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Jazz singer José James has just released 1978: Revenge of the Dragon, his 13th studio recording in a career that has swung dramatically from relatively “straight ahead” jazz (his third Blue Note album was a tribute to Billie Holiday) to groove-based music, including a recent tribute to a different singer: Erykah Badu. It is his second consecutive recording, based at least in part on the music made in the year of his birth.
José James explains in this interview that “I still want to be known as a jazz singer, one who can do it all.” His insinuating baritone sound has a rich set of shades and overtones that any jazz singer should envy. However, James’ music arguably came alive on his fourth recording, No Beginning No End, recorded in 2013 with many soulful collaborators, including the jazz-new soul keyboard innovator Robert Glasper, bassist and producer Pino Palladino, and jazz and hip-hop drummer Chris Dave. Released on Blue Note, this recording was the most sophisticated and pleasurable of its decade, and it found a recipe for creating a blend of jazz, soul, and hip-hop.
In the following dozen years, José James has applied his voice and production to a wide range of music that tells his story: the Holiday and Badu tributes, of course, but also a wealth of original compositions, a Christmas album, and a set of Bill Withers interpretations.
1978: Revenge of the Dragon is among José James’ most intriguing sets and a great place to discover him for the first time. It is uncategorizable: four original songs and four classics from 1978, with each cover song, by the Bee Gees, the Rolling Stones, Michael Jackson, and Herbie Hancock, beyond category. The soul and hip-hop grooves are deep, the rubbery bass lines refuse to quit, and the impressionistic harmonies are straight from a modern jazz recording. Every track puts the leader’s voice in the leading role, seducing, searching, cutting across decades with lyrics that name-check heroes from Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder to Nas.
In conversation, jazz singer José James is literate and a good listener, clearly excited about connecting music to politics, culture, and history.
I just listened to your guest vocal spots with jazz pianist Junior Mance from his 2007 live album. The sound and energy you have in 2025 were already present on those tracks. Your jazz skills make you a canny singer and a sophisticated songwriter, but your core musical identity seems closer to Stevie Wonder, Sly Stone, Gil Scott-Heron, and Bill Withers. Do you hear a consistent voice in your work? How do you approach being a “jazz artist” who perhaps isn’t creating music that is “jazz”?
I look for freshness in everything I do. I love the jazz tradition. I loved working with [jazz drummer] Chico Hamilton and Junior Mance, who were both my teachers at the New School. They contained a depth of knowledge, the stories they would tell about working with Lena Horne, Dinah Washington, Joe Williams, and Charlie Parker — to name just a few — were incredible. I think there’s no way to move forward in music without going deeper into the past. You have to understand why Louis Armstrong was such an innovator and why Bessie Smith was the biggest black entertainer of her time.
Jazz was never a small room for me. Jazz is a template or blueprint you learn to use to do whatever you want. I relate to someone like Miles Davis. He style-hopped, too, but his sound remained consistent from when he met Charlie Parker until he was doing electronic stuff in the 1980s.
The problem of being labeled a “jazz singer” is considerable. People want you to record standards (and you have), but it is not easy to advance the art or to express yourself beyond tradition. You remind me of an artist you have worked with: Becca Stevens. You both have a knack for incorporating a jazz attitude into adventurous music that bends other styles into something creative.
Becca was in the same class as me at the New School. Jazz school is a huge umbrella for everything but classical music. I still want to be known as a jazz singer who can do it all. I think jazz singers are historically known for doing one or two things very well, but I try to be expansive. I would look at George Benson as an artist and a guitarist, and he could go from his Wes Montgomery stuff to singing and playing like an R&B crooner on his version of “On Broadway”.
You were born in 1978, but it seems interesting to you for other reasons. That year was filled with musical turning points (the dominance of disco, the recent birth of hip-hop) as well as being a time of transition from an era of protest to the Reagan era. Talk about the salience of that year in framing musical projects for you.
Exactly, you get it. 1978 came at a culture-defining moment. Politically, we had recently withdrawn from the Vietnam War and were grappling with women’s liberation. My mom, who raised me, was a staunch feminist who had me door-knocking in our Minnesota neighborhood. Musically, disco was everywhere. There was a musical opening to other cultures. The US had previously heard world music as something other, some exotic, but now you had someone like Bob Marley and the Wailers talking about global politics while selling millions of records.
At the same time, you have David Byrne and punk rock, and you still had people like Billy Joel, Elton John, and James Taylor working and hitting new heights. I’m fascinated by all of this music, and it all had things in common. People still recorded in the studio and often in the same studio with the same musicians, who shifted from style to style.
You have four intriguing covers here: Michael Jackson’s hit “Rock with You” from his first solo album Off the Wall; the Rolling Stones’ “Miss You,” which making rock fans heard as a disco song; “Love You Inside and Out” from the Bee Gees, who were disco stars after the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack album; and “I Thought It Was You” where Herbie Hancock used a vocoder to continue his experiments with jazz in pop music. Talk about choosing to interpret those songs.
To me, these songs are like a prism of disco. In 1978, disco was king, and there was no escaping it. Even if you weren’t doing it, you were reacting to it. All four of these artists were grappling with disco. You can hear an A&R man saying, “Herbie, we gotta get into the disco thing.” These four songs each deal with disco in a different way.
