J Boykin | ar

Jesse Boykins III has a timeless sound. He shares a point of view that crosses all genres, generations and cultures. Every note and each word in all his recorded works, to his live performance is skillfully crafted evoking emotions that can move any listener across the world to examine and acknowledge those feelings within themselves. Jesse who was born in Chicago on February 20, 1985 spent most of his childhood in Jamaica and Miami before spreading roots as a teenager in New York City. In his youth Jesse spent most of his time outside of school learning valuable life lessons...

Brenda calls it "Bourbon and Cornbread," the musical mixture of jazzy sweetness and down-home sass that marks her as "the most authentic and most inventive female jump blues vocal stylist of her generation," according to blues historian Lee Hildebrand. Brenda Boykin has earned a sterling reputation in the San Francisco Bay Area as a masterful interpreter of jazz and blues material gleaned from big bands, old blues hands, and honky tonk heroes. Boykin has firmly established herself as an unsurpassed vocal talent whose elixir of bourbon and cornbread - sounds from silk to sandpaper - delight both new listeners and...

Ronnie Boykins (1935 - April 20, 1980) was a jazz bassist most noted for his work with the Sun Ra Arkestra in the 1950s and 1960s. Boykins grew up in Chicago and played bass for musicians such as Muddy Waters and Jimmy Witherspoon. He joined the Arkestra during the Chicago period, travelled with them to Canada and then to New York City. Boykins has been described as "the pivot around which much of Sun Ra's music revolved for 8 years" [1]. This is especially pronounced on the key recordings from 1965 (The Magic City, The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra,...