Pee Wee Ellis
Saxophonist and arranger for James Brown and others who was central in creating the funk genre
PEE WEE ELLIS, who has died aged 80, was a saxophonist and composer who worked across various musical genres ranging from jazz and R&B to rock and soul; he arranged many of James Brown’s most vibrant numbers including Cold Sweat,
which is said to be the first funk track, did a long tour of duty with Van Morrison and in later years teamed up with the Cream drummer Ginger Baker.
Ellis joined Brown’s band in 1965 and told how one night after a show he was summoned by Brown, who had an idea for a song and tapped out some rhythms. He left the rest of Cold Sweat
for Ellis to complete on the tour bus while travelling from New York to their next gig in Cincinnati. By fusing complicated harmonies with rhythm and blues, Ellis effectively created funk, an earthy and catchy music rooted in jazz.
One of his biggest hits with Brown was Say it Loud (I’m Black and Proud),
which was created after the assassination of the American civil rights leader Dr Martin Luther King in April 1968. “The song was written the usual way,” Ellis recalled, adding that Brown showed up the next day with “the words he’d written on a napkin he’d kept in a brown paper bag”. It was recorded with the addition of a 30-strong children’s choir paid $10 each. When Brown chanted: “Say it loud,” the chorus shouted back: “I’m black and proud.”
Within days Say it Loud had swept the country, spending six weeks at No 1 in the R&B charts. After Brown’s death in 2006 Ellis created a tribute show, Still Black, Still Proud, while the original song became an unofficial anthem for the Black Power movement and was revived again after the murder of George Floyd last year.
He was born Alfred James Bryant in Bradenton, Florida, on April 21 1941, the son of unmarried parents, Elizabeth Bryant, and Garfield Rogers, whose many occupations included undertaker and pilot. In 1949 his mother married Ezell Ellis, and they moved to Lubbock, Texas, where Ellis booked bands for dance halls and visiting musicians gave the diminutive
Alfred the nickname Pee Wee. “I grew bigger, but the name stuck,” he said.
His interest in the saxophone came after finding an old instrument covered in mildew in the bottom drawer of a bureau in his grandfather’s home. Before long he was being roped in to cover when musicians at his stepfather’s club were too drunk to perform.
In 1955 his stepfather was stabbed after dancing with a white woman; he bled to death because the nearest hospital in Lubbock would not admit black patients. Afterwards Pee Wee’s mother took him and his two halfsisters to live with their aunt in Rochester, New York, where he was educated at Madison High School and played in jazz clubs.
He was visiting a saxophone repair shop on Broadway in Manhattan when he cheekily asked for lessons from the man queuing in front of him. It turned out to be Sonny Rollins. “I guess he saw the desperation in my eyes and the sincerity,” Ellis said. They went around the corner to Rollins’s studio, where Ellis soaked up his every word.
After several years as a jobbing musician, mostly playing Florida hotels, Ellis was recruited to Brown’s band, recalling that he was given only a few days to acclimatise to the new job. “I stood in the wings for a week watching the band with my mouth on the floor,” he said. Two years later he was promoted to music director.
He wrote 26 songs with Brown, but after five years Ellis grew tired of acting as an intermediary between the “hard-ass” Brown and the other musicians. He later said that he had only joined Brown to make enough money to afford to play jazz, his first love.
He returned to New York and joined the Kudu jazz label, working with musicians such as George Benson and Esther Phillips. By the late 1970s he was living on a houseboat in San Francisco, fishing, golfing, bowling and playing local gigs with Dave Liebman, Miles Davis’s former sideman.
One day he received a call from the trumpeter Mark Isham, who was working with Van Morrison in a Californian studio on the album Into the Music. Isham felt that the tracks needed more horns: could Ellis help with the arrangements? He got on so well with Morrison that he was called back for the singer-songwriter’s next album, Common One, which includes the majestic 15-minute Summertime in England, and worked with him on several more albums.
Thanks to his relationship with Morrison, who lived in Bath, Ellis settled in the nearby town of Frome in the 1990s, making a series of solo albums that illustrated the depth of his music. He toured with the Ginger Baker Jazz Confusion quartet, received an honorary doctorate from Bath Spa University in 2014 and was patron of the Bristol International Blues and Jazz Festival, giving his final performance there in early September.
Neither Brown nor Morrison were easy to work with, but Ellis took it all in his stride. “They were both very demanding artists because they want things to be how they wanted it to be,” he said. “I’m easy.”
Pee Wee Ellis is survived by his wife, Charlotte Crofton-sleigh, whom he married in 1994, and by a stepson. A son from a previous relationship predeceased him.