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JJ Grey & Mofro
According to musician, singer and songwriter JJ Grey, “The best songs I've ever written, I never wrote. They wrote themselves. The best show I ever played, played itself and had little to do with me or talent. To me, those things come from the power of an honest moment, and I guess I'm trying to live in that power and not force life to cough up what I want.”
Since his first album, Blackwater, back in 2001, Grey has been releasing deeply moving, masterfully written, funkified rock and front porch Southern soul music. Now, with his new album, Olustee – his tenth and first in nine years, and the first he has self-produced – Grey is back, singing his personal stories with universal themes of redemption, rebirth, hard luck, and inner peace. With his music, Grey also celebrates good times with lifelong friends, oftentimes mixing the carnal with the cerebral in the very same song. Fueled by his vividly detailed, timeless originals spun from his own life and experiences in the Northern Florida swampland, Grey’s gritty baritone drips with honest passion and testifies with a preacher’s foot-pounding fervor.
With Olustee, JJ Grey has once again pushed the boundaries of his own creative musical, lyrical and vocal talents, delivering an album that is destined to become a stone-cold classic. Many of the songs are all steeped in the mythical Southern stories of his ancestral Florida home and filled with people from JJ’s life. The songs overflow with the sights and sounds of the region as told through the eyes of a poet and sung with pure, unvarnished soul. The album’s ten songs range from the introspective opener The Sea to the raucous, celebratory first radio single, Wonderland, to an escape from an out-of-control wildfire in the title track, to the inward-looking closer, Deeper Than Belief. Singing of his own personal triumphs and struggles, his hopes and desires, his friends and family, Grey’s message is simple and strong: respect the natural world and always try to live in the moment. And never forget the importance of having a good time.
Grey made his recording debut in 2001 with Blackwater, following up in 2004 with Lochloosa. Both albums were released on the Fog City label under the name Mofro, a moniker the young Grey chose to describe his music and sound while still working his day job at a lumberyard. He has since used the word to name his band of world-class players. In 2007, Grey signed with Alligator Records and released a string of five popular and successful albums: Country Ghetto, 2008's Orange Blossoms, 2010's Georgia Warhorse, 2011’s live CD/DVD Brighter Days and 2013’s This River. Ol’ Glory was released on the Provogue label in 2015. Throughout this amazing run of releases, press, radio and years of touring helped catapult JJ Grey & Mofro further into the mainstream.
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Various artists: Alligator Records: 50 Years of Genuine Houserockin’ Music
by Jim Trageser
Maybe this half-century commemoration of the jny: Chicago-based, blues-focused label should have been titled, The Last of the Independents." Almost alone of the mid-major labels that formerly thrived in the 1980s and '90s by specializing in non-mainstream styles of music, Alligator has managed to navigate stunning changes in the music business--from the vinyl of LPs and 45s to cassettes and CDs, and then, most recently, the virtual collapse of the retail record business and wholesale pivot to online ...
read moreJJ Grey & Mofro, Jonny Lang and The North Mississippi Allstars at The Paramount
by Mike Perciaccante
JJ Grey & Mofro, Jonny Lang and The North Mississippi Allstars The Paramount Huntington, NY July 16, 2015 On a warm July evening, just prior to the summer's first real" heat wave, JJ Grey & Mofro, Jonny Lang and the North Mississippi Allstars touched down in Huntington, NY for a triple-headlining performance at the Paramount. Though the venue was not sold-out, the three bands played full sets to a loud, fervent and ...
read moreJJ Grey & Mofro: Georgia Warhorse
by Doug Collette
Recorded in the same studio (Retrophonics) with the same producer (Dan Prothero) as all of JJ Grey & Mofro's previous works, Georgia Warhorse constitutes an overview of the band's whole career. The CD strikes an effective balance between the swampy blues of early albums like Lochloosa (Alligator, 2007) and the authentic R&B/soul music that filled the predecessor to this album Orange Blossoms (Alligator, 2008) The CD sounds like a throwback at first, as it begins with Diyo Dayo," ...
read moreJJ Grey & Mofro: Orange Blossoms
by Doug Collette
JJ Grey & Mofro Orange Blossoms Alligator Records 2008
JJ Grey and Mofro's Orange Blossoms is a natural evolution from its predecessor, the ambitious Country Ghetto (Alligator, 2007). Here Grey and his regular road band extract the R&B/soul elements and artfully expand upon them.
The title song is emblematic of the way Grey uses imagery from his Florida heritage as a means to telling a story: orange blossoms" is a trigger to remembrance as ...
read moreJJ Grey & Mofro: Country Ghetto
by Chris M. Slawecki
It's rather promising for a band's debut to remind you of the Faces on the fast numbers and of Otis Redding on the slow ones, but these legends provide solid points of reference for JJ Grey & Mofro's Country Ghetto.
Country Ghetto is swampy, funky, bluesy, and above all genuine, straight from JJ Grey's backwoods home in the swamps outside Jacksonville, Florida. Grey composed and arranged every tune, sings lead, and plays keyboards as well as acoustic, electric ...
read moreJJ Grey & Mofro: Country Ghetto
by Doug Collette
Like all musical genres, the blues has its own particular set of conventions. Yet the seemingly infinite variations on the shuffle tempo and the AABA lyric format derive from the unique personalities involved. Such is the case with JJ Grey & Mofro's new album. Country Ghetto feels like everything that is the blues while mostly sounding nothing like it.
While Mofro boasts a somewhat unconventional instrumental lineup-- no bass guitarist--the low registers nevertheless permeate the music almost like a subliminal ...
read moreCoco Montoya and JJ Grey & Mofro Headline Waukesha BluesFest August 10 & 11
Source:
Chris M. Slawecki
The Waukesha Rotary Club has announced the headliners for the 2012 Waukesha BluesFest. Friday, August 10th will feature California blues guitarist Coco Montoya, and on Saturday, August 11th, JJ Grey & Mofro will bring their soul infused blues rock to the Waukesha BluesFest stage.
Born into a family with generations-old roots in rural Florida, JJ Grey was raised with a combination of backwoods wisdom and old-school blue-collar values. Grey’s original songs are inspired by legendary musicians, including Southern rockers Lynyrd ...
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JJ Grey & Mofro Celebrate New Release with Live Performance in Philadelphia
Source:
Chris M. Slawecki
Down-home roots, rock and soul artist JJ Grey and his band Mofro will celebrate the release of his first-ever live DVD/CD two-disc set, Brighter Days, with a live performance at Union Transfer in Philadelphia on Friday, January 27, 2012. The 78-minute CD and 2-hour DVD were recorded at Atlanta's Variety Playhouse in January 2011. Both as a film and a live concert CD, Brighter Days, perfectly captures Grey's power as a performer and writer, as well as the talent of ...
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“Impassioned singing, riff-based Southern rock, cold blooded swamp funk and sly Memphis soul. Rich, funky blues celebrate life’s most fundamental joys. Grey is a singer-songwriter with unforced talent and deep feeling.”
--The New York Times
”A deeply-rooted blend of southern-fried rock and swamp funk…richly evocative lyrics…plainspoken, blue-collar American music.”
--NPR
”The swami of swamp rock…JJ Grey is a North Florida sage and purveyor of the funkiest swamp rock the world has ever heard…Chicken-scratch guitar and bone-deep” songs.
--Oxford American