The Dynamites featuring Charles Walker | Patrick Sweany

If the first attention-grabbing horn lines of The Dynamites' album Kaboom! evoke a dramatic curtain call from a late 1960s funk concert at the Apollo Theater, it's no accident. After all, that's exactly where Charles Walker, the band's singer and frontman, first cut his teeth as a performer. When the revolutionary "new bag" now known as funk first made the scene, Walker was right there in the thick of it, opening for the likes of James Brown, Etta James and Wilson Pickett and imbibing himself in a cultural movement’s genesis.