Lee Fields live in AK, Jan 11 next year

Lee Fields and the Expressions are set to play their first-ever show here on Saturday 11th January 2014, at the Powerstation in Auckland. This promises to be a dynamite night of super soul! Presale tickets start Nov 5, see here for more info.

From the press release:

"There aren’t too many artists making soul music today who had a release in 1969; Lee Fields, however, is one such artist—or maybe he’s better labelled a phenomenon.

Since the late sixties, the North Carolina native has amassed a prolific catalogue of albums and has toured and played with such legends as Kool and the Gang, Sammy Gordon and the Hip-Huggers, O.V Wright, Darrell Banks, and Little Royal. With a career spanning 43 years, releases on twelve different record labels, and having toured the world over with his raucous-yet-tender voice, it’s mind-blowing that the music he’s making today with Brooklyn’s own Truth & Soul Records is the best of his career.

With a catalogue that ranges from James Brown-style funk to lo-fi blues to contemporary Southern soul to collaborations with French house DJ/producer Martin Solveig, Lee Fields has done it all. Today, with The Expressions–Truth & Soul’s house band, Lee Fields continues to evolve, enmeshed into the group’s sweeping, string-laden, cinematic soul sound. Their first full-length together, My World, released in June 2009 on Truth & Soul, was called “one smoking mother of an old-sound soul record” and a “throwback done right” by Pitchfork.

While drawing comparisons to groups like The Moments, The Delfonics, The Stylistics, and–of course–James Brown, My World has been able to create a space of its own due to the group’s desire to interpret and further the formulas of good soul music rather than parrot and imitate them.

“In a curious case of musical evolution, the older Fields becomes, the closer he gets to perfecting the sound of soul that he grew up with as a young man,” so said music writer, scholar, and DJ Oliver Wang about Fields in a piece for NPR in July 2009. The latest LP from Lee Fields and The Expressions, titled Faithful Man, is the next step towards this perfection. A step that may find Fields& The Expressions, finally being bestowed the contemporary soul music crown."