Soul sister Sharon Jones and her funky partners The Dap-Kings visit the Westcott Theater on Saturday
There’s music playing in the background when Sharon Jones answers her phone in South Carolina, where she relocated in April after living in New York City since 1959. Jones excitedly dishes about her recent discovery on Facebook literally minutes before the interview. It seems that The Jelly Jazz Radio Show is featuring her first major performance with her backing band, the Dap-Kings, at the time called the Soul Providers, back in London circa 1999. And she’s loving listening in.
“Oh my God,” she exclaims, as she rattles off the songs she’s singing in the recording, in obvious awe that it’s taken 12 years for her to hear it. “It’s the most amazing thing! You gotta look it up! I’m gonna figure out how to buy it.”
Despite the excitement, Jones is a bundle of conflicting emotions. She’s getting ready for her upcoming tour, which stops at the Westcott Theater, 524 Westcott St. on Saturday, Dec. 10 at 8 p.m., but her mother has been in and out of the hospital and Jones hasn’t been sleeping well due to the stress.
“It’s taking a toll on me. It’s really bothering me. I’m really depressed,” she says. “But I get on stage and that’s where I usually get my release.”
The Jelly Jazz trip down memory lane helps lift her spirits, and so does mention of her recent invitation to perform at VH1’s new edition of Divas Live, airing on Monday, Dec. 19, at 9 p.m. She’ll be joined by leading ladies Chaka Khan, Erykah Badu, Mary J. Blige, Kelly Clarkson, Florence The Machine, Jennifer Hudson, Jill Scott and Estelle. Jones plans on honoring a lady lost by performing the Amy Winehouse track “You Know I’m No Good.” The cover was suggested by the Dap-Kings, who performed with Winehouse on much of her acclaimed 2006 album Back to Black (Universal Republic) and during her subsequent U.S. tour.
“It’s sad that she’s gone,” Jones says. “I wish she woulda been here because over the years I wanted to be able to do something with her. That would have been one of the greatest things. She came to my show one time and said, ‘I’ll come back and we’ll sing.’” Although that will never be, Jones, 55, has pressed forward with music, which reminds of an earlier time, much like Winehouse’s. Both draw from throwback Stax, Atlantic and Motown styles from the 1960s, with special help from the Dap- Kings, who use vintage instruments to help build the authentic sound. At Daptone Studios, where the Dap-Kings serve as a modern-day Funk Brothers (the session musicians who played on all the Motown recordings), they even stick to all analog recording technologies and employed Ed Sullivan Show-era TV cameras for the making of Jones’ music video “100 Days, 100 Nights.”
The combination of the 1960s style with new energy has helped make this outfit a growing sensation since they released their 2002 debut album, Dap Dippin’ with Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings (Daptone). When the nine-piece swaggers into the Westcott on Saturday, they’ll remind Syracuse why retro rocks.
For Jones, the progression to where she is today was natural, but not easy. “Music was a part of me, coming up in the church and singing,” she says. “It’s always been a part of me since I was a little girl. I remember singing “Silent Night.” I played an angel.
I think I knew that day that it was in me.”
Jones sang in church and with various groups, but didn’t make a career of music for most of her life. She worked as a corrections officer at Rikers Island, for Wells Fargo and at Charles P. Young Management Services and tried out for various theatrical productions, although she never had the “look” necessary for the parts. She did all this while performing side jobs with wedding bands and in studio sessions.
“After the 1970s left and the 1980s came, the music changed,” she says. “My interests went more to gospel, but just trying to work doing the wedding band thing—the covers and Whitney Houston and Janet Jackson—and then I just got to a certain age and it wasn’t working. When a wedding band starts telling me I have to sing Jennifer Lopez {Jones starts singing ‘Waiting for Tonight’}—not saying there ain’t nothin’ wrong with that song—that was it for me. I’m heading into my 50s and I’m singing ‘Waiting for Tonight’? I don’t think so.”
In the mid-1990s, Jones’ ex-fiance, a horn player, turned her on to the Soul Providers, who were putting together an Afrobeat funk album and needed three female backup singers. When they asked Jones to find two friends, she explained she could do all three parts on her own. Needless to say, she caught their attention.
Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings (they changed their name in 2000) followed their 2002 debut album with Naturally in 2005, 100 Days, 100 Nights in 2007 and I Learned the Hard Way in 2010. They’ve appeared on late-night gabfests with Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon and Jay Leno, performed at the South by Southwest, Lollapalooza and Bonnaroo music festivals, and have logged plenty of touring miles. Yet more than a decade after their start, many new listeners still mistake them as an overnight success, something Jones couldn’t disagree with more.
“It’s been a long, long struggle, a long haul,” she emphasizes. “I’m showing you stuff from 1999, but people just hearing us now are thinkin’ we’ve just been out for the past three years. We’ve been out since, like, 1995. Now I’m just so glad that this is all gold. This is why we never stopped doing what we were doing. That’s why we never changed. We still put out soul, funk and r’n’b. We never went pop, hip-hop. We’re not playin’ around. I knew that God had blessed me with something and I really had something. I just wanted people to accept me for my voice, my gift. I’m glad I stayed in there.”
That straightforward mission is aided by a common thread of interest among the musicians, despite the age differences. When the group first got together, Jones was in her mid-30s while drummer Homer Steinweiss was only 16. “He was still learnin’ drums,” she says. “He’d mess the beats up! Gabe {Gabriel Roth, aka bandleader Bosco Mann} would have to slow it down or just go over and over.”
Regardless of the Dap gap, all of the members are avid record collectors and keep a steady stream of the classics flowing into their ears. “A group of guys like that, they’re so true to what they’re doing,” Jones says. “I couldn’t help but to become a part of that.”
The results have paid off. On Saturday, Westcott Theater audiences can see for themselves, despite Jones’ modest downplay. “I hope people don’t expect a lot because all I do is go out there and be me,” she says. “The band comes out, they introduce me, I come out, I dance, I sing, I interact with the audience. I love when I can get people up to dance. I dance, I jump around. I don’t know. I just be guided. Before I go on that stage every night I have that prayer. Me and my girls say a prayer and me before I walk on, I say that extra prayer. That prayer is: “Give me the right things to say, Lord. The right things to come out of my mouth.” And that’s what I do.”
Advance tickets for Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings are $25, available online at www.thewestcotttheater.com or at Armory Square’s Sound Garden, 310 W. Jefferson St. Expect to pay $30 at the door.
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