Solomon One

Detroit, USA · b. 1996 · FARA Records

Solomon One (Solomon Reese Carter, b. 24 April 1996) was born and raised in Detroit — which is not a city with a music scene so much as a city that keeps inventing them and then watching other people get rich off them. He grew up entirely inside that pattern, and grew up angry about it in a way that never once curdled into bitterness, because the other half of the pattern is that Detroit just makes another one. His father worked in a plant and played trombone at church and considered both to be honest work, which is where the two convictions the whole act runs on came from: that a thing made by human hands has a quality you can hear, and that the people who make it should own it.

A church band and a bass guitar, in that order. He learned to play on the one before he could name what he was doing, and understood physically — before he understood it intellectually — that when a room of people lands on the downbeat together, something happens that isn't really about music at all. His voice is rough and gritty with real authority, spoken-sung rather than crooned, closer to a preacher working a room than a vocalist working a melody, with a full choir answering on every phrase and the big statements arriving as spoken declarations. Under him: thumb-slap bass carrying the melody, a snaking Minimoog, wah guitar, horn stabs landing on THE ONE, and a two-chord groove that never resolves, which is precisely why it moves you.

A bandleader and something close to a preacher — he runs a room rather than performing at it, and the whole set is built to end with the audience doing most of the singing. Big, generous, theatrical and genuinely funny; the politics arrive wrapped in a joke and land harder for it. He introduces every member of the band by name, every night, without exception, and says a funk record with an anonymous rhythm section is a contradiction in terms. He has turned down offers to leave Detroit more than once, on the grounds that the city has invented enough music for other people already. Warm, righteous, funny.