one. The whole sort of the feel of that and the motion, the rhythm that, well, it’s just a cool rhythm. It’s African, but western and almost South American. That’s one of my favorites.”
Our FSQ cover takes the Talking Heads version and puts a bit more of Caribbean spin on it, leaving some breathing room for new percussion patterns and a revision of the plucky guitar accents that are a bit more hidden in the original. You will also hear new synth arpeggios that FSQ’s One Era developed for our cover.
The original Talking Heads 1979 version, running at just 3 minutes in length, is much more thick with a very dense sound. While the original “I Zimbra” has a soupy feel at times, especially when all the guitars lines ring in together, it is also very cutting with it’s precise throbbing funk.
Talking Heads’ “I Zimbra” is led by Tina Weymouth’s very thick and slippery bass line, which lands “on the one” at each measure. The pulsing bass is accompanied by very jangly and heavy interlocking funk rhythm guitars. On the guitars are Talking Heads’ Jerry Harrison and David Byrne, but they are also joined by King Crimson’s Bill Frisell, who’s screaming guitar solos appear about 2 minutes into the jam.
We didn’t find the studio version of “I Zimbra” to be all that funky on first listen, but apparently it’s 1 of only 4 songs by the Talking Heads to ever make Billboard’s Hot Dance Club Play Chart, peaking at #28 on March 29th of 1980. Interestingly there was no extended 12" version of “I Zimbra” that drove it up the charts, but it was the Brian Eno remix at 3:55 in length that was being played in discos at the time.
An extended version of legendary producer Brian Eno’s remix of “I Zimbra” did surface from the vaults about 2010. It runs about 7 minutes and is the most dance floor friendly version with extended drum and percussion break downs that you don’t hear in the shorter version.
It turns out that the conga players you hear who really drive along the beats on this extended version were recruited by Brian Eno and David Byrne right off the New York City streets. Brian and David discovered these two guys, Gene Wilder (not the actor) and Ari (no last name given), playing congas in Washington Square Park and thought they played so well that they should add their congas to “I Zimbra”.
Note in the photo used for the extended “I Zimbra” version on YouTube, you see the extended Talking Heads group pictured about 1980. In the center of the photo is our friend and vocalist Dolette McDonald who was with the group at the time and also joins our FSQ “I Zimbra” EP as the lead vocalist.
If we didn’t find the original to be that funky — again admittedly we felt that way only on the first few listens — why would FSQ cover this Talking Heads song?
FSQ was performing with Dolette McDonald at Miami Music Week 2017 for Soul Clap’s House of E Funk show at the Electric Pickle club in Wynnwood.
We wrote an in-depth post on Dolette McDonald’s incredibly diverse and important music career which is linked here — but for now the short answer of why we chose to cover “I Zimbra”
Dolette and FSQ had produced one original song by Miami Music Week 2017, called “Shaking My Damn Head”.
So we needed a few other tunes to round out our set with Dolette at the House of E-Funk.
We chose “Burning Down The House” by the Talking Heads because everyone knows and loves the tune and there’s an instrumental version of it available to sing over.
There’s also an instrumental of Dolette McDonald’s “Xtra Special”, a 1982 boogie funk favorite. Dolette used this to perform “Xtra Special” that night at the Electric Pickle.
This left us with one more song to perform for our set so we needed to choose one.
When we think of Dolette’s time with the Talking Heads, one of our favorite performances of her’s with the band is their Rome 1980 Live concert which you can catch in it’s full entirety here at this link (1 million views and counting).
One of the jams where Dolette dominates and really shines on during the Rome 1980 concert is “I Zimbra”.
You’ll see Dolette here in the purple jump suit. Her voice is absolutely incredible on “I Zimbra” live, delivering the vocals in a high register with operatic flair. Dolette is really the lead vocalist on this with David Byrne following slight behind her in a much lower register.
