Kae Sun is completely clueless as to who booked him. If I were an interviewer, i'd have researched this a lot better. Kae Sun shuns the nu funk tag BRAD WHEELER - Globe and Mail February 21, 2008 Who's got the funk? Urban musician Kae Sun is booked to play Clinton's Tavern tomorrow, and although the show is part of a multi-venue nu funk festival, don't ask the Hamilton-based artist what exactly "nu funk" is. "In my opinion, funk is very much alive," says the 25-year-old Sun, who released his EP Ghost Town Prophecy last year. "You can hear it in elements of what hip hop artists and R & B artists do." And the term "nu funk?" "You'd have to ask the guy putting the festival together, but I think it's more of a marketing thing." Funk music has always been a hybrid of sorts, a mix of soul, jazz and rhythm and blues, famously popularized by the likes of James Brown, Sly Stone and George Clinton, a crazy-great weird-haired pioneer who brings his Parliament-Funkadelic collective to the Phoenix on Monday. Sun, born and raised in Ghana, doesn't regard Clinton as a prime influence on his own music (a blend of spoken word, soul, reggae and spiritual rock), but does count funk-informed hip hop duo OutKast as heroes. As for other shapers - "all across the map" - Sun draws on Bob Marley, K-OS and the sly and lithe Curtis Mayfield. In sum, Sun's package is as hard to define succinctly as it is to describe "funk," a danceable music with more extensions than George Clinton's hair and just as freaky.