James Moseley Band ready to Blow Your (Welcoming) Faces Off

The concerts - held on the last Friday of the month through September - continues with its second show tomorrow and the namesake of the James Moseley Band is worthy of a hearty welcome to his new hometown.

Moseley, a stalwart on Marin's live music scene, really deserves the welcome wagon from all of us Novatoans since he recently bought a home here — very close to where the band will play Friday evening — after almost two decades in Mill Valley.

“Novato is nice and very welcoming,” he says with his deep, gravelly voice. “We love it. Glad we made the change. ... The people are really warm and considerate. That’s been our experience so far.”

I love hearing that about our large but little town, don’t you? Somebody get this man a plate of cookies and a pie!

Expect a mix of dance-oriented rhythm and blues, soul and reggae from this seven-piece band, which includes two women on horns, including one who played on David Bowie’s “Young Americans” album. Both are also members of the highly esteemed Montclair Women’s Big Band, but more about these exciting gals with chops in a moment.

The show at at the renovated shopping plaza in Ignacio will be the first time Moseley will play Novato with this particular band formation, but he’s played at with a rhythm and blues quartet called the Groove Zone and as part of a jazz guitar duo 13 Strings at .

The James Moseley Band features a horn section powered by two dynamos including the assistant director of the Montclair Women’s Big Band, Jean Fineberg, on tenor saxophone and flute and Marina Garza on trumpet and flugelhorn. The Montclair Women's Big Band performed at the Women in Jazz festival at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., five years ago.

Fineberg not only toured and recorded with David Bowie but also Sister Sledge and the late Phoebe Snow, to name just a few. She has the distinction of playing Carnegie Hall with none other than Dizzy Gillespie and Clark Terry.

“I'm having a ball playing with the James Moseley Band,” she reports, “The musicians are all top-notch and the band really rocks. I always have a great time.”

She says she loves playing "A Change is Gonna Come" because "the message is so wrenching and powerful, and James Moseley sings the heck out of it!" she says. "I (also) love all the James Brown tunes he does, because I'm a die-hard James Brown devotee.”

Asked the same question, Garza, who is also band leader for Orquesta D'Soul, a Bay Area salsa band that opened for Marc Anthony back in 2002, says she loves Michael Jackson's "I Want You Back."

Even though the weather for last month’s Pacheco Plaza show with Steve Lucky and the Rhumba Bums was a bit on the chilly side, it didn’t stop people from being out and about enjoying their home-made picnics of wine and cheese and the plethora of take-out options available in the plaza. The weather this time promises to be pretty darn perfect for an outside concert starting around 6:30 p.m. with sunny skies and temperatures in the 70s on what will be, of course, one of the longest days of the year.

Some chairs are provided but you are welcome and encouraged to bring your own. Parking is quite plentiful, but carpooling is always a good idea since 600 or more people are expected.