North Bay soul outfit Monophonics teams with R&B veteran Lee Fields at Fillmore

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The legendary Bay Area soul group Monophonics and gritty R&B singer Lee Fields will begin their co-headlining tour Thursday night at San Francisco’s Fillmore.

Over the course of their nearly two decades in business, Monophonics, one of the most innovative R&B groups in the North Bay, has seen a significant transformation. Founded by drummer Austin Bolman in 2005, the quintet initially mined a vein of instrumental jazz-funk similar to boogaloo revivalists The Sugarman 3, Soulive, and the Greyboy Allstars whose saxophonist, Karl Denson, guested on the crew’s 2010 albumInto the Infrasounds.

In Your Brain (2012), the group’s third album, featured the Temptations’ “Psychedelic Shack,” which sounded like the product of some severe woodshedding by the members of Monophonics. Introducing a fuzzed-out guitar sound soaked in Echoplex delay, tunes like “Sure Is Funky,” “All Together,” and the title track were reminiscent of the acid-laced grooves of early Funkadelic and noted Motown producer Norman Whitfield’s most tripped-out creations with the Temps and Edwin Starr.

In addition, the album had a fantastic rendition of “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” that foreshadowed the band’s future musical direction and stands up to the immortal Nancy Sinatra and Terry Reid renditions of the Sonny Bono song. Although the band’s most recent recording, Sound of Sinning, is still heavily influenced by the ’60s sound, it embraces a distinct aspect of the psychedelic era.

The latest Monophonics album features complex orchestrations and slow-burning balladry that showcase keyboardist Kelly Finnigan’s amazing pipes while paying equal homage to the Beach Boys’ and the Zombies’ lush chamber music, all without completely giving up on distorted guitars and funk breaks. The band’s explosive performance on the main Banjo Stage at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass in 2015 was a festival highlight.

The ensemble completed a trifecta of significant Bay Area music festivals in 2018 by playing Outside Lands and becoming a featured performance at BottleRock in Napa the following year. To keep fans occupied until the release of their 2020 album It’s Only Us, the band’s debut full-length for renowned vintage soul label Colemine Records, they also released their EPMirrors, a compilation of well-known and obscure covers.

The album found the group coming into its own with its lush tunes and intricate string and horn arrangements that at times evoke the majesty of classic Curtis Mayfield and Rotary Connection records, continuing Finnigan’s solo debut, Tales People Tell, which embraced the languid sounds of lowrider soul balladry.

Before being allowed to play some live gigs last year, the band released an instrumental version of the album exclusively on digital platforms, but they were initially unable to promote it through touring because to the COVID shutdown. The group continued to write and record new songs for their most recent album, Sage Motel. This vague concept album, which is centered on the events and people who live in a made-up bohemian inn, pushes the boundaries of the band’s increasingly well-crafted choreographed, surreal atmospheres.

While Finnigan released his latest solo effort last fall with the celebrated collectionA Lover Was Bornand will be embarking on a solo UK/European tour later in January, he and Monophonics will hit the road for a string of dates that find the group co-headlining with fellow R&B favorite Lee Fields.

Much like his fellow soul singers Bettye LaVette and the late Sharon Jones and Charles Bradley, gritty funk shouter Fields delivers impassioned, heart-on-the-sleeve vocals that hearken back to the music’s classic ’60s era. Fields started his recording career in 1969 after relocating from his home in North Carolina to New York City while still in his teens.

With moves, a sound and even a physical resemblance to James Brown, Fields earned the nickname “Little J.B.” and recorded a cover of Brown’s 1959 hit “Bewildered” for his first single release on the Bedford Records label. He would put out a number of funk 45s for a variety of different labels during the early ’70s while sharing stages with such notables as Kool & the Gang and O.V. Wright. He would work with the label Angle 3 Records during the latter part of the decade, eventually issuing his first full album,Let’s Talk It Over, in 1979.

While his mix of sweaty funk workouts and soulful ballads didn’t find an audience at the height of the disco era (Fields would eventually start working in real estate to support his family during the 1980s), the effort later became a coveted collectors item, selling for hundreds of dollars. In the 1990s, Fields would make a comeback to music, first recording a few synth-heavy soul/blues albums for Ace Records before collaborating with Gabriel Roth and Phillip Lehman and their New York City imprint Desco Records on a number of singles that harked back to Fields’s earlier James Brown-influenced work.

That label would evolve, splitting into Daptone Records and Soul Fire Records. The two companies would feature Fields and Sharon Jones on a number of 45s and albums, elevating the singers as two of the foremost classic ’60s sound and funk revivalists of the 2000s. Fields has put out a series of outstanding R&B albums, most recently issuing the acclaimed 2016 effortSpecial Nighton Big Crown Records. The singer’s uncanny vocal emulation of James Brown led him to provide the singing voice for the Brown biopicGet On Upin 2014.Along with his talented backing band the Expressions, Fields and company have established a well-deserved reputation as a scorching live act that has become a staple of music festivals across the globe, appearing on the main stage at Outside Lands in 2017 and co-headlining a Stern Grove concert with reggae legends Toots and the Maytals two years later.

For his latest album, Fields reunited with Daptone Records co-founder and producer Roth in 2022 to recordSentimental Foolbacked by the label’s all-star stable of session players for one of the singer’s most emotionally charged efforts in years. He and his band stole the show from headliner Thundercat in October at one of the last free San Francisco concerts of the season put on by Noise Pop and the Civic Joy Fund that drew thousands to Golden Gate Park. In addition to thisThursday night show at the Fillmorein San Francisco, the co-headlining tour alsostops in Monterey at the Golden State Theatre on Friday.

Lee Fields and MonophonicsThursday, Jan. 9, 8 p.m. $49.75The Fillmore

The managing editor of the CBS Bay Area website is Dave Pehling. In the late 1990s, he began producing music-related freelance articles as a journalist. In 2003, he joined KTVU.com as a web writer, editor, and producer. In 2015, he started working for CBS Bay Area.

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