Maceo Parker Shakes It Up With Deep-Down Funk

----------------------------------------------------------------- Music review

Maceo Parker, 8:30 and 10:30 p.m. tonight and tomorrow, Jazz Alley; $13.50-$16.50, 441-9729. -----------------------------------------------------------------

When you pass Jazz Alley this week, the silhouetted audience through the tinted windows will not be nodding politely, but swinging and swaying like trees in a hurricane.

Maceo is in the house, and he is blowing a tempest.

Maceo Parker, for more than 20 years the saxophonist and musical director for James Brown, is commanding. "Get on your feet," he says, and the usually sedate Jazz Alley audience does.

"Shake everything you got," he sings, and the crowd does - shakes a few things it don't got, as well.

"Good gawd! Shucks!" he grunts.

Parker, who also was one of George Clinton's P-Funk-ateers in the 1970s, says his music is 10 percent jazz, 90 percent funky stuff. There's R&B and soul simmering in there, too. But mainly, it is foreplay music. He plays the saxophone like a man who knows how the evening will end.

He smiles like a Cheshire cat and wiggles his hips. He struggles against his green suit like a caged lion, one hand holding his lapel, the other flat against his thigh.

Parker does not make you want to sniff flowers, or do good deeds. He makes you want what he promises at the beginning of the set: "some funky stuff."

He sings, "Pass the peas, pass the peas," in bursts and, in between grunts and "good gawds," he blows a cooing, flirting saxophone that nevertheless slices.

Missing this time around is Pee Wee Ellis, his longtime sideman. Fans will miss the interplay between Ellis and Parker. At the bar, one fan whines, "No Pee Wee? Where's Pee Wee?" when the band is introduced.

But trombonist Fred Wesley has accompanied Parker again. He jerks his trombone slide not back and forth but in gyrations as he flails about.

In repose, Wesley - rotund and bespectacled - looks as if he should be singing lullabies to his grandchild. But in action he and Parker have the look of men who've done too much and want much, much more. When he dances, he spins his arms like a windmill. The fans at the bar encourage, "Fredfredfredfred . . ." until Parker has to restrain Wesley in a bear hug.

Alongside Parker and Wesley are guitarist Bruno Speight, Will Boulware of the Hammond B-3, drummer Jamal Thomas, and Jerome Preston, who plays a thumping bass.

Their tunes reflect the influence of James Brown. The punctuating bursts of brass, and the swirling doorooroorooroos heard in "I Feel Good," are recurrent. Near the end, the band does the "Wayman Reed," a pelvic dance named after the late James Brown trumpeter.

But the night slows, as it tends to do, and the band switches gears with a slow-dance-whispering-in-your ear rendition of Aretha Franklin's "Do Right Man." Parker plays long deliberate notes, like a heartfelt speech in which the words are carefully chosen.

Shucks. Good gawd.