Updating Howard’s Event Schedule:
On January 29, 2017, Howard will appear at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem as part of an extended celebration of his 75th birthday.
Melissa Slocum (bass), Yayoi Line (piano), and the great Newman Taylor Baker (drums) join the fun. More Info here:

Howard new CD: Howard Johnson and Gravity – Testimony
2017 CD is soon to be released on Tuscarora Records
Until then, you can check out 2 cuts from the CD on SoundCloud here.

Howard Johnson is a foremost tuba, baritone sax and cornet player who has recorded and toured with an all-star roster of musicians for more than half a century. He got his first break from Charlie Mingus, was mentored by Gil Evans, became (and still is) a longtime cohort of Taj Mahal and Levon Helm, and spoke with John Lennon on the night he died.  He leads Gravity, a first-class tuba choir, and a German-made tuba bears his name. Recently he sat down for a lengthy interview with ROLL magazine in his Harlem apartment.

How did you come to be a tuba player?

I have a thing for low pitches—the bass voices in our church choir, the sounds that came through the floor at my uncle’s place. He lived over a juke joint and if I spent the night and slept on the floor, I could hear the bass line very well. And that was very satisfactory. When I was in the junior high school band in Ohio, trying to be a percussionist, the tubas and the sousaphones had their bells pointing to where I was and I could hear what they were playing. I liked it a lot. But I never thought of playing the tuba, it just didn’t occur to me. Actually, it was totally by accident that I ever started to play the baritone sax.

The bandleader suggested I try it. He definitely didn’t need me in the percussion section, clanging around on cymbals and stuff like that, which he considered clowning. But he had a schedule that left him in our junior high school for about an hour-and-a-half with nothing to do. He said that he would teach me to play in that time, since I had a study hall that I was glad to get out of. But then the long-asked-for change in his schedule came through, so he had only two opportunities to get with me. In those two days, he taught me how to handle the reed on the saxophone and he taught me two scales. It was around April so he said, ‘Take it home and see what you can find out about it.’ So I effectively taught myself to play the baritone sax that way. I was about 12 at the time, but I was a year ahead in school so the rest of my class was 13.

Howard Johnson’s Tuba by Catherine Sebastian

How did you progress from baritone sax to tuba?

After about a year, I was in a different junior high but with the same band leader. I noticed that the baritone sax parts in a concert band are like tuba parts and the reason they’re probably like that is that if you don’t have any tubas in your band, you’re gonna make one of your saxophone players play the baritone—hopefully the one who doesn’t play as well as the others so that the notes are covered. It’s not the majesty of the tuba, it’s more kind of oinky than that. So it’s oink oink instead of oompah.

I noticed that not only are the parts similar, but some of the fingering was similar between the brass instruments with three valves and the saxophone. I thought that was pretty interesting. Whenever there was a note coming up that I didn’t know the tuba fingering for, I’d stop and watch them and learn what that note was – just out of curiosity. I learned a lot of things that way. It occurred to me that maybe I could play a chromatic scale on the tuba since I had the knowledge of the fingering. So I tested it out, but I had to do it surreptitiously because you weren’t allowed to touch other players’ school-owned instruments and that band director was very strict about that. So I waited until he left the room and I played my chromatic scale on the tuba, down and then up and I was about to do something else when I looked up and he was there and watching me. It was already May at that time, just a few more weeks left in school and I thought, ‘I’m going to get detention until the end of the year.’

The band director said, ‘How long have you been playing the tuba?’

I said, ‘I’m very sorry and I’ll never do it again.’

He asked me how I learned, and I said I learned the fingering from watching the tuba players. He asked how I managed to get a tone.

And I said, ‘I don’t know, do I have a tone?’

He said, ‘Yeah, you really do. People play that instrument for weeks, sometimes months, without being able to get a solid tone. And you just played a chromatic scale.’

He said, ‘You’re going to go to the high school band next school year and they are not only going to do halftime shows at the football games, they’ve been invited to the Tournament of Roses parade in Pasadena. There’s a lot of competition among the drummers and you were never that good. They don’t march a baritone sax but they’re graduating five seniors from the tuba section so they need somebody and it would give you the best chance of making the band. I’d say your only chance.’

