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From her earliest days fronting Rufus, Chaka Khan soon became recognized as one of the greatest singers of our time. Over the course of her four-decade career, this legendary artist has won 10 Grammy Awards, released 22 albums and scored a bunch of timeless, No. 1 songs.
While she’s been hailed as the “Queen of Funk,” Khan can effortlessly cross genres from R&B, pop and rock, to gospel, country and world music. This remarkable versatility is reflected in the diverse range of leading musicians she has collaborated with including Miles Davis, Stevie Wonder, Prince, George Benson, Eric Clapton, B.B. King and Joni Mitchell.
Her most recent album, the superb, Grammy-winning “Funk This,” showcases the breadth of her artistry and “re-affirms her legacy as one of popular music’s most beloved and awe-inspiring voices,” proclaimed PopMatters.
There are beautiful ballads like her original song “Angel,” a smoking hot collaboration with Mary J. Blige on “Disrespectful,” and unique covers of Mitchell’s “Ladies Man” and Jimi Hendrix’s “Castles Made of Sand,” along with a standout version of the Doobie Brothers’ “You Belong to Me” with Michael McDonald. And, as a Soul Tracks review noted, “Chaka is likely the only artist alive who is capable of re-inventing the 1987 Prince masterpiece ‘Sign o’ the Times.’ “
“It screamed about what’s going on, even right now,” says Khan about the Prince classic. “Prince is a visionary and those are some of my favorite lyrics.”
By adding a hopeful, ending chorus – “Don’t you know we change the world” – Khan actually enhanced the impact of “Sign o’ the Times.”
“I did my own little ad lib at the end,” she notes.
After first covering Prince’s ballad “I Feel for You” in 1984 and turning it into a million-selling hit single, Khan continued to collaborate with Prince on tracks like “Sticky Wicked” (which also featured Davis), finally teaming together for their “Come 2 My House” album in 1998.
A Rolling Stone review of the recording praised, “If melted caramel had a sound, this would be it: rich, thick, warm and enveloping.”
“He’s a genius, he’s amazing,” she says of Prince. “We did the whole CD in two weeks. I’d write a poem and give it to him and he’d come back the next night and the music would be done and I’d sing it. I would sing a song and he’d say, ‘We’re done.’ I’m like, ‘Are you sure, are you kidding me?’ It was very fast.”
It might surprise some to hear that Khan recorded a Mitchell song on her “Funk This” album. She’s been a huge fan for many years, and it was the Canadian icon who suggested she sing “Ladies Man.”
The two musicians had been chatting after Mitchell was inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame, where Khan performed with Herbie Hancock.
“I was going to do ‘Backstreet’ or something like that, and she said, ‘You can’t do that, it’s too depressing, do something like ‘Ladies Man.’ “
They’ve shared a mutual admiration since working together on Mitchell’s 1977 masterpiece “Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter.”
“She called me at like 3 in the morning to help her in the studio,” Khan recalls. “I was so excited; finally we get to sing together.”
Kahn plans to release a whole album as a tribute to Mitchell.
“I’ve been working since last year on a CD of my favorite songs of hers,” she explains.
Whatever song she decides to cover, Khan makes it her own. Take Fleetwood Mac’s “Everywhere,” included on the compilation album “Epiphany: The Best of Chaka Khan,” which she completely transformed with a hint of reggae into a sensual soul classic.
“There are some songs which I feel I wrote,” she explains. “‘Everywhere’ was one of those songs. I feel that way about almost every Joni song. Songs are creations and they don’t belong to any one person. They come from the heart or spirit of a person. They may get royalties, but they’re not theirs.”
While Khan is known for classic funk hits like “Ain’t Nobody,” “I Feel For You” and “Tell Me Something Good,” her musical tastes are far wider. Last year, she teamed with the Tedeschi Trucks Band at the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival in Tennessee for a wild, rocking take on Led Zeppelin’s “What Is and What Should Never Be.”
