In the Mix

The exclamation point is mine. Darondo Pulliam more than earns it. No amount of punctuation could do justice to the show the 61 year old soul man and his partner in funk Nino Moschella put on at Club DeVille on Saturday night.

Moschella is a 29 year old Bay Area funkateer of the first order, a bushy haired keyboard player and guitarist with a pretty impressive falsetto of his own who fronts a righteously tight seven piece band. Darondo is something else entirely, a processed pompadoured old-school legend who, after recording three singles in the early 1970s that soul connoisseurs dare to compare to Al Green, disappeared altogether.

In 2005, British DJ Gilles Peterson included Darondo's "Didn't I," on his compiliation, Gilles Peterson Digs America: Brownswood U.S.A. Darondo, it turned out, was alive and well, and in 2006 a nine song compilation, Let My People Go, of his salacious '70s recordings was issued on the Ubiquity label.

And now, here he was at SXSW, being greeted as a conquering hero come back to life, singing "Didn't I" and "Let My People Go" in a fiercely emotive voice, intermingling the spiritual and sexual, and delivering seduction instructions that involved cherries and whip cream. Darondo took the stage like a man desperate to make up for all he had missed, and the funk got harder, and more irresistible. "It's like Christmas!" the woman next to me said, and indeed it was, though considering the resurrection theme, Easter might have been the more apt holiday. The best thing I saw all week, without a doubt.