Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival

 In December 2005, Don Byron launched a new group dedicated to the music of soul legend, saxophonist and singer Junior Walker. Starring Byron on tenor saxophone (!), his band was joined in the studio by singer/guitarist/actor Chris Thomas King (“O Brother Where Art Thou,” “Ray”) to record Byron’s sixth album for Blue Note Records. Entitled Do The Boomerang, the new CD features covers of some of Junior Walker’s biggest hits, including “Shotgun,” “Cleo’s Mood,” “I’m a Roadrunner,” “What does it take (to win your Love),” as well as a version of James Brown’s “There It Is.”

Don Byron Plays Junior Walker will be touring in the US and Europe throughout 2007, following the CD release in October 2006. At the June 17 Bonnaroo Festival performance, the band line-up will feature Chris Thomas King on lead vocal and guitar.

Don Byron tenor saxophone & clarinet / David Gilmore guitar / Kyle Koehler  Hammond
B-3 organ / Brad Jones bass / Will Calhoun  drums / Chris Thomas King  lead vocal, guitar

“Junior Walker was an important part of ‘soul music’ as a movement,” Byron says.  “Along with guys like King Curtis and Eddie Harris, he was successful at creating an instrumental improvisational style out of the gospel/blues techniques that were transforming popular singing. He played no bebop, he was a preacher. He was an effective and underrated vocalist, and his vocal and saxophone style differ very little. He managed to have lots of hit records, and was, perhaps, the only true Motown instrumental artist. His music sounds much less cultured and much more Southern than anything else on the label. His vocal covers of more mainstream Motown material like ‘Come See About Me’ are not only credible but, in contrast to the elegant mannered performances of the originals, seem raw and sincere. I managed to see him play once at a bar in Boston and thought I had never heard a better sound on an instrument.”   

From the start of his career as a bandleader in the early 1990s, Don Byron has reveled in interpreting the music of a wildly diverse range of artists, including Duke Ellington, Igor Stravinsky, Mickey Katz, Raymond Scott, John Kirby, Sly Stone, Henry Mancini, Sugar Hill Records’ early hip-hop, Earth Wind & Fire, and Herb Alpert. Adding Junior Walker to his repertoire underscores his position as one of the most open-minded and adventurous musicians today. In TIME Magazine’s words: “Calling Don Byron a jazz musician is like calling the Pacific wet – it just doesn’t begin to describe it... Byron has carpentered an extraordinary career precisely by obliterating the very idea of category.”