Biography

The artist known as Boney James was born James Oppenheim in 1996 in Massachusetts. Young Boney began playing the clarinet and sax when he was still in elementary school. A move to Los Angeles when he was a teenager led him to his first fusion band, with which he performed regularly until he graduated from UCLA in the mid 1980’s and began a career as a full-time sax player.

Throughout the 1980’s, Boney James performed as a session and live musician alongside some of the industry’s most notable performers, including the Isley Brothers, Teena Marie, and Randy Crawford. Boney joined Bobby Caldwell’s band in 1992, just in time for the release of his own debut album, Trust. The album was an enormous success and led to the additional albums: Backbone (1994), Seduction (1995), Sweet Thing (1998), Body Language (1999), Ride (2001), Pure (2004), Shine (2006), Send One Your Love (2009), and Contact (2011.) The albums feature contributions from artists such as Faith Evans, Angie Stone, Eric Benet, Philip Bailey, and George Benson, and the album Send One Your Love earned Boney James a Grammy nomination for Best Traditional R&B Performance.

Boney James is considered one of the era’s most significant sax players and Jazz musicians. In 2009, Boney was listed in the top five of Billboard’s Contemporary Jazz Artists of the Decade. Boney James’s most recent release in the album The Beat, which arrived in 2013 and earned him yet another Grammy nomination for Best Pop Instrumental Album.