Fred 'The Man' Wesley was born on 4 July 1943 and grew up in Mobile Alabama. His musical career started at the age of three on the piano as his grandmother, with whom he spent a great many of his formative years, was a piano teacher. She had him playing scales and pieces such as the Minute Waltz and Rachmaninoff's Prelude in D-Minor. He never really wanted to play the piano because his musical aspirations were elsewhere. His father, Fred Wesley Sr., was a musician who ran his own big band that played tunes like The Hucklebuck, Open the Door, Richard J, Little Red Top and other tunes by Louis Jordan. Fred Sr. was also the chair of the music department in the Mobile Central High School where the young Fred later attended. The horn players in the big band used to go to his father's house for rehearsal and it was the trombone player Harry Freeman that caught the attention of the young Fred.

He was such a gregarious type of person, he always laughed and played with me, and I wanted to be just like him when I grew up. He played the trombone, so naturally I wanted to play the trombone to be like Mr Freeman.

Fred did not start playing horns until he went to Junior High School and then he started on the trumpet. His school band teacher E.B. Coleman, was also a local big band leader. He told Fred that if he could sort out his chops on the trombone over the summer he could play in his group. In the following autumn Fred became a featured band member.

[Coleman]...wrote me out a solo for 'Tuxedo Junction', I was about twelve years old, and I became a little star around the -school because ! would play a bebop solo. ! got a lot of experience from him, because he'd write things that ordinary high school bands wouldn't do, little jazz things, so that exposed me to jazz at a very early age.

I lived a lot a at my grandmother's in Mobile Alabama, and where I slept was right next to the Blue Diamond Cafe. There was a joke box right on the we!! there so I went to bed every night and woke up every morning to the blues, serious blues, so I'm sure that had something to do with my development.

Fred Wesley and Maceo Parker

It was not very long before he was playing blues and rhythm and blues in night-clubs but not exclusively on the trombone. He played drums in a group with his father who played the piano and with the help of a trumpeter they played pop-songs and easy listening music.

Fred then attended Alabama State University where he gained an Associate Degree in Music. His career as a musician started to take off when he was 17. Ike Turner asked him to play in the Ike and Tina Turner hand. He toured with them briefly before deciding to move on. After a bout of pneumonia Fred was drafted into the Army where he played in the 55th Army Band at Redstone Arsenal, Huntsville, Alabama. There he became a featured soloist. He left the army as a Graduate of the Armed Forces School of Music and with a wife and daughter. The responsibility of having a new family caused Fred to think about quitting the music business and funding a good day job that paid well.

I had the chance to become the first black milk delivery man in Mobile and I was about to take the job when I got a call from Waymon Reed. Waymon Reed was now playing for James Brown and he told me that the band needed a trombone player...

So in 1967 Fred began playing with James Brown on a fixed salary rather than gig money and because he was playing virtually every night there was little chance to practice jazz. In 1970 he became the music director of this band; arranging, producing and co-writing.

When I was with James, I did James Brown work. I completed his creations, I followed his blueprints... He would give me horn things to write, but sometimes maybe it would be incoherent musically and I would have to straighten it out, so to speak. When it came out of my brain, it would be a lot of James Brown's ideas and my organization. The same thing would happen with all other instruments. So James Brown was the instigator, he would start things.

The James Brown hits 'Doin' It To Death' and 'Papa Don't Take No Mess' were Fred Wesley's own tunes. He also got into writing film music co-writing scores for the movies 'Black Caesar' and 'Slaughter's Big Rip-off'. Fred was with James Brown for 11 years and in 1978 he decided to move on. He then joined up with George Clinton which seemed like a natural progression from James Brown.

Being a creative person myself you kind of get tired of doing somebody else's thing. George Clinton came to me and offered me an opportunity to ‘do what you wanna do, give me something good man!’ It was like, okay, you've been to college, you got your degree. you're Doctor of Funk now. here's a chance of putting it into action! It was almost a natural flow into the P.Funk thing. When I first heard those Mothership Connection tracks, the rhythm tracks Bootsy had laid down, it freaked me out. Boy, I said, this is some new funk, this is where it's going. I'm going to get a chance to be in on the first of the new stuff! I'm in! It was like saying goodbye to the old and hello to the new.

