Funk for the future

The summer of 2003 is promising to be a hot season of brainy funk, with sly and irresistible new tracks from the Neptunes, Outkast, Macy Gray and others slicing through radio’s sickeningly sweet R&B; and mad-dog hip-hop to find urban music’s more introspective funk heart.

Stepping out front in a new velvet suit is Cherrywine, a highly evolved project by Ishmael “Butterfly” Butler, former frontman for underground hip-hop’s leading lights, Digable Planets.

From the first blasts of pure electro on “What I’m Talking,” the opening track on Cherrywine’s debut album, “Bright Black,” echoes of black futurist funk a la Parliament well up from the depths. A guitar starts vamping, and a beat settles in -- a beat informed by hip-hop but too subtle, too bluesy -- and the imprint of another funk master rings out, unmistakable. Cherrywine has made the album Prince should be making right now.

Over that hand-clap electro beat and wandering blues guitar, Butler’s lyrics are urgent, if understated, a new soul argot: “Come in the place and trip, that’s what I’m talkin’ ‘bout / pour yourself a tasty sip, oh, that’s what I’m talkin’ ‘bout.” It’s not rap, it’s more like blues phrasing. The feeling is narcoleptic, fuzzy, a hazy party music. This is the album you put on this summer when the Saturday night party starts spilling over into Sunday.

“I started playing guitar a year and a half ago,” says Butler, his soft, charismatic voice curling down the phone from his home in Seattle, “and the cats that was teachin’ me little things here and there are guys that got their chops in the ‘80s in that sorta Minneapolis- James Brown-Prince- Jesse Johnson sound. Consequently, we got that progressive sound on the guitar.”

Making music reminiscent of Time guitarist Jesse Johnson is a huge departure for the man whose early ‘90s band was considered one of the underground saviors of hip-hop. Digable Planets came straight outta Brooklyn as the antidote to the dominating ethos of West Coast gangsta rap, a trio of soft-stepping beatniks calling themselves Doodlebug, Butterfly and Ladybug. Their 1993 debut album, “Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space),” includes the single “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat),” which won a Grammy. After the politically oriented follow-up, “Blowout Comb,” the Planets didn’t make another album.

Butler moved back to his hometown of Seattle, where the single father of three could be close to his mother and grandmother. There he made a synth-driven hip-hop funk album for the indie label Red Aunt, titled “Since 1999,” which was shelved when the label went belly-up.

Then he started playing guitar under Thaddeus Turner, who plays with the groove-oriented R&B; Seattle band Maktub, and his bass-playing brother, Gerald. After relying on session musicians for more than a decade, Butler started finding himself. The Turners lent Butler a new appreciation for the Minneapolis sound and its avatar, Prince.

“He was able to get really deep emotion and even meaning out of kinda simple words,” Butler says. “It is a tradition of trying to be funny. Trying to be spontaneous. Tryin’ to be everything other than deep. And then, maybe you can get that, because you’re bein’ real, and what’s deeper than reality?”

Now 32, the former dabbler in politics also has given up what he now sees was radical sloganeering. “See for Miles,” one of the most remarkable tracks on the album, and one of Butler’s favorites, is driven by the eerie, drawn-out anti-chorus, “Cocaaaaaine’s comin’.” Though Butler says half the tune is about a man taking a woman to a far-off island to propose marriage, the track also is partly about cocaine as a community reality, about its power to change lives, make people rich and distort dreams.

But funk’s real power is as party music, even when fitted with a political cutting edge, and this is a traditional sweet spot in which “Bright Black” revels with total abandon. “So Glad for Baby” is a wah-wah-powered funk track with a slamming drum line, the perfect fusion of the best elements of hip-hop and funk instrumentation. Cherrywine’s live shows, Butler says, will go the extra mile for the funk, including costumes and light shows.

Corny if done wrong, tapping the historical funk can pack a complex wallop when it’s fresh.

“It has power because it’s irreverent. It’s like 50 Cent: You can’t question their credibility,” he says. “When we get out there and do our thing, and look wild, dress wild, talk wild, do wild things, if we say something and it’s lucid and true and comes from a real place, man, you got to listen to that.”

Hip-hop, Butler says, is like reading the news: It’s the street telling you exactly what the kids think, what they wear, what concerns them, what they dream. Cherrywine is something different: This is the intelligent, subtle party music of a man who’s been there. This isn’t a strategy to be underground or alternative.

“The guy that does Nelly’s beats, and the Neptunes, and 50’s new album, man, that is monumental,” he emphasizes. “So these cats that are a reaction to that, the so-called underground -- nothing bling-bling, and keep a realness about lyrics -- I mean, that’s ... so reactionary.”

*

Cherrywine

Where: Troubadour, 9081 Santa Monica Blvd., West Hollywood

When: Wednesday, 8:30 p.m.

Cost: $12

Info: (310) 276-6168