With a recording career stretching back to the late ’80s with Thee Hypnotics, Jim Jones has recorded over a dozen albums with the aforementioned Thee Hypnotics, Black Moses, Jim Jones Revue, Jim Jones and the Righteous Mind, and now with the Jim Jones All Stars, producing a consistent run of albums that barely dip below the south side of excellent.
With his latest band, Jones has pulled in a sterling cast of musicians creating an enthralling 8-piece band including 2 sax players, a backing singer, and a keyboardist alongside a second guitarist and a shit-kicking rhythm section, making the small stage at The Cluny a rather cramped experience for them, not that that inhibited Jones’s energetic exuberance one little bit.
Kicking off with “Cat Fight” from his hot off the press release of the same name, Jones certainly set the night off with a bang and never paused for breath all night.
Across the show, lasting just over an hour, it was a rambunctious evening of Garage Punk-fuelled “Rock ‘n’ Roll” evoking images of Little Richard being fired out of an MC5 cannon by Iggy and the Stooges, while the New York Dolls stand by picking their teeth with a switchblade knife. This is what music is all about. Energetic, sweaty, raw, ragged, and bloody exciting.
Honking horns powered “Exiled” while the surf drum of “Let U Go” gave Jones the opportunity to strut and swagger, while the greasy grime of “Born 2 Ride” snarled and roared backed again by some ferocious sax work, made all the remarkable as Luciano literally joined the tour as a very late replacement for their regular saxophonist due to a family emergency. Hats off to the guy, he never put a foot wrong all night.
“Hey, Hey, Hey” was Little Richard on steroids with some simply banging Honky Tonk piano adding the icing to a rather delicious Rock ‘n’ Roll cake.
The wonderful Stubblefield groove of “Give Me The Grease” had the whole room moving while the explosive “Rock ‘n’ Roll Psychosis” more than lived up to its name before “Shakedown” brought the night to a suitably riotous end.
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