Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings

100 Days and 100 Nights | Daptone
By JEFF TAMARKIN  |  October 30, 2007
3.5 3.5 Stars
inside_SHARON-JONES-&-THE-D
You can’t really call Sharon Jones a retro soulster. She’s been at it a good 10 years longer than Joss Stone has been alive, and though her career was interrupted for a couple of decades as black music morphed, once she was discovered for real in the late ’90s, Jones — who’d paid the bills in the meantime as a corrections officer — dusted herself off and picked up where she’d left off. Her brand of Southern-fried R&B is the genuine Etta/Tina/Aretha/Irma stuff that kept Muscle Shoals, Memphis, and NOLA happening in the ’60s and pre-disco ’70s. At nearly 50, Jones has the voice of someone who has lived a life, but not so much of one that she can’t inject a sweet romanticism into her morality tales. The eight-piece Dap-Kings are the perfect accomplices: on the gospelized “Tell Me,” a ringer for a classic Stax dance-floor burner, pumping bass, Booker T. drums, and a snappy horn section lift Jones’s forceful singing through the roof. The title track’s cascading vocal, coaxed by churchy organ, is pure chitlin’ circuit, and “Humble Me” is Otis’s “Pain in My Heart” redux. Any of these songs would have been a charttopper in the day. Should be now, too, but that’s another story.

Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings + Budos Band | Middle East Downstairs, 480 Mass Ave, Cambridge | November 9 | 617.864.EAST

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  Topics: CD Reviews , Joss Stone, Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings,  More more >
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ARTICLES BY JEFF TAMARKIN
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