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Dap-Dippin' with Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings

JSngry

By JSngry
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scottb Newbie

scottb

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Just stayed up until 1 AM to see them on Conan. It doesn't come on here until 12 midnight. Anyway, well worth the wait. They are TIGHT! The drummer rockin his 4 piece kit, the horms tighter than anything since JB, Sharon spillin' her soul, old time funk wah wah.

That was the best musical performance I've seen on TV for as long as I can remember! (Yes, even including Ashlee Simpson) I'm glad they got the exposure and I hope their album does well and encourages people to get back to real music, both players and listeners alike, and stop sending all this crap up the charts!

  • 2 months later...
wolff Newbie

wolff

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Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings: Naturally :tup:tup

Tasty stuff!!!

I'd love to see Angie Stone change labels and front the Dap-Kings for an album or two.

Edited by wolff
JSngry Grand Master

JSngry

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naturally-med.jpg

Just got around to picking this one up, and it's another winner. Might lag a little on the last few tunes, but what comes before is killer, and the very last tune is too, so it's all good like that.

  • 2 years later...
Man with the Golden Arm Newbie

Man with the Golden Arm

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Well I've been doin' to the Dap for sometime now ... so THANKS JIM! :tup

now -

A new album arrives in October followed by tour.

in the meantime - only on 45 but:

(to the right of the pic)

and you can find the instrumental too.

a tangential aside -

Mark Ronson's 'Version' finally came out in the states last month.

He uses the Daptone Horns exclusively, and to utmost funkability. And while a bit of the same trick kicks nearly every cut, but I never tire of it over and over, his production & sound is making this my favorite (edit out some of the neo brit like the hit single Smith's tune "Stop Me") go to for the summer. Highly recommended!! - esp Amy Winehouse on "Valerie" with that Jam meets the Vandellas while walking on sunshine. :tup

  • 1 month later...
  • 4 weeks later...
Alexander Newbie

Alexander

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Got it on Tuesday. Haven't listened to it yet. (This is becoming the story of my life.)

Did anybody see the article on Sharon Jones in the NY Times? Seems she's got some choice words for Amy Winehouse for swiping her band.

Man with the Golden Arm Newbie

Man with the Golden Arm

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She’s Not Anybody’s Backup Act

Casey Kelbaugh for The New York Times

Sharon Jones, once a prison guard at Rikers Island, performing in Battery Park this summer.

By BEN SISARIO

Published: September 29, 2007

There is an elephant in the room at the Brooklyn headquarters of Daptone Records — a skinny, British elephant with an enormous beehive hairdo and a knack for getting her picture in the tabloids.

“What’s-her-name,” shrugged Sharon Jones, the inexhaustibly energetic 51-year-old star talent of Daptone, an underground label so devoted to its pursuit of verisimilitude in 1960s-style soul and funk that it built a studio of vintage equipment and has released far more vinyl 45s than CDs.

The elephant in question is Amy Winehouse, this year’s breakout vocal star. She hired Ms. Jones’s longtime band, the Dap-Kings, to back her up in the studio and on tour, giving the group its first real taste of the limelight. But as Daptone prepares for the release on Tuesday of Ms. Jones’s new album, “100 Days, 100 Nights,” and Ms. Jones prepares for her highest-profile concert yet, at the Apollo Theater on Oct. 6, it has found that its association with Ms. Winehouse is a mixed blessing. For one, they say, people unaware of their years of hard musical labor might wonder if Ms. Jones is jumping on Ms. Winehouse’s bandwagon.

“They jumped on us!” Ms. Jones exclaimed in an interview at the Daptone studio and office, a converted row house in the Bushwick section that has microphones in the bathroom and reels of audio tape filling the kitchen cupboards.

“Even what’s-his-name, Ronson,” she continued, referring to the New York D.J. Mark Ronson, who produced the bulk of “Back to Black,” Ms. Winehouse’s hit album. “They came to us to get the sound they wanted behind their music. We were just sitting here minding our own business, doing our little 45s and albums, and all of a sudden they were like, ‘I want your sound.’”

Thanks to Ms. Winehouse and singers like Joss Stone, Ryan Shaw and Marc Broussard, retro soul styles are enjoying a greater presence in mainstream pop than they have had in years. The Dap-Kings are the most obsessive and skillful revivalists of the bunch, and they are clearly grateful for the exposure they have gotten from Ms. Winehouse and Mr. Ronson, who recently hired the Dap-Kings horns to back him up as the house band at the MTV Video Music Awards.

