J Wess Presents Tha LP

James Wesley Essex, better known by his stage name J-Wess, is an American-Australian hip hop and R&B musician. He is based in Melbourne, Australia. His sole album, J-Wess Presents Tha LP, reached the top twenty in Australia in 2004, and included three hit singles. J-Wess was born in Los Angeles, California and played basketball in the National Collegiate Athletic Association while studying business finance at college. In 1999, J-Wess was... invited to Australia to train with the Gold Coast Rollers, a National Basketball League team based on the Gold Coast, Australia. The Gold Coast Rollers folded shortly after he arrived and he moved to Adelaide to play with the Woodville Warriors and the South Adelaide Panthers in the subsidiary Australian Basketball Association. J-Wess has 2 younger L.A based siblings, a sister and a brother. His brother Jason, is producer of 2008 Sundance selected film 'Downloading Nancy' starring Jason Patric and Maria Bello. In the middle of 2003, J-Wess's first single, "Bang This", was released.
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Rhythm and blues, often abbreviated to R&B, is a genre of popular African-American music that originated in the 1940s. The term was originally... used by record companies to describe recordings marketed predominantly to urban African Americans, at a time when "urbane, rocking, jazz based music with a heavy, insistent beat" was becoming more popular. The term has subsequently had a number of shifts in meaning. In the early 1950s, the term rhythm and blues was frequently applied to blues records. Starting in the mid-1950s, after this style of music contributed to the development of rock and roll, the term "R&B" became used to refer to music styles that developed from and incorporated electric blues, as well as gospel and soul music. By the 1970s, rhythm and blues was used as a blanket term for soul and funk. In the 1980s, a newer style of R&B developed, becoming known as "Contemporary R&B". Jerry Wexler of Billboard magazine coined the term "rhythm and blues" in 1948 as a musical marketing term in the United States. It replaced the term "race music", which originally came from within the black community, but was deemed offensive in the postwar world.
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