Daddy B. Nice’s CD Reviews 2022

December 10, 2022

KING GEORGE: Juke Joint Music (Ace Visionz)

Five Stars ***** Can’t Miss. Pure Southern Soul Heaven.

The dust has finally settled since King George hit us like a ton of bricks. This is a guy who’s a shoo-in for Best Debut of the year. What a laugh! That doesn’t begin to convey the impact he’s had on the southern soul audience. King George is way beyond best debut—he’s catapulted to southern soul stardom. And what he’s accomplished in the space of a few months isn’t easy. If it was, hundreds if not thousands of aspiring southern soul artists would have already done it.

I say “a few months,” but the work that went into this year of meteoric success and this greatly-anticipated collection surely took many years. It’s evident in the weight and heft of the songs, their melodic richness, their traditional-sounding yet original guitar riffs, and of course the lyrics and the ability of King George’s vocals to make the messages instantly believable.

Juke Joint Music brings together the four great songs that made King George a legend: “Keep On Rolling,” “Too Long,” “Leave And Party” and “Friday Night,” supplementing them with three more songs that King George already had recorded—“Love Song,” “Be With You” and “Don’t Let Me Be Blind”—and adding three more fantastic tracks: the radio-edit of “Keep On Rolling,” the duet with Tucka on “Jukebox Lover” and George’s new single “Girl You Got It”.

In other words, this is exactly what the fans have been clamoring for—with one caveat. Distribution is still dicey. The big sellers—Apple, Amazon, etc.—don’t have it (yet). This link takes you to King George’s own website, where I just pushed the BUY button (hard copy CD only) and came up with $12.99. Very reasonable for such a once-in-a-lifetime collection, especially compared to E-Bay (below), where a constantly revolving set of buyers and sellers has been maintaining an average sales price between $25 to $30 in a modern-day version of bootlegging out of car trunks in days of old. George could increase the supply by distributing through the major retailers.

Once in a lifetime? Yes, that’s how I view this album. A unique, early-career triumph that will probably never again be matched. A fleeting moment—a magical moment—when youth and inspiration fuse into a genuine artistic voice and an artist’s identity is sealed forever in a pocketful of seminal songs. Fans never forget that. Ask Sir Charles Jones.

I chronicled my own introduction to King George step by step earlier this year, and most of it concentrated on “Keep On Rollin'” and the crowds of women pumping their fists to “one monkey don’t stop no show” at his concerts, although many of the other songs made the Top 10 Singles in the first half of ’22. Meanwhile letters poured in. Where can I buy King George? Sales were lost. There was unprecedented demand. Gradually, the King George hoopla subsided somewhat. Music turned to other things…Tucka with “Jukebox Lover,” Pokey Bear with “Here Comes Pokey”…

The pause was good for me, and I’ve come back to King George’s music with fresh ears and a renewed appreciation for “Too Long,” or “Can’t Stay Too Long,” which depicts a man who isn’t about to get distracted from getting back to the woman waiting for him at home. My own trajectory with “Too Long” went from a kind of apathy—at first I couldn’t understand why it had a million views—to a growing fascination with the lyrics—the angelic side of King George as portrayed in “Too Long” as opposed to the devilish side portrayed in “Keep On Rollin'”.

Once I got hooked on the lyrics, it brought me back to the music. The chords materialized. I was swept up in the song’s current, and I reveled in its instrumental track and vocal. So now, after a half-dozen months of King George, it’s “Can’t stay too long…” I keep hearing in my head, not “Gon’ keep on rollin’…” These two spectacular songs have each garnered around twenty million views on YouTube—about seventeen million more than they had just a few months ago, when three million seemed astounding.

King George is just the latest in a line of hip-hoppers who’ve crossed over into southern soul music bringing an enhanced mastery of production techniques. Even in an easily-overlooked song like “Friday Night,” the production and arrangements, both instrumental and vocal, make you gasp with the care lavished upon them. “Leave And Party,” with its marvelous gospel background choruses, aptly captures the muted frustration and impatience of an otherwise hard-working man intent on “getting his party on”. Add the sparkling fizz of “Girl You Got It” and you have a set of songs for the ages.

—Daddy B. Nice

Buy hard-copy CD only of King George’s new Juke Joint Music at 803KingGeorge.com.

Buy King George’s new Juke Joint Music album at E-Bay.



October 1, 2022

J-WONN: Mr. Right Now (Music Access)

Five Stars ***** Can’t Miss. Pure Southern Soul Heaven.

J’Wonn’s “I Got This Record” is this generation’s “Sho’ Wasn’t Me,” the most perfect expression in a few verses of an entire era of southern soul, and still the finest southern soul single of the last decade. I’ve never played it for someone for the first time without them being impressed and genuinely touched. “I Got This Record” is primal in a way nothing J-Wonn has recorded since is. Subsequent albums have been good, even exciting at times, with quality songs more frequently than not, but there have also been tendencies that have been, shall we say, disturbing.