Since there was no instrumental version of “I Zimbra” for Dolette to sing over, FSQ’s One Era (Matt Coogan) and Chuck Da Fonk (Charlie Fishman) went to work in early March of 2017 just weeks before the Miami show to come up with their own instrumental version for Dolette to perform over.
We really followed this 1980 live version as a guide for our cover versus the 1979 studio version. Busta Jones takes the bass lead here and is more staccato with his bass line while Tina Weymouth moves from bass on the original, over to the two little high plucked notes on a guitar here live. We replayed Tina’s live guitar part in our remix and made it prominent.
There’s also more interplay in the rhythm guitar lines on the Rome 1980 live version — you can clearly hear David Byrne’s slinky chords lock in against Jerry Harrison’s single note afro beat guitar line. Then there’s Adrian Belew who carries some lead guitar solos that are like absolute lightening through the track. I’m not sure we could replicate any of Belew’s shredding in our FSQ cover without veering off too far into rock territory. But we could draw from Bernie Worrell who plays some single note keyboard riffs that give this live rendition a bit more of an angular funk than the studio version. We certainly put some of that Bernie spirit into our cover. So Rome 1980’s version was clearly our inspiration for our FSQ cover.
The Talking Heads studio version of “I Zimbra” has four different movements. In our cover, we cut the number of movements down for the sake of the dancers and instead only offer up an A section and a bridge.
We also found inspiration in a live version of “I Zimbra” from the David Letterman show in 1983. Our FSQ cover is probably is closest to this Letterman performance. Here, Tina Weymouth moves back to bass and Busta Jones over to guitar. Bernie Worrell adds more P-Funk synth wizardry to this rendition out of all the other live performances we are aware of. Percussionist Steve Scales is the unsung hero of “I Zimbra” on these live performances. Finally, Brides of Funkenstein / Parliament-Funkadelic singer Lynn Mabry joins Dolette here on vocals.
When we performed our cover FSQ version of “I Zimbra” with Dolette at Miami Music Week it seemed to work well and we figured we should release the production. So eventually we recorded Dolette’s vocals to the cover and brought it to our friends at Midnight Riot Records. Dolette nailed the cover and by the way the lyrics of the song are not easy to remember!
We thought “I Zimbra”’s lyrics were written in some African language. It turns out the lyrics are an adaptation of Dadaist Hugo Ball’s poem “Gadji beri bimba”, basically a whole lot of non-sensical made up words.
Soul Clap, Alan Dixon: Where our friends went with their remixes of our FSQ “I Zimbra” cover …
There are also two remixes of the FSQ “I Zimbra” cover on this Midnight Riot Records EP.
Soul Clap’s remix takes our new elements and expands them, as well as Dolette’s vocals, stretching them out over a James Brown funky drummer type sample. One could say Soul Clap’s drum programming harkens to Jersey or Baltimore club beats. Soul Clap’s well thought out club rhythms add a new urban dynamic to a song that originally was supposed to be citing African music.
Alan Dixon’s remix adds soaring, jazzy melodies led by groovy clavinets, big pianos and bright synthesizers. Dixon takes the song in a new and rich direction probably never imagined by the Talking Heads who seemed to really focus on a more Fela Kuti / James Brown funk vamp in their original. While the original “I Zimbra” is more a funk workout appropriate for tropical jungle settings, Dixon’s remix has so much of a gospel vibe you could play it in church on a Sunday morning.
We even got in the action and offered our own FSQ remix of the cover. Midnight Riot Records let us know they had a Balearic music compilation coming for the summer of 2017. So we took our “I Zimbra” cover, and sun-drenched it with 80s synthesizer sweeps, soft marimbas, bell chimes and other low slung, left field sounds. We dubbed out Dolette’s vocals too. Our FSQ Cap Negret Remix gives “I Zimbra” a chilled out feel, ready for a spin against any of the finest Mediterranean vistas. It appears on Midnight Riot Records compilation “Balearic Headspace, Volume 2”.
