Visit the website georgeclinton.com, and the first thing you’ll see is a disarming, dynamic video rendition of the Funkadelic classic “One Nation Under a Groove,” performed by the youthful Detroit Academy of Arts & Sciences Choir.
Now think: What musical style would you least expect to hear covering the hits from Clinton’s P-Funk archives, and where would it be performed?
If you guessed “A symphony orchestra … at the Detroit Opera House?” you made the Mothership Connection! You win … the opportunity to buy tickets to witness “Symphonic PFunk: Celebrating the Music of Parliament Funkadelic” at 8 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 31. Nona Hendryx, Rahsaan Patterson, and Vernon Reid will be among the special guests.
It’s billed as a first-of-its-kind event, and while Clinton has no direct involvement in the concert, Dr. Funkenstein says he’ll break away from his own current world tour to see it for himself in his adopted hometown.
Opening his conversation with the traditional Detroit greeting — “What up doe?” — Clinton rhapsodizes over tearing the roof off the Opera House. This will be the first time Clinton’s songbook has been performed with an orchestra. “And it’s really nice that it’s in Detroit,” beams Clinton, who came to Detroit with The Parliaments in the 1950s to audition for Berry Gordy’s Motown. They weren’t signed, but Clinton became a songwriter for Motown and moved the band to Detroit.
Detroit is also “where we did so much of the music,” he says, including the band’s breakthrough album Mothership Connection, which was recorded at United Sound Studios. “And we actually used a symphony band on many of our tracks. So it’s gonna feel like a homecoming for a lot of people.”
Ray Chew, the renowned musician and orchestral arranger perhaps best known as the music director for Dancing with the Stars since 2014, doubts whether any of the instrumentalists performing at the Opera House worked with Clinton in his heyday — it’s been a few decades, after all — but is thrilled to see his own P-Funk vision become reality.
“My wife and business partner, Vivian Scott Chew, has a longstanding history with George,” he explains. “She released his album T.A.P.O.A.F.O.M. (The Awesome Power of a Fully Operational Mothership) in 1996 when she was an executive at Sony Music, and they celebrated its success by landing the Mothership in New York’s Central Park.”
Chew continues, “2026 marks the 50th anniversary of the original Mothership landing, and we began envisioning what an orchestral presentation of George’s music would look like. And here we are! We’re very excited for our company, Chew Entertainment, to partner with the Detroit Opera House in kicking off this celebratory year.”
Were there challenges in converting P-Funk to orchestral melodies? “The only challenges were those to the imagination,” Chew contends. “George’s music has been played and sampled for over 50 years, so it is important that we are authentic to the style and feel.”
The goal, Chew says, is to take the show on the road and perform it in the world’s most prestigious concert venues. “Having the first show in Detroit was a no-brainer,” he adds, “due to George’s rich history with the city.”
To absolutely no surprise, the North Carolina native agrees.
“Oh yeah, you’re going to have like three generations of audience,” says Clinton, who received the first-ever Quincy Jones Award from the Paid in Full Foundation last fall for his lifetime of influence on rap and hip-hop music. “Because Detroit was with us when we were doing the suits [as the R&B group The Parliaments] and the early funk. You got a lot of them that identify with the ’70s and P-Funk, then you got the high boots, the high heels of Funkadelic later on. Then you got the hip-hop crowd that knows it through all the sampling and stuff that still goes on.”
“And of course, we was Motown-influenced ourselves. I ain’t afraid to tell nobody that. Smokey Robinson is still my hero. So I put it like this: From Smokey to Eminem, P-Funk is down with Detroit.”
He might get down with Detroit himself. While he’s not slated to perform at the Opera House, “I might just jump up there and hang out with them on a couple of songs or so,” Clinton teases. “I plan to just sit there and watch them do it, to enjoy most of it, but you know you’re going to have all kinds of P-Funkers there. You’re going to have to keep reminding them that it ain’t their show, but they’re going to be ready to get down.”
This summer, Clinton will turn 85, an age at which most people can’t even recall their retirement. How is he still ready to get down?
“I got a spaceship, man,” he replies with a wink. “It does all the work. Hey, don’t tell nobody, man. They gonna beam me up.”
This story originally appeared in the January 2026 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Click here to get our digital edition.
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