The Velvet Jellyfish

A jellyfish, as any schoolchild who has been stung by one will tell you with feeling, has no heart, no brain, and no spine — and the six musicians who gathered in a Memphis kitchen by way of Detroit, Philadelphia, Richmond, Dallas and the South Side of Chicago would like it understood that the name is a joke, and that the joke is on the name, because they are nothing on this earth but heart. What they have appointed themselves to do is keep every room of American soul music lit at the same time, all of them, at once, on one electricity bill.

The Detroit church and the Hitsville snake pit, the Memphis horn section and the Philadelphia string date, the incense apartment in Brooklyn and the three-in-the-morning session where the lights on the board are the only stars — they walk between all of them mid-record and refuse, on principle, to be cool. Warmth, here, is a discipline; cool, as they like to say, is a refrigerator setting. Mama Pearl runs the kitchen and the key, the Tides answer every chorus and ask no follow-up questions, and the whole thing hangs in one black-velvet frame whose eyes follow you across the room.