“He’s right up there with any player,” says Worrell, acknowledging that Kimock’s profile is somewhat inverse to his talents. “Believe me, people will be trying to catch up to him.”
The Steve Kimock Band with Worrell, drummer Wally Ingram, and bassist Andy Hess performs Monday at the Middle East in Cambridge. XVSK, featuring Kimock’s son on drums, is opening.
The guitarist overhauled the previous incarnation of the Steve Kimock Band, which featured drummer Rodney Holmes, guitarist Mitch Stein, and bassist Alphonso Johnson.
“That was definitely more of a progressive rock band,” says Kimock, who was reached in his home studio in Pennsylvania while packing up gear for his first extensive Steve Kimock Band tour in more than two years.
With Worrell, a driving force in George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic camp, Kimock finds himself moving toward music with a greater degree of lightheartedness.
“Bernie is such a pioneer of the squirrelly little synth thing. He is such a musical cat that he makes it work. And then he has all that he can do with traditional keys and with his European, classical training,” Kimock says. “His stuff is tight. It’s equal parts classical and cartoon.”
Kimock says he had an aversion to synthesizers before opening up to Worrell’s sound.
“Whenever I saw someone playing some little plastic red thing, I thought it lacked dynamic reality. It was just wrong,” he says.
So Kimock was happily surprised the first time Worrell visited.
“He shows up with a bag no bigger than a purse, and pulls out these two little keyboards, and maybe a melodica, and plays the most compelling stuff,” Kimock recalls.