“Besides jazz, rock ‘n’ roll and country is my first music,” she says. “I grew up on jazz and when I first got with Rufus, we were doing rock ‘n’ roll and country, and then I walked into R&B. I love all music if it’s good.”
Sometimes she feels people restrict her artistically by putting her in a box, “because of my skin color,” she says. “I’m still trying to fight my way out of that box.”
Born and raised in Chicago, as a young teenager Khan began her singing career with the all-female group the Crystalettes.
“I ran away from home at 16, and I was thinking how am I going to support myself?” she recalls. “I had no choice, maybe join a band, make some money. I wanted to be an anthropologist, and I put that aside. But I didn’t know music would become my main calling.”
At the age of 18, she became the singer for the Chicago-based band Rufus. When Stevie Wonder became a fan of the group, he offered them his song “Tell Me Something Good.” The single from the group’s 1974 platinum-selling album, “Rags to Rufus,” earned Khan her first Grammy.
With Khan as the group’s dynamic center, Rufus dominated the airwaves with hits like “You Got the Love,” “Once You Get Started,” “Sweet Thing” and “Ain’t Nobody,” which also won a Grammy. Reviews began comparing her to Tina Turner and Aretha Franklin.
Before she left Rufus, she released her first solo album, the million-selling “Chaka,” featuring the enduring hit “I’m Every Woman” (with a young Whitney Houston on backing vocals).
“That song and ‘Ain’t Nobody’ are probably songs I’ll be doing for the rest of my life,” she says.
As a solo artist paired with the late producer Arif Mardin, her catalog of hits grew with songs such as “Clouds,” “Papillon” and “What ‘Cha Gonna Do For Me?”
It was during this time that Khan began pursuing her love of jazz. With Mardin she brilliantly re-worked the classic “Night in Tunisia” with its composer, Dizzy Gillespie, on trumpet. She also recorded an album of jazz standards, “Echoes of an Era,” with such jazz luminaries as Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke and Lenny White, interpreting classics like Thelonious Monk’s “I Mean You” and Duke Ellington’s “Take the ‘A’ Train.”
Also in 1982, she recorded her superb, Grammy-winning tune “Be Bop Medley” on the album “Chaka Khan.” She calls it her “crowning achievement to date.” The song prompted Betty Carter to proclaim Khan the one female singer working outside jazz with legitimate improvising credentials.
Besides jazz icons like Gillespie, she’s also performed with Davis, including joining him in concert at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland.
“After working with Miles, I was like, ‘OK, I can go now,’ ” she says. “My producer Arif Mardin was a great jazz afficianado like my dad was. I ended up working with a lot of the musicians that he used to play with when I was a kid. That really moves me. I fell in love with the sax and trumpet when I was growing up.”
So does she play the sax? “No, I played flute in school, but I play drums and bass.”
Since her earliest days, Khan’s vocal magic has been featured on many musicians’ albums. Her voice electrified Steve Winwood’s Grammy-winning “Higher Love.” Quincy Jones teamed her with Ray Charles on his hit album “Back on the Block.” Rod Stewart recorded a duet with her on the fourth edition of his “Great American Songbook” series. Keyboard great Herbie Hancock teamed her with Ravi Shankar’s daughter Anoushka Shankar and legendary saxophonist Wayne Shorter for an Indo-jazz fusion track on his “The Imagine Project.” And in 2013, she was a guest vocalist on Clapton’s album “Old Sock.”
For the future, along with her Mitchell project, she has been working on another new album, which she describes as “eclectic, sort of upluggish, without a lot of production, and really earthy,” with “songs that have meaning as I am a witness to all that is going on on the planet.”
Having been honored with many awards over the years, Khan is especially proud to have had a street named after her in her hometown.
“Chicago is my home, where I was born and raised,” she says. It’s a great place to be from and it’s also pretty racist. For a black person to have a street named after her is a big thing there. It’s right on the same street I went to high school. So it was really cool. It was really meaningful for me. It was one of the times when I felt like I had accomplished something.”