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Source: washingtonpost
Frankie Beverly, a singer-songwriter whose smooth baritone and exuberant soul-funk anthems — about love and harmony, joy and pain — helped make his band Maze one of the most enduring acts in R&B, died Sept. 10. He was 77.
His family announced the death on social media but did not say where or how he died.
Mr. Beverly, who also produced and played guitar, was the founder and driving force behind Maze, a seven- and then eight-piece group that Ebony magazine once dubbed “Black America’s favorite band.”
Beginning in the late 1970s, they developed a reputation as an energetic live act, and rose to the top of the R&B chart with songs that were later sampled by hip-hop artists including 50 Cent, Wale, and the New York duo Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock. Mr. Beverly concluded a farewell tour with Maze earlier this year, and made a guest appearance with the group at the San Jose Jazz Summer Fest in August.
While Maze never achieved the crossover success of Mr. Beverly’s musical lodestars Al Green and Marvin Gaye, synthesizer-laden songs such as “Love Is the Key,” “Southern Girl,” “Feel That You’re Feelin’ ” and “Joy and Pain” became staples of R&B radio stations and decades of house parties. The band’s most enduring hit, the jubilant 1981 single “Before I Let Go,” peaked at No. 13 on the R&B chart and was later covered by Beyoncé.
“There isn’t a cookout, not a wedding or family reunion in Black America where you won’t hear” the song, Essence magazine declared in 2017.
The band’s sound combined Philly soul with a sense of laid-back California cool, reflecting Mr. Beverly’s 1971 move from his hometown of Philadelphia to the San Francisco Bay Area. It also seemed to draw from Mr. Beverly’s childhood, in which he sang hymns and gospel songs at a Baptist church where his father was a deacon.
Wearing a ball cap and all-white outfit at concerts, Mr. Beverly seemed to adopt the persona of a secular preacher, urging listeners not to “judge a book by its cover” (“Color Blind”), asking why “we try and make each other sad” when “we could all be having so much fun” (“We Are One”), and wishing “happy feelings” on his audience in a song of that same name.
“Maze means magic and love,” he told Ebony in 1984. “Everybody is in this maze of life together — people of all types, colors and ages.”
