Rhythm and blues is a huge part of Corey Glover’s musical DNA. Best known for being the front man for New York City rock band Living Colour, the Brooklyn native’s latest project is The Soul Experience featuring Corey Glover.
Fans will get a taste of this six-piece when they hit My Father’s Place on July 18. For someone who spent plenty of time taking family road trips listening to a wide panoply of R&B, Glover created The Soul Experience as an extension of those formative years. He kicked it all off back in 2017 by doing a residency at a club near where Glover lives up in Marlboro, N.Y., called The Falcon.
“With that residency, I was talking about the history of music and the journey music took,” he recalled. “It’s not just Muscle Shoals and New Orleans. It reached places you wouldn’t know and helped finance bootlegging operations. Whole ideas about music it changed because of [these scenes]. I kept thinking about what this was like for me.
Basically, it was car trips on the weekends with my family to visit family and friends on Long Island. Or we took a long drive to Michigan to visit my cousins and it was about what was on the radio or the 8-track player on the way there. We’d be listening to artists like Al Green, Bill Withers, Sly & the Family Stone and Carlos Santana.
It was that kind of stuff and The Soul Experience is me paying homage to that kind of thing.”
With Glover front and center, The Soul Experience is rounded out by keyboardist Jeremy Baum, guitarist Dan Kottman, drummer Cleveland Love, bassist Ivan Bodley and saxophonist Neal Spitzer. Far from being a run-of-the-mill cover band performing overplayed, lowest common denominator material, the sexagenarian vocalist and his crew have instead curated a set-list that mixes deeper soul cuts and Living Colour gems.
A recent City Winery show found the Soul Experience covering everything from the Ohio Players’ “Skintight” and Earth, Wind and Fire’s “Mighty Mighty” to the Bee Gees’ “To Love Somebody” and The O’Jays’ “Back Stabbers.” For Glover, it’s all about feel.
“[Set lists are determined by] how much I dig a song and if I can sing it,” he said. “We try to be as uplifting as we possibly can. Sometimes you go see people play and it’s done by numbers. This is this song and this is that song. There’s a personal aspect to all of these songs for me. For me, it goes back to listening to AM radio or the Oldies station on FM radio while I was going through something. Maybe I was pining over some girl or thinking about graduating that year. It was that kind of thing—teenage angst with music playing in the background.”
While Glover’s earliest musical include hearing his self-described family of “Miles Davis devotees” keeping “Bitches Brew” in constant rotation around the house, it wasn’t until a boost from his grandmother and a healthy dose of sibling rivalry that set young Corey down the road to singing.
“My brother, who is a little older than me, was the singer of the family,” he explained. “He was and still is an amazing singer. As the story goes, one Easter, my brother had a solo in church that the whole family went to see. The nine-year-old me thought it was all just BS. My grandmother, who came to check this out, asked what I was so upset about. I said he wasn’t so great and I could do what he does. She quizzically looked at me and said, ‘Really? Show me.’ I sang for her and she said okay. Jump cut to Easter dinner and everybody is heaping praise on my brother. My grandmother, who was in the corner, said, ‘You know, Corey can sing.’ Needle scratch and people were like ‘What?’ And that was the start of my musical career.”
It wouldn’t until Glover was a college freshman that he crossed paths with Vernon Reid at a Crown Heights party where the former’s rendition of “Happy Birthday” got the attention of Reid, who was transitioning from playing in avant-garde jazz-rock outfit The Decoding Society and was looking to form what eventually became Living Colour.
Fast-forward to the present, and Glover is more than happy to split his time between working in Living Colour and pursuing his path. Ideally, the latter will lead him to the recording studio.
“What I’d love to do is get a record deal and sort of do what I did with my first solo record, which is called ‘Hymns,’” he said. “This music is seminal to me. If I could recreate that kind of vibe, it would have to be the real analog and not digitally done at all. It’s the best fidelity for me and allows this kind of music to sound warmer and breathe.”
The Soul Experience featuring Corey Glover will be appearing on July 18 at My Father’s Place at the Roslyn Hotel, 1221 Old Northern Blvd., Roslyn. For more information, visit www.myfathersplce.com or call 516-625-2700.