But that exposure has also put Ms. Jones, who was absent from those freelance gigs, in the odd position of competing against a younger, far more famous singer who had the good taste to use her band.

“First, I feel kind of angry about it,” she said, but then added, “Well, if it took Amy to get the Dap-Kings heard, then it’s a good thing. I say it’s great. Thank you.”

And Ms. Jones is starting to get some breaks of her own. She plays a juke joint singer in “The Great Debaters,” a film by Denzel Washington due in December about a debate team from a black college in the 1930s.

“There’s a reality to her,” said Mr. Washington from Los Angeles, where he was editing the film. “She’s honest. I love her.”

Born in Augusta, Ga. — James Brown’s home town — Ms. Jones moved to Brooklyn with her family at a young age and sang gospel music in church. She has said that she was rejected time and again by record labels for her looks and full figure, and eventually for her age, and she worked as a prison guard at Rikers Island and sang at innumerable weddings while doing backup and session singing. She met Gabriel Roth, the Dap-Kings’ bassist and a co-founder of Daptone Records, at a recording session in 1996 and joined the Daptone family.

Years of club gigs have honed the eight-piece Dap-Kings’ technique, and in its recordings the group meticulously recreates the sound of ’60s-era James Brown and Stax Records. In precisely orchestrated yet fiery live shows, Ms. Jones invites fans half her age to dance with her onstage, and she outlasts every one of them.

When Mr. Ronson was looking for a vintage feel for Ms. Winehouse’s album, he said, he was amazed at the group’s ability to invoke the sounds he wanted better than any sampling or studio wizardry could.

“We were using every computer trick in the book to make it sound old,” Mr. Ronson said. “But it was just so ridiculous.” He said that on the first day the Dap-Kings joined him and Ms. Winehouse in the studio, “it just sounded a million times better.”

Mr. Roth said that the Winehouse project was “something we spent a handful of afternoons knocking out real quick so we can pay some rent.”

“It was a good, honest piece of work,” he continued. “But our music is something we’ve been working on together as a family for a dozen years, and it’s a product of a lot of love and creativity.”

Daptone remains fiercely self-reliant, controlling every aspect of its catalog itself, from recording to publishing to licensing and distribution. The Daptone team members say they are more interested in making music than in seeking commercial success, and with “100 Days, 100 Nights” seem almost obstinately devoted to their sound and methods.

The album has no single intended for pop radio or remixes by Mr. Ronson; in almost every way, it could have been made in 1966. Nor does Daptone intend to make more commercial records in the future. The label’s next release, Mr. Roth said, would be an a cappella gospel album, which he said was almost certain to lose money. The goal is to simply be self-sufficient.

“We’re not comfortable,” Ms. Jones said. “We’re independent. I drive an ’88 Honda.”

peaked my curiousity.

I doubt really that the Dap-Horns are bitching about being the MTV Awards house band and all over Ronson's new album when they go to make a deposit. They even do up the horns on Ronson's Dylan re-mix (?). More power to 'em.

So the truth comes out ... it was Sharon who slipped the mickey in Amy's Ketamine punch!

mjzee Mentor

mjzee

Posted
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That was pretty good. Addresses my comment in another thread about Blonde on Blonde doesn't do it for me because of the drumming/rhythmic thrust. This version gets it right-er.

Man with the Golden Arm Newbie

Man with the Golden Arm

Posted
Posted

nuther article from the VV:

The 35-Year Plan for Soul Superstardom

Sharon Jones, Darondo, and other soul sensations hit it big after decades on the outskirts

by Indrani Sen

September 25th, 2007 4:03 PM

Sharon Jones always knew she was put on this earth to sing soul music. But she soon realized she'd never be a star. "In the '80s, they told me I needed to bleach my skin," she recalls. "They told me I was too dark-skinned, too fat, too short. And once I passed twentysomething, I was too old."

Still, Jones, who was born in Augusta, Georgia, and now lives in Far Rockaway, sang where she could—her church choir, talent shows, wedding gigs. She picked up session work here and there and worked as a correction officer on Rikers Island. " 'God gave me a gift, and one day people are going to accept me for that gift'—that's what I put in my head," Jones recalls. "And it took another 20-something years to happen."

Now, at the age of 51, Jones has finally found her place: up onstage in a shimmery dress, singing her heart out. A tiny black woman with a mischievous sense of humor and a deep, expressive voice, Jones has toured the world with her band, the Dap-Kings, delivering their pure pre-Parliament funk to eager crowds of sweating, dancing fans. "I don't feel embarrassed because I can't dance like Beyoncé or what's-her-name, Shakira," Jones says, giggling and shimmying in her seat at Daptone Records, the Brooklyn soul label that has nurtured her career. "I'm just so glad I can sing something and get on that stage and jump around."

