Booker T. Jones LIVE at Dimitriou’s Jazz Alley | June 27th-30th, 2013

Booker T Jones is a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee, Musicians Hall of Fame inductee and Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award recipient. Arguably, as the leader of the legendary Memphis soul icons, Booker T and the MG’s, he single-handedly set the cast for modern soul on classic Stax tunes like “Green Onions” and “Time is Tight.” A plethora of captivating artists join Booker on his upcoming celebratory return to Stax Records, including Anthony Hamilton, Raphael Saadiq, Mayer Hawthorne, Estelle, Vintage Trouble, Luke James and James Jay Picton among many others. Gary Clark Jr., Poncho Sanchez, and Sheila E. also contribute their singular instrumental prowess to the soulful tracks among this highly anticipated release, coming June 25th, 2013.
 
In Booker T. Jones, the seed was planted early. In addition to jazz, Booker T. had an early education in classical sounds. “Indiana had 24-hour access to their music library and I was always in there listening,” Booker says. “I listened to a lot of French music, Claude Debussy. I listened to a lot of Russian music, a lot of Wagner and also British music, Italian music… The actual music can mean an emotion, they can be one and the same. A piece like ‘Finlandia’ by Sibelius, how does a man write that? His country has been taken and belongs to another country. When an artist can put an emotion in a piece of music and a listener feels the same emotion, then it’s been transferred. That’s just a real true thing that you can’t touch.”
 
Booker has made real true things all his life. Some seeds fall near the tree, some are carried by the winds to distant lands. Booker’s first fruits were drawn from the root of American music—the Mississippi Delta’s blues became soul and rock & roll. Memphis and New Orleans passed those rhythms forth and back, then shipped them out across the globe. Booker found his destiny manifested in California, leaving the murky provincialism of the Mississippi River for the vast embrace of the Pacific Ocean. Like any good pioneer, on his road from Memphis he brought only what he could carry, cherished what he could use, and he built a new life, sun-filled with possibilities, rich with distant echoes.