MUSIC
What: Booker T. Jones, Keith and Tex, The New Groovement, Garden City Soul Club
Where: Ship Point, Inner Harbour
When: Today at 4 p.m.
Tickets: $39.50/$45 at Lyle’s Place (770 Yates St.), Jupiter (619 Johnson St.), Tourism Victoria, Vinyl Envy (1717 Quadra St.), Area 51 (191 Station St., Duncan), Fascinating Rhythm (51 Commercial St., Nanaimo), at ticketweb.ca
Note: Jones will give a free keynote address at Victoria High School’s auditorium (1260 Grant St.) today at 1 p.m.
Booker T. Jones plays 50 to 60 dates a year, a modest schedule for the veteran performer, but one that can accommodate his myriad projects.
In addition to writing his memoir, which is nearing completion, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member spends the majority of his days working in his studio. “All my life, I’ve been writing,” Jones, 71, said from his home in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. “I always have music going in my mind, and I’m trying to get it out.”
Jones has contributed mightily to the pop- and soul-music canon in a career that has been in full swing for six decades. He is one of the last remaining members of the Stax soul-music family, the groundbreaking Memphis record label that dominated popular music for the majority of the 1960s. And as the leader of Booker T. and the M.G.’s, he put his name to three indelible instrumentals: Green Onions, Time is Tight and Hip Hug-Her, among other hits.
He still performs them live, and will do so when he appears tonight at Ship Point for the Victoria Ska and Reggae Festival. “The youngsters have a respect for the music we did in the ’60s, and that’s nice,” Jones said of his audience, which includes a growing number of fans born well after some of his hits were originally released.
“I’m almost 72, and I have some things I can pass on, things that young people can use.”
Jones will educate fans on musical matters at 1 p.m. today. Prior to his performance, he’s booked to give a free keynote address at Victoria High School’s auditorium, the official kickoff to the 18th annual Victoria Ska and Reggae Festival. Jones said he never used do this type of thing, but that changed in 2012 when he gave a commencement speech at Indiana University, where he received his degree in music.
“Since then, I’ve done more public speaking on various subjects,” Jones said.
His talk today will be new territory for Jones, who was convinced by the organizers of Skafest to give a talk on the connection between rocksteady, a Jamaican musical style, and Stax. “It’s been interesting. I’ve been researching, looking into Jamaican music and Rastafarianism. I have looked back into Africa, my own physical and spiritual roots, and the music we’re going to be talking about. It’s going to be fun. And it’s going to be educational for me as well as everyone else, I hope.”
He took the opportunity to study facets of ska and reggae, making himself a mix tape of songs to get in the spirit, and dug deeper into the history of black leader Marcus Garvey and Rastafari messiah Haile Selassie. The process got him thinking about civil rights, and how his Memphis upbringing and relationship with Stax Records — whose studio and offices were mere blocks from where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated — factored into that.
“[Stax founder] Al Bell and his association with Dr. King and our association with the Lorraine Hotel, all of that,” Jones said. “We didn’t have a conference room at Stax, and we used the Lorraine for everything we didn’t have at McLemore Avenue [the former location of Stax Records].”
Through the process of writing his memoir, Jones found himself marvelling at what he and his bandmates accomplished. “I think we were the only ones besides James Brown who had popular music addressing the racial issues,” he said.
“It’s been good for me to write about my life. I’ve done more in my life than I realized, once you start to put it on paper.”
