Home

The Pimps of Joytime, "Workin All the Time"

Steamboat Springs — About five years ago, Brooklyn-based musician Brian J. was getting ready to make a record he knew would lead to creating a band.

He was writing songs in all kinds of styles, but the knowledge that this record would decide his future pushed him in a specific, danceable direction.

“It was going to lead into what I was going to be doing for the next 10 years of my life, if not longer, and I knew that I wanted to have fun and I knew I wanted to have people have fun. … So that led me to say this is going to be a funky-type situation,” he said.

The band became The Pimps of Joytime, a heavily funk-oriented group with elements of soul and a live show that draws on the variation and cohesiveness of Brooklyn’s DJ culture. The band plays a free concert at 3 p.m. Saturday in Gondola Square at Steamboat Ski Area.

Brian J. said concert attendees can expect “a funky good time” from the five-piece band.

“They can expect to dance, and that’s a typical reaction of people at our shows. It’s a funk derivative, so it’s definitely about people moving their body, plus we’ve got some good songs and some nice vocals,” he said.

Listing Sly & the Family Stone, Marvin Gaye, Bill Withers, Muddy Waters and early rock musicians among his influences, Brian J. leads The Pimps of Joytime on vocals, guitar and keyboards. He said the live set tends to flow behind styles in a fluid way.

“We have a lot of different seasonings that we put into our stew and we stir it up. We use ingredients such as Afro-beat, soul, hip-hop, blues, electronic music and rock ’n’ roll. We use a lot of these elements and we mix them together and come up with our own brew, but at the core of everything is funk,” he said.

The Pimps of Joytime are performing as part of the 11th annual Bud Light Rocks the Boat free concert series. Hip-hop and reggae act The Dirty Heads is set to perform April 3, and singer-songwriter Donavon Frankenreiter closes the series on closing day, April 11.