Earth, Wind & Fire

White was a Chess session drummer when Lewis hired him, and for nearly three years he shadowed a working bandleader on the road, badgering him with the same question until it stuck: "He would ask, 'You have a publishing company?' 'What is a publishing company?'" Lewis remembered — and recalled White laying out a plan years ahead of schedule: "We're gonna play jazz, R&B. We're gonna have choreography, some magic, a horn section." In 1974 the two reunited as equals: White co-wrote, co-produced, and drummed on Lewis's Sun Goddess, with EWF's Philip Bailey singing alongside him.

listen: upstream & heresource: Earth, Wind & Fire official site — Biography (Maurice White on Ramsey Lewis, band origin, founding vision) ↗share

1974

Sun GoddessRamsey Lewis

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1975

ReasonsEarth, Wind & Fire

listen for"Sun Goddess" glides on a jazz-funk bed of horns and strings under a wordless, soaring falsetto hook — half of it played and sung by White inside someone else's band. Cue up Earth, Wind & Fire's "Reasons," cut the same year, and hear the formula turned inward: Philip Bailey's falsetto stretched over a long, patient vamp, horns answering rather than leading. It isn't a cover — it's the same musicians proving the same idea twice, once as a guest, once as the headliner.

Stepney was a classically trained Chess Records arranger when White was still a session drummer there, and the two reconvened a decade later when Stepney signed on to produce four straight Earth, Wind & Fire albums — Open Our Eyes, That's the Way of the World, Gratitude, and the unfinished Spirit, which the band had begun writing as a tribute to him before he died mid-production in 1976. Keyboardist Larry Dunn called him "my mentor and a musical genius," adding, "He had an amazing, profound impact on my artistic development." The strings and horn charts Stepney built into those records reshaped the band from the inside out.

listen: upstream & heresource: Wikipedia — Charles Stepney (Chess Records career, EWF production credits) ↗share

1971

I Am the Black Gold of the SunCharles Stepney

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1975

That's the Way of the WorldEarth, Wind & Fire

listen forPlay Rotary Connection's "I Am the Black Gold of the Sun," the psychedelic-soul group Stepney produced and arranged, and hear his signature move: a string section that swells and recedes like a second vocalist wrapped around a plainspoken melody. That's the Way of the World's title track does the same thing four years later — the same cinematic strings cushioning Philip Bailey's lead, the same instinct to let an arrangement breathe. It's the "ornate, orchestral flourish" that Wikipedia's own account of the band credits to Stepney directly.

On Chicago's South Side, years before Chess Records, a teenage Maurice White fell in with trumpeter Phil Cohran's Artistic Heritage Ensemble. Cohran, a Sun Ra Arkestra alumnus, had built his own electrified thumb piano, the Frankiphone, and exposed White to astrology and Egyptology alongside it. Biographer John Szwed's Sun Ra history records that Cohran taught White and his brothers music in their youth, "much as the Wailers were tutored by Joe Higgs." It's Cohran's amplified kalimba, not just his cosmic worldview, that migrated whole into White's stage show and gave Earth, Wind & Fire its signature instrument.

listen: upstream & heresource: Wikipedia — Phil Cohran (Frankiphone / kalimba origin, citing John Szwed's Sun Ra biography) ↗share

1968

New Frankiphone BluesPhil Cohran

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1974

Kalimba StoryEarth, Wind & Fire

listen forCohran's "New Frankiphone Blues" is built entirely around the instrument's plucked, bell-like tone, run through amplification until it hums like a cross between a music box and an electric piano. Six years later, Earth, Wind & Fire named a whole single after that same instrument: "Kalimba Story" opens on the identical tone before horns and rhythm section arrive, a direct instrumental callback to the man White credited as its source. Listen for the pluck itself — the tuning and attack carry straight from one record to the other.