NILE RODGERS
During the late 1970s and early ’80s, Nile
Rodgers took the old-school chordal style
that had earned him a spot as house guitarist at New York’s famed Apollo Theater
and morphed it into the key ingredient of
a dance revolution. The band that was the
vehicle for this revolution was Chic, and it
was the toast of the New York disco/funk
scene. Rodgers pared down his jazz chord
vocabulary in favor of a more R&B-like
approach and refined it to fit within a tight,
badass funk ensemble. Drummer Tony
Thompson and bassist Bernard Edwards
were the band’s muscle, while Rodgers’ less-is-more approach—which favored triads and
dyads (two-note chords)—was the secret
sauce. One of the more intriguing elements
of his style is how he is able to mute unwanted notes with his fretting hand, while still
using those notes to give his fretted notes a
fatter, more percussive sound.
That clucky muted sound became the
centerpiece for songs like “Le Freak,”
“Everybody Dance,” and “Good Times,”
and it has also become a standard within
the funk and disco lexicon. His signature
style can also be heard on hit songs by Sister
Sledge (“We Are Family”), David Bowie
(“Let’s Dance,” which also features a solo by
Stevie Ray Vaughan), Diana Ross (“Upside
Down”), and many others. On all of them,
his presence is undeniable.
