Michael Jackson & Brass Construction

This week I decided to just search "brass" into whosampled, just to see what I could find. Tijuana Brass showed up, which I expected. But the top result (with almost 300 samples total!) was a group called Brass Construction, who I had never heard of before. One of the firsts samples that came up was one used by the King of Pop himself, Michael Jackson, so that's who I'll be talking about in this post!

Everybody knows Michael Jackson. Even kids in grade school today know who he is thanks to Tik-Tok keeping some of his most famous songs popular and alive. He is to this day still known as the King of Pop even though he passed away over a decade ago. I'm sure most of us may even remember when he passed away as well. Michael Jackson's music was HUGE in my family, so his death was a really big deal, and I remember that day very well. My mom had so many CDs of his, and would play them on car rides all the time, so I grew up on music from albums like Off The Wall, Thriller, Bad, and Dangerous, which has the track Can't Let Her Get Away.

I think this track is really great, but its definitely not one of my favorite Michael Jackson songs. I really love the chord progression that comes out in the verses though! And when the strings are added in the second verse it is really beautiful. I think that the chord progression from the verses could've been used to lead into the bridge and really make it stand out, but what do I know 💁 I think that the song just gets a little too repetitive. Many of his songs just go on and on, which works in most cases, but personally I think in this case the song could've been shortened a little bit. The bridge doesn't have much lyrical content, just him kinda yelling over it. But I will say, even though the Chorus is pretty repetitive as well, his harmonies are really cool (as always). If you've never listened to any of his isolated vocals you should check some out! They're incredible. I also want to point out that even though we're looking at an example of something that Michael sampled, he has also been sampled countless times as well. It's interesting to see how the sampling chain just keeps going, similar to how composers like John Williams have continued to borrow from his predecessors within classical music. 

Here's Can't Let Her Get Away, the sample hits at 0:18 and throughout:

Brass Construction was a funk group from New York that was active from the late 60s to the mid 80s. The group consisted of Keys/Vocals, Guitar, Bass, Drums, Percussion, and the brass members. This included Wayne Parris and Morris Price on Trumpet, and Jesse Ward Jr. Michael "Micky" Grudge on Saxophone. I know the saxes aren't technically brass, but in this context I think they should be considered "brass" alongside the trumpets. They were signed in 1975, and soon after in 1976 they released Movin', which topped out at #14 on US Billboard Top 100. This song has been sampled in over 200 songs, and most of these probably only include the same sample that Michael used: the horn hit right at the beginning! There's almost 9 more minutes to the song, and he only pulled the first note. It's a great example of how selective some samples can be.

I really enjoyed Movin'! It's the kind of song you dance to, and the song is very indicative of the 70s. Te groove is constant (with big hits on 2 & 4), there isn't much lyrical content, there's long vamps which allow for solos. This is the kind of song that would be 1000x better live than through a recording. Again, the sample that Michael Jackson uses is the first hit at the beginning of the song.

Here's Movin':