Are you ready for The Wizard of Woo?

The Central Jersey Jazz Festival is coming to Main Street on September 12th and we've got a great line-up of performers to kick off the event in Flemington.

The lineup includes headliner, Bernie Worrell and his Orchestra.  Bernie's bio reads like a who's who in music and entertainment.  From Parliament Funkadelic, The Talking Heads, David Letterman, and even the classic TV series Car 54, Where are you?, Bernie's contribution to the world of music and entertainment is evident.  Bernie, a.k.a "The Wizard of Woo" wrote his first concerto at the age of eight and performed with the Washington Symphony Orchestra at ten.




Upon leaving the Conservatory, Worrell served for several years as Musical Director for Maxine Brown before joining the Parliament/Funkadelic crew. Worrell then proceeded to provide this freewheeling collective with a structural foundation which, while occasionally implied, was ever present.

At the same time, he explored and expanded his own musical ideas in every conceivable direction with a brazenness which was both revolutionary and evolutionary. From fanciful forays on clavinet which leaped without warning from guttural gulps to squiggly squeals to liquid Minimoog bass lines which herded listeners to the dance floor, it all represented new musical language. All the while, his rapid advancements of the synthesizer's potential were actually traceable to his classical foundation.

In 1997, Worrell was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame along with Parliament/Funkadelic (Talking Heads would follow five years later).

Lecture: Bernie Worrell (New York 2013) from Red Bull Music Academy on Vimeo.

Watching Bernie's lecture at Red Bull Music Academy you'll get a real sense of this humble musical genius and lover of music.

After departing Parliament/Funkadelic, Worrell resurfaced with the revamped Talking Heads lineup for several albums, including The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads, Speaking In Tongues and Jonathan Demme's dazzling concert film, Stop Making Sense. Worrell's ominous colorings, this time delivered via new digital keyboards such as the Prophet 5, were central to the recasting of group leader David Byrne's musical ideas through African rhythms. 

In the years since he left Talking Heads, Worrell has been a phenomenally prolific studio musician, serving as a primary change-agent in the many experimental works of producer Bill Laswell while contributing his singular flair to projects by the likes of Keith Richards, the Pretenders, Jack Bruce, Deee-Lite and Bootsy's New Rubber Band. At the same time, he has been among the most sampled musicians ever, with Digital Underground, De La Soul, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, DMX and countless others having acknowledged his timeless grooves by building their tunes around his signature riffs. 

"When the synthesizers came about, my having been brought up classically and knowing a full range of orchestra, tympanis and everything, I knew how it sounded and what it felt like. So, if I'm playing a horn arrangement on keyboard, or strings, it sounds like strings or horns, 'cause I know how to phrase it, how a string phrases, different attacks from the aperture for horns, trumpets, sax or trombones." - Bernie Worrell

The "Wizard of WOO" continues to wear many hats as effortlessly as he mixes musical forms, performing with both Mos Def's Black Jack Johnson band and Colonel Claypool's Bucket of Bernie Brains.

His newest collaboration is The Bernie Worrell Orchestra [link]. Their debut album launched in 2013 and the title track, "BWO is Landing" named the winner in the IMA (Independent Music Award) Funk/Fusion/Jam Song category.

Read more about Bernie Worrell on his website.

Let's give a big warm Flemington welcome to the Wizard of Woo September 12th!