So did that convince you?

Actually I put my mind on something else, because all I really got out of that conversation was ‘no detention.’ If he didn’t give me any detention, I was cool. But the next day I got a call to go to the high school and speak to the band director. What I didn’t know was that my band director called the high school one and told him he had found a kid who could play the tuba. The other band director asked when I learned to play .

‘Well, he says he just started today.’

The high school band director couldn’t believe it and that’s why I was summoned to go down there. But I didn’t know what was going on.

He said, ‘Mr. Reed says you can play the tuba.’

I said, ‘I just was trying out on some kid’s horn and he caught me.’

He asked what I had played, and I said that he must have heard me play a chromatic scale, and he asked me to play one for him. He put a sousaphone on my shoulder and I did what I had done the day before. And he looked at me and looked very suspiciously. I was just a ninth grader, but not emotionally a ninth grader, since I just turned 13 in August.

He asked me to articulate the scale in triplets, so I did that. It was a bit rocky coming back up, but I did it. Then he gave me a piece of music – a march or something like that – and I played that. All of a sudden, he slammed his hand down on the desk and said, “Who’s been teaching you to play? Tell me right now!’

He couldn’t believe that I could have just started yesterday and be able to play that well. And I said, ‘Well I did it, but I ain’t doing it no more!’

Howard with fellow Washington High School Marching Band member Margret Steffens, Massillon Ohio, 1958.

After he got me calmed down, he said I might be able to make the high school band if I played the tuba. I didn’t know there was anything unusual about what I did. I didn’t know that people did struggle and didn’t want to play it and weren’t motivated. The way I put it is: There’s not much I could have done in my life to avoid becoming a tuba player. It was on its own track by the time I got on it.

So you were a born tuba player?

I have a certain kind of thing with my visual input that other people don’t have. I literally did learn to play by watching the others, because what they were doing meant something to me on an unconscious level. It’s just a total coincidence that I did what I did at that moment and not when the director was safely out of the way. But it’s the same brain system that allowed me to read when I was 3 ½ because my sisters would read things to me that I memorized and I would take the books and pretend I was reading. And I knew it said ‘Hickory, dickory, dock’ but I hadn’t studied them consciously. One day I had a comic book and noticed that in the dialogue balloons, there were a couple of words that I knew.  I was started to scan for words I knew and suddenly, I knew them all! That just happened during the scan and it didn’t seem strange to me at all because it was so natural. I thought that’s how it is. You’re not able to tie your shoe properly and then one day you can. I thought reading must be like that.

You had something special right away?

There was only one other person who was even trying to do what I was doing, and he was getting over even though he was not very good. He was just a year older than me although we were in the same class.  But he acquired a tuba, and I was so envious. I had been playing around with the baritone sax, but I kept telling people I was a tuba player. Their idea of what a tuba player does was what this other guy did. And it was frustrating to have to say, ‘I don’t play like that.’ His whole physical approach to it was totally wrong—he was a guy with a big overbite in his jaw and a big gap in his teeth and he played the tuba with his teeth clenched. But if you listened to what he played, he had good ideas and real soulful conception but he was just not able to execute. And he had the same idea as a lot of people – after all, it’s a tuba! What do you want?

The first year that I played, I rapidly developed a really powerful upper range. I thought I was playing catch-up—that all the stuff that I taught myself to do, the others could already do it. There was a dynamic in the band between the kids who learned in school and the ones who took private lessons. And I didn’t even learn by the school route. The ones who were the best in the section were kind of like role models, I wanted to play like them someday. But by the end of that school year, I could play much better than they could. And I could do a lot of other things.

Like what?

I developed as an arranger because I was already listening to jazz and I had a little band.  I was surprised to find out that if you have a band, you can’t just go out and buy the music. There were stock arrangements but I didn’t really know what else to do. I would think, ‘My part should go like this, and the melody should go like this, and for these two other voices I can find some good notes in between.’ I’d never heard of an arranger.

When we were coming back from the Rose Bowl on the train, I talked to an older guy who had his own band. I told him about my little kid band and what we played and he asked about the instrumentation, and who was the arranger.

I said, ‘We don’t have one of them.’

