Gabriel Roth,a Riverside native and bassist for Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, performs in Solana Beach at the Belly Up Tavern on June 27, 2010. (Vanessa Franko)
This story originally appeared in The Press-Enterprise on June 12, 2009.
BY VANESSA FRANKO
STAFF WRITER
When you add it up, Gabriel Roth has a pretty sweet gig.
The Riverside native is a critically acclaimed producer and songwriter, co-founded an independent record label that has a focus on actual vinyl records, engineered a Grammy-winning song and still finds time to play bass in soul outfit Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, who perform at the Playboy Jazz Festival at the Hollywood Bowl on Saturday.
Granted, it is a bit off the original path for the husband and father who always wanted to be a high school math teacher. But his math training hasn’t been for naught – Roth uses those skills in his musical endeavors.
“There’s a lot of people who just hear melodies and just have music pouring out of their hearts and they’re pulling it out of the sky. I’ve never had that kind of gift,” Roth said in a telephone interview from New York. “I’ve always had kind of a formulaic approach to music, a mathematical kind of head. So learning rhythms and the way chords work and that kind of music theory is still to this day my approach to music.”
As Roth grew up in Riverside, the music of Aretha Franklin, Smokey Robinson and the Beatles floated around his house.
When he was 6 or 7 years old, he and his sister Samra got a keyboard-type toy and he remembered picking out melodies to songs he had heard on the radio.
His sister, who is now a public defender in Fontana, taught Roth his first music theory on the piano.
Roth would bang on coffee cans before playing more formal kits in high school and college playing around in blues bands, jamming at parties with friends.
But just as much as his early musical influences, the tales he would hear at the dinner table impacted him as a writer. His mother, Diane Roth, is now an attorney for the city of San Bernardino. His father, Andrew Roth, is a Riverside civil-rights lawyer.
“I think that definitely influenced some of my lyrics and just being a little progressive and really kind of aware of certain civil-rights challenges that are a lot further from being met than a lot of people pretend,” Roth said.
He ended up going to New York University and found cool courses in recording. He met French record collector Phillip Lehman, who had a record label reissuing rare soul and funk gems. Roth was a fan of the label, and when Lehman moved to New York, they got together and started making records, on vinyl only, with a label called Desco.
“We just wanted to try to make the records that we wanted to hear,” Roth said.
That is the philosophy he still uses with Daptone Records, his company with Neal Sugarman, today.
He connected with Sharon Jones, frontwoman for Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, when she came in to sing backing vocals for soul legend Lee Fields in 1996. When the other singers didn’t show, she did all of the backing vocals herself.
“There was just something about him. God sent him to me,” Jones said about Roth in a recent telephone interview.
Desco crumbled in 2000 and Roth and Sugarman ended up creating Daptone Records, a record label and accompanying studio, which has put out records from Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, Lee Fields, Charles Bradley, Binky Griptite, the Budos Band, Naomi Davis and the Sugarman 3.
The label’s most recent release is Naomi Shelton & the Gospel Queens’ “What Have You Done, My Brother?” which came out in May.
Roth’s pseudonym, Bosco “Bass” Mann, is on much of his music and production work.
“Gabe had a business head, and he put his all into it,” Jones said.
In between the time starting up Daptone and now, the label’s studio got some recognition for being the place where Amy Winehouse recorded her breakthrough “Back to Black.” Roth received credit on the Record of the Year Grammy awarded to her hit “Rehab” for engineering.
There’s a lot of attention paid to detail and the authenticity of the records at Daptone. Tracks are recorded on tape, where there’s not an undo button. Vinyl LP releases have a cover that is glued onto the cardboard, a more expensive process than printing on cardboard, but it gives the listener the true tactile magic of a vinyl record.
In addition to Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings’ busy touring schedule, the band is working on a new record.
Jones said she thinks Roth seems more comfortable than before. He comes back to Southern California when he can to visit family with his wife, Veronica, and infant daughter Penelope.
“My daughter is the best thing I’ve ever made,” he said.
As far as the future, Roth is hoping that one day he may still be a math teacher.