BENTLEYFUNK@HOTMAIL.COM / 2025 / SINCE 2008: T-Connection

mardi 14 mai 2024

T-Connection

T-Connection was a funk and disco group from Nassau, the Bahamas, who scored two hits on the Billboard Hot 100 between 1977 and 1979. They did better on the US Hot Dance Music/Club Play chart, where they had five Top 10 hits, including "Do What You Wanna Do", which reached #1, and "Everything Is Cool", which peaked at #10 on the US Billboard R&B chart.^[1] In the United Kingdom, they scored five entries in the UK Singles Chart, with "Do What You Wanna Do" their highest placed success at #11.^[2]

Their track "Groove to Get Down" has been heavily sampled due to its inclusion on the 1986 Ultimate Breaks and Beats series.

Group members included the brothers Theophilus "T" and Kirkwood Coakley, plus guitarists David Mackey and Monty Brown and drummer Anthony Flowers.^[1]^[3]

Calvin Harris has stated that "Do What You Wanna Do" was a formative influence on him when he was beginning to produce music at a young age.

T-Connection was one of those groups during the late '70s and early '80s that blurred the line between funk and disco. Unlike virtually all of their peers, they were from the Bahamas; led by vocalist, guitarist, and keyboardist Theophilus "T" Coakley, T-Connection's membership was fleshed out by Kirkwood Coakley (bass, drums), David Mackey (guitars), and Anthony Flowers (drums, percussion). Shortly after the group's 1975 inception, they decided to relocate to Miami, FL, and ended up signing with Dash, an offshoot of Miami's T.K. Disco. The group's affiliation with that label spawned four albums released between 1977-1979; "Do What You Wanna Do," released in 1977, would become the most popular highlight of their career, reaching number one on Billboard's Disco Singles chart and also registering at number 15 on the R&B chart. Once their time with T.K. was up, they signed with Capitol and headed north to New York. Four more albums steeped in synthesized funk followed for the group until they opted to stop (the title track from 1981's Everything Is Cool peaked at number 15 on the R&B chart). A number of retrospectives have hit record-store shelves since then; Classic Masters, released in 2002 by Capitol, is the best of the bunch.