“Twenty thousand people can’t be wrong.” That was the mantra floating around the Brooklyn blogosphere this past August, shortly after Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings – SJDK, as they’re known to their fans in shorthand – electrified an over-capacity crowd at Prospect Park’s outdoor bandshell. Their emotionally charged set was the cap to a steamy Saturday night celebration of funk, soul, torch ballads and hypnotic grooves, with a slew of guests – including veteran shouter Lee Fields and Staten Island’s own Budos Band – on hand to keep the party hot. If there was ever a case to be made for the vibrancy of New York City’s soul scene, this was it.

“I stood there and cried after that show,” Sharon Jones recalls. At 54, with four studio albums now under her belt, she believes she’s just hitting her stride. “With me, my break will come when I’m about ready to retire. I just want to push it. I mean, Prospect Park was crazy, because I never would have thought it would be that big. They said it was the second biggest show they ever had there. And I don’t wanna sound too proud, but any new young soul singer out here now needs to finally stop calling what we’re doing ‘retro.’ If you want to label it, call it soul music today. I don’t do Motown, I do Daptone.”

Jones has a point. Since its launch in 2001, the Daptone label has drawn persistent comparisons to Motown, Stax, King and Aretha Franklin-era Atlantic, not just for its lovingly curated identity and style, but for its sound. Each Daptone release captures a live, in-studio event, recorded for the most part with vintage analog gear, that recalls the raw sizzle of a late-‘60s date with Otis Redding or The Staple Singers.

Daptone co-founders (and fellow Dap-Kings) Gabriel Roth and Neal Sugarman enjoy the buzz, but they insist that their music isn’t just about cranking up a wayback machine. “I could say the Daptone sound is heavily influenced by soul records from the mid-‘60s to the early ‘70s,” Sugarman offers, “and that would probably be a pretty good indication – in all genres, from gospel to soul-jazz to funk to soul. But it’s not Southern soul like Stax, and it’s not slick like Motown; the records are starting to come out now with a mixture that’s ours alone. We’re all musicians who have been playing together for a long time, and like Stax and Motown, a lot of the same musicians are on many of the sessions. To me, that’s where the sound comes from.”

Roth’s stance is more philosophical, firmly rooted in his multiple roles as Daptone’s in-house producer, arranger, engineer and bassist. “There’s a lot of tit-for-tat these days about so-called retro soul music and whether it’s just looking backward or moving forward,” he says. “The thing is, we never had ambitions to recreate or mimic a sound. Very often, people believe it’s a technical thing with us, and that we use certain microphones and tape machines and guitar amps and stuff, but it’s really not about the equipment at all. We just want to make records that feel great.”

Since 2003, when Roth and Sugarman took over a two-family house in the once-hardscrabble, now-hip Bushwick section of Brooklyn, installing a recording studio and label offices in the process, Daptone has spread its influence far and wide. In 2007, the Dap-Kings recorded and toured with Amy Winehouse and producer Mark Ronson, while Sharon Jones joined Lou Reed on stage for his critically lauded revival of Berlin. A year later, the Daptone Horns were recruited by producer (and Roots drummer) Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson to back Al Green on his Lay It Down album and Jones was invited to appear in the Denzel Washington film The Great Debaters. (More recently, she tracked a vocal session for Booker T.’s upcoming album.) Meanwhile, the label itself has expanded, launching a reissue imprint (Ever-Soul) and a subsidiary (Dunham, founded by multi-instrumentalist Tommy “TNT” Brenneck) while gearing up for its 10th anniversary next year.

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings

If it’s been a long strange trip for Roth and Sugarman, then it’s also been a hard-fought one. A dedicated fanbase doesn’t necessarily guarantee an endless string of world tours, sold-out venues and super sessions. There’s always more work to be done, but the heavy lifting began well before Daptone came into existence.

Rewind to 1995. Roth, an undergrad in NYU’s Music Technology program, was soaking up everything he could about studio recording techniques, while Sugarman, on tenor saxophone, was fronting his own Sugarman 3 organ trio with Hammond B3 specialist Adam Scone and drummer Rudy Albin. (The latter cut his teeth with the legendary jazz organist Jack McDuff.) Enter soul aficionado Philip Lehman – an avowed crate digger and archivist with a label, Pure Records, devoted to rare funk reissues.