And he said, ‘Wait a minute, where does the music come from?’

I said, ‘I write out all the parts,’ and he said, ‘So you’re the arranger.’ I had never heard of that before.

What drew you to jazz?

I was listening to everything. I listened to not only the Grand Ole Opry but to WWVA Jamboree from Wheeling, West Virginia, Friends and Neighbors, and there were radio stations that had gospel programs. The jazz programs would be like Duke Ellington, and Count Basie, but there was a new station that was a bebop station. They had Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker and Dexter Gordon and they were very exciting because their music sounded like they were taking chances. They were being very much in the moment and the notes came out as they would. Finally I developed favorites. I still liked all kinds of music, but my favorites tended to be on the bebop station – Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley, some of the west coast people too. I found out later that I mostly liked the west because it was simpler stuff and I could learn more about it but after a while I couldn’t dig the west coast at all except for a couple of players. But I decided that I was gonna go as far as I could in that music. I felt like I had something to offer. There was always room for something new in that scene and there was quite a lot of support in it.

Howard Johnson by Catherine Sebastian

When did you start playing professionally?

My older sister Terry was a dancer. At first, she was not encouraging about me being a musician because she had some friends who were musicians who were like starving artists. But after she decided that I might be good enough to make it, I was doing most of my gigs with her. She’d come to a party where they rented a hall and she did a 20-minute dance thing that was kind of exotic. They called it “exotic dancing” but that didn’t mean what it does today. You had to be dancing, not just wiggling. People really liked it. And if I went with her, I could save her a lot of time by dealing with the band and being in her show. If I was there to help her, she could maybe book three gigs in a night, although we mostly did two.

One night she asked me if I thought I could handle myself with some ‘real’ musicians. So I sat in with this friend of hers in Cleveland. I did a couple of really clumsy things. Like there’s a tune called “Midnight Sun” and I didn’t know the bridge, the middle part. I didn’t know the bridge to anything, I didn’t know you had to learn that part. They decided to close the set with an ‘up’ tune. I agreed, but I didn’t know they meant up-tempo. They started the tune and I was like, ‘oh shit’ so I blew a couple of choruses of the blues and bailed out of that. I don’t know what it sounded like to any of them, but it was kind of safe. I knew these notes could work but I didn’t know if any of it was getting across. When they came off the bandstand, I was very contrite and I wanted to go hide but I just sat there and owned up to it.

I said, ‘I don’t want you to think that I think that’s how I should play.’

And he said, ‘You got the wrong idea! You come in here, you’re in tune and you’re all fired up and you bring a lot of spontaneity to the bandstand. That lets us know that however well you say it, you’ve got something to say.’

In those days, if they really wanted to compliment a guy, that was the biggest compliment: ‘That cat is saying something. He’s not just holding his horn, he’s not just running his notes, he’s saying something.’ So that was major encouragement. They could have used that same incident to slam me. But they were particularly encouraging and so I kind of had that like a protective cloth. I could go out and play with anybody within reason.

What I was doing on the tuba was not being done in jazz or anywhere else. There was a prescribed role for it in classical music that was maybe interesting and challenging, but it wasn’t like jazz where you can just go everywhere and really tap into your expression.

How did you get to NY?

After high school, I was in the navy and sent to Boston. There I met the great jazz drummer Tony Williams, who was about four years younger than me. I was 18 and he was 14 and he was already the baddest drummer in Boston. And between him and the best cats in Boston and the guys who were going to Berklee School of Music, like Chick Corea, Skip Beckwith, I had a pretty good environment to develop. But I didn’t think I was ready to go straight from Boston to NY after I got out, so I had an idea to spend two years in Chicago, being around some good cats to be able to develop and also be able to buy a tuba, because I didn’t have one! When I had been there three or four months and working in a Montgomery Ward warehouse, I went to see John Coltrane at a club. He had Eric Dolphy with him and I started chatting him up. He was very interested in what I had to say about the tuba because he thought it had a lot of problems. And I said I could pretty much play on the tuba whatever I could play on the baritone sax. He said, ‘You don’t mean like up tempo.’  I didn’t have this deal where I’m gonna become a tuba innovator, I just wanted to be a jazz musician. I