Category: James Booker

Legendary New Orleans pianist and songman James Booker only released two studio albums in his lifetime. His second and last studio effort, Classified, has recently been remastered and remixed for reissue, and it speaks to his wild talent and chaotic life, a sublime R&B record that prompts the question where else his dazzlingly skill might have taken him had things turned out differently.

In 1973, New Orleans piano wunderkind James Booker cut a session after a gig while in Los Angeles. Which was promptly lost and, much later, found. You can read our piece on the session ( and its forthcoming reissue), here . But…if you . […]

One night in 1973, pianist James Booker and his band, freshly seasoned from recent shows at the nearby club Dirty Pierre’s, sauntered into Paramount Recording Studios in Hollywood. It was late at night, maybe 10:30 […]

In July of 1978, James Carroll Booker III sat down at a grand piano in a large concert hall in Montreux, Switzerland and played “True.” The video of this performance is spellbinding, if not galvanizing — equal parts Crescent […]

Staying on this James Booker tip for a minute, this BBC session is very much worth digging into. Broken into two parts, the interview/performance was recorded in 1978 for the BBC while Booker was in the midst of a European […]