Bernie Worrell, keyboard who found groove with P-Funk, dies

NEW YORK — Bernie Worrell, the ingenious “Wizard of Woo” whose amazing array of keyboard sounds and textures helped define the Parliament-Funkadelic musical empire and influenced performers of funk, rock, hip-hop and other genres, has died.

Throughout the 1970s and into the ’80s, George Clinton’s dual projects of Parliament and Funkadelic and their various spinoffs built upon the sounds of James Brown and Sly and the Family Stone among others and turned out some of the most complex, spaced out, political, cartoonish and, of course, danceable music of the era, elevating the funk groove to a world view.

With a core group featuring Mr. Worrell, guitarist Eddie Hazel and bassist Bootsy Collins, P-Funk maintained an exhausting and dazzling pace of recordings, from the hit singles “Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof off the Sucker)” and “Flash Light” to such albums as “One Nation Under a Groove” and “Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome.”

[...] the studio music was just a starting point for the live shows, costumed spectaculars of wide-brimmed hats, war paint, dashikis, military gear or perhaps a white sheet with only a fig leaf underneath.

Anything seemed possible when he was on keyboards, conjuring squiggles, squirts, stutters and hiccups on Parliament’s “Flash Light” that sounded like funk as if conceived by Martians.

Mr. Worrell’s contributions as a keyboardist, writer and arranger didn’t bring him a lot of money, the source of much legal action and fierce criticism of Clinton, but fellow musicians paid attention.

Mr. Worrell met Clinton in the early 1970s and performed with him off and on through the following decades even as P-Funk had imploded by 1980 amid reports of drug abuse and unpaid royalties.