Charles Ellerbe, a guitarist whose R&B and rock roots helped lend a funky frisson to Ornette Coleman’s electric Prime Time band, died at home in North Philadelphia in the hours between Sunday, Oct. 4, and Monday, Oct. 5. He was 76.
His death, following a long illness, was confirmed by his lifelong friend and collaborator, drummer G. Calvin Weston.
Ellerbe was one of three members of Prime Time who grew up within a mile of one another in North Philly. Bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma had been hired first, fresh off a gig with organ great Charles Earland from which both he and Ellerbe had been fired. Tacuma recommended his guitarist friend Ellerbe, then the two of them brought in Weston.
“Charlee Ellerbe was a real rock star of the guitar,” says Tacuma. “Charlee understood the importance of taking that guitar forward. Playing with Ornette Coleman allowed him to find his voice in that very special way. And he was a person of epic proportions in terms of his compositional work.”
Ellerbe had never intended to play jazz. He hadn’t even considered playing an instrument until junior high, when he was surprised to see his close friend Arnold Langley playing during an in-school performance. He began taking lessons from the younger boy, later attending Combs College of Music to study composition and arranging, pursuits more attuned to his vision of creating music rather than playing virtuosically.
“The last thing I want to be is a guitar player,” Ellerbe told the podcast Remembering Ornette. “I don’t consider myself one at all. Guitar players are people like Wes Montgomery, George Benson, Earl Klugh, Charles Christian, Kenny Burrell, Philip Upchurch… I use the guitar for total self-expression.”
Like so many musicians growing up in the orbit of the Uptown Theater, Ellerbe got his professional start playing R&B with bands like the local soul group The Ambassadors. As he remembered it, he was performing on that stage when he first caught Tacuma’s ear (the bassist’s own memories differ slightly).
“Jamaal knew me before I knew him,” the guitarist recalled when we spoke in 2008. “He used to frequent the Uptown Theater. I was standing on the corner of my block one summer, me and some neighborhood guys, and Jamaal walked by with an empty bass case in his hand. He stopped and said, ‘You’re Charlee Ellerbe, aren’t you? Y’all are bad. Maybe we should get together sometime.’ It started from there.”
Weston and Ellerbe lived within a few blocks of one another for most of their lives. As Ellerbe recalls, they were aware of each other from the neighborhood and were drawn together by the sound of music emanating from their respective homes. They formed a short-lived band together called Veto.
“Every neighborhood had a band,” Weston says. “Around here, every block had a band. Charlee was one of the first guitar players that I played with that used fuzz and sustain on his guitar. Charlee was playing rock and roll. I was always playing R&B, and you don't hear a lot of fuzz and power chords in R&B. I dug it.”
Around the same time he was also recruited to replace his friend Arnold Langley in the jazz-funk band HEEM, whose ranks at various times include drummer Pete Vincent, guitarist Reggie Lucas, trombonists Tyrone Hill and Harold Watkins, and saxophonist and future educator Lovett Hines.
Even after joining Prime Time, Ellerbe continued to play in other bands and styles, guesting on A Tear and a Smile, the fourth and final album by Philly fusion band Catalyst, and playing sporadically with The Trammps, best known for the hit “Disco Inferno.” He recorded with those disco pioneers on 1979’s The Whole World’s Dancing.
That recording came four years into what turned out to be a 15-year stint with Prime Time. Ellerbe was only vaguely aware of Coleman’s music when the saxophonist and composer enlisted him. His free-form, Harmolodic approach proved challenging, so much so that Ellerbe recalled asking Coleman for guidance.
“After about four rehearsals, because it was so brand new, I was confused,” Ellerbe described to me in 2008. “I asked Ornette if there were any of his albums that I should listen to, to bring myself up to speed. His answer was no. He wanted more or less the natural you, and he would much rather deal with correcting the side effects of that than to have you mimic something or be influenced by something he’d already done.”
Ellerbe ultimately recorded five albums with Coleman between 1977’s Dancing in Your Head and 1988’s Virgin Beauty, the latter of which included a guest turn by Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead. As with most of Coleman’s music, Prime Time was met with a mixture of acclaim and distaste, its abstract funk and chaos-skirting independence posing a visceral, engaging challenge.
The band’s guitar duties were shared by Ellerbe and Bern Nix, whose contrasting sounds intertwined like barbed wire. Ellerbe was the more rough-hewn and brusque of the pair, his serrated lines set against Nix’s more muted, subtly crafted approach. (Nix died in 2017, at 69.)
After Prime Time was reinvented in 1989, Ellerbe returned to Philadelphia and his career slowed. He spent some time in the ranks of the Sun Ra Arkestra, and several years teaching at the Clef Club of Jazz and the Performing Arts, in the program led by his old friend Lovett Hines. He launched his own take on the Prime Time concept with his band Matrix 12:38, which performed rarely. When they did convene, the band showcased the livewire fluidity and gnarled aggression of Ellerbe’s fretwork, embracing his jazz influences as eagerly as hard-rock skronk.
“Charlee always had the courage to focus on his sound, what he heard,” said Hines. “He was the consummate individual, and a consummate talent.”
