A jazz singer who sings Badu, Billie Holiday and the beat in between

José James has never seemed troubled by the supposed gap between jazz and hip-hop. Born in 1978 and of Irish and Panamanian descent, the baritone vocalist and composer studied at The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, and his music has combined the two worlds ever since.

His debut came in 2008 with The Dreamer, a success that followed after DJ Gilles Peterson signed him to the new independent label Brownswood Recordings. A second album, Blackmagic, appeared in 2009. In 2010 he made For All We Know for the Impulse! label, a collaboration with Jef Neve that won both the Edison Award and the Académie du Jazz Grand Prix for best vocal jazz album of that year.

Next came a long stretch at Blue Note: No Beginning No End, While You Were Sleeping, a tribute record titled Yesterday I Had the Blues: The Music of Billie Holiday, Love in a Time of Madness, and Lean On Me. Alongside them he took guest spots with a wide circle of musicians, from Jazzanova and Basement Jaxx to Takuya Kuroda and Christian McBride. Tracks such as “Trouble”, “Come To My Door” and his reading of “Lovely Day” show how easily his voice slides between the smooth and the soulful.

Since then he has released music on his own Rainbow Blonde label, including On & On and 1978. His latest project at the time of the source is On & On, José James sings Badu, performed on the Kennedy Center's Millennium Stage in October 2022 with a band of five young musicians. He is married to Taali, a Grammy-nominated singer and producer. In an age of tidy genres, James is a reminder that a voice can belong to several traditions at once and still sound entirely like itself.