Clinton began to evolve and refine funk as an aesthetic, a marketing ploy, a black cultural battle-plan and a way of being if not a spiritual discipline. And it gave rise to a product line that spanned a half-a-dozen labels and a multitude of supporting acts and side projects: Parlet, Brides Of Funkenstein, Bootsy's Rubber Band, the Horny Homs, [Fred Wesley, Maceo Parker, (saxophones), Rick Gardner, (trumpet), and Richard 'Kush' Griffith, (trumpet)], and solo LP's by Eddie Hazel and Bernie Worrell.

Fred was pivotal with his funky horn arrangements as well as his clean trombone sound.

In essence Clinton and main man Garry Shider took care of the Chorale... Bootsy Collins hotrodded the rhythm section while Worrell, abetted by another James Brown alumnus Fred Wesley, poured every bit of his extensive training into the horn, string and keyboard arrangements which might go from the baroque to the funkybutt to the Schoenbergian at the drop of a hat, never failing to score and underscore, compel and propel the lyrical liquid from outer space.

Fred Wesley

P-Funk was famous for its heavily flunked, outlandishly costumed party atmosphere. But behind all me glitter and outer space references there was a more serious message. George Clinton was very politically aware of the racial situation in America at that time. Parliament and P-Funk metamorphosed from Clinton's original band Funkadelic whose lyrics were influenced by the anarchic Yippies and the militant collectivism of the Black Panthers. The new band was musically more polished but Clinton's underlying message was still there but well hidden. His astute social commentary in me guise of 'interplanetary funksmanship' would be a great influence on me black radical bands that followed.

...Without Clinton and P-Funk's intervention in the major labels' attempts to whitewash the sound and content of black music, there would probably be no Afrika Bambaataa, no Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five and certainly no Public Enemy, or no Living Colour and Fishbone either.

In 1981 Fred got the chance to get back into Jazz.

Waymon Reed, the great trumpet player, married to Sarah Vaughan, used to come through Mobile with a circus. He turned me on to the James Brown gig, then he went with Basie. So when they needed a trombone player they contacted me. I went, Wow! Count Basie! I'm straight off a Bootsy's Rubber Band gig - play loud and hard as you can, long as you can, right? All of a sudden I've got to play Lit' Darlin', real soft and quiet: and if you can imagine an elephant in a bunny rabbit parade, and I think he liked me right off, so he let me hang on until I kind of gelled in there. It was rough at first. I practiced after the gig and before the gig. Where I was sitting was the best seat in he house! It didn't pay much, and my wife say, 'When are you gonna get a gig that makes some moneys?' And I'd say, 'Baby, I'm having a great time.'

After leaving Count Basie, and for the rest of the Eighties, Fred concentrated on producing and arranging. He lent his talents to such projects as the 'SOS Band's' debut album Take Your Time' and Cameo's 1989 hit The Skin I'm In. Other artists that Fred worked with during this time included Whitney Houston, The Meters, De La Soul, Curtis Mayfield and Dr. John. At the end of the eighties, Fred decided to launch his solo career with the album 'New Friends'. Since then there have been seven more solo albums and numerous appearances on other albums. In addition to personal appearances, the horn licks from his playing and arrangements have been sampled by hip hop and rap artists. This has been done to such a degree that, along with James Brown and George Clinton, he is probably one of the most sampled musicians in the world today.

Naturally at first I was upset, because when you hear yourself on something that's making a lot of money and you're not getting paid for it, the it causes concern. But I take a philosophical view of it now - I realize that people sampling my music and James Brown's music and other peoples music actually keep those people alive and keep today s listeners aware of what was before.... I have a totals new career today due to sampling. Imitation is the greatest form of flattery - well, I'm flattered by sampling.