The Bernie That Mattered

R.I.P. Bernie Worrell of P-Funk, April 19, 1944 – June 24, 2016
Legendary Parliament-Funkadelic Keyboardist Bernie Worrell Dies At 72
This man's work is woven and sampled all throughout the DNA of the last four decades of r&b, pop, and hip hop. Talk about someone who's music will live forever!

From the NYT:
"Mr. Worrell reached a new audience in the early 1980s as a member of the expanded Talking Heads, whose 1983 tour was documented in Jonathan Demme’s film “Stop Making Sense.” In the 1990s, Mr. Worrell’s synthesizer lines for P-Funk songs were widely recycled as hip-hop tracks, becoming the foundation for the West Coast rap — sometimes called G-Funk — of Snoop Doggy Dogg and Dr. Dre....Mr. Worrell’s best-known innovation was the bass line he played on three connected Minimoog synthesizers in the 1978 Parliament song “Flash Light.” It had a descending and ascending chromatic line with a meaty tone and a certain swagger, an approach that would spread through funk, new wave, electro, synth-pop and countless other iterations. Many Parliament recordings from the 1970s, like “Aqua Boogie,”another song that would be widely sampled in hip-hop, revolve around the multiple, constantly surprising keyboard parts Mr. Worrell devised."