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Published on 7/4/08
Published on 7/2/08
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The album of the year was, of course, recorded by a demon-eyed British Jewess with a black bouffant, horrifying teeth and a preternatural gift for writing wickedly catchy soul-pop songs. But what of the gentlemen whose horns and guitars helped make Lady Winehouse’s Back to Black so spectacular? For much of her record and subsequent tour, Winehouse has relied not on anonymous session players from her native London, but rather the Dap-Kings, a tight-knit group from Bushwick. The house band of Daptone Records—a label co-owned by bassist Gabriel Roth and saxist Neal Sugarman—the Dap-Kings possess an unwavering focus on vintage soul that made them a perfect fit for Winehouse and her producer, Mark Ronson. “Most of the demos she had recorded were acoustic-guitar based and real songwritery,” Roth says. “Mark wanted us to take her songs and put our sound on them. It was actually pretty natural.”
The Dap-Kings remain staunchly devoted to their main gig backing Daptone star Sharon Jones, whose third album, 100 Days, 100 Nights, comes out September 25. Meanwhile, they’re becoming the go-to band for funky old sounds. The group is regularly tapped by Ronson, who placed assorted Dap-Kings in the house band for this week’s MTV VMA awards. And though they were slightly blindsided by Winehouse’s success—Roth says each player took home about $350 per song, even “Rehab”—it has led to some swank gigs, including projects for Al Green and Bob Dylan (a fully authorized, Ronson-produced remix).
If the Dap-Kings have a contender for their crown, it’s the Dansettes, another bunch of young New Yorkers pursuing sounds from R&B’s golden age. Fronted by a trio of female singers, the group writes and performs original material steeped in ’60s girl-group pop. Stripped of the women, the instrumentalists (under the rubric United Journal Square Rhythm Band) have carved a niche backing wrinkly soul singers like Archie Bell and the Mighty Hannibal. “These singers are still really good,” Dansettes organist J.B. Flatt says. “But they usually get stuck with a pickup band that turns everything into generic blues-rock. It’s an injustice.”
The advantages of working with a fully operational band have not gone unnoticed by America’s tastemaking elite. When Randy Jackson, the American Idol judge who calls people “Dawg,” was producing a forthcoming Boyz II Men album, he summoned the Dap-Kings to the studio. “He was really excited,” Sugarman says. “He kept saying, ‘This is the difference between working with a band as opposed to a bunch of studio musicians.’ Which is a really good point, ya know?”
Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings play Apollo Theater Oct 6.
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