Everything Is A Blessing: Leroy Burgess

Words: Oli Warwick
Photos: Laurie Diaz

Catching up with the disco and boogie legend ahead of his full-band performance on GALA’s main stage.

To disco devotees, Leroy Burgess is a household name. But even if he exists just outside the mainstream popularity of contemporaries like Nile Rodgers, there’s every chance his music has touched your life at some point. From Black Ivory and Inner Life to Phreek, The Universal Robot Band, Aleem and writing anthems for the likes of Jocelyn Brown and Fonda Rae, his legendary status is undisputed in Black American dance music.

Burgess is coming to GALA with his band Saving Coco, promising a life-affirming ray of sunshine for Saturday afternoon, whatever the weather brings. Burgess has always spoken about his creative mission to uplift people, and his music lives up to that task without fail. Even in the hard-times social commentary of Universal Robot Band’s Barely Breaking Even there’s a sense of joy. Catching up with Burgess in New York in late February 2022, you have to ask if an ambassador for good vibes can hold fast in the face of the world’s difficulties and keep spreading love.

“My songwriting and composition has always reflected what I'm living or what's going on around me,” says Burgess. “I'm working on my first new album since 2010, and the title is These Days. It’s relevant to our current condition, but I want to help people believe in themselves, and what's possible when we're truly unified. I've been all over the world, and I find that, basically, we're alike in more ways than we are different.”

There was a period where we didn’t hear so many of Burgess’ positive messages. After his peak of productivity through the 70s and 80s, music culture was shifting from the full-band orchestrations and studio craftsmanship he had come up through into the DIY era of house and hip-hop. While there were a few moments where Burgess dipped his toe into the house scene as it was taking off, he by and large sat the 90s out working behind the scenes as a senior producer. It was hip-hop in particular, with its focus on sampling existing material, which perplexed an artist so steeped in the tradition of great songwriting. It wasn’t until 1999, when he struck up a connection with Chicago house titan Glenn Underground, that he was pulled back into the mix. “I said, ‘Okay, let's try to do this again. See if there’s any fuel left in the tank.’”

Burgess was no stranger to electronic sounds, being a keyboardist himself and singing over the slick synth funk of Aleem. Despite the huge growth of electronic music culture during his down time, he views the likes of house and techno as dance music in the same lineage as swing, rock n’ roll, 60s Motown and so on. “That's just one person's apples and oranges,” he shrugs. “Further down the line in the 2030s and 2040s it's going to be renamed again, but it's still going to be the same.”

Music may have travelled considerable distance since Burgess cut his teeth in Black Ivory, but more recently there’s been just as much emphasis on reviving old values, from analogue studio practices to classic songwriting. The sound Burgess made his name on has become prized by a younger generation discovering it for the first time. It was through the Lyon-based festival Nuits Sonores Burgess was invited to perform in France in 2016, and he listed his requirements as a nine-piece band including backing vocalists who could learn the songs and get them tight.

“I said, ‘If you can get me committed musicians, I can come in and we'll see where it goes,’” explains Burgess. “We set up a show with two days for rehearsal. But the band were so good at the first rehearsal, I cancelled all the others. When we did that first performance, they nailed everything.”

Saving Coco was the band in question, and from that first gig they’ve formed a close working relationship with Burgess, even releasing an EP of original material in 2019. More than just studiously rolling out carbon copies of Burgess’ evergreen songs, what Saving Coco achieve is that all-important vibe in and around the notes and rhythms.

“It's like walking back into the studio, and actually walking into the recording,” Burgess enthuses. “All of the parts are there, all of the background, all of the feeling and emotion. If I were ever to imagine my perfect band, it’s them.”

After all these years, Burgess’ sincere passion and gratitude shine through when he talks about his work. Humble to the last, paying tribute to his own musical heroes and heaping thanks upon the people still enjoying his music the world over, he’s the embodiment of soul in the most uplifting, nourishing sense of the word.

“The best music is done by people that are extremely happy to be doing it,” he explains. “And that translates within their performance. Everything is a blessing, if you have the foresight and wisdom to see it as such.”

By that token, Burgess is a very wise man, as you’ll see when he brings his live show to GALA.