Since bursting onto the scene as a precocious but eminently talented 18-year-old sensation from the nation’s capital, blues musician/songwriter/recording artist JW Jones has been a prolific producer of recorded music, an incendiary and increasingly popular concert attraction, and the epitome of the hard-working, endlessly creative blues troubadour since the dawn of the new millennium.
The tumult that has enveloped the year 2020, with its pandemics and political uproar, has not blunted Jones’ creativity, as the highly accoladed artist has used his involuntary lockdown to expand what was initially going to be a new EP of songs into what has become a true statement of artistic intent – the album Sonic Departures, which was released Aug. 14, on Solid Blues Records.
“We had tracks recorded with a big band late last year. Basically, I started to put together an EP and I thought I might put four tunes on it and just post it up on the website for download, and just have four cool tunes that feature a huge band. And then the pandemic hit while I was starting to mix that stuff with an engineer. So, we went remote and he worked from his home and I worked from mine, and things started to sound so good that I said, ‘man, I should take advantage of this downtime and turn it into a real record.’ That’s what brought me to buying gear to learn how to record my own vocals. And my bass player Jake {Clarke] and drummer Will [Laurin] did the same thing and they overdubbed some parts and changed some things and I added some guitar solos after the fact, otherwise everything was recorded live together in one room with my full band plus 13 horns. It ended up being a 17-piece band.” Jones said from his home in Ottawa.
“The first four songs on the album, three of which were originals, were the original four I recorded. And then the covers and stuff I chose just fit together. We could have selected any tunes out of the 20 I think we recorded but I wanted to focus on the ones that really felt best for releasing. And that’s what we did.”
Earlier this year, Jones hit a significant milestone turning 40. Although he took it with stride, he made note of the fact that as one ages within the blues milieu, respect grows with the number of candles on the birthday cake.
“I don’t know if I can be acceptably called young in the blues anymore, that’s the scariest part. Honestly though, it’s great man. I don’t mean to sound cliché when I say that it’s just a number, but I don’t feel any differently than I did 10 years ago. With the exception of a few more aches and pains after the long drives, I feel like the same guy who is just excited to play music and get out there and do shows and keep recording – to just keep doing what I am doing,” he said.
“The older I get, the closer I find I get to being able to really hang with all my idols. Even though I have worked with a bunch of my favourite blues artists in the past, like Hubert Sumlin, Kim Wilson, Colin James and Charlie Musselwhite, but now I am hanging backstage with guys like Robert Cray and Jimmy Vaughan. The older I get the more I seem to be accepted into ‘the club’ kind of thing. I guess they see that if you’ve been doing this for a long time, and you’re obviously serious, it’s not just some flash in the pan trying to play some blues riffs and release a record. I feel really good about that and I think that kind of thing really does have to come with age and experience. So that’s one element that’s cool about turning 40.”
Sonic Departures is Jones’ 11th album, and the many years of experience on the blues scene, coupled with this growing respect amongst his peers and hitting the magic 40 milestone means he has felt less encumbered to try new things, especially sonically on record. The album marked the first time Jones had worked with producer Eric Eggleston, whom he chose precisely because he wanted a different approach to the music and the structure of the record itself.
“I started working with him on a solo project and we did a bunch of demos together I guess almost two years ago now. While working with him I realized I just love his production style, because he doesn’t come from a blues background. He comes from a background of recording all kinds of different musicians. And he is really original, he thinks with a lot of originality. He’s got a lot of really good ideas and that’s where I wanted to use his skill set to make things like cool intros for the songs on this new album,” Jones explained.
“For example [lead off track] Blue Jean Jacket and Snatchin’ It Back have these kind of wacko intros with loops and some effects and things like that, which are really cool. It kind of breathed new life into these tunes in a new and modern way, and I love that stuff. If you think if Herbie Hancock doing Watermelon Man, it’s like the way that goes from one little idea into this huge song and bunch of songs. That’s one of the things I wanted to work into this record and why it ended up being called Sonic Departures.”
Another huge departure is readily apparent – horns. And lots of them.
“The last record I released was my 10th [2018’s LIVE] and it was a live record so that was off in it’s own little world, where I wanted to make it all covers because I had recorded a lot of originals in the past and I wanted to pay tribute to the artists that I really love and the live show that we put on. I wanted to capture that, so that’s what I did with the live album. But if you look at the two albums before that [High Temperature and Belmont Boulevard] working with Colin Linden and Tom Hambridge, those have a lot more original songs that were not quite perfectly in the traditional blues box. They were definitely contemporary blues, but not traditional.
“And then moving towards this new album, it’s definitely a time in my life where I just want to do the things that I really want to do musically, and recording with a big band literally has been a bucket list item for me since I was 20 years old. I just never thought it would happen because it’s a huge, huge undertaking having charts written for 13 horn parts. So, the element of doing the big band alone is a sonic departure for me. And in the fact that we had some really interesting production values like those intros I was talking about, and some other stiff sprinkled throughout the album, that’s how I got to the title.”