“A mutual friend hooked us up,” Roth remembers. “I had learned a little bit about engineering and arranging, and just for fun, we started making records. The first one we did was a fake kung fu film soundtrack called The Revenge of Mr. Mopoji. Little by little it all turned into a legitimate business. I never expected to be a record label owner, or even a serious musician. I just stumbled into it and one thing led to another.”

Roth and Lehman would eventually open a basement studio at 440 W. 41st St. in Manhattan, naming their new label Desco in honor of the vacuum cleaner store above them. “There was a guy named Frankie Inglese,” Sugarman continues, recalling his first contact with Desco. “He had a party called Soul Kitchen, and he told me, ‘Man, you gotta get in touch with Phillip Lehman. He’d be into what you’re doing.’ So I went to visit him and Gabe, and we hit it off pretty much immediately. There was a real scene around the label, and they were building a catalog of music that you could relate to. The next day we were like, ‘OK, when can we get in and record an album?’ That was the first Sugarman 3 record.”

Roth not only engineered the jazz-inflected Sugar’s Boogaloo, cementing Sugarman’s commitment to Desco, but nurtured the project from start to finish. Desco rolled out its releases exclusively on vinyl, usually accompanying them with 7-inch singles and B-sides that might have been left off the original album, making them fan-collectible pieces. Eye-catching cover art and packaging were also key elements of each LP – another nod of solidarity to vinyl junkies.

This winning formula would serve as a template for Daptone a few years later, but one Desco project in particular turned out to be the real harbinger of things to come. Shortly before Desco 440 Studios opened for business, Roth and Lehman had recorded an album with Lee Fields, a journeyman soul singer from North Carolina with a grit-and-nails voice. Fields had quietly been making albums since the late ‘60s, and had a song called “Meet Me Tonight” that became a minor hit in 1993. That song was stuck in Lehman’s mind when he tracked Fields down and offered to help him find a backing band.

“I felt like these guys had an idea but at the time, they were a bit green,” Fields observes. “They had more ambition than actual skills. Nowadays, of course, they got the skills, but it took a little while to get that together. But I saw what they had, and it was wonderful, man. I could understand later why they found me – because we had so much in common. They were the new generation of musicians, but they had the same vision I had – they wanted to make what they like, and I think that’s what still keeps everything tight. Daptone today is like a colorful, never-ending entity within itself, and as far as I’m concerned, I get another lift just from watching it grow.”

Soul Tequila, by the Soul Providers featuring Lee Fields, turned out to be as much of a milestone for Daptone as it was for Desco. It marked the beginning of a long-term working relationship with Fields and it featured a funky workout called “Switchblade,” which introduced the sassy attitude and delivery of Sharon Jones. “Gabe needed somebody to do background vocals,” Jones explains, looking back on her first session with the group that would gradually morph into the Dap-Kings. “My ex [tenor saxophonist Joe Hrbek] played with the horn section, so he was like, ‘Yo, my lady sings.’ They wanted three parts, so they asked if I knew any other singers, and I was like, ‘Well, I can do all three parts. Can you layer it down?’ So I went in and did ‘Switchblade’ and that was it. Close to a year later, they called me back to go to Europe, and we opened for Maceo Parker as Sharon Jones and the Soul Providers.”

Budos Band by Kisha Bari

Creative differences between Roth and Lehman eventually led to the demise of Desco, but Roth was convinced there was still plenty more in his tank. “At that point we’d put together a real family of musicians,” he says. “The Soul Providers went through a bunch of changes [in personnel] and the Dap-Kings came out of that. But we had guys from Antibalas and the Sugarman 3 and The Mighty Imperials – a real crew, with Lee Fields and Sharon Jones, and I’d hooked up with [singers] Joe Henry, Charles Bradley and Naomi Shelton. We just wanted to keep making records.”

Sugarman was also intent on continuing to work with Roth, but neither of them had a tangible plan for how to do it. After a studio move to Brooklyn, where they set up in the basement of Antibalas frontman Duke Amayo, Roth and Sugarman tracked the first Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings album ( Dap-Dippin’ ) and the third Sugarman 3 album (Pure Cane Sugar). While they were shopping both projects to numerous labels, the path ahead became clear.

