By Colin Stanhope, PostGenre
The Brecker Brothers, throughout their twenty-year career, always embodied an interesting duality in their music. On the one hand, every member was accomplished in pop, funk, and R&B, performing on seminal albums with everyone from Frank Zappa to Parliament-Funkadelic. Their recordings are infused with a unique tightness of the horns and a deep groove, both of which became the group’s hallmarks. There was also their then-groundbreaking, now common, use of electronics on acoustic instruments like Michael’s saxophone or Randy’s trumpet. On the other hand, each of its members was fundamentally a jazz artist, playing with the complexity and feel of that style. This dynamic ultimately produced some of the best fusion recordings of the 1970s and 1980s. Live and Unreleased (Piloo Records, 2020) showcases the group performing fantastically at Onkel Pö’s Carnegie Hall in Hamburg, Germany in 1980. Read the full review here.