October 13, 2012
FULL-LENGTH LABEL DEBUT NO BEGINNING NO END SET FOR JAN. 22 RELEASE
IT’S ALL OVER YOUR BODY EP AVAILABLE EXCLUSIVELY THRU iTUNES TODAY;
“TROUBLE” FEATURED AS iTUNES SINGLE OF THE WEEK;
JAMES TO PERFORM AT iTUNES FESTIVAL 2012 IN LONDON ON SEPT. 23
Singer-songwriter José James has signed to EMI’s Blue Note Records and is set to release his full-length label debut No Beginning No End on January 22. However, fans need not wait until then to get a taste of James’ intoxicating blend of jazz, hip-hop, and R&B. The vocalist has released the four-track It’s All Over Your Body EP today exclusively through iTunes. “It’s All Over Your Body” is also available now as a single through all other digital retailers and streaming services. iTunes is also currently featuring James’ song “Trouble” as their free Single of the Week
James will also perform on September 23 at the iTunes Festival 2012 on a double-bill with label mate Robert Glasper Experiment. The festival is taking place all this month at the Roundhouse, Camden Town in London. By downloading the free iTunes Festival App, fans from across the globe can watch the show live or view it afterwards for a limited time on their computer with iTunes, on their iPhone, iPad, iPod touch or on the big screen using Apple TV.
“It’s not nearly enough to say that a musician mixes jazz, soul and funk, because so much has been built around that intersection since the 1970s,” wrote Ben Ratliff in The New York Times earlier this year. “The singer José James lives around that intersection too. He’s a romantic baritone with a deep-funk band, stretching out songs, evoking both the ’70s of Roberta Flack and Gil Scott-Heron and the ’90s and oughts of J Dilla.” Ratliff continued, “But Mr. James, who has revealed himself in stages over the years, is a very different kind of singer than D’Angelo. He’s a little more acoustic singer-songwriter, a little more delicate. He’s clearer, more disciplined and lower key; he can move you with silence and the pure strength of his vocal tone.”
The Minneapolis-born, Brooklyn-based James is a musical omnivore whose career path has steadfastly followed its own rhyme and reason. He is an artist that resists being pigeonholed, equally at ease on stage with a jazz legend like McCoy Tyner as he is in the studio with rapper Oh No or electronica pioneer Flying Lotus.
No Beginning No End is a seamless musical experience that moves between different styles with remarkable fluidity, bound together by James’ transcendent voice. The influential UK DJ Gilles Peterson got an early listen to the album and immediately took to Twitter to declare it “a landmark” likening it to “Smokey Robinson for the new generation.”
Conceived, recorded and produced independently, the album is James’ most personal statement yet and boasts collaborators including noted producer/bassist Pino Palladino; pianist/composer Robert Glasper; R&B singer/songwriter/guitarist Emily King; international French-Moroccan singing star Hindi Zahra; and the 2011 Thelonious Monk Competition winner pianist Kris Bowers.
“No Beginning No End sums up how I feel about music right now,” says James. “I don’t want to be confined to any particular style. I decided I didn’t want to be considered a jazz singer anymore and that was really freeing. Once I realized that jazz singing is just something that I do and it’s just a label, it freed me as an artist to just write without any boundaries.”
The track listing for the It’s All Over Your Body EP is as follows:
1. It’s All Over Your Body (album version)
2. Trouble (album version)
3. It’s All Over Your Body (Spinna remix)
4. It’s All Over Your Body (Spinna remix instrumental)
5. Come To My Door (acoustic)
