Led by Grammy Award winners from the highly acclaimed Snarky Puppy, Dallas’ Ghost-Note makes a tour stop Sunday at Holland’s Park Theatre. The Local Spins interview with this hard-hitting band.
Ghost-Note: A percussion-based ensemble unleashing a funk, hip hop and jazz melange. (Courtesy Photo)
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In music parlance, a ghost note is a note that is muted or barely played, so soft it’s heard more as a percussive effect than an actual note.
Well, that’s true most of the time.
The exception is Ghost-Note, a band that delivers the goods, throwing down its mix of funk, jazz and hip hop. Helmed by multi-Grammy-winning percussion duo Robert “Sput” Searight and Nate Werth, Ghost-Note is their effort to create a band focused on percussion and what they termed “conscious funk.”
Searight, Werth and the band bring their heavy-hitting funk to the Park Theatre in Holland on Sunday (Dec. 7). Opening act is Seattle’s soul/funk band True Loves. Tickets, $32.35, for the 7 p.m. show are available online here.
They formed Ghost-Note in 2014 while both were still members of Snarky Puppy and released their first album, “Fortified,” a year later. Werth remains affiliated with Snarky Puppy, but Searight left the band to focus on Ghost-Note and other musical activities. “I was in the band four or five years,” Searight says.
Those activities included working as a drummer and producer with a variety of artists, including Snoop Dog, Justin Timberlake, Kendrik Lamar and Timbaland. He moved on to a touring with Toto from 2020 to 2023. He was recommended for the gig by former Prince keyboardist Dominique Xavier Taplin, who was enlisted in Toto when founder David Paich was unable to tour. Searight then returned the favor by enlisting Taplin in Ghost-Note.
“I grew up on that music (Toto’s classic rock and pop), I was a big fan. It was a cool experience, but I wanted to put all my eggs in Ghost-Note.”
Searight says his former band was a loose aggregation, but after experimenting with various lineups, Ghost-Note has emerged with a core group. “Snarky was a collective, a group of musicians that rotated in and out,” he says. In contrast, Ghost-Note is a seven- or eight-piece, depending on who’s available, though there are other associates who step in as needed in the studio or on the road.
Searight says while he and Werth were in Snarky Puppy, they discovered they worked well together and had similar ideas about how to take their playing in another direction. “Playing in Snarky together, we were getting nasty and naughty with that band. When I realized we had a thing, I felt we should probably get our rocks off on a record,” he says.
Opening for Ghost-Note: Seattle’s funky and soulful True Loves (Courtesy Photo)
“Fortified” came out in 2015, a year after they formed Ghost-Note. “The whole thing was we didn’t wat to use melodic instruments. We based it all on percussion instruments,” Searight says.
That approach worked for the debut album, though it did include some horns and keyboards. By the time of the succeeding “Swagism” in 2018, they had opted for more inclusion, with additional instrumentation. “Mustard n’Onions,” released in April last year, features a full band alongside just a few guests.
The band’s forte is a modern take on the sound pioneered by the likes of James Brown and Sly & The Family Stone, with dollops of jazz, Afrobeat, hip hop, psychedelic rock and more. That was most evident on the band’s debut album, which Searight says was a mix of approaches.
“The first record, ‘Fortitude’ was just me and Nick. We were all over the place stylistically,” Searight says.
With its second album, “Swagism,” Ghost-Note began moving firmly into its current funk style. “The second album included everyone,” notes Searight. “Mustard N’onions” solidified both its approach and its membership. “Now we have a band. We took it a notch up.”
Both Searight and Werth are multiple Grammy winners. Though that’s primarily for their work with Snarky Puppy, Searight collected one in 1998 at age 18 for his work with the gospel group God’s Property. That was 16 years before collecting another with Snarky Puppy, the first of that band’s five Grammy wins.
They’ve experienced similar success with Ghost-Note. Its first two albums both reached No. 1 on the iTunes Jazz Chart, while “Mustard n’Onions” has been favorably reviewed by a number of critics, including funkcity.net, ukvibe and Jazz Journal, which said it is “dripping with tight, percolating grooves, frenetic bass and synth lines and the kind of hard-hitting horn arrangements you’d expect from Tower of Power.”
True Loves began in 2014 at a jam session between drummer David McGraw, bassist Bryant Moore, and guitarist Jimmy James. Since then the band has added percussionist Iván Galvez, trombonist Greg Kramer, and saxophonists Gordon Brown and Skerik. The group’s live performances have garnered them acclaim and millions of streams on YouTube.
VIDEO: Ghost-Note, Tiny Desk Concert (NPR Music)
VIDEO: True Loves, “Dopus No. 1”
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