Jones has toured with Lou Reed, and appears in the upcoming Denzel Washington movie The Great Debaters. British soul ingénue Amy Winehouse borrowed the Dap-Kings to record her breakthrough, Back to Black. And in October, Daptone is releasing Sharon's third album, 100 Days, 100 Nights, a collection of gospel-tinged soul laments that she'll celebrate with a date at the Apollo Theater.

"I never saw myself going to Europe and Australia and all these places singing some funk, soul, and r&b," she says. "Not now, in this day and era. But I guess that's what's meant to be."

Jones is one of a motley assortment of aging funk and soul singers unexpectedly drawn back into musical careers they abandoned decades ago. These late bloomers owe their second wind to record collectors and "rare groove" enthusiasts obsessed with undiscovered musical gems of black American music from the late '60s and early '70s. Independently released, long forgotten 45s from that era—rescued from basements in Bed-Stuy and church sales in Detroit—can be worth hundreds on the Internet. Britain led the trend in the late '80s, and such DJs as Norman Jay and Gilles Peterson did much to popularize it, releasing compilations culled from their own massive collections. Crate-digger culture now has its own well-established specialty magazines and reissue labels.

It's a familiar story, but there's something magical about what's happened to this early funk—that a song like "Ham Hocks and Beans," recorded in 1971 by the little-known Chuck Womack and the Sweet Souls in Arizona, could reach out now, across decades and continents. Lately, collectors have started looking beyond the rare records to the now-older singers whose clear, young voices cry out from those sweet, tinny, soulful tracks. The search is on for those undiscovered talents of early funk, now computer programmers, real-estate brokers, and prison guards long over their dreams of stardom.

_____

William Daron Pulliam, a colorful Oakland-–San Francisco Bay Area character known as Darondo, recorded three smooth falsetto songs in the early 1970s—"Legs," "Let My People Go," and "Didn't I" —that have since been heavily collected, and lately included on high-profile compilations. A local public-access TV star known for his white Rolls-Royce, fur coats, and glamorous lady-friends, Pulliam tantalized collectors with his persona and mythology as much as his blues-driven, brassy funk singles. He disappeared from the public eye in the late 1970s, adding to his mystique.

In 2005, Justin Torres, a music historian and record collector, tracked Pulliam down in a suburb of Sacramento after a five-year search. "It's really that 'Eureka!' kind of feeling," Torres said. "It's unearthing somebody who was lost for 30 years—to us, anyway."

For his part, Pulliam was bowled over by the news that people still listen to his records. He had spent the last three decades traveling, working as a physical therapist, buying and flipping real estate, getting married, having children. The music he made in his twenties was a distant memory. "To me, it was a hobby, something I just liked to do," Pulliam, 60, says now from his home in Elk Grove, California. "Justin was telling me how much the records were worth. It shook me up! It's like The Twilight Zone."

Torres put Pulliam in touch with Ubiquity, a Los Angeles–based record label that promptly released an LP, Let My People Go, remastered from an ancient demo reel that Pulliam dug up in his garage. Critics have compared the songs, despite their rough production values, to Marvin Gaye and Al Green. Now he's working on a new song, "Is It My Baby?", based on the DNA-paternity testing on Maury Povich's TV show. "It's going to be No. 1," Pulliam says. "Ain't no doubt about it."

Lee Fields, Sharon Jones's label mate, got a similar out-of-the-blue call from Desco Records, a precursor to Daptone, in 1996. Since then, the 57-year-old singer—a dead ringer for James Brown in appearance and style—has recorded several LPs and seven-inch singles for the two labels. He has toured the world with Daptone's Sugarman Three and Co. and launched a parallel career in European dance music, working with French DJ Martin Solveig.

This success didn't come quickly. Fields moved to New York from North Carolina as a teenager to be a part of the burgeoning late-'60s soul scene. He sang for a few months with Kool and the Gang, but left before the band's breakthrough. In the disco '80s, Fields had a chart hit with a song called "Stopwatch"; other than that, Fields says, "I would put a single out every time I could come up with enough money to go in the studio. I'd press maybe a few thousand and then move on to the next project." By the mid-'80s, Fields had lost his faith that he could support his growing family on music alone. "I came to the conclusion that I'm going to need something else," he says. "These folks that we called 'squares' back in the day, they had homes, they had a foundation. Maybe they had a point."

