Larry Graham & Graham Central Station - Full Concert [HD] | Live at North Sea Jazz Festival 1996

Larry Graham & Graham Central Station - Full Concert [HD] | Live at North Sea Jazz Festival 1996

Date & location: SUNDAY 14 JULY 1996 • STATENHAL • Congress Centre, The Hague, The Netherlands

Larry Graham Jr. (born August 14, 1946) is an American bassist and baritone singer, for the psychedelic soul/funk band Sly and the Family Stone and as the founder and frontman of Graham Central Station. In 1980, he released the single "One in a Million You", which reached the top ten on the US Billboard Hot 100. He is credited with inventing the slapping technique on the electric bass guitar, which radically expanded the tonal palette of the bass, although he himself refers to the technique as "thumpin' and pluckin'". In 1993, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Sly and the Family Stone. He is also the uncle of rapper Drake. Graham played bass guitar in the funk band Sly and the Family Stone from 1967 to 1972. The band was the first major American rock group with a racially integrated, mixed-race lineup. They had a string of influential songs in the 1960s that reached the Billboard Hot 100, including "Dance to the Music" (1968), "Everyday People" (1968), and "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)" (1969), as well as critically acclaimed albums such as Stand! (1969), which combined pop sensibility with social commentary. After years of tension between Graham and frontman Sly Stone, he left Sly and the Family Stone in 1972 when a brawl broke out between Graham and Sly after a concert amid rumors that Larry had hired a hitman to murder Sly. Graham and his wife climbed out of a hotel window to escape, and Pat Rizzo gave them a ride to safety. Unable to work with Sly any longer, Graham immediately quit. In 1993, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Sly and the Family Stone. After Sly and the Family Stone, Graham formed his own band, Graham Central Station.

The name is a play on Grand Central Station, the train station in Manhattan, New York City. Graham Central Station had several hits in the 1970s, as well as the album track "Hair". In the mid-1970s, Larry Graham teamed up with Betty Davis, the second ex-wife of jazz musician Miles Davis. Betty Davis' band included members of the Tower of Power horns and the Pointer Sisters, and they recorded three albums that were critically acclaimed but not very successful commercially.
He reformed Graham Central Station in the early 1990s and performed with the band for several years, releasing two live albums. One was recorded in Japan in 1992, and the other, recorded in London in 1996, had only 1,000 copies pressed and was sold exclusively at concerts. In 1998, he recorded a solo album under the name Graham Central Station GCS 2000. It was a collaboration between Larry Graham and Prince. Although Graham wrote all the songs except one co-written by Prince, the album was co-arranged and co-produced by Prince, and most of the instruments and vocals were recorded by both Graham and Prince. Graham also played bass on tour with Prince from 1997 to 2000. He appeared on Prince's 1998 VHS Beautiful Strange and the 1999 DVD Rave Un2 the Year 2000. He has since appeared with Prince on several international stages. Graham and Graham Central Station toured internationally with a 2010 world tour and the 2011 "Funk Around the World" international tour. He appeared with Andre Beeka as a special guest on Jim James' "Rock N' Soul Dance Party Superjam" at the 2013 Bonnaroo Music Festival. Graham is the half-brother of Dennis Graham and the uncle of Canadian rapper and actor Drake. Graham is said to have pioneered the art of slap-pop playing on the electric bass, partly to provide percussive and rhythmic elements to complement the bassline notes when his mother decided not to have a drummer in her band, while Graham also admits in a BBC documentary on funk music that he is unsure whether this was done for economic reasons; the thumb slap was used to mimic a bass drum, and the index or middle finger pop was used to mimic a snare drum. This style has become the archetype of modern funk. Slap-pop playing combines a percussive thumb-slapping technique of the lower strings with an aggressive finger snapping of the higher strings, often in rhythmic alternation.
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