HB Concept - Mine, All Mine (1993)

H.B. Concept was the Vancouver funk and R&B band led by bassist, singer and songwriter Henri Brown. Born in Spokane, Washington, Brown grew up in a family woven into the city's Black musical history. His mother was the blind gospel, blues and R&B singer Pearl Brown, and his first cousin was Jimi Hendrix, whose grandmother Nora Hendrix cooked at Vie's Chicken and Steak House near Hogan's Alley. As a boy Henri cared more about basketball than music and dreamed of playing for the Harlem Globetrotters. Brown formed H.B. Concept while his previous band, Freshwood, was preparing for a European tour. He had spent years trying to get his cousin Lovena Fox to sing with him, and she finally agreed to try it for a week. Guitarist Corey Phillips was a rock player Brown spotted at Long & McQuade. Drummer Gianco Fucito, from Naples, had been running his own drum school in Switzerland when he joined, and Paul McIntosh played keyboards. Earth, Wind and Fire was the model, and by 1983 Brown's originals made up half of the live set. That year H.B. Concept beat 18 Lower Mainland acts to win the CBC television competition Fame Game, which earned them a half-hour special broadcast on December 26. They also played a week at the Plazazz! Showroom. Brown reached Maurice White of Earth, Wind and Fire, who called him back and offered to produce the band in Los Angeles if their songs showed promise. Brown sent a tape and took the Fame Game footage to California. The band still faced a city where most clubs booked rock, and where, as Brown put it at the time, there was not much of a market for Black music. Brown kept a parallel career on screen in the early eighties, with a state trooper role in First Blood and parts in Spacehunter and the television film The Haunting Passion. Three H.B. Concept recordings, 'Wild And Sweet', 'Mine, All Mine' and 'Last Time', open The Soul Of Vancouver: The Untold Story, a 1993 compilation on Brown's own Rece Records (RR2121). Brown produced it with Gordon Durity for Des-Tash Music, collecting his own band alongside Le Sassy, N.R.G., Det-A-Nation and The Touch to document a Vancouver soul, funk and rap scene that had gone largely unrecorded. The compilation is streamed through the Museum of Canadian Music. Brown has continued as a musician, producer, engineer, actor and film writer, and still leads a dance band, HB Wild. In his own studio he has recorded with Buddy Miles, Narada Michael Walden and Wynton Marsalis, and with his mother, who recorded her album Black Cultured Pearl with Marsalis. -Robert Williston Gordon Durity: keyboard programming Henri Brown: keyboard programming Keith Harrison: keyboard programming Stan Ganapolsky: keyboard programming Wayne Brown: keyboard programming Bill Knight: keyboard programming Guiliano Franco: keyboard programming Dave Pickell: keyboard programming Graham Coleman: keyboard programming Jerry Wong: guitars Olaf Deshield: guitars Terry Wallace: guitars Aaron Anderson: drums Dave Say: saxophone Produced by Henri Brown and Gordon Durity for Des-Tash Music Co-produced by Keith Harrison, Otis Brown, and Marlon McLain Full album citizenfreak exclusive: https://citizenfreak.com/titles/31437...