Success for performing artists in the music business comes in many forms, most of which fly decidedly under the familiar radar of current superstars like Taylor Swift or Bad Bunny, Beyoncé or Harry Styles.
Case in point: South Florida-based blues singer, guitarist and songwriter J.P. Soars (jpsoars.com), leader of the Red Hots trio. He likewise has multiple album releases, radio airplay, placement near the top of album charts, numerous nominations and awards, and international touring experience that includes Europe and South America during a lengthy career.
Yet most of those experiences have occurred while Soars was based out of the decidedly non-musical hotbed of his current residence since 1999, Boca Raton.
In 2009, Soars’ trio won the annual regional International Blues Challenge, sending the trio to Memphis for the finals. The group not only won that competition (which no artist can win more than once), but Soars also earned the coveted Albert King Award as its best guitarist. The stage was set for upward mobility; a departure from Florida to climb higher rungs of the musical ladder seemingly impossible to achieve near the southernmost point in the United States.
Former area guitarists like jazz/fusion icon Scott Henderson had moved to Los Angeles; blues player John Beemiller to Nashville, and traditional jazz artist Jonathan Kreisberg to New York City in search of more and better gigs; higher earnings and profiles. All succeeded to varying degrees, but Soars — whose hands-on approach means he still personally books the vast majority of his band’s gigs, from Florida to internationally — maintains priorities not based in fame.
“I have family in Hobe Sound,” he says. “My brothers and sisters, and now 11 nieces and nephews, are nearby. And once I started touring to so many other places, it actually made me realize how much I really love Florida. I never thought in a million years that I would settle in Boca Raton, but it means that I’m seven minutes from the beach, close to I-95, and Fort Lauderdale is 20 minutes one way and West Palm Beach is 20 minutes the other way. It’s become a central, peaceful location for me.”
The 57-year-old Soars’ ninth album is the new Gypsy Blue Revue (Forty Below, 2026), which features his longtime trio mates Chris Peet (drums) and Cleveland Frederick (bass) as well as classically trained Chicago-based violinist Anne Harris. Her credits include roots music icons Taj Mahal, Keb Mo and Otis Taylor, and the album had been in the works ever since Soars and Harris first crossed paths on the festival circuit in 2019.
“We decided to combine forces and make this into something,” Soars says. “Anne’s great. Her ear is amazing. She’ll latch onto a melody after hearing it one time and can play it back verbatim. She also has a great sense of harmony. She’s very musical, and very easy to work with.”
Recorded live at Tony’s Treasures Studio in Cadiz, Ohio, in June of 2025 with no click tracks and minimal overdubs, Gypsy Blue Revue thus blends studio sound quality with concert energy. Soars’ growling, Dr. John-like baritone stands out on slower original vamps like “Jessie Mae” (co-written with keyboardist the Rev. Billy C. Wirtz), the repurposed “Viper” (initially on Soars’ 2014 release Full Moon Night in Memphis), and “Goin’ to South Carolina.”
And Harris is a textural presence on her introspective composition “May Mountain Waltz” (on which she doubles on mandolin), the Brazilian-influenced instrumental “Paradise,” a reverent cover of Django Reinhardt’s “Minor Blues,” and the raucous “Cigar Box Jam.”
The latter 18-minute track offers an album-ending synopsis of Soars’ open mind and dexterity, encompassing not only blues and rock but jazz/fusion, jam band, pop, Latin and world music. All with the guitarist playing a fretless, two-stringed slide guitar that’s his own design, and for sale both online and on stage. More on all of that later.
Soars took a wayward route toward becoming a longtime South Floridian. Born in Anaheim, Calif., he moved with his family to Arkansas at age 3 before the growing clan relocated to West Palm Beach when he was 16.
“I’m the oldest of seven children,” he says. “My parents had all of us before they turned 30 years old, and my dad was usually self-employed, but things were rough in Arkansas with that big of a family. My parents filed for bankruptcy and we moved to Florida, where the construction business was booming in 1985, and they were able to find work. I had an aunt and grandparents living down here, so that was the seed that brought us south.”
A youthful Soars first found local musical success playing loud, fast, metallic rock during the 1990s with the groups Raped Ape, Paingod, and Divine Empire, a band that toured Europe and Canada. But meeting blues titan B.B. King at age 18 set Soars on a more roots-oriented musical course. Capable of practically any style between his hollow-bodied, two-stringed cigar box, and steel and nylon-stringed hybrid guitars, Soars’ influences include King and Muddy Waters, Reinhardt and Wes Montgomery, Hank Williams and Tito Puente, and Slayer and Black Sabbath.
