Kings Go Forth transcends trends with soul-funk goodness

Indeed, a wave of artists has emerged in recent years who shares at least some of that mind set, whether it’s Cee Lo Green, Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings, Jamie Lidell or Adele. To Noble, only the artists who bring something new and contemporary to the sound will endure.

“I think all this will be seen as a fad,” Noble says. “In two or three years it won’t be here anymore. I want to be the group that transcended the revival, and the way to do that is to make good music that is bigger than any trend. I live in that kind of music. It could go out of style next year, but I’ll still be into it. I’m pretty fickle as the producer and when I deejay, so I figure if the music we make passes my test, that’s probably a good thing.”

Noble grew up in Milwaukee and was playing in punk and ska bands while in high school; he was touring the country soon after he got his driver’s license.

“I’m surprised my parents were cool with it – seven teenagers traveling to the East and West coasts,” he says. “We were precocious, booking our own shows, opening for larger groups. We had the wanderlust of 16-, 17-year-old boys.”
       
But Noble burned out on his “fate being shared with seven people who could flake out and leave you high and dry at any minute.” He threw himself into record-collecting and deejaying.

“While in the group I would go to records stores in my spare time looking for rare stuff as songwriting inspiration,” he says. “In the pre-Internet world, record-digging was the only way to find out about huge chapters of musical history, like dub reggae, Brazilian bossa, Latin jazz, indie soul and funk from the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s. I was mentored by a few older guys who knew about this stuff, and then struck out on my own. I got further away from mass-produced product and into more homemade stuff, not just to impress people because it was more obscure, but because it didn’t have a whole bunch of filters between what you’re hearing and what the band is playing. It had a certain emotional directness that you miss on a Columbia Records release in 1977 that had 100 A&R guys working on it.”

Noble developed a following as a DJ, particularly when he began focusing on soul and funk, and ran the Lotus Land record store for nine years.

“Record shops are like barber shops,” he says. “You had people hanging out -- musicians, record heads. If I didn’t have a shop, I wouldn’t have met Black Wolf,” a k a Jesse Bilal, a longtime vocalist in the Milwaukee underground soul scene.

“I’d met a lot of guys who had put time into the R&B scene in Milwaukee from the ‘60s and ‘70s,” Noble says. “He was a living resource for some history in that scene, but he was also still active, still writing, still singing, which made him different” from his contemporaries.
       
Before long, Noble and Black Wolf were in the studio together, cutting singles. What started out as a studio project became something else when one of the tracks they cut, “One Day,” started sparking interest from soul aficionados worldwide.
       
“We created demand by putting the songs on-line, then pressed 500 copies (of the ‘One Day’ single), which sold out in presale,” he says. “It was going for $150 on ebay.”
       
Luaka Bop, a respected New York indie label, eventually persuaded Noble that Kings Go Forth’s music had an appeal beyond hardcore soul fans and put out the group’s debut last year, “The Outsiders are Back.”

“They treated us like a real group so we had to become one,” Noble says. Kings Go Forth evolved into a 10-piece multi-cultural group, with group members’ ages spanning from the early-30s to the mid-‘50s. Its concerts are celebratory affairs, geared for dancing.

“It’s not about nostalgia, it’s not about retro,” he says. “That implies that we’re taking you on some kind of time travel trip. This is not some ‘60s costume party. We really try to take cleverness and intellectualism out of what we’re doing and put intuition and spontaneity at the forefront. I want to make music that’s classic, that will sound as good now as they might have in 1962.”
       
greg@gregkot.com

Kings Go Forth: 6:30 p.m. Monday at Pritzker Pavilion, Millennium Park, free; www.millenniumpark.org or 312-742-1168.