José James Artistfacts

January 20, 1978
José James' music is rooted in jazz, but with lots of other sounds blended in. Instead of letting the music press describe his sound, he came up with his own tagline: "A jazz singer for the hip-hop generation."

"I quickly learned that if you don't shape the conversation around yourself as an artist, then other people will do it for you," he said on the Songfacts Podcast.
James is from Minneapolis but was signed to a British label called Brownswood, which released his first two albums. His debut album, The Dreamer, got some attention in the UK, with favorable reviews from The Guardian and the BBC. In America, most of his coverage around this time was in jazz publications. As his career progressed, he got more mainstream coverage.
Regarding his ethnicity, James' mother is Irish and his father is Afro-Panamanian. "It's kind of a strange identity," he told Songfacts. "I straddle many, many worlds and I feel like I don't fully belong in any of them."
His third album, For All We Know (2010) was released on the American jazz label Impulse! Records. From there he moved to Blue Note, where he was labelmates with Norah Jones, Gregory Porter and Jamie Callum. In 2018, James started his own label, Rainbow Blonde Records, with his wife Taali, who is also an acclaimed singer-songwriter.
James uses lots of modern technology to create songs, often recording ideas into his iPhone as voice memos and using Ableton software to put the tracks together, but he keeps some part of the process analog, often recording to tape. He feels this imbues the process more importance because it's a lot more expensive to record analog. Instead to doing endless takes in a digital environment, he'd rather dial in on a few takes.
José James listens to music in a disciplined way, always trying to identify something in a song that he likes, even if it's a genre that doesn't appeal to him. He might pick up on a snare drum sound or a vocal inflection, storing it away in his creative memory.
He grew up listening to artists like A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul that merged jazz with hip-hop, so that combination seemed natural to him. In the world of jazz, he's a big Miles Davis fan and also cites Billie Holiday and John Coltrane as influences. And being from Minneapolis, of course Prince put some colors in his musical palette.
His first concert was a good one: Michael Jackson on the Bad tour. It was a transformative moment. "I saw Michael Jackson and I was like, 'I'm a performer,'" James told Songfacts. "I was 8, and it was like, 'Well, that's what I do.' You could spend decades of therapy and college education trying to get that idea implanted into somebody's head, but when I saw Michael, I was like, 'Yeah, that's it.'"

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