Read original article...

6/7/2004

Jim Farber

The new world of old soul

Emerging acts echo the classic sounds of vintage R&B

Forget neo-soul, that decidedly modern take on music that dates from the sock-it-to-me heyday of artists like Aretha Franklin and labels like Stax.

There's a growing movement in retro-soul - music made by young musicians that sounds exactly like the shouted style of old.

Up-and-coming artists like the Bo-Keys, Joss Stone, Ricky Fante and Ellis Hooks make no concessions whatsoever to the music of their peers, preferring vocal inflections and instrumental styles directly nicked from the records an earlier generation spun in its youth.

On "Rewind," the major-label debut coming next month from 25-year-old Fante, he growls with the grit of a young Otis Redding. On Stone's debut, "The Soul Sessions," she tries to out-rasp Janis Joplin, while the Bo-Keys' debut, "The Royal Sessions," imitates the Southern-fried instrumentals of Booker T and the MGs.

"I felt that the world doesn't need another smooth neo-soul singer," Fante explains. "I wanted something that would put more of a push on my throat, that classic soul style." "This is definitely a throwback sound," says Bob Slade, who hosts KISS-FM's old-school radio show "Soul Beginnings." "But these new kids knock me out. They can really sing." The results have paid off for Stone. Her album earned an immediate press buzz when it came out in September. With careful promotion, it has recently broken into the upper quarter of Billboard's Top 200 Album chart.

Stone hardly fits the profile of the classic soul mama. She's a 16-year-old white girl - from England.

She got her introduction to old soul by listening to her parents' scratchy 45s.

That's what first hooked Fante, as well. His mother and father played plenty of Motown around their house in Washington, D.C., and took him to see Stevie Wonder when he was just 5.

"[Stevie] was doing a free concert on the Washington Mall to try to get Martin Luther King's birthday made into a national holiday," says Fante. "I was totally blown away."

LIVE ENERGY

The Bo-Keys came to vintage soul by exploring the music of their home city, Memphis. Band leader Scott Boman, 28, says: "Living in this city you can't help but see guys still playing in clubs who were on those original records from [locally based labels like] Stax."

Boman conceived the Bo-Keys as a multi-generational band, mixing guys who played on the old Stax Records with younger bucks. He was teaching music at a school connected with a museum that salutes the Stax history when he hooked up with Skip Pitts, who created the classic wah-wah guitar line on Isaac Hayes' "Shaft," and organist Ronnie Williams, who has worked with, among others, Stax songwriter, producer and artist David Porter. The resulting group named its first CD after Royal Studios, where they recorded it and where Al Green waxed his greatest hits.

Ellis Hooks, whose gravelly tones recall Wilson Pickett, has the most traditional background of these new artists. The 30-year-old singer was born in Bay Minette, Ala., the 13th of 16 children of an African-American sharecropper. He's been playing since he was 15, traveling the country as a street performer, even busking for a while in New York.

"I picked cotton, peas and all that," Hooks told the roots-oriented magazine No Depression. "It taught me to work hard."

Hooks found himself more entranced by the older sounds than the new. Fante says the lure has to do with the formal structure of old soul songs. "They have verses, choruses, a real bridge," he explains. "It's not like modern R&B, which is just a groove."

Boman feels the appeal of the sound comes from the fact that "the musicians all played together live on the recordings. It was more spontaneous."

Slade says the love of vintage soul is spreading among the young, citing ratings for his "Soul Beginnings" program. It ranks in the Top 10 with 18- to 34-year-olds. He also feels TV shows like Fox's "American Idol" have helped by featuring lots of older R&B songs.

NBC's "American Dreams" has further spread the word by getting modern artists to impersonate older ones. Fante recently appeared as Wilson Pickett.

Such mimicry may lead to criticism of these new soul rebels as mere revivalists who lack any ideas of their own.

"Would critics rather have me sing booty songs like everybody else?" Fante counters. There's also the question of whether such songs can sell at a time when hip-hop-inflected R&B dominates the field. To address this, Fante's record company is offering a modern remix of his single.

Slade feels the music will make it "if the record companies stick with it."

"People want to hear real singing again," he says. "Next we have to bring back real playing."