Pursuing Many Paths to Find His Own

THE singer José James’s cool and confident new album, “No Beginning No End,” to be released by Blue Note next week, sounds like the result of the black-pop continuum, jazz and soul and hip-hop and R&B, slow-cooked for more than 50 years.

It descends from a lot of things. First among them are the great neo-soul records of 2000, D’Angelo’s “Voodoo” and Erykah Badu’s “Mama’s Gun.” It’s got the lagging relationships to the beat on the hip-hop records produced in the ’90s and oughts by J Dilla; some of the ballad rumination in Stevie Wonder and Roberta Flack’s records from the early and mid-’70s; the tempos of Sade, the vocal color of Gil Scott-Heron, the phrasing of Billie Holiday.

Its parts don’t have a clinically defined relationship, A + B + C. It’s an evolved compound, and the album sounds evolved in other ways too. It definitely wants to be appreciated by adult women, with songs like “It’s All Over Your Body” and “Come to My Door”: the male soul singer representing sex and trust and ethics, sometimes in duets with calm, female voices — the French-Moroccan Hindi Zahra on “Sword + and Gun,” the New Yorker Emily King on “Heaven on the Ground.” It’s likely to have a following among musicians, especially through tracks like “Vanguard,” with the rhythm section of the pianist Robert Glasper, the bassist Pino Palladino and the drummer Chris Dave, who play an intricate Morse code of funk and negative space. (Mr. Palladino, one of the bassists and producers on “No Beginning No End,” played on the D’Angelo and Badu records; the engineer Russell Elevado, who recorded this one, recorded those too.)

Recorded in New York, Paris and London, the album is on a label famous for jazz, but this isn’t jazz: no solos. It’s got more live-band groove than most singer-songwriter music. It’s a little too warm and inward to be considered R&B. It is not trendy music, but its stubborn nonchalance gives it a kind of originality.

“It doesn’t feel like he’s going for an older-singer kind of vibe,” Mr. Glasper said. “He is jazz. He doesn’t have to walk around proving it. And very naturally he’s a child of hip-hop and R&B. He’s just breathing.”

I first saw Mr. James, 34, at the Thelonious Monk Jazz Competition eight years ago. He was small and compact and still relatively young, but his voice seemed bigger, deeper and older. He sang “Every Day I Have the Blues,” and he seemed to be referring to Joe Williams’s sleek version from the mid-’50s. It was a centered and anxiety-free performance. His bearing implied that he didn’t care whether you liked it or not. It killed the judges, including Jimmy Scott, who waved his hands in the air as if he were in church.

Mr. James had come from Minneapolis, the only contestant in the competition who hadn’t gone to music school. The actor Billy Dee Williams, one of the M.C.’s, told him backstage that he ought to, which irritated him. “I didn’t have money to go to school,” he told me a couple of weeks ago over lunch in Fort Greene, his Brooklyn neighborhood. “It wasn’t a choice.” He didn’t win, but he did go to the New School the next year, staying on to work in the equipment room when he ran out of tuition money.

Then things started to happen — a slowly unfolding series of events routing him through Europe, distant associations with hip-hop and house music, a false start on a once-great jazz label and his current rehabilitation on another one. He has been meticulous this time, financing the recording of “No Beginning No End,” and presenting it to Blue Note as a fait accompli. “Nothing was touched,” he said proudly.

Mr. James grew up on the hip-hop and indie rock of the late ’80s and early ’90s: Ice Cube, Nirvana, the Pharcyde, Digable Planets. He is the son of a Panamanian jazz tenor saxophonist with the same name, though his father didn’t raise him; he lived with his Irish-American mother in Duluth, Minn.; Seattle; and Minneapolis. He joined his Catholic-school choir at 14 when his voice changed, then dropped out of school and worked at odd jobs for a while. “I had really fractured teen years,” he said. “It’s hard to piece it all together.”

