PLENTY GOOD EATON by CLEVELAND EATON

Cleveland “Cleve” Eaton is a member of the Alabama Music Hall of Fame, right there with Nat Cole, Wilson Pickett, Martha Reeves, Jerry Wexler, the Blind Boys of Alabama, and a few dozen other notables. “I don’t play like nobody else,” he told The Birmingham News when inducted in 2008. “I do my own thing. It’s absolutely Alabama.”Eaton’s Plenty Good Eaton, recorded in Curtis Mayfield’s soul Chicago at Chess Recording Studio with local hired guns and first out in 1975, belongs to the r&b genre even though there are side paths into soul-jazz. The lushly arranged “Chi-Town” proceeds from a cloned “Shaft” introduction into a lushly produced funk romp with Eaton’s upright bass guiding a chicken-scratch funk guitar, electronic keyboards, strings, horns, and a female singer or two. With Eaton’s acoustic bass typically prominent in the mix, and with Ed Green’s violin steering its melodic course, “Keena” exists as a happy union of r&b and disco. In spite of lame repetitive chants of its title, “Moe, Let’s Have a Party” makes the right dance floor moves with a funk groove that popular bands like Rufus and the Ohio Players wouldn’t mind claiming as their own.