JAY B tape: roots tour: Tacoma Pantages Show
JAY B stood alone at a mic stand under white light for "Sweetie," an unreleased R&B track, and let the backing track cut out entirely on the line "I can't help but sing for you," leaving his voice hanging in the room for a beat before the next song started. It's the clearest statement of what tape: roots is actually trying to do: prove JAY B can hold a room on vocals alone, with the choreography stripped away.
That premise mostly works. The set pulled two songs that hadn't appeared on his previous US tour - "Hush" and "Rainy," the latter released under his earlier stage name JB - specifically to foreground his voice over his dancing, and JAY B said as much from the stage. "Hush" arrived against a backdrop of clouds, the singer in all-white, playing almost as a hymn; "Rainy" worked as a callback for longtime fans who knew him before GOT7 made him a member of a seven-person act rather than a solo artist standing alone under a single spotlight. Both songs ask for control rather than power, and JAY B delivered it - his falsetto on "Layback" was strong enough that he stopped mid-song at the Los Angeles show to catch his breath, joking that the high notes were getting harder as he got older.
The set drew heavily from TR.EE, his third mini album and the reason for the tour in the first place. "Time," "We" and "One Call Away" carried the groove-forward R&B the EP is built on, while "Hold Onto My Back" and "Layback" showed off the falsetto and looser choreography that made his 2022 EP Be Yourself a No. 1 iTunes album in 34 countries. "Dive into You," pulled from the Crazy Love OST rather than his own catalog, was the best vocal moment of the night - a full-voiced ballad delivered center stage with none of the staging tricks the rest of the set leaned on, and the one song where JAY B's range was on display without a single dance step to hide behind.
Then the show ends on a GOT7 medley - "Thursday," "PAGE" and the 2015 track "Before the Full Moon Rises" - and the whole vocal-first premise gets quietly abandoned. It's the most crowd-pleasing stretch of the night, and the chants prove it, but it also undercuts the argument the first two-thirds of the set spent building. A show that opened by choosing songs specifically because they hadn't made his last tour's dance-heavy setlist closes by falling back on the dance-heavy songs everyone already knows. JAY B earns the encore energy; he doesn't need it to make his case.
The tour's small-venue format helps more than it hurts. The Pantages Theater, like the Wilshire Ebell in Los Angeles, is a seated, sub-1,500-capacity room - a scale that let JAY B walk the aisles during the encore, high-fiving fans directly rather than working an arena floor from a runway. That intimacy is the whole selling point of tape: roots, and it's also the thing a bigger production couldn't replicate.
tape: roots continues to Palladium Times Square in New York on September 23, The Bomb Factory in Dallas on September 25, and closes at Chicago's Copernicus Center on September 27.