“I think even when we were working on Pure Cane Sugar, we were thinking about starting a label,” Sugarman says. “We had all these contacts from Desco, we had the name recognition and we had the artists. So we just started making phone calls from my apartment in the Lower East Side. Gabe would come by after I’d been up drinking coffee – it’s 12 o’clock and I’m still in my underwear [laughs], selling 45s to all these different distributors and record shops. That’s how it all started.”

The new heads of Daptone sought to foster a creative environment where new ideas were heartily encouraged, artists were paid fairly and everyone involved had a vested interest in the success of the label. (It’s an ethos that extended to Daptone’s employees: One of the first, label vice president Nydia Ines Davila, has an equal say in the curation and musical direction of the catalog.) Of course, keeping up a steady flow of new projects without flooding the system was equally important. Daptone had access to a few albums from the Desco catalog that were ripe for reissue – including the Daktaris’ Soul Explosion, the first two Sugarman 3 albums and an unreleased gem by The Mighty Imperials – but Sugarman and Roth had their ears open for new talent. That’s when the Budos Band came into the picture.

“I was living in Staten Island and playing with a band called Dirt Rifle and The Bullets,” recalls multi-instrumentalist and producer Tommy Brenneck. “We were giving Neal and Gabe demos all the time, and going to Antibalas and Sugarman 3 shows. This was the post-Desco, pre-Daptone period, when they were just figuring out what they were doing with the label.”

With a stripped-down sound modeled after James Brown’s original J.B.’s, Dirt Rifle quickly emptied its clip on funky soul. Changing direction, the band absorbed more percussionists and horn players and began mixing funk with Afrobeat into an “Afro-soul” hybrid. By the time they started calling themselves The Budos Band, recording and releasing their first album with Daptone in 2005, Brenneck was already a full-time Dap-King – having signed on for the second SJDK album, Naturally – and sharing guitar duties with Binky Griptite (who had been involved with Antibalas and the Soul Providers).

“I pretty much started recording at Daptone from day one,” Brenneck says. “I mean, we were knocking down walls and helping them rebuild the house from the inside. Gabe knew I was diehard because I moved from Staten Island to Bushwick just so I could walk to the studio every day, so he became my mentor for recording, engineering and arranging. At one point, I was rehearsing with the Budos Band on Monday and the Gospel Queens on Tuesday – only when I wasn’t on tour with the Dap-Kings, making records with El Michels Affair or my own Menahan Street Band on the side [laughs]. It was extremely busy, but really fertile and creative.”

The Daptone Building by Ann Coombs

At a time when industry-wide CD sales are circling the drain, Daptone is thriving in every format, whether it’s CD, vinyl or digital. Sugarman points to the early years when he and Roth were in the trenches, slowly but surely establishing the label as a brand fans could trust. And if the massive turnout at Prospect Park in August was any indication, the label is winning new converts with each new release. Ten years later, does anyone still really believe this is just a faddish “retro” phenomenon?

“Obviously, we’ve worked really hard in developing an identity and we’ve been very careful with it,” Sugarman explains. “To me, the best part of this whole economic downturn is that it shook out all the bullshit. Honestly, it’s gotten much better for us. Every record outsells the one before it and I have to believe that’s because we’ve never compromised. I think you’ll find this in a lot of small businesses. The ones that are succeeding are quality-based; all the ones that have fallen by the wayside were more about turning over a dollar than offering their community something they couldn’t get anywhere else.”

Looking ahead, 2011 promises to be yet another breakout year. Tommy Brenneck’s Dunham subsidiary, which shook up plenty of sample-hungry hip-hop producers in 2008 with Menahan Street Band’s instrumental opus Make the Road by Walking (including Jay-Z), is planning the long-awaited Charles Bradley debut No Time for Dreaming for January release. Daptone will also oversee the reissue of some classic African funk from Benin by the legendary El Rego – and there’s always the possibility that some unreleased SJDK material will see the light of day. Whatever happens, the label’s founders don’t see any need to disturb the groove.

“I don’t want to grow too big,” Roth insists. “We put out a couple of albums and a bunch of 45s a year, and that’s about as much as I think we can do and still keep our fingers on everything. If we do more than that, then we might start to lose that attention to detail that makes the label real special, right down to the artwork and the 45 labels and everything else. Every record is born from the blood, sweat and tears of the family, and I hope it stays that way. I think we’ve got the best studio in the world and I want to make a lot more records – whether it’s gospel, Afrobeat or soul – just more records that feel good.”