JW Jones might never have become a blues musician. The Ottawa native started his musical career as a drummer, and if it wasn’t for a B. B. King concert he saw in his mid-teens he might never have put down his sticks and picked up a Gibson.
The night he saw B.B. on stage, something clicked. The way the blues legend used his guitar “like an extension of his voice” seemed unreal.
“I could see him putting so much emotion into what he was doing,” Jones remembers.
After that concert Jones shoved aside his drum and his go-to classic rock and took a deep dive into blues and the guitar.
He was never really into sports, he wasn’t great at school, but the blues gave him a rush, and he latched onto it in a serious way.
Two years after B. B. King changed his life, Jones had his own blues band. He jokes about competing in a battle of the bands contest amongst a slew of plaid-shirted grunge acts playing Nirvana covers.
“We were dressed differently, we looked different and we played different than anyone else,” he says.
As surreal as the whole thing was, Jones and his band still won the contest, landing them some time in a recording studio. He used the time to put together a six-song demo and before long he was fielding calls from blues magazines and record labels.
Then the European outfit, CrossCut Records, which still puts out his music on that continent today, picked him up.
Jones remembers being bewildered when the company told him they had sold 1,200 copies of his album in Europe. He couldn’t understand how a European audience was even aware of him, let alone why they would buy his record.
More than a decade later, Jones and his band have just released their seventh album, appropriately titled Seventh Hour.
It’s somewhat of a milestone, Jones says, because it marks the first time they’ve cut a record without any special guests.
Jones’ past albums featured blues icons such as Colin James, Ray Charles’ long-time sax player David “Fathead” Newman and Howlin’ Wolf guitarist Hubert Sumlin. Jones says it was a dream come true to play with such big names, but this time around he wanted the band to stand on its own.
For a long time, Jones was known for perfecting the 50s and 60s Chicago blues sound, but says that as he’s spent more time with the blues he’s learned to appreciate when someone brings something different to the table.
He thinks he’s accomplished that with Seventh Hour.
“I want to bring what excites me to the band,” he says.
Trevor Nichols
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