eMusic Review 0
Audacious American DJs had been playing European dance records before Germany's answer to Gamble & Huff and Barry White's string-wrapped soul luxury first appeared in early 1975. Most of those acts — England's Gary Glitter, Spain's Barrabas, Norway's Titanic — were rock groups with a glam of sense of stomp, and/or shades of Latin funk cribbed from Santana. Munich's Silver Convention mined slick soul, film scores and Muzak. By minimizing vocals, reducing lyrics to simple phrases easily understood by non-native English speakers and accentuating extremes of the instrumental sonic spectrum via booming bass and airy violins, producers Silvester Levay (Hungarian-born composer, keyboardist) and Michael Kunze (lyricist, eventual German theatre librettist) created the prototype for what would eventually be known as Eurodisco.
In those first few years when disco was inseparable from soul, this German approximation penetrated the R&B world in a big way: Silver Convention's second single, "Fly Robin Fly," won the 1976 Grammy for Best R&B Instrumental Performance much like MFSB won the year before with a record that clearly set its mold, "The Sound of Philadelphia." But whereas Philly disco proffered love as its message, this sleeker, more efficient German model suggested sex. With its… read more »
