Lady J and the Soulful Knights at the Organ Pavilion August 23

Great night of vintage blues and soul, with a "ringer" tribute to Tony Bennett.

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s (Wednesday, August 23) “Twilight in the Park” concert featured a band I’d seen in earlier years, Lady J and the Soulful Knights. I got to sit in the third row and right next to me were Lady J’s daughter and grandson – I “got” the connection between them when the grandson helped her get onstage. I’ve seen Lady J at previous “Twilight in the Park” concerts at which she sang soul classics like Etta James’s “Something’s Got a Hold on Me” (also a regular repertoire item for the all-woman, all-white band MOXIE,” but Lady J’s version so totally blew MOXIE’s out of the water she could have said to them, “Pretty fly for white girls”) and the Otis Redding/Aretha Franklin “Respect.” Last night she didn’t do either of those but she did play an electrifying set opening with a blues instrumental during which she came out for the last few bars, rapping over the music. Then she got down to business and did Memphis Slim’s “Every Day I Have the Blues” (best known in the version by Joe Willliams with Count Basie and His Orchestra), Nora Jean Wallace’s “I’m a Blues Woman,” Dinah Washington’s “Fat Daddy,” Bobby Troup’s “Route 66” (she said she’s been on the real Route 66 but it’s only a shadow of its former self and no longer runs to all the places the song, most famously recorded by Nat “King” Cole, said it did), Aaron “T-Bone” Walker’s “Stormy Monday Blues,” Bobby “Blue” Bland’s “Members Only,” Ray Charles’s “Night Time Is the Right Time” and Sam Cooke’s “You Send Me.” In between “Stormy Monday Blues” and “Members Only” she threw in a “ringer”: Jerome Kern’s classic “The Way You Look Tonight,” which she sang to a pre-recorded backing of piano, bass and drums (a bit disappointing since I’m sure her excellent musicians could have handled the song just fine) and she announced as a memorial to Tony Bennett.

Her excellent band included Bobo Zacharakis on electric lead guitar, Pat Kelly on keyboards, Fred Larson on electric bass (the only Black person besides Lady J in the band) and drummer Rick Lee (coincidentally that was also the name of the drummer for the white blues-rock band Ten Years After from the late 1960’s and early 1970’s), whom when she introduced him during the performance I thought she called him “Pygmy.” Later I got a chance to ask Lady J who her guitarist and drummer were as her band was packing up their instruments – they did not do an encore, unlike just about everyone else this year – and Lady J remains an excellent soul/blues singer and a local musical treasure. She mentioned having been to the Rady band shell on the Embarcadero the night before to see Gladys Knight and Patti Labelle in concert, and said that if her voice sounded hoarse (it didn’t to me!) it was because she had yelled herself into hoarseness at that concert. She also mentioned she’d wanted a last chance to see and hear these two great legends of her kind of music because you never know when will be the last chance you’ll have to see them before they pass on – and she offered that by way of explaining why she went off her usual musical wheelbase long enough to sing a standard song as a tribute to Tony Bennett. Lady J also said she’d like to do a whole concert of standards with the San Diego Symphony backing her up, and while I won’t exactly be holding my breath, it would be wonderful if she did! (Tony Bennett’s last two albums were duets with Lady Gaga, who phrases standards so wonderfully I’d love to hear her do a solo album of them – just as one of my musical regrets is that the late Donna Summer never did a standards album; judging from her eloquent phrasing on the slow introductions to “Last Dance” and “On the Radio,” she could have done that sort of music quite well.)