http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/06/arts/music/sharon-jones-headlines-daptones-night-of-soul.html 2014-12-06 01:36:35 Sharon Jones Headlines Daptone’s Night of Soul Sharon Jones and her band, the Dap-Kings, joined other acts on the Daptone Records roster on Thursday for the opener in a three-night stand at the Apollo Theater. === “Right now it’s time for me to shout!” It was a vintage, sizzling soul performance delivered from soul music’s most celebrated stage. Ms. Jones was headlining the The lineup also included the soul belter Charles Bradley and his band the Extraordinaires; Naomi Shelton and the Gospel Queens; the Sugarman 3, an instrumental group whose members are also in the Dap-Kings’s horn section, and Saun and Starr, a duo who also sing backup with the Dap-Kings. The lineup’s outlier was Antibalas, a New York band that plays Afrobeat, the Nigerian funk that Fela Anikulapo Kuti introduced in the late 1960s. Antibalas The rest of the program held both the pleasures and pitfalls of revivalism. It can be easier to reproduce a style than to come up with songs that stand up to memories of hits. Mr. Bradley, who had a long career as a James Brown tribute act, has a redoubtable soul scream and, at 66, many of Mr. Brown’s moves: the quick stepping, the twirls, the microphone-stand tricks and the hip swivels. His songs are more mixed; they often borrow too clearly from Mr. Brown, Otis Redding or Motown. Behind the moves that had the audience roaring, there’s often a bleak side to Mr. Bradley’s songs. He opened his set with the bluesy “Heartaches and Pain,” about waking up to police sirens and learning his brother was dead, fully justifying that scream. Ms. Shelton also has a striking voice, cutting through the harmonies of her three Gospel Queens. It’s a brusque, percussive rasp, and it was as full of conviction when she was praising God as it was when she sang lines like, “Ain’t no stranger to desperate times.” Ms. Jones’s songs hark back to the middle and late 1960s of Mr. Brown, Stax and Motown; her finale was a hyperactive demonstration of dance moves from 1965. Many of her songs take neatly turned, rightful vengeance on unworthy men — “I got better things to do,” she sang, “than remember you” — as she carries them from moan to snarl to airborne high notes. But Ms. Jones, 58, lives in the present, too. When she preached, she recalled being at the nadir of cancer treatment, bald and sore and weak. She took a photograph and posted it to Facebook, where fans rallied behind her with replies like, “We love you bald!” Ms. Jones said. It was a 21st-century story in classic guise.