Brooklyn Funk Essentials

Born in Brooklyn in 1993 around Arthur Baker and Lati Kronlund, Brooklyn Funk Essentials began as a studio project before becoming a flexible live collective tied to New York’s 1990s club culture. They developed a funk approach nourished by acid jazz, soul, jazz, hip‑hop, Latin rhythms, dub and dance, in a format combining singers, MCs, instrumentalists and spoken word. The band's sound rests on pronounced grooves, prominent horns and a constant dialogue between live playing and urban production, with an aesthetic open to cross‑pollination between scenes and origins. Brooklyn Funk Essentials released In the BuzzBag in 1998, an album recorded in Istanbul that extended this cosmopolitan dimension, and continued with various configurations and subsequent releases, including Funk Ain’t Ova in 2015. Over the years Brooklyn Funk Essentials has preserved this collective, international logic; since 2016 the lineup has notably centred around vocalist Alison Limerick, singer‑guitarist Desmond Foster of Jamaican origin, and Lati Kronlund.