Jones is an interesting mix of purist when it comes to what he believes blues music is and should be, but within those rigid confines, has a real sense of dynamism, to the point of creative restlessness at times.
“As an artist, I love playing 1950s traditional blues in our live shows. I also love standing at the front of the stage and wanking away on the guitar for a bit, just to get a rise out of the audience – that’s fun too. I love the songwriting aspect where I can play a super quiet love song or a rockin’ blues rock tune. I love it all and, for better or for worse, some people like that variety as an audience member and some other people want the one thing that they really like, and they want a lot of that one thing. There are so many different ways of looking at it. At the end of the day, you just have to respect that these artists are playing the music that they enjoy. A lot of my favourite blues artists have kind of released the same record over and over and over again. I love what they do and that’s totally cool. I have no problems with that at all because they are really good at doing that one thing perfectly,” he said.
“On the other hand, I do like hearing artists that change it up every album or two and it’s like, ‘oh wow, I didn’t see that coming.’ The way I like to look at blues music is it’s more raw and from the heart than your typical pop music. When you whittle it all down, with blues it comes down to a lyric, it comes down to an emotion and it comes down to usually just someone playing the guitar or the piano or whatever the case is, and in that sense I just feel that there’s something more raw about it than what you hear on the radio today.
‘And you know what, I will tell you right now that I was a blues snob. There is still an element of me that is one of them and the reason why is because if you’re playing blues, you’re playing blues. If you start playing blues rock, okay, it’s still got enough blues in it to be called blues rock, but there’s a point where it is no longer blues and its just rock. So, to me, there has to be a line somewhere, and I will always stand by that. If I look at my own material, can I call the second song on this record [Same Mistakes] a blues song? I don’t know. Maybe it’s soul/blues, maybe it’s R&B. The guitar playing is undoubtedly blues, I mean that’s me playing the way I play, and I don’t know anything but blues. I mean there are other tunes on there like Bye Bye Love, which was by the Everly Brothers and they certainly weren’t blues. Ray Charles recorded that song with a big band and all of a sudden you could call it jazz. So, does that mean my version is blues? Yes, I was a major blues traditionalist, blues snob and everything else. As the years go on, as I said this is album number 11, on my first few albums all I cared about were my idols thinking that I was legit and that I was playing in a way that was going to be accepted by them. As time passed, guys like Kim Wilson kept saying, ‘you know it’s okay to break some of these rules. Just do whatever you want, man.’ And then I started to loosen up on the idea and over the years have gone in all sorts of different directions. But I almost feel that this new record, Sonic Departures, is more traditional than my previous two studio albums which were done in Nashville. But everyone’s going to have their own interpretation of it.”
Having been at the game for more than two decades, and as much as he admits to his own prejudices when it comes to blues music, he realizes there are many people out there who are even more puritanical and precious when it comes to what they see as blues music. Age and experience have given him the perspective to let any negative or critical comments just roll off him like water off a duck’s back.
“Listen, I have been criticized for being too traditional. I have been criticized for bring too blues rock. I have been criticized for being too West Coast blues because when I started, I played a lot of swing stuff and had a killer harmonica player in the band. No matter what, there’s always some weird little subgroup of people who are like, ‘that guy’s not legit because he’s playing this or that,’ or ‘he’s not playing that properly.’ For those people, you can never win. But at the end of the day, the average person who isn’t the blues purist, who isn’t the one pointing fingers or shaking their head, they just like whatever they are hearing. They’re just down with enjoying the show and enjoying the music. They have a much more open mind and usually the people being super critical are not the people buying records anyway. So, you get to a point where you’re asking yourself why am I trying to force myself into this box to make one per cent of the already tiny blues scene happy so that they buy my record and say nice things about me,” he said, continuing along the theme of the continued popularity of blues music across national borders, language barriers, cultural and ethnic divides and how it continues to appeal to the young and young at heart.
“It about the emotion. There is this undeniable feeling about blues music, especially live. Anyone that I have ever spoken to or run into after shows who had never really heard blues before, they all say, ‘I can’t believe I didn’t know about this.’ They are blown away by the feeling, they are blown away by what they see on stage, they can’t believe the emotion coming from the artists. Maybe they are used to seeing a big rock show like AC/DC or whoever. A band like that has its own soul too and don’t get me wrong, Angus Young is one of the most soulful guitar players you’ll ever hear, but there’ on a huge stage and they don’t or can’t connect in the same way as the smaller stages, or in the clubs that blues artists play. The more intimate the venue, the deeper connection with the artist. I can’t see deep connections being formed from the back of an arena when you’re seeing Bruce Springsteen. It’s a great show, but is there really that deep connection?
“Ultimately, the goal is to bring joy and bring positive vibes to the people. That’s the only reason musicians really play, is because you want to bring that feeling to others. And if we’re doing that, mission accomplished.”
For more information on JW Jones, future tour dates, and Sonic Departures, visit www.jw-jones.com or his social media channels.
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for nearly 30 years. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
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