Friday Night YouTube Music #4

Coming to you on Saturday

Scary Pockets

Maybe it was the pandemic that kept me at home most of the past 2 years, or the period of rehab I went through last summer after knee surgery. In any case, I watched a great deal of YouTube, including music. The result was I found many artists I’d not known about and an entire group of musicians for whom YouTube was their primary means of distributing their music. Disclaimer: I haven’t listened to pop music for years, but my tastes are eclectic.

One of the most successful of this latter group is Scary Pockets with almost 1 million subscribers. The group is actually two professional musicians, Ryan Lerman (guitar) and Jack Conte (keyboards) who assemble ad hoc groups of other professionals to perform covers of popular songs in a funk style. The assortment of great musicians and vocalists they gather for their sessions is astounding: You will see jazz-blues guitarist John Schofield, drummer Louis Cole, bassist Tim Lefebvre, jazz organist Larry Goldings, Vulpeck drummer/guitarist Theo Katzman… The list is very long.

My first discovery was a young woman, Elise Trouw, doing a cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams”. Elise was not yet 20 when this recording was made. She plays drums here, but she is a multi-instrumentalist (bass, guitar, keyboards, and drums). You can find her on her own YouTube channel.

Some Scary Packets covers are surprising re-arrangements of familiar tunes. Check out Judith Hill’s rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah“.

They do cover contemporary pop tunes, too. Here another unknown (to me) vocalist belts out a cover of Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep”:

This cover of Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” by Dannielle DeAndrea is one of my favorites:

They have a knack for selecting the singers and musicians and, as they say, “funkifying” covers. This example is a reverent tribute to the late Bill Withers:

There are dozens of videos on the Scary Pockets channel. They recently rolled out “Stories”, a YouTube channel that features acoustic covers. Then there’s Pomplamoose, the band started by Jack Conte and his wife, Natalie Dawn. This is also a cover band. A sample of their style:

Before I leave you with all this ear candy, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Cory Henry joining Scary Pockets to cover Tears for Fears “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”. If you don’t know Cory, you need to check out his insane synthesizer solo on the jazz-funk fusion band Snarky Puppy’s live in-studio recording of “Lingus”. You can also find him on YouTube with his band, Cory Henry and the Funk Apostles.

I will leave this here for now as I dive back into a Cory Wong rabbit hole (more on him soon). In the meantime, please use the comments to share the names of artists you have discovered recently. They may not be contemporary artists, just people you’ve discovered recently. And for the good of the human race, I hope they weren’t brought to your attention by Spotify’s algorithms.

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