George Clinton may have been a skeptic, but that didn’t keep millions of other listeners from grooving to Earth, Wind & Fire.

“Earth, hot air and no fire” was how the Godfather of Funk once described his smoother, more radio-friendly contemporaries, as chronicled in this collection’s extensive, illuminating liner notes. And while George was no doubt entitled to his opinion, the plain fact is that EWF brought funk to the masses in a way that few artists have before or since.

This was a genuine accomplishment. When EWF would come on the radio in my teenage years, I’d bop along for a minute until I caught myself and went off in search of some angsty thing with monster-jam guitars and drums. (What can I say, I was a product of my environment: the ’burbs.) If Philly soul “put the bow tie on funk,” Earth, Wind & Fire slapped the rainbow paisley bell bottoms on it, cranking both the funk engine and the strings-and-horns accoutrements up to 11, while adding a dash of New Age spirituality to the blend. This is funk with elegance, groove and raised consciousness.

Still, even “funk dressed up with horns and strings” barely scratches the surface of the EWF story. This musical collective, often a dozen strong, always masterminded by drummer/songwriter Maurice White and his brother, bassist and frequent co-writer Verdine White, with Philip Bailey’s smooth and powerful vocals out front, was essentially a soul-funk orchestra. Throughout the group’s lengthy tenure, the White brothers functioned as maestros, producer-arranger-songwriters whose sprawling ensembles played with masterful precision while constructing a groove designed to get the stodgiest hips in the audience moving.

Greatest Hits tells that story as well as any single album could hope to, peppering its track list with radio smashes while chronicling the evolution of the group through its 1974-81 prime. Unlike many similar collections, it’s well and thoughtfully sequenced, not strictly chronological, but in an order that both makes sense and makes for an engaging listen.

Opening cut “Shining Star” (#1 Pop and R&B in 1975) features the ensemble at the peak of their powers, with keys, organ clavinet, bass and drums deep in the celebratory groove, counterpointed on the high end by the horn section and Bailey’s soaring falsetto. In “The Way Of The World” it’s the slinky seductiveness of the rhythm section that carries the whole song, the little hesitations and advances in Verdine’s bass line telling a whole story in themselves while the vocalists dazzle with low lows and high highs.

“September” is exuberance in musical form, with the horn section out front while the push exerted by the rest of the group provides drive for days. Then smoldering ballad “Can’t Hide Love” offers a brief respite ahead of the group’s finger-snapping cover of “Got To Get You Into My Life,” which takes the blue-eyed soul of the McCartney original and injects it with giddy funk. The winking “Sing A Song” is pure fun, while “Gratitude” attempts an easygoing, pleasant funk that makes you think George may have had a point; at times it feels a little too bright and shiny.

Ah, but then we get to “Serpentine Fire” and whammo, you’re in the grip of one of the standout bass lines of the century—the stops, the starts, the fat plucked notes like exclamation points, the impossibly nimble runs—and the way the different elements of the arrangement intertwine and play off of each other is absolutely serpentine, not to mention brilliant. Another intricate groove fuels “Fantasy,” along with some of Philip Bailey's most memorable falsetto.

At this point we duck back to catch a pair of (relatively) early hits in “Kalimba Story,” Maurice White’s ode to the African percussion instrument, and the horns-and-guitars jam “Mighty Mighty,” both deeply funky and driven by the spectacular Maurice-Verdine rhythm section. For the sake of contrast, the funk disappears entirely for the soulful ballad “Reasons,” featuring Bailey testing the upper limits as strings and horns provide lift.

Radio hit “Saturday Nite” (#4 R&B, #21 Pop) is a light-hearted party anthem that’s pop in the sunny melody and pure funk in Verdine White’s ubiquitous bass line. It’s a fun ride… and then there was disco. “Let’s Groove” embraces the new sound without entirely losing the band’s funk roots; it’s a marriage of the two and Bailey’s stinging falsetto and Verdine’s elastic bass give it just enough grit to work. For “Boogie Wonderland,” EWF collaborated with The Emotions, and the female vocal chorus paired well with the rest of the group, even if the BPM is pure disco.

On the penultimate track, the group’s pop side is ascendant on the sweeping 1979 David Foster ballad “After The Love Is Gone,” which sounds more like Chicago fronted by Philip Bailey, which is less surprising once you notice that Foster’s co-writer here is future Chicago frontman Bill Champlin. To close things out, we jump back to the aptly titled “Getaway,” from the same album that featured “Saturday Nite,” 1976’s Spirit. The BPM’s are up, but Verdine’s bass is brilliant as ever, the horns are all over the place, and the group plays with genuine fire.

One of the issues EWF faced with critics like George Clinton was that they could never satisfy people who were purists about a particular style, because they never stuck to just one—they were constantly combining funk and soul, or funk and pop, or pop and soul, or funk and disco, crossing and blurring genre lines and inventing fresh hybrids. That was always going to be a tough sell for the purists in the crowd, but the evidence—more than a dozen crossover hits ascending the upper reaches of both R&B and Pop charts—demonstrates that they were pretty damned good at what they did.

Rating: A-

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