Musically, for one thing, J-Wonn shows a distinct preference for melody over groove, tempo and rhythm tracks, the kind of “bottom” his old mentor Big Yayo used to bring to the table, which has resulted in a bit of a musical imbalance—for lack of a better word an overly “flowery” oeuvre. For another, culturally (and lyrically), J-Wonn indulges in a world view restricted primarily to teen-age angst (extended to twenty-somethings) which for southern-soul-loving grown folks in particular seems far from the urgency and realism of “I Got This Record”. If there’s a knock on J-Wonn, it’s been his tendency to limit himself to an extremely narrow slice of life’s experiences—sans marriage, divorce, working life, etc. He’s an open book, he asks you to take him as he is—all of which is admirable—but his preoccupations are often trivial or sentimental, something that would never occur to anyone listening to the equally young and raw performer singing his heart out on “I Got This Record”.

The good news is that J-Wonn has finally bequeathed us with a spectacular album to match “I Got This Record” and his quiver of glittering singles. Mr. Right Now integrates treble-clef melodies and bass-clef rhythm tracks with masterful alchemy. It also refreshes and recharges J-Wonn’s major theme: the male/female dynamic. Close watchers of the southern soul scene will immediately recognize the worthy and radio-friendly “Move On,” whose official YouTube video already tops five and a half million views, and “Girl In The Mirror,” with a melody so lushly memorable it stands out even in J-Wonn’s melodically-rich catalog. Along with the refreshingly uptempo “I’m Impressed,” “This Ain’t That” and “Meet Me”, this quintet of songs is migrated from 2021’s Black Heart, The “Move On” EP. In July of this year the indie distribution network Music Access announced the imminent arrival of a new six-track J-Wonn EP titled “Thrill Is Gone”. However, J-Wonn evidently decided to hold off on publishing another EP and packaged the “Move On” EP with the new “Thrill Is Gone” set to make an eleven-track album under the title Mr. Right Now.

“Thrill Is Gone” is a solid song, one of the best of the set, and it’s received extensive airplay and YouTube response from the fans. Show a little respect for the Godfather, B.B. King, though, Jawonn. J’Cenae recently recorded “Ain’t Nobody,” making anyone who loves Chaka Khan wince. Don’t these youngsters have any sense of musical history? B.B. King used to stay in a special, always-reserved, two-story room in a motel at I-20 & Ellis Ave. in your very hometown of Jackson, MS., Jawonn. If you’re going to use the exact same words in the title as an illustrious predecessor (and deleting the “The” in “The Thrill Is Gone” doesn’t count), better to do a cover song—an homage. Imagine J-Wonn doing a cover of King’s “The Thrill Is Gone”. I’d be interested in that. In fact, I’d be interested in anything J-Wonn wanted to cover, from LaMorris Williams’ “Impala” (which Jawonn wrote before he got famous) to Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti”.

What “Move On,” “Thrill Is Gone” and “Girl In The Mirror” signal is that maturity is gradually creeping into J-Wonn’s duffel bag of techniques. Even a middle-of-the-road track like “Wantin’ More,” co-authored with Daniel Ross (aka Beat Flippa), has a deftness that lifts it above J-Wonn’s typical fare. And “Mr. Right Now” the strongest and newest cut on the album, is J-Wonn’s most outstanding song in quite awhile, with a memorable melody, instrumental track and vocal. Whereas so many of J’Wonn’s melody-dominated tunes bloom and die quickly from familiarity, “Mr. Right Now” has that ineffable quality (like “I Got This Record”). Written by David Jones, it’s more melodic than J-Wonn’s usual melodic stuff, but less obtrusively melodic. Like “I Got This Record,” it transcends melody, and J-Wonn sings it like an angel.

The funny thing is “Mr. Right Now” hews to the same juvenile behavior I lamented earlier. Essentially, it’s a young guy trying to talk a girl into a one-night stand based on their “animal magnetism” and other well-worn cliches with which women are painfully familiar. J-Wonn even bursts into Spanish at one point—one of the many unique touches that gives the song its special depth and insures it will be replayed long after other songs have faded. It reminds us that any subject can become universal (appeal to everybody) with the right musical ingredients and its singer’s conviction. Like some crazy unknown kid telling us he’s got a record. And like its title cut, Mr. Right Now the album is the first long-play set of which one can truthfully say J-Wonn fulfills the vaunted promise of his classic single.

–Daddy B. Nice

Buy J-Wonn’s new MR. RIGHT NOW album at Blues Critic.

 



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Write to: daddybnice@southernsoulrnb.com




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