| Jazz Funk |
You may know Paul Litteral without ever realizing it. For more than thirty years, his trumpet has moved like a shadow across the great stages of popular music, lending its color to James Brown’s volcanic energy, to the sleek power of The Power Station, to the restless swagger of the Rolling Stones, to Robert Plant’s haunted echoes, to Ray Charles’ gospel fire. He has been everywhere and nowhere, both indispensable and invisible, the kind of musician whose fingerprints are all over the music of our lives even if his name never quite reached the marquee.
But make no mistake: Litteral is not just a consummate sideman. He is a craftsman of rare intelligence, a composer and arranger with a kind of secret alchemy, able to dissolve genre boundaries so that we no longer ask whether his sound belongs to funk, to jazz, or to something else entirely. It belongs, instead, to the heart’s vocabulary of passion.
In this new album, Litteral turns his attention to Steely Dan, those architects of urbane sophistication. Yet he does more than revisit; he rewrites, reimagines, re-sculpts. It is as though he has taken their polished towers of harmony and carved new windows into them, letting the sunlight pour in at different angles. Decades of experience, on the road, in the studio, always in the thick of sound, have given him the confidence to reshape familiar songs without fear, to build productions of grandeur that never lose their intimacy. The trumpet, curiously, is not pushed to the foreground. Instead, it hovers like a quiet master of ceremonies, guiding rather than dominating, giving the spotlight to voices and to the other instruments. Each arrangement is a balancing act of weight and air, of rhythm and silence. And then there is his “Do It Again”: a version so stratospheric it seems to have been lifted from a film score, the kind of sound that fills not just a room but an entire horizon.
At first, the record seduces the body, its grooves sway, its surfaces shimmer, and one might be content to let it play as the soundtrack to movement, to pleasure, to dance. But listen closer, and another level reveals itself. These songs, known and lesser-known, are not merely revived but reborn; they gleam with a new polish that also manages to reveal their hidden grain. To do this is not simply an exercise in arrangement but an act of reverence, even of nobility: to take what was once familiar and show us its inner architecture, to remind us of the secret beauty we may have overlooked.
And what is the language of this album? It speaks in accents of both funk and jazz, slipping from one tongue to the other without breaking stride. The line between them is thin, sometimes invisible, because their roots drink from the same river. If funk is the body and jazz the spirit, Litteral’s music is the bridge, the pulse that unites them, the bloodstream that flows between continents and cultures. In his hands, these songs cease to be property of one tradition or another; they become common currency, a music that belongs to all who can feel its sway.
In the end, Paul Litteral’s album is less a collection of tracks than a statement of philosophy: that music, when lived fully, transcends the categories we try to impose on it. It is memory reshaped, passion disciplined, experience turned into sound. And above all, it is joy, joy crafted by a man who has walked in the shadows of legends, only to step forward now and remind us that the trumpet, like the human voice itself, can carry not just notes but whole worlds.
Thierry De Clemensat
Member at Jazz Journalists Association
USA correspondent for Paris-Move and ABS magazine
Editor in chief – Bayou Blue Radio, Bayou Blue News
PARIS-MOVE, September 17th 2025
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Musicians:
Paul Litteral – Trumpet
Tony Pia – Drums
Bill Bodine – Bass
Sam Morgan – Sax
Kyle Zimmerman – Guitar
Shante’ Palmer – Trombone
Rocky Davis – Keys
Craig Kupka – Trombone
Colin Kupka – Sax
Track Listing:
Home At Last
Give It Everything You Got
Black Crow
Ghostown
Do It Again
New York By Dreams
Use Me
Dying To Live
Virtual Insanity
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