JAMES “JIMMY SOUL” HOLVAY Revisits Classic Chicago Soul Sound of the ’60s on ‘This Girl’ EP
“If vintage Chicago soul has a place in your heart, you need these tracks,” – Americana Highways
“A wonderful 5-track EP, ‘Sweet Soul Song’. is an unashamed homage to the Golden Age of Chicago soul, to the craft of people like Curtis Mayfield, Major Lance, Gene Chandler and Tyrone Davis.” – Soul & Jazz & Funk
“This is a peach of a release; all hits ….. and no sh**!” – The Rocking Magpie
JAMES HOLVAY
CHICAGO SOUL AND ROCK LEGEND RETURNS WITH NEW EP
THIS GIRL
New Release on Singer-Songwriter-Guitarist’s
Mob Town Records Imprint
Succeeds His Widely Acclaimed 2021 Return Sweet Soul Song
First Listen: “Hot N’ Heavy Love” premieres at Soul Tracks
MAY 25, 2022 (Los Angeles, CA) — The musical renaissance of veteran Chicago musician James Holvay, which began with 2021’s soulful delight Sweet Soul Song, continues with the June 8 release of a new five-song EP, This Girl, on his own Mob Town Records label.
Known to his fans as “Jimmy Soul,” singer-songwriter-guitarist-producer Holvay established a formidable rep on the Windy City music scene during the ‘60s, as the co-founder of the horn-based band The MOB — the major inspiration for another popular local act, CHICAGO — and as the author of The Buckinghams’ chart-topping national hit “Kind of a Drag” and three other top-20 hits by the group.
Absent from the music scene from four decades after the dissolution of the MOB, Holvay drew fresh inspiration from Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones, and other young neo-soul musicians when they appeared early in the new millennium. He recalls, “I went, ‘Wow, what is with this?!’”
Over the course of the last decade, Holvay returned to penning material in the style of his own musical role models: Chicago-bred R&B talents like Curtis Mayfield, Gene “Duke of Earl” Chandler, and Major Lance.
Sweet Soul Song, the first fruit of a renewed burst of writing and recording activity, met with universal critical kudos for its knowing grit and deep-soul feeling. “Another soul veteran makes a great comeback,” raved Blues & Rhythm magazine, adding, “These songs could have been recorded in Chicago in 1965.” Jeff Burger wrote in the Seattle Post Intelligencer, “If vintage Chicago soul has a place in your heart, you need these tracks.” Jazz.com called the music “a vital five-song slab of authentic Chicago-style soul music.”
Holvay’s hometown alternative weekly the Chicago Reader celebrated his return with a detailed 3,000-word feature about his career by Steve Krakow, the local historian, graphic artist, musician, and DJ (a/k/a “Plastic Crimewave”) and author of My Kind of Sound: The Secret History of Chicago Music Compendium.
Krakow, who had previously documented the MOB’s story in a 2015 “Secret History” installment, says, “If all Jimmy Holvay had ever done was write a classic and influential Buckinghams track, he’d be a legend — but helping birth all of ‘horn rock’ in Chicago, and being a guy who still completely ‘gets’ and channels all soulful musical forms, makes him a veritable sonic deity.”
This Girl arrives as a similarly styled excursion through Holvay’s classic soul roots and finds the musician flexing his Mayfield-styled falsetto on three new original numbers and two memorable remakes of songs he wrote for the MOB with his bandmate Gary Beisbier.
Holvay says of the latter numbers, “I thought, why don’t I mine some of the better MOB songs that I personally like, and redo them the way I wanted them done in the studio? I wanted to pick out the best stuff that I had and put it on the second EP.”
He continues, “Although Jerry Ross of Colossus Records did an excellent job in recording ‘More of You.’, it was different than the way we used to do it. The song is very Chicago soul, very Jerry Butler, in that whole bag. The same goes for ‘She’s Gone Away.’ I recut that because that was one of our best ballads. I used to sing that song in the show.”
The new collection is rounded out by three new Holvay originals, “Hot and Heavy Love,” “This Girl,” and “Whatever She Wants,”.
Like Sweet Soul Song, it was painstakingly recorded with a group of top-flight Los Angeles session men with the objective of making the music sound right as it did when it was made “in the day.”
THIS GIRL
Tracklisting
“Hot N’ Heavy Love”
“This Girl”
“More of You”
“Whatever She Wants”
“She’s Gone Away”
“It took me literally two years to find guys who could play the music,” Holvay recalls. “These are the road dogs — they go out with the O’Jays and the Temptations when they tour. The bass player’s main gig is in Al McKay’s Earth, Wind & Fire. The drummer is currently out with Robert Cray. They work with all those acts, so they are masters of that music.”
“Duane Benjamin, the horn and string arranger, is also a trombone player and has played with Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, Marvin Gaye, and Aretha Franklin. He’s done strings for every R&B star in the business.
The horn parts he writes are right on, too. I can tell him, ‘This is like an Impressions type tune,’ and he says to me, ‘I know exactly what you want.’ I can tell all these guys, ‘This is the groove,’ and bam!, there it is.”
As on the previous release, the recordings on This Girl were carefully built from the ground up, instrument by instrument, by Holvay, engineer Steve Cohen, and mixer Cameron Lew.
“I record the basic tracks in Steve Cohen’s studio, Lake Transfer, in North Hollywood,” Holvay says. “He lays down a click track so that, as I bring in musicians, the time will be right. I’ll sit on the mic, sing a working vocal and play the guitar. Steve finds the right tempo. I may add a scratch bass line because I also play bass. Then I bring in Stu Pearlman on the keyboard.”
“In order to get that Morris Jennings (Chicago soul session drummer), we cut the final drum track in the kitchen at my house. Steve said, ‘You know, this would be a cool place to cut your drums.’ I said, ‘Can you do that?’ And he said, ‘Yeah,” and Les Falconer recorded the drums on Steve’s laptop in my kitchen.”
A lot of time and effort went into the creation of the sound heard on This Girl, which some might consider “old school.” But it’s also as modern as yesterday: Anyone who also cocks an ear to contemporary radio will be immediately struck by the similarity between Holvay’s music and “Leave the Door Open,” the 2021 smash hit by Silk Sonic, the hot neo-soul unit fronted by Bruno Mars and Anderson.Paak.
He adds, “The fact that Silk Sonic was recognized for record of the year and song of the year at the Grammy Awards this year really legitimized the music that I’m doing and the music of anyone else doing something similar.
The Recording Academy said, ‘People like this music, and it’s valid today.’ It’s not just some guys trying to bring back the past.”
