UCSB Arts & Lectures presents Grammy Nominee for Best R&B Album Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings Wednesday, Oct. 28, at 8 p.m. at UCSB’s Campbell Hall.
Give the People What They Want is not just the name of the group’s Grammy-nominated album, but the mantra that brought Sharon Jones, the matriarch of the world’s No. 1 live soul act, back with her beloved Dap-Kings after a recent battle with cancer.
Few singers can match Jones’s energy and honest soul. The group’s magnetism has attracted everyone from Prince to Beck to John Legend to Michael Bublé, both on stage and in the recording studio, not to mention countless fans at more than a decade of electrifying shows that bring packed rooms to rapture.
There’s a freshness in the band’s performance and songwriting that will keep those sharp danceable funk grooves in your bones; the fervent, impassioned singing in your heart; and the sweet soul hooks sticking in your head for days on end.
Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings rose from the ashes of Desco Records, a fiercely independent label that developed an international underground following for releasing hard funk vinyl in the 1990s. After the label’s demise in 1999, the musicians that populated its roster regrouped to form an all-star band, the fiery Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings.
The band released their first album, Dap Dippin’, in 2002. Over the next decade, they toured vigorously, each album release bringing them wider acclaim.
Their 2005 album, Naturally, brought them their first of numerous television performances, and 2007’s 100 Days, 100 Nights sold more than 100,000 copies in the U.S. alone.
2010’s I Learned the Hard Way debuted at No. 16 on Billboard’s Top 200 Album chart, outselling its predecessor in the first few months.
2014’s Grammy Award-nominated Give the People What They Want was the band’s dramatic return from Sharon’s 2013 battle with pancreatic cancer.
Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings have been sampled, licensed for film and television and called upon to join other artists in studio and on stage.
Mark Ronson famously used the Dap-Kings when he produced Amy Winehouse’s Grammy Award-winning album Back to Black, as well as for his own No. 1 hit “Uptown Funk (featuring Bruno Mars).”
Jones and the band opened for Prince at New York’s Madison Square Garden and at a venue in Paris. They joined John Legend with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center and with the LA Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl.
The Dap-Kings have backed Beck, worked with David Byrne and laid down studio tracks with producer Bob Rock. Jones has collaborated with David Byrne, They Might Be Giants, Rufus Wainwright and Lou Reed.
She joined Michael Bublé on Saturday Night Live to perform the duet “Baby (You Got What it Takes).” She also acted and sang in the Denzel Washington film The Great Debaters, and the band joined her in Wolf of Wall Street.
Given the band’s heavy touring schedule and their participation in other outfits, it’s easy to understand why the American Association of Independent Music (A2IM) awarded them the Hardest Working Band of the Year in 2014.
Sharon Jones is the subject of the forthcoming documentary Miss Sharon Jones! (Nov. 12), by two-time Academy Award winner Barbara Kopple (Harlan County, USA). Kopple follows the R&B queen over the course of an eventful year, as she battles a cancer diagnosis and struggles to hold her band together.
The band will release its new album on Oct. 30: It’s a Holiday Soul Party.
Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures.
Tickets are $30–$42 for the general public and $15 for UCSB students with a current I.D.
For tickets or more information, call UCSB Arts & Lectures at 805.893.3535 or purchase online at www.ArtsAndLectures.UCSB.edu.
88.7 KCRW Presents is the media sponsor for this event.
UCSB Arts & Lectures gratefully acknowledges the generous support of SAGE for its major corporate support of the 2015–2016 season.
— Caitlin O’Hara is a senior writer and publicist for UCSB Arts & Lectures.