Music
Press
This one’s a bit of an oddity. According to the sleeve notes, Benny Williams has a long pedigree in R&B music, including singing back up vocals with Sly & The Family Stone, playing percussion with the Intruders, and “sharing the stage” with Billy Paul, Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes, the Chilites and McFadden & Whitehead, amongst others. What on earth he's doing recording an album for Studio One is anybody’s guess.
Most of the tracks are straight ahead New York soul, but occasionally Benny plunders the Brentford Road vaults to add his vocals to well known classics such as Too Experience, No Man Is An Island (Lonely Soldier), My Time and Cry Me A River. His voice is sweet and strong, and he carries off the reggae vocals with aplomb - it’s a pity he didn’t decide to make a straightforward reggae album. Backing vocals are supplied by JD Smoothe and Alpheus and production credits are shared between C.S. Dodd, Michael Hall and Benny Williams (with C.S. Dodd as executive producer). It was voiced and mixed at Music Lab in New York.
But on the whole, this is not much more than an uncomfortable mixture of R&B, funk, gospel and reggae. For Studio One completists only, I would think.
- Down Beat
Discography
Album 'Once In Your Life'
Itunes
Rhapsody
Amazon
E-Music
Jango Internet Radio
Photos
Bio
Benny Williams now better known as Benny & The Ben-Jam-Min Band has an extensive music history that spans more than 25 years. He has rightly earned professional respect throughout the industry because of his electrifying performances as opening act for industry heavy weights like Frankie Beverly and Maze, the legendary Liberace, The Intruders, Blue Magic, Manhattans, Billy Paul, Colonel Abrams, Delfonics, Hal Melvin and the Blue Notes, Shylites, Ray Goodman & Brown, Cuba Gooding, Main Ingredients, McFadden & Whitehead, Conjunction, The Joneses and many more...He was also was the lead background & percussionist for 'The New Sly and the Family Stone.....
The Band performed at The Apollo Theatre, Indigo Blues, Milwaulkie Summerfest, Michigan State Fair, Billing Montana State Fair; Great Adventure (Minnesota); State Office Building Summerfest (Harlem USA);
Links
