Boney James

With over three million album sales to his credit, Boney James is a firmly established player in the jazz/R&B genre. His playing style is known for being harder-edged and grittier than his smooth-jazz contemporaries, honed by spending seven years on the road as a jobbing sax player with R&B acts such as The Isley Brothers, Bobby Caldwell and Randy Crawford. James' debut album Trust was released in 1992 on Spindletop Records, a small independent label. The album's popularity led to James being signed by Warner and after modest success with the album Backbone, released in 1994, his follow-up, Seduction went gold a year later. A series of collaborations with artists such as George Benson, Al Jarreau, Faith Evans and George Duke firmly established James as a serious player in the jazz and R&B world, and by 2001 he had received his first of four Grammy nominations. A move to Concord Records in 2006 marked a new era for the artist bringing more widespread commercial success. His 2015 release Futuresoul spent eleven weeks at number one on Billboard's Contemporary Jazz Chart and crossed over into the mainstream Pop Charts, progress which he continued in 2017 with his sixteenth LP, Honestly. Amidst the coronavirus pandemic, he returned in 2020 with the therapeutic new album Solid, which earned him a new personal best of #100 on the Billboard Artist 100. He remains a popular touring act and has also branched out into producing work by other artists.