Ronald Bell

The Jazziacs and Amateur Night at the Apollo

In New Jersey the brothers took their paint cans, and a few cheap drums, to the subway entrance in Greenwich Village. "We'd make about five dollars in three weeks," Bell told Rolling Stone in 2015. With school friends Spike Mickens, Dennis Thomas, Ricky Westfield, George Brown and Charles Smith they formed the Jazziacs, then cycled through the New Dimensions, the Soul Town Band and Kool & the Flames. As the Jazz Birds they won Amateur Night at the Apollo Theater while still in high school.

The Hollywood Reporter says the group settled on the name Kool & the Gang in 1969, the year before its self-titled debut album. Bell remembered the early band as stubborn about its jazz. "You had a hard time trying to get us to play R&B," he told Rolling Stone. "We were diehard jazz musicians." The 1972 album Music Is the Message was the first the band produced itself, and Bell called it their "maiden voyage."

Wild and Peaceful Instead of a Soul Makossa Cover

After the Good Times album, which Bell said had very little commercial value, the label wanted the band's first producer, Gene Redd, back in the studio and suggested a remake of Manu Dibango's "Soul Makossa." Bell told SongwriterUniverse in 2016 that the group refused and chose to write its own "jungle music" and to go commercial "full steam."

The result was Wild and Peaceful in 1973, with three top 10 hits, all co-written by Bell. "Funky Stuff" began when Charles Smith walked in playing a guitar riff, and it was finished the same day. "Hollywood Swinging" took its hook from the radio DJ Frankie Crocker's on-air name, with lyrics by Westfield; the first version ran 18 minutes. For "Jungle Boogie," Bell built the horn riff after listening to Edgar Winter's "Frankenstein." Rolling Stone says the track was cut in one take. The Grammy site counts those horns on more than a hundred other records, among them Luniz's "I Got 5 On It" and the Beastie Boys' "Hey Ladies."

An Empty Record Store and Ladies' Night

By the late 1970s disco had moved past the band. Bell described an in-store appearance where one person showed up and told them Kool & the Gang were "old hat." He said he took it personally. The group added a singer, James "J.T." Taylor, the only one it auditioned, in 1979. Kool, who had been going to clubs such as Studio 54, walked into the studio with two phrases, "Hangin' out" and "Ladies' night." Bell, at the keyboard, wrote the hook to the second, and the band wrote the lyrics together.

The Grammy that obituaries credit to the band was not for one of its own albums. The Recording Academy's site says Kool & the Gang won Album of the Year at the 21st Grammys, in 1979, through their inclusion on the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, and lists two other nominations. The Hollywood Reporter counts two Grammy wins for the band. Bell held no Grammy in his own name.

The Sheraton on Seventh Avenue and Celebration

Bell told SongwriterUniverse he remembered exactly where the idea for "Celebration" came: a room at the Sheraton Hotel on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, where he was reading scripture about God gathering the angels to announce the creation of human beings, and the angels answering with praise. He called the song "actually written for mankind." He described the source to both interviewers only as scripture.

Others finished it. The producer Deodato wrote the horn part, Earl Toon the chorus melody, and Bell the bridge. He said he was listening to Prince and Donna Summer at the time. The single, from the 1980 album Celebrate!, reached number one on the US pop chart, according to the St. Louis American. "Somewhere, someone is always celebrating something," Bell told Rolling Stone.

Compass Point Studio and the Emergency Album

The hits of the early 1980s came from small starts. A friend asked Bell whether he listened to Bob Marley, and he worked out the "Get Down On It" bass line on an Oberheim OBX synthesizer. "Joanna" began as a Charles Smith track called "Dear Mom"; the name was picked while Toto's "Rosanna" was a hit. Bell wrote the melody of "Cherish" at Compass Point Studio in the Bahamas, and Taylor added the words. "Misled" grew from Rockwell's "Somebody's Watching You." Emergency, released in 1984 with "Fresh," "Misled" and "Cherish," became the band's biggest-selling album.

Bell said he was "the main producer," doing most of the studio work, finishing and mastering, while the credit went to the whole band until late in the run. He still described the group as a unit. "We called ourselves The Magnificent Seven," he said.

Blunted on Reality and Public Enemy

Outside the band, Bell produced the 1994 debut album of the Fugees, then called Tranzlator Crew, Blunted on Reality. By then Kool & the Gang records were sample sources for hip-hop. "After Public Enemy, I was all in," he told Rolling Stone in 2015, and he said he could hear George Brown's drum break inside Fear of a Black Planet.

Songwriting Credits and the Songwriters Hall of Fame

No reliable figure for Bell's net worth has been published, and no sale of his songwriting share has been reported. What can be stated is the size of the work. He told SongwriterUniverse he co-wrote every Kool & the Gang hit except "Too Hot," which George Brown wrote. The band collected 25 top 10 R&B hits, nine top 10 pop hits and 31 gold and platinum albums, and Rolling Stone puts its sales above 70 million albums. The St. Louis American reported that he credited much of his music to his Muslim name, Khalis Bayyan, which Rolling Stone says he adopted later in life.

In 2018 the Songwriters Hall of Fame inducted Ronald and Robert Bell, George Brown and J.T. Taylor. Bell spread the credit wider than that. "A lot of the songs, I may have spearheaded 'em," he told The New Yorker that year. "But it's really, with a 'K,' the [collective] genius of a band called Kool & the Gang."

Kool Baby Brotha Band and the Virgin Islands

The band received a BET Soul Train Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014 and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in October 2015. In 2016 it released "Sexy (Where'd You Get Yours)," which reached No. 15 on the Billboard R&B chart, on its own label, K.T.F.A., for Keep The Funk Alive. Bell was also re-recording the band's 1970s catalog as Kool Baby Brotha Band and working on "Kool TV," animated shorts about the group's childhood and career.

He died suddenly on September 9, 2020, at his home in the U.S. Virgin Islands, aged 68. Sujata Murthy of Universal Music Enterprises announced the death and no cause was given. He was survived by his wife, Tia Sinclair Bell, ten children, his brothers Robert, Wahid and Amir, and his sister Sharifah. The family asked for donations to the Boys & Girls Club of America. November 1, 2026 would have been his 75th birthday.

Sources

• Ronald Bell Kool And The Gang Interview - Writing Their Classic Hit Songs
• Kool & the Gang Co-Founder Ronald 'Khalis' Bell Dead at 68
• Ronald 'Khalis' Bell Dead: Kool & the Gang Co-Founder Was 68
• Ronald "Khalis" Bell, Co-Founder Of Soul-Funk Greats Kool & The Gang, Dies At 68 | Grammy
• Khalis Bell, Co-founder of Kool & the Gang, is Dead at 68 - American Songwriter
• Ronald Bell, aka Khalis Bayyan, of Kool & The Gang died Wednesday, Sept. 9 - St. Louis American
• Kool & the Gang co-founder Ronald 'Khalis' Bell dead at 68
• In Memoriam: Ronald "Khalis" Bell - Overstreet Access
• Ronald "Khalis" Bell, Co-Founder Of Kool & The Gang, Dead At 68
• Singer and Co-Founder of Kool & the Gang Ronald 'Khalis' Bell Dead at 68