At 17 he moved back in with his mother and returned to school; his jobs gave him income to buy records. He did it methodically. First the basics, then a wide-angle understanding of the important labels, and then deep into single artists. (He spent $500 on Mosaic’s 18-CD boxed set of the Nat King Cole Trio on Capitol Records, he said, and listened to nothing else for a month.) Around this time he wrote words to John Coltrane’s solo on “Equinox,” to be sung in the vocalese tradition of Eddie Jefferson and Jon Hendricks. He shared his experiments with older musicians, the saxophonist Douglas Ewart and the pianist Carie Thomas, in Minneapolis, who had connections with Chicago’s avant-garde jazz scene of the 1960s; he started playing with them and forming ideas about the entire arc of jazz history.

After graduating from high school he sought out a vocal teacher, who taught him opera technique but no repertory, just warm-ups and exercises. That was his only formal instruction, he said, besides records. Mr. James knows where his music comes from and speaks with specificity and certainty about what he’s learned. He calls Billie Holiday’s 1950s music on Verve, for example, “the blueprint for ‘Mama’s Gun’: where she sat in relation to the band, the way that the musicians supported her and the lines went through hers, Ben Webster and those guys playing counterpoint. She took her time. The whole behind-the-beat, J Dilla thing, she was all over that. She meant every word she sang. She took you to the pain right away.”

And also: “She would reharmonize a line that sounded like it should have been written that way. And it’s clear that her genius came from her community: she really got tight with her musicians. You hear, in rehearsal tapes, ‘Try this, Billie,’ and she’d sing it like that, and remember it.”

In 2006 he recorded a few tracks, including his vocal version of Coltrane’s “Equinox,” with a band. He went to London for another singing competition, which he also didn’t win, but handed out a lot of copies of his demo; one reached the BBC radio D.J. Gilles Peterson, who had become an important European taste maker, specifically where jazz meets electronic dance music. Mr. Peterson had started his own label, Brownswood, and they made two records together, “The Dreamer” and “Blackmagic.” The first, recorded in New York when Mr. James was still a student, sounds a lot closer to jazz, or his notion of it; the second was made more according to Mr. Peterson’s ears, downtempo dance music with jazz harmony. Among its producers were Flying Lotus, the Los Angeles post-hip-hop producer, and Moodymann, the Detroit house musician.

Mr. James moved to London for a while, and he found an audience in Europe and Japan; he noted with satisfaction that instead of playing jazz clubs for 30 people he was playing spaces like the Paradiso in Amsterdam, a 1,000-capacity club where D’Angelo played last year. But Brownswood had no North American distribution, and it frustrated Mr. James that he had no career in his own country.

“Basically I just feel like it was my image, you know?” he said. “Nobody knew what to do with me. It was either ‘You look like a rapper’ ”— he wears a Yankees cap over a stencil pattern cut into his short hair — “or, if I’m singing standards, ‘It’s not Michael Bublé, it’s not pop, it’s not easy enough to sell.’ ” He played an excellent set at the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival in Harlem a few years ago with Junior Mance, one of his New School teachers, singing blues and standards, but that wasn’t quite him. He played at the Blue Note with McCoy Tyner, singing songs from the album “John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman,” but that wasn’t quite him either. He briefly signed to Verve, the label that once released most of the Coltrane records he loved, but that resulted in “For All We Know,” a drowsy duet album of standards with the Dutch pianist Jef Neve; it won awards in France but didn’t sound convincing here.

So he’s back, reinvented at Square 1. He has great young jazz musicians in his band, including the pianist Kris Bowers, but you won’t see him playing at jazz clubs, if he can help it. (He’ll perform at the Highline Ballroom next Wednesday.) Before long you may not see him in New York at all. “That sense of New York being the hub for artists is gone,” he said. “More and more, people are saying Berlin is cool, Paris is cool, Marrakesh is cool. My label’s here, my musicians are here. But I’m not going to stay here forever.”