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On video: Opening musicians jam before Jaystorm hits the bandstand, recorded live at Ray’s ESG, Nov. 16, 2007. In case you can’t see me, I’m the guitar in back with the FRO. :)
Check out this video: ROBERT (ZOOT) JAMES AT 4620
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Robert James, Jr. (“Bob,†"Zoot") was born in Jackson, Mississippi. He began writing songs in junior high school, having been heavily influenced by the music of Stevie Wonder, The Isley Brothers, and Sting. It was during this time that Bob’s abilities grew to the point where he decided to make a career in music. To avoid future confusion with well-established jazz keyboardist Bob James, he chose "Zoot" as his stage name, based on his penchant for wearing snazzy dress clothes -- and his still unquenched desire to own a zoot suit. He bandied the name about among his friends and fellow musicians, and the moniker soon stuck.
His music began to take on more of a jazz bent as he attended Hampton University in Hampton, Virginia, where he majored in jazz studies with a concentration on guitar performance. While at Hampton, he became influenced by such jazz and jazz fusion greats as Chick Corea, Wayne Shorter, Eliane Elias, Allan Holdsworth, and Jean-Luc Ponty, just to name a few. This is where his jazz background was solidified. In the realm of art music, his favorites are Beethoven, Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, and Still. Along the way, Bob also became well-versed in other forms, such as rock, metal, blues, new age, house, go-go, latin, reggae, experimental, and microtonal music.
Bob played trombone in The Hampton University Marching Force from his freshman year to his junior year. During this time, he wrote marching band arrangements of four Top 40 hits of the day, one of which was performed on-field by The Force.
In the early 1990s, Bob arranged and recorded five songs with vocalist Taffye L. Benson. Bob played all the instruments, and Ms. Benson sang all vocals. One of these songs, “Make Me Smile,†was played on Foxy 99’s (WZFX’s) “Make It Or Break It,†receiving 11 “makes†and only three “breaks.â€
Bob began performing professionally while at Hampton University, and he continued in that vein while living in Fayetteville, North Carolina after his graduation. In November of 1996, Bob received the call to play in Southport, England with hit 70s and 80s funk group, The Fatback Band . The account that Bob wrote immediately following that trip will soon be placed in a blog on this site. This band toured England again in May of 1998, doing a string of five club dates at the Jazz Café in London. Whereas Bob’s duties were limited to guitar in the previous England trip, on the second he held guitar and auxiliary keyboard duties to make up for the absence of Fatback’s original keyboard player. He toured again with Fatback in May of 2006, this time hitting England, Spain, and Tokyo, Japan (see the photo gallery for pictures from the Tokyo dates).
In 2001, Bob’s experimental piece, “Of Sin and Sainthood,†was included on a visual arts CD-ROM entitled Current Work 2001: A National Competition. This music was reused on the next edition of the CD-ROM, Current Work 2002: A National Competition.
Later that year, Bob was hired to transcribe an hour-long opera by deceased African-American composer Betty Jackson King, entitled Saul of Tarsus. The project involved rewriting the score into a computer using various handwritten scores and recordings, and it took about a year to complete.
Bob entered graduate school at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, in 2002. While there, he composed a brass quintet entitled “Ode to Adjustment,†which won first prize at the 2003 Southeastern Composers’ League Forum in Athens, GA. He also performed an original solo piano piece, “Untitled 3,†at that forum. Since then, he has composed a trombone sonata and a symphonic poem.
Now living in Knoxville, Bob regularly plays guitar with world-renowned keyboardist Donald Brown, as well as gifted sidemen Keith L. Brown, Kenneth Brown, Marcel Holman, and Will Boyd.
