Earth, Wind & Fire

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• Top 6 Funk Artists of All Time

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• Parliament-Funkadelic

  Parliament-Funkadelic, the collective umbrella for bandleader George Clinton's overlapping Parliament and Funkadelic groups, built an elaborate science-fiction mythology around their music and stage shows, most famously the "Mothership," a massive spacecraft prop that descended onto the stage during live performances throughout the 1970s. Clinton's combination of psychedelic rock instrumentation with deep, syncopated funk rhythms created a musically ambitious hybrid sound that distinguished Parliament-Funkadelic from more straightforwardly danceable funk contemporaries, giving their albums a conceptual and sonic ambition closer to progressive rock in scope. The collective's massive, rotating lineup of musicians across both Parliament and Funkadelic gave Clinton an unusually large pool of collaborators to draw from, and the resulting catalog's rhythmic and melodic elements became some of the most heavily sampled material in the subsequent development of hip-hop production. Clinton's elaborate stage theatrics, extended jam-based live performances, and the sheer conceptual scope of the "P-Funk" mythology he built across dozens of albums made Parliament-Funkadelic one of the most artistically ambitious and influential acts in funk history, with an influence extending directly into hip-hop, G-funk, and numerous other subsequent genres.

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• Sly and the Family Stone

  Sly and the Family Stone was one of the first major American bands to feature a racially integrated, mixed-gender lineup performing together as genuine musical equals, a structural choice that reflected bandleader Sly Stone's explicit vision of the band itself as a model for the kind of social integration he addressed directly in his lyrics. Their 1969 performance at the Woodstock festival, delivered in the early hours of the morning to a massive, exhausted crowd, became one of the most electrifying and widely remembered individual sets of the entire festival, helping cement the band's reputation as one of the most dynamic live acts of the era. The band's 1971 album There's a Riot Goin' On marked a dramatic tonal shift from their earlier optimistic material, reflecting Stone's own increasingly dark personal struggles with drug addiction and the broader disillusionment following the decade's civil rights and countercultural movements' unmet promises. Sly Stone's innovative use of early drum machines and layered, dense production techniques on that album directly influenced the subsequent development of hip-hop production, and the band's combination of genre-blending musical ambition and explicit social integration made them one of the most influential funk and soul acts of their era.

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• Kool & the Gang

  Kool & the Gang, formed in Jersey City in 1964, built one of the longest sustained commercial run of any funk band, moving successfully from their earlier jazz-funk instrumental sound into disco-influenced dance-pop hits during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Their 1980 single "Celebration" became one of the most widely used celebratory anthems in American popular culture, performed at everything from sporting event victories to the 1981 White House ceremony welcoming home American hostages released from Iran, giving the song an unusually broad cultural and political reach. The band's ability to successfully evolve their sound across multiple distinct musical eras — from jazz-funk instrumentals through disco-era dance-pop — without losing commercial relevance reflected an adaptability that many of their funk contemporaries struggled to match across changing musical trends. Kool & the Gang's combined catalog of hit singles across multiple decades, along with "Celebration" specifically becoming one of the most ubiquitous celebration songs in American culture, has made them one of the most commercially successful and culturally pervasive funk bands in popular music history.

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• Rick James

  Rick James coined the term "punk-funk" to describe his own genre-blending sound, combining funk's rhythmic foundation with rock-influenced guitar work and a deliberately provocative, sexually explicit performance style that distinguished him from more polished contemporaries in the genre. His 1981 single "Super Freak" became one of the most enduringly sampled songs in popular music history, later forming the musical foundation of MC Hammer's 1990 hit "U Can't Touch This," a sampling connection that introduced James's music to an entirely new generation of listeners who may not have known the original source. James's combination of commercial success and increasingly public struggles with substance abuse, culminating in a highly publicized 1991 criminal conviction related to assault charges, complicated his legacy even as his musical influence on subsequent funk, hip-hop, and R&B artists remained substantial. His flamboyant, sexually charged stage persona and genre-blending sound directly influenced later funk-influenced artists across R&B and hip-hop, and "Super Freak" specifically remains one of the most recognizable and heavily sampled funk recordings in the history of popular music.

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• Chic

  Chic, formed by guitarist Nile Rodgers and bassist Bernard Edwards in 1976, built a sophisticated, precisely arranged funk-disco sound anchored by Edwards's instantly recognizable basslines and Rodgers's tightly rhythmic, chord-based guitar playing style, a technique that became one of the most widely imitated guitar approaches in popular music. Their 1979 single "Good Times" became one of the most sampled and interpolated basslines in music history, most famously forming the direct musical foundation for the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight," one of the first commercially successful hip-hop recordings, giving Chic a direct foundational role in hip-hop's earliest commercial emergence. Rodgers went on to become one of the most sought-after producers in popular music, working with a wide range of subsequent major artists across pop, rock, and R&B, extending Chic's musical DNA and Rodgers's specific guitar style into decades of subsequent hit records well beyond the band's own recordings. Chic's precise, elegantly restrained approach to funk and disco, distinct from the more raw, loosely improvised style of some funk contemporaries, established a specific musical template — tight, minimal, endlessly danceable groove-based arrangements — that's remained foundational to dance and pop music production in the decades since.

