It's no earth-shaker to say that Motown is the greatest pop and/or r&b record label. If you look at the list of artists they produced, and the number and variety of hit records they made, or more simply, if you listen to the quality of the writing, the arranging, the singing and the playing that these recordings contain, it's hard to find a candidate around which you could build an argument to the contrary. (I'll be writing about two that could be considered as challengers, Atlantic and Stax-Volt, in the days ahead.) No, the unbelievable success, both artistically and commercially, that the label achieved is a given; what has to be explored is how they did it and what the story can teach us.

A good place to start for anyone who wishes to do so is the film, Standing in the Shadows of Motown (2002), which tells the story of the label from the perspective of the musicians. The central cast of whom were known as the Funk Brothers, accomplished jazz musicians playing in clubs around the Detroit area who were recruited by label founder Berry Gordy to form a session band which could record in a number of styles at a rapid rate, with a high level of quality and, perhaps most importantly, with the capability of making on-the-spot creative contributions to the songs. And the plan worked. Because of them, the interaction that is heard on the records is at a level much higher than that heard on any other pop or r&b recordings (right up to and including the present, to my ears). Their ability to process information and to play with rhythmic power as well as high degrees of sensitivity and subtlety came from their jazz backgrounds, where these qualities are expected.

A few days ago, I wrote that many of the best bands were racially integrated, which the Funk Brothers were as well, and proudly so. And yesterday, in writing about the Foundations, I mentioned that they were integrated in terms of both race and age. Motown could be considered as having gone even a further step, in a way, by integrating high-level jazz musicianship with equally excellent pop/r&b songwriting, singing and performing. The results sound like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xz-UvQYAmbg.

James Jamerson, the virtuosic Motown bassist, probably did more for the success of the label than anyone. There are several reasons for this, the most vital being that music is usually "polarized" in nature, by that I mean that the melody or soprano voice (on top) and the bass line (on the bottom) are the two most active parts in the majority of music. The inner voices, the alto and tenor, have their moments certainly, but for the most part their role is to fill in the middle in the most sonorous way possible. Ergo, the two most important musicians on most pop records are the singer and the bassist. Now Motown's singers have become among the most famous in history (Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Smokey Robinson, Michael Jackson, Marvin Gaye, etc.), but the musicians who played on the records didn't. There was an attempt at redressing the situation with the 2002 film, Standing in the Shadows of Motown (which took its title from a 1989 book about Jamerson's life and work), and it did to a large degree - it's a great movie, by the way - but it came too late for many of the musicians, and particularly the most accomplished and most important artist on the label's roster. I'll be writing more on him in the days ahead, but for now here's a good example of his brilliance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JmVrkRcTgo