“Acid Funk” and Beyond: Yolanda Charles Steps Into the Spotlight with Her Own Music

For decades, Yolanda Charles spent her career as a session musician, lending her formidable low-end skills to artists like Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, Paul Weller, Van Morrison, BB King, Roger Daltrey, and more. (Get a sample from her Spotify playlist.) Her talent has been recognized worldwide, and in 2020, she was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE).

But now, she’s fully embracing her own musical voice. That journey has led to her new album, Acid Funk, with her band, Project pH. The record is a bold fusion of jazz, funk, R&B, and rock, with shades of ‘80s jazz fusion and ‘70s funk—tied together by stellar grooves and bass tones to die for.

Charles wrote all of the music and lyrics, with guitarist Nick Linnik stepping in as co-producer. Acid Funk also marks a new chapter for her as an independent artist, released through her own fledgling label, MAMAYO Records. Currently available exclusively through Bandcamp, the album will soon see a wider release on vinyl and streaming platforms.

With the new album finally out, we spoke with Charles about Acid Funk, her approach to bass, and how she brings her signature sound to life. This is part 1 of our interview.

This is kind of a newer band for you, right? How long has Project pH been around?

We started in 2018, funnily enough, but very low key. It was done around my session work. So I wasn’t really doing much else besides my session work—a tiny bit of teaching here and there, and then PH was in its fledgling. I had tried to start a new band for some time because I’ve had a band since 2003 or 2002, but I had these breaks and I thought every time, “Do you know what? I’m going to start a new project.”

So I had three project names over the last 20-odd years. It’s all just me basically, which is kind of funny. Project pH was the next attempt, but it was half-hearted. I wasn’t fully committed at the time because I was still heavily touring. So I just got together with my guitarist at the time and we did some stuff from my back catalogue from my other bands.

I was primed to write new material and record, and that was the end of 2019. We’d started to go into the studio to demo some songs.

In 2019 I had just had a chat with Sting about joining his band. My plan was to do five more years of session work, in the meantime just gently work with my band in the background, and after five years of sessioning, I would quit session work forever and focus properly on the band.

During that time I would have been building it up in a gentle way because it wasn’t a business move. It was a passion, a love. Obviously, COVID changed all my plans and so I just dropped the session work early, five years earlier than I had planned. In fact, 2025 would have been the year that I would have quit sessioning.

I ended up just quitting session work in 2022 and I’ve been working on my band since then. So it feels like a new thing because it took us so long to get the record together and for me to figure out what I was doing. Effectively the band’s been gigging quietly at Ronnie Scott’s in the late show where we’re not really the main attraction. There we’ve been shaping the band’s sound from 2022 and the album came out at the end of 2024.

In the song “No ID,” one part I love is the unison bit that you play together. What was the composition process like for that?

Great. Well, OK, so I originally started playing guitar when I was 14 and I wasn’t very good on the guitar in terms of just getting into it as an instrument. I tried lots of different instruments and instruments were always just a vehicle for me to speak through. I had little musical ideas and I wanted to find a way of playing it, so I play the same stuff on any instrument. If I’m on keyboard I play keyboard lines that were what I hear. Turns out what I hear is bass. I hear bass lines. I hear single-line riffs. I don’t hear polyphony as much.

It didn’t work so great with my guitar teacher that I didn’t really hear chords so much and I heard more single-line stuff. He said to me, “You’re a bass player.” So I was like, “Okay, I guess I’m a bass player.” Which is cool. It found me, you know? So when I play guitar, because I did learn some guitar, I play bass lines on the guitar because that’s what I hear.

So all of the riffs and a lot of chord parts [I wrote]. They got changed over time because I work with Nick Linnik who’s the producer-guitarist and you could say he’s like co-arranger. I wrote all of the music from before I even met him. He came along and went, “Yeah I don’t like that chord, I don’t like that chord, let’s change this, let’s change that.” He changed some of the harmony, which is cool, but all of the unison riffs, every single line that’s written on that thing, I wrote them on guitar.

So everything that sounds like heavy guitar, like on the track called “My Dying Day”, which is a blues/rock/funk thing in that kind of ‘90s sound. The riff that’s heavy on that, I wrote that. That’s a bass riff.

The thing about bass riffs is when you play bass riffs on guitar with distortion and massive effects, they sound great, especially doubled up with the bass underneath, sort of giving it that extra weight. So I am in my element when I have a guitarist who understands bass lines and can articulate the phrasing in the same way that I play it, which Nick does so beautifully. So we have that unison thing going on in the album in a few spots on a few tracks.

Yeah, that’s a good point. Now that you said that, it makes me realize all my favorite metal riffs are just bass lines played on guitar.

Yeah man, it’s just bass. Bass rules. The thing about bass is that it’s underestimated because the magic of bass is subtle and bass players understand that. Some producers understand it, some arrangers understand it, but a lot of people they don’t really understand what bass is and what it does to the music. They only know when they like it and they know when it’s annoying and in the way, but they’re not really thinking about the actual physics of what it does to the music… the perception of the music, the depth of the harmony changes. And not just from note choices. As many people have said, the way that the bottom note of a chord dictates the harmony structure, so the bass is responsible for that in a lot of ways. But it’s not just that, it’s the sonics of it, as well.

So the frequencies, the range that the bass covers widens the harmony as well. It all changes your focus away from a certain area, depending on where the bass is.

So on my five-string, if I go down to the lowest string and I play a Db there, as opposed to the octave up, it’s a very different effect and different weight, not just because it’s lower by a whole octave, but because of what that octave actually does to the music. It makes it feel different as well. So it’s a perception thing too, as well as a harmonic register thing.

If you want to say something powerful, you’ll choose a particular note in the chord for the bass to express, or you choose a particular frequency in the settings, or you choose a particular register in the range of the bass. This is why I play five-string, because I want a scope of range and I don’t need the higher register.