Africanized killer horns

How do you get to The Palace of Auburn Hills?

Ride that funky mudslide.

The Sun Messengers started out 30 years ago as an eclecticjazz-world-funk outfit with overtones of jazz’s mystic mastermind, Sun Ra. Nowit’s the official band of the Detroit Pistons, riling everybody up with brassyMotown and funk grooves that pulsate with Motor City pride. The band performs at 2 p.m. Saturday at the Mi.Funk Festival at Grand River Avenue and Turner Street in downtown Lansing.

“Artists need to reach out and be entertainers,” founder andbaritone sax man Rick Steiger said. “Go back to the era before 1950: Jazz wasmusic for dancing.”

Steiger said The Messengers began as Detroit’s firstworld-beat band.

“We had two percussionists, doing everything from SouthAfrican jazz to Sun Ra to originals,” he said. “We found out playing fordancing is fun.” After that, the band gravitated to the Detroit sound – “musicthat gets people in southeastern Michigan dancing.”

They still perform original tunes — a 30^thanniversary disc of all-new music is due out this year — but covers are itsbread and butter.

“I say this in all humility, but nobody around here can doJames Brown like we do,” Steiger said.

Steiger sees funk everywhere in popular music, especiallyhip-hop and rock.

“For a while, James Brown’s ‘Funky Drummer’ beat was sloweddown, sped up and sampled every which way,” he said. “It was all over the popcharts, and a lot of people didn’t even know that’s what it was.”

Funk is no less than “the Africanization of American music,”in Steiger’s view.

“It’s a parallel to what Latin music was doing in that it’sstretching out the rhythm,” he said. “When James Brown did that, he basicallytook the music right back to Africa.”

In the ’80s and ’90s, the Sun Messengers were a frequentvisitor at Rick’s American Cafe in East Lansing, flirting with fire codeviolations for packing so much horn firepower in an enclosed space.

Steiger said he hasn’t played Lansing since he and the SunMessengers jammed at Old Town galleries with legendary local sax man Ron Gulyas(Big Red) in the late 1980s.

He was delighted to see a funk festival sprout up here in2010.