Saxophonist who co-founded Kool & the Gang
Dennis “Dee Tee Thomas, a saxophonist who cofounded Kool & the Gang and remained one of its core players for more than five decades, propelling hits like “Jungle Boogie” and “Celebration” with his funky, euphoric horn blasts, died Saturday in New Jersey. He was 70.
The band announced his death in a statement but did not say exactly where or how he died. He had been living in Montclair, N.J., and last performed with the group at a Fourth of July concert at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.
In addition to playing the alto sax, Mr. Thomas was a flutist and percussionist for Kool & the Gang, which was formed in Jersey City in 1964 as a jazz combo called the Jazziacs. Stretching out to incorporate soul, funk and R&B, the band recorded buoyant dance floor staples like “Hollywood Swinging” and “Jungle Boogie,” then got a lead singer — James “J.T.” Taylor — and developed a lighter, more pop-oriented sound.
That evolution helped make Kool & the Gang one of the biggest bands of the 1980s, when they climbed the Billboard Hot 100 with songs such as “Ladies’ Night” (“Oh, what a night”) and the charttopping “Celebration,” a horn-driven fixture of wedding receptions, sporting events and family cookouts. In March, the song was selected for the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry.
“We can pretty much tell when a song will be a hit,” Mr. Thomas told the Detroit Free Press in 1987. “When it’s finished it has a certain spark. ... The big surprise to me was ‘ Celebration.‘ I thought it would do well, but not that well. I remember struggling with the song and saying, ‘I think we’re finished with this one.’”
Starting out in Jersey City, Kool & the Gang had little interest in pop or R&B, preferring to gather around a record player at trumpeter Spike Mickens’ home to listen to jazz albums by John Coltrane, Wes Montgomery and Paul Chambers. “We were anti-Motown. Mm-mm, nope,” Mr. Thomas said in a video interview that the band released in February.
The original seven-member lineup included brothers Robert “Kool” Bell and Ronald Bell, who later went by Khalis Bayyan, along with their teenage friends Mr. Thomas, Mr. Mickens, Ricky Westfield, George Brown and Charles Smith. After five years and several name changes, they became known as Kool & the Gang in 1969, placing Kool’s name front and center but maintaining a collaborative approach to running the band.
“We came to realize what kind of people we were playing for then,” Mr. Thomas told the New York Times in 1973, looking back on the group’s turn toward R&B. “They weren’t developed music lovers. They didn’t understand the difficulty of some of the music being played. And the youngsters didn’t dig jazz then. We learned that we had to simplify, that most simple music will grab a wide part of the audience.”
While Kool & the Gang often celebrated joy itself — “Celebrate good times, come on,” they sang in “Celebration” — the group also addressed social issues, as in “Who’s Gonna Take the Weight,” from their 1971 album “Live at the Sex
Machine.” Mr. Thomas came up with the song’s prologue, writing spoken-word lyrics evoking the political violence and environmental activism of that era:
“We’re gonna have to learn to live together and love each other. Because I believe one day, someone or something is gonna wanna judge who’s creating all this corruption and death and pollution and all these difficult situations on Earth. And he’s gonna wanna know: Who’s gonna take the weight?”
Speaking for the band, Mr. Thomas told the Times, “We want to play a universal music. We want to lift our audiences up so they think about what they’ve heard.”
Dennis Ronald Thomas was born in Orlando, Fla., on Feb. 9, 1951. He was 2 when he moved to Jersey City with his family, and 18 when Kool & the Gang released its self-titled debut album in 1969. By then, the group had spent several years playing in local clubs.
The band recorded a dozen Top 10 hits in all, including the 1980s pop ballads “Joanna” and “Cherish,” and reached a new generation of listeners in the 1990s, when their songs were used in movies such as “Pulp Fiction” and sampled by hiphop acts including Nas, Luniz, Eric B. & Rakim, N.W.A. and Mase.