Jamal Batiste of New Orleans plays drummer in James Brown movie: Growing East
By Veronica Barbarin, Eastern New Orleans columnist
on August 21, 2014 at 8:16 AM, updated August 21, 2014 at 8:18 AM
In the movie, Batiste plays drummer John “Jabo” Starks.
Batiste said an interesting fact about the part he won is that…he and Starks are good friends.
Batists credits Starks’ for some of Brown’s popular songs. “The songs that everybody knows like ‘Get on Up,’ and ‘Sex Machine,’ Jabo was responsible for those beats,” Batiste said. “And, then of course, when you think about hip hop and these James Brown drum samples that we hear, a lot of that stuff is Jabo being sampled.”
Scott K Fish 