Before moving to Boca Raton, Soars was working a day job for an established corporation, and even tried relocating to a musical metropolis.
“In 1997, I was working in electronics for Motorola on Gateway Boulevard in Boynton Beach and living in Lake Worth,” he says. “I decided to quit that job and move to Hollywood, California. I wanted to study at the Guitar Institute of Technology in Los Angeles, but I couldn’t afford the tuition. Then my metal band Divine Empire got a record deal, so I was flying back to Florida to record with them. It all made me realize how much I missed my family and this area. So after a couple years in California, I came back to Boca Raton in 1999.”
Divine Empire’s lineup changes and struggles helped Soars transition into a force at area blues clubs’ open jams by the mid-2000s. Starting his original recording career in 2008 with the independent release Back of My Mind, his profile rose quickly after the IBC win in Memphis. An explosive 2011 sophomore album, More Bees With Honey, was followed by Soars’ appearance on the Legendary Rhythm and Blues Cruise, on which he traded solos with Jimmy Thackery, guitarist for Washington, D.C. blues road warriors The Nighthawks. The 2012 album As Live As It Gets documented the occasion, and the 2013 Red Hots release Live From the Netherlands showcased his trio’s own international road prowess.
“When I first heard J.P. Soars,” Thackery says, “I knew right away that he was separate from the rest of the pack.”
“I didn’t even know the album with Jimmy was being recorded,” Soars says. “A couple months later, he told me, ‘That sounds pretty good, so I think I’m going to release it.’”
The ongoing regional collective Southern Hospitality also launched during that same era, featuring Soars and Peet, Bradenton-based singing guitarist Damon Fowler and his bassist, Chuck Riley, plus Memphis vocalist/keyboardist Victor Wainwright. More recent Soars releases include Let Go of the Reins (Whiskey Bayou, 2019), recorded at fellow singing guitarist Tab Benoit’s studio in Louisiana and featuring that blues star’s production and drumming as well. Brick By Brick (2024) and Gypsy Blue Revue have followed in Soars’ recording catalog.
Harris turns Soars’ trio into a quartet mostly during festival appearances, the way it began with them seven years ago. On the aforementioned “Cigar Box Jam” from the new album, she displays influences from Stephane Grappelli to Regina Carter in answering and anticipating Soars’ phrases. And the guitarist’s wizardry on the unorthodox two-stringed instrument includes nuances of guitarists from pop to rock (George Harrison, Jimi Hendrix, Carlos Santana, Jimmy Page), jam bands to jazz/fusion (Jerry Garcia, Jimmy Herring, John McLaughlin, Jeff Beck).
Frederick takes a solo displaying his wide range of influences, plus an impeccable tone influenced by the inimitable Cameroonian jazz/fusion bassist Richard Bona, and Peet’s lengthy break on his toms echoes the work of British phenom Ian Paice of Deep Purple on that group’s anthemic track “Space Truckin.’”
“People have been asking us about recording that track for a long time,” says Soars. “In fact, we decided to record this entire album because so many folks would see us play a festival and ask, ‘Do you have a recording of what we just saw?’ For years, we’ve had to say no, but finally we do.”
As an almost-famous musical artist, Soars is not alone in being content with his comparative anonymity. On a July episode of Fresh Air on National Public Radio with Terry Gross, longtime Patti Smith guitarist and collaborator Lenny Kaye, age 79, expressed gratitude that he’d never achieved stardom because of the prospective fortune and temptations that might’ve resulted.
“I’ve been tempted a little bit to relocate, and it was a learning and growing experience when I moved to L.A.,” says Soars. “A bit overwhelming, actually. The competition for gigs there and in places like Nashville and Austin is insane, while most of our shows still involve playing original music in Florida in spite of the current tribute act craze. I’m happy to be able to play music for a living here. I’ve been able to pay off my condo and student loan, and my vehicles are paid for, all through music. It’s a good quality of life.”
If You Go
See J.P. Soars and the Red Hots at 8 p.m. August 22 at Village Music Café, 10410 Forest Hill Blvd., Wellington (561-798-5334), 5 p.m. August 23 at Rudy’s at Bamboo, 21 S. J St., Lake Worth Beach (561-602-5307), and 7 p.m. August 28 at DAS Beer Garden, 1203 Town Center Drive, No. 116, Jupiter (561-776-8669).