Dance Your Ass Off

Whether you consider disco a cousin of funk, an offshoot, or a pure bastardization, it’s hard to dismiss the connection between the two genres when you’re presented with a Bohannon LP. By the middle of the decade, the former Stevie Wonder touring drummer had strung together a formidable discography for the Dakar label, and you could point to Side A of this ’76 LP as a peak not just for Bohannon as a bandleader and arranger but for the prospect of disco-as-funk on the whole. The title cut’s a thoroughly exhausting demand — not tediously compulsory, but relentlessly motivating, dynamic enough to switch up its frantic chicken-scratched grooves to let the bassline breathe but imposing enough in its dance-commanding velocity to scare the wallflower tendencies right out of you. And the further that side goes — into the pulsing Night Train itinerary of “Spread the Groove Around,” the Georgia-as-hell country funk of “The Groove I Feel,” and the manic reiteration of the string-stabbed “Bohannon’s Theme” — the clearer it becomes that this is what it sounds like when the disco set has fully internalized the legacy of James Brown. Flip it over and you’ve got some solid jams, too — “Party People” is (thankfully) more of the same, but the charge of “Zulu” and its submersible B3 organ recalls a theoretical mid ’70s Booker T. & the M.G.’s that never imploded after Melting Pot, and “Trying to Be Slick” boasts a woodwind solo that would have Bobbi Humphrey fanning herself. A total gimme of a party-starting record, and more than enough to win over any skeptic of the disco-sadistic.