Michael was uptown at Studio 54, hanging with that subset of New York, the uptown glamour of it. The Rolling Stones are in New York, but they are going for this gritty downtown scene that has an edge to it and keep it rock ‘n’ roll. People thought that the Rolling Stones’ career was over, and Some Girls was a comeback album that showed them incorporating this new style that was so popular, but in their own way.
The Bee Gees had already had huge success with disco, but it was with this album that they cracked into Black radio. Herbie, who hadn’t yet made “Rockit”, was showing jazz musicians how to incorporate disco. Without this music, there would be no Robert Glasper Black Radio, no Erykah Badu, no J Dilla, and no Madlib. They were all moving in different spaces, but it’s all great music.
“Last Call at the Mudd Club” and “Tokyo Daydream” sound like classic disco songs in their groove, but they have those mysterious chords that suggest the approach of Quincy Jones, taking songs into jazz territory. Of course, he was the producer of the original “Rock with You.”
Absolutely. I was trying to evoke that Quincy Jones formula of 1978. Off the Wall was really his album; he picked all the tunes and musicians. Quincy’s formula, and no one did it better, allowed him to put jazz on top of any other style. That’s what Stevie Wonder did as well, and that’s what Al Green did. I think it’s an important approach because you’re meeting your audience at the highest level. You’re not dumbing anything down, but you’re not overcomplicating it either. You’re saying that the music can be a bit harmonically richer and still connect.
“They Sleep, We Grind” has the most contemporary sound on your new album, with those off-kilter moments built into the groove, suggesting up-to-the-minute hip-hop, but also the soul of 1978.
My Erykah Badu project influenced me a lot. I think she is one of the greatest living artists of my generation, and I don’t think she has entirely gotten her due. I enjoyed getting inside her head. This track is my nod to her and great hip-hop producers like J Dilla, Prince Paul, and Madlib. They had all the jazz records and knew all these beats and samples. I wanted to pay tribute to them and Erykah. This is the contemporary space where that 1970s music ended up as it was transformed over time.
I assume that you were also heavily influenced by Prince. You are from his hometown, and he was also a brilliant chameleon like Miles Davis.
DJ culture and crate-digging culture have been huge in my life. DJs listen to music differently from other musicians and singers. It’s important to have that perspective and feel that all that music is available. I discovered jazz through hip-hop, through samples. It was like time travel to listen to albums by De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, Ice Cube, Cypress Hill, and Beastie Boys. Loving that music made me feel that jazz wasn’t old. It was like a beautiful bookshelf where you could just pull something out and read anything.
And his first album came out in 1978!
I can’t overstate his influence on me, musically and otherwise. To grow up in the same extremely segregated and extremely racist city as Prince, who looked like me, whose dad was also a Black jazz musician, it was important. Michael Jackson was king as I was growing up, and I even got to see him in Minneapolis on the Bad tour when I was ten, but to know that there was another artist going toe-to-toe with Michael who had so much in common with me? That gave me permission to be myself as a musician and a person.
Musically, Prince claimed every genre, and he produced, wrote the music, played so many instruments, and sang on every song to the highest level. To me, he will always be the GOAT, the legend. He is unstoppable. I wish I had met him!
You are from Minneapolis and spent vital years in New York. But now you live in Los Angeles. Tell us about the contrast and the rising importance of the Los Angeles scene.
The scene is wherever the artists are. I lived in London for two years and witnessed the birth and rise of dubstep, and that was one of the most musically exciting times of my life. Being present for that made you feel how someone might have felt about witnessing Coltrane at the Vanguard. That’s why I’m not surprised by this wave of London musicians, because they grew up listening to electronic music.
The West Coast has a different feeling from New York. LA gives off the vibe of having something to prove relative to New York, and I love that underdog quality. Terrace Martin and Kamasi Washington are obviously huge influences on the new generation out here. I think right now, pound for pound, the LA scene is incredibly strong relative to New York. In New York, you practice and then you go out to play in a club. In Los Angeles, you’re either going to the studio or thinking about soundtrack work or composing. That is a different way of expanding yourself. LA musicians tend to be more expansive in that way; they are scoring films and thinking cinematically versus the bandstand. That’s a cool perspective.
Speaking of Terrace Martin and Kamasi Washington, let’s talk about two great saxophonists who appear on 1978: Revenge of the Dragon. “Love You Inside and Out” gives us a fat tenor saxophone solo from Ben Wendel, and young Ebban Dorsey sounds great on “I Thought It Was You”. What does a young improviser in this tradition bring to your music that older players might not?
Ebban Dorsey is undeniable. Her talent is once-in-a-generation. I’ve heard a lot of horn players, but I really hear it in her. What immediately struck me about Ebban was her tone, that sound. Her conception is light years beyond her age. She was 18 when I first heard her, and when someone is that good at that age, you just feel that there’s something ancestral there. She has an ease and fluidity with the art form that is incredible.
She is the first sax player I’ve heard who is post-Terrace Martin. She is coming from players who are rooted in jazz but whose playing perhaps is not jazz per se, and she is going beyond that. I find it very cool. Her first recorded solo is on my Erykah Badu album. It was one take, and she is so unafraid to go in any direction. Someone older might think really hard about something before doing it, but she just jumps in and knows she is part of something bigger.
She is so humble. She was so excited to meet Ben Wendel on this session!
