Steven Bernstein's Millennial Territory Orchestra MTO Plays Sly
The Royal Potato Family
2011
The Sly Stone songbook is a solid gold thing, and it is strange that it is so rarely revisited. Then again, repertory tributes are generally paid to artists who have passed. Stone is still with us, although, it sometimes seems, only just: over the last few decades, he has been ravaged by "personal problems" which would likely have finished off any mere mortal. The man who promised the late 1960s/early 1970s counterculture that he wanted to take it higher, and whose pre-Family Stone band was simply called The Stoners, has himself gotten higher than most—and the subsequent crash and burns have not been pretty.
Step forward downtown NYC trumpeter Steven Bernstein and his little big band, the Millennial Territory Orchestra. As a pre-teen growing up in Berkeley, California at the time of Stone's post-Woodstock ascent, Bernstein was aware of the Family Stone, but too young to be a card-carrying fan. He plugged in later. When, in 2009, he was asked to come up with a strand for NYC's River To River Festival, which was that year celebrating Woodstock's 40th anniversary, he suggested a Sly & The Family Stone tribute.
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