ALBUM REVIEW - Claiming her retro-soul crown

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings "100 Days, 100 Nights" (Daptone)

* * * ½

Since forming in 2000, New York's Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings have built a loyal niche following with their retro-soul sound. Based on funk and R&B styles from the 1960s and '70s, retro soul, like Jones' group itself, has largely stayed off the mainstream radar. Yet, for Jones and the Dap-Kings' third album, "100 Days, 100 Nights," they've enjoyed unprecedented attention, including high-profile features in magazines and on MTV. This new spotlight has an unlikely source: "rival" Amy Winehouse.

The Jones-Winehouse tussle is even less real than 50 Cent and Kanye West's recent, over-dramatized beef. There's been almost no direct jousting between the two women, yet fans and the media happily whip the flames for them. Ostensibly, the issue centers on how Winehouse recruited (read: "stole") the Dap-Kings as her studio and touring band for her multi-platinum, retro-soul-infused "Back to Black" album. The actual source of tension, barely veiled, is a familiar debate that revolves around youth, image and, most of all, race.

Winehouse is white, twentysomething, waif-ish and a tabloid train wreck. Jones is black, fortysomething, full-figured and has no rehab history (she's a former corrections officer). Her last album with the Dap-Kings, "Naturally," has sold 50,000 units over two years; Winehouse's "Back to Black" sold the same amount in the first week of its U.S. release, back in March. These disparities stir up old tensions that compare black "innovators," white "imitators" and their contrasting fortunes.

But casting Winehouse as a modern-day Janis Joplin to Jones' Big Mama Thornton is too easy a jab. The racial dynamics of retro soul have always been complicated: Most bands pair young, white, American and European musicians with older black vocalists -- Jones and the Dap-Kings, Finland's Nicole Willis and the Soul Investigators, Britain's Quantic Soul Orchestra and Spanky Wilson. In a sense, these bands nod to an earlier era of Southern soul studios such as Stax and Fame, where many a black singer -- including Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin -- was backed by an integrated or even all-white rhythm section.