VO5 "Soul Shiny Day" (John Feith, dir.)

“Soul Shiny Day,” from the album Dance Originality, opens with a riff from Miles Davis’ Bitches’ Brew and takes obvious cues from Jackson Five’s “ABC” and “I Want You Back,” modernized with Chicago–style chords and horns and sung in a flowing jam–band style by its writer, Jim Yockey. Like the first two songs, this song is about joy in movement (this time, a bike ride in a Madison neighborhood) and religious–likeecstasy. Yockey, VO5’s percussionist, studied religious themes in world music as a PhD student at Berkeley. One word in the song “Chabas” (“chabas jumping in the puddle”) is mysterious, referring perhaps to children from a Paul Chabas oil painting or a type of amphibian.