So Fields got a job driving a forklift at a machinery company and bought some real estate. He kept a foot in music, playing the South's blues circuit, but was relatively quiet until Desco came calling. Sipping a can of beer at his immaculate home in suburban New Jersey, he's got a theory as to why his music has resonated for so many decades. "I don't consider myself a great singer," he says. "But I do consider myself a person that's able to interpret feelings better than average. That's what I do—I convey feelings."

He's glad that those funky songs he recorded in his youth have lived on, but not surprised. "I ain't going to cut a record that's going to die," Fields says. "Because if you cut from your heart, how can a record die? That's an imprint from the soul."

His only regret, he adds with a grin, is that he didn't keep his early records. "If I had the originals, then I'd get rich."

_____

There's nothing new in the international fascination with black American music. But why that particular moment? What is it about that early funk era, those sweet songs of yearning, defiance, and love, those sharp suits and natty little dance steps? "To me, there was a certain peak sometime in 1968, 1969," says Gabe Roth, the 33-year-old co-owner of Daptone Records and bandleader of the Dap-Kings. "It was kind of a summit, where the technology and theory and the talent perfectly met in some kind of pinnacle, which is this raw outpouring of emotion."

After that, in his view, it all went downhill. "Technology made it possible to make a technically cleaner record with less crackles," he continues, "or, when you talk about disco music, more precise rhythms by using drum machines. But all those advancements have not necessarily helped people express themselves."

If that momentary confluence of elements created this soul music 40 years ago, today another perfect storm of technology and musical trends has revived it. Hip-hop and sampling kept vinyl alive, while the Internet has changed the way music is disseminated and erased geographical barriers, so a little-known song from Minneapolis can become internationally desirable within its own tiny niche. Also, Roth adds, "some of it might be reactionary. Some of it might be people who are tired of hearing commercial radio, driven by these awful pop songs."

Roth, a curly-haired Californian, co-founded Desco Records in 1996 when he was an NYU student, and has been putting out fiercely authentic-sounding new-soul songs ever since. Jones first met him and the Desco crew in 1997, when she was hired to sing background tracks on a Lee Fields record. "My first impression was, 'What do these young little white boys know about funk music?' " she recalls. "But then when they started playing, I was like, 'Oh.'"

"It's not a throwback," Roth explains. "It's not like a bar band playing 'Play That Funky Music, White Boy.' There's no Afro wigs; there's no bell bottoms. It's just real people playing real music."

Daptone's recording methods seem eccentric: They use analog tape, edit with an X-Acto knife, and have a studio full of vintage equipment. But Roth maintains that by stripping away the digital technology, Daptone can produce a richer, more emotionally resonant sound. "A lot of pop records are made in computers with infinite numbers of tracks and overdubs and samples and synthesizers and drum machines and untalented people taking 30 or 40 whacks at something, which is later pieced together word by word or bar by bar," he says. "Our approach is a lot more live—we never say, 'Oh, we can fix that in the mix.'"

With Jones and Fields on board, Daptone's music is sometimes indistinguishable from the funk of 40 years ago. Roth has even passed off new records as old. When Desco started out, the idea of new bands playing old-style funk was a hard sell to the soul aficionados they were trying to reach. So the label's first album, The Revenge of Mr. Mopoji, was credited to "Mike Jackson and the Soul Providers" and purported to be a reissue of a soundtrack from an obscure 1970s kung-fu movie. The movie never existed. "Nobody would even listen to it if they thought it was new," Roth says. "I mean, I wouldn't have either. I can't really blame anybody. Our take on it was, 'Look, the music is real.' "

But times have changed, and Daptone's new-old soul sound has become an easier sell, especially with the attention that Winehouse has brought the Dap-Kings and classic soul in general. Still, Roth takes his recent success with a pinch of salt. "We're doing the same shit we're always doing," he says. "If people are into it now, that's good. We can afford to do more of it. But it's the kind of music that always sounded good to me, so the question for me is: How come it took so long?"

For Jones, Pulliam, and Fields, this belated, Internet-driven niche stardom is very different from the fame they aspired to in their youth. It's a little confusing, Fields admits. "I can play in any city in the world and draw a crowd. But still, I walk the streets and I'm not famous . . . I didn't expect things to be like that. I thought either you are out there or you're not out there." Jones agrees. "We're not on TV, and they don't play us on major radio stations," she says. "I just thank God for all these computers and websites. And MySpace and your space and everybody's space."

VV

  • 2 weeks later...

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