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• Naftule's Dream

  Naftule's Dream grew out of the Shirim Klezmer Orchestra, a Boston-area group that had already been playing traditional klezmer for 14 years before Newton, Massachusetts-born clarinetist Glenn Dickson and accordionist-songwriter Michael McLaughlin spun off a more adventurous, improvisation-focused outlet from within it. The band released two records on their own, "Search for the Golden Dreydl" in 1997 and "Smash, Clap" in 1998, before going on to record three further albums for composer John Zorn's Tzadik label under its Radical Jewish Culture series, a significant marker of downtown-avant-garde credibility. The Boston Globe praised the group for fusing "klezmer music, Phish-like improvisation, and radical Yiddish poetry," a description that captured how directly the band pushed past traditional acoustic klezmer instrumentation and arrangement. Their combination of their roots in a 14-year-old traditional klezmer orchestra and their three albums on John Zorn's boundary-pushing Tzadik label has made Naftule's Dream one of the most musically adventurous bands in the klezmer revival movement.

• Brave Old World

  Brave Old World formed in 1989 with members drawn from California, Chicago, New York, and Berlin, an unusually international lineup for a klezmer band, originally featuring clarinetist Joel Rubin, drummer Ben Bazyler, multi-instrumentalist Stu Brotman (a former member of 1960s rock band Kaleidoscope and a sideman for Canned Heat), keyboardist Alan Bern, and violinist Michael Alpert. Rubin was later replaced by Kurt Bjorling, musical director of the Chicago Klezmer Ensemble since 1984, bringing another deeply credentialed klezmer specialist into the lineup. The Washington Post called Brave Old World "the revival's first supergroup," noting that "every player is a virtuoso," and the band won first prize at the 1992 International Klezmer Festival in Safed, Israel, a significant early validation from within the genre's own community. Their combination of their genuinely international, virtuoso-level lineup and their 1992 Safed festival win has made Brave Old World one of the most artistically respected bands in the klezmer revival.

• Kapelye

  Kapelye was assembled in 1979 when ethnomusicologist Henry Sapoznik organized a group of musicians to perform at a klezmer lecture at Temple Beth-El in Providence, Rhode Island; the November 18, 1979 debut went well enough that the musicians agreed on the spot to keep performing together as a full-time band. The group took its name from the Yiddish word for "a band" and began actively researching and collecting turn-of-the-century klezmer recordings, drawing several members, including fiddler and vocalist Michael Alpert, from the overlapping Balkan music community. Their 1981 debut album, "Future & Past," mixed traditional Yiddish folk ballads with labor and political anthems and songs pulled directly from Yiddish theater, and the band followed it with "Levine & His Flying Machine" in 1985 and "Chicken" in 1987, before "Old-Time Jewish American Radio" became their most successful release. Their combination of Sapoznik's foundational archival research and their genre-launching 1981 debut album has made Kapelye one of the most historically significant bands in klezmer's modern revival movement.

• Andy Statman

  Andy Statman, born in New York City in 1950, started on banjo and guitar at 12 before switching to mandolin, which he studied briefly under lifelong friend David Grisman, and by 1970 he was playing in the experimental bluegrass group Country Cooking, followed by stints with David Bromberg's band. In 1975, Statman sought out klezmer clarinet legend Dave Tarras and became his protégé; Tarras wrote melodies specifically for him and eventually bequeathed Statman four of his own clarinets, deliberately passing the older master's living klezmer lineage directly to him. His late-1970s album "Jewish Klezmer Music" became a touchstone recording for that decade's klezmer revival, released alongside his mandolin-focused "Flatbush Waltz," and the National Endowment for the Arts later named him a National Heritage Fellow, the nation's highest honor in the traditional arts. His combination of his direct mentorship under Dave Tarras and his rare parallel mastery of klezmer clarinet and bluegrass mandolin has made Statman one of the most historically important figures in klezmer's modern revival.

• Giora Feidman

  Giora Feidman was born in 1936 in Buenos Aires to a family of klezmer musicians spanning his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, and by 18 he was already leading clarinetist of the orchestra at Argentina's Teatro Colón before joining the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in 1957 on the recommendation of conductor Paul Kletzki. He played with the Israel Philharmonic until 1974, then launched a solo career and was crowned "the King of Klezmer" in New York already in the 1970s, well before klezmer's broader American revival movement took hold in subsequent decades. In the early 1990s, Steven Spielberg invited Feidman to record alongside violinist Itzhak Perlman on the score for "Schindler's List," and Feidman's solo clarinet became a defining voice on that soundtrack, which went on to win the Academy Award. His combination of a multi-generational klezmer family lineage and his solo clarinet performance on the Oscar-winning "Schindler's List" score has made Feidman one of the most significant ambassadors for klezmer music worldwide.