‘Dee Tee’ was original part of Kool & The Gang
Dennis Thomas, who has died aged 70, was a founding member of Kool & The Gang, playing alto saxophone and percussion on the group’s numerous hits of the 1970s and 1980s, such as Celebration, Get Down On It and Jungle Boogie.
The band was formed in the mid-’60s by half a dozen friends at Lincoln High School in Jersey City, where “Dee Tee” grew up after having moved there as a child from Orlando, Fla., where he was born on Feb. 9, 1951.
Centred around the Bell brothers — Robert and Ronald — they were all jazz fans who initially played on street corners and then in local clubs. The eponymous Kool & The Gang was released in 1969, by which time they had changed from jazz to R&B. They had also changed their name from Kool & The Flames to placate James Brown, whose backing band was The Furious Flames.
Although a private person offstage, at concerts Thomas assumed the role of master of ceremonies. In their early days, it was Thomas who kept their wages safe in the horn of his sax.
Their first taste of success came in 1973, when they scored Top Ten hits with Hollywood Swinging and the raucous Jungle Boogie (the latter subsequently used by Quentin Tarantino in the opening credits for Pulp Fiction).
Thereafter, however, they left behind their raunchy edge to embrace the more fashionable sounds of disco.
Only when they took on a full-time singer, John Taylor, for the first time, and turned to pure pop in the late 1970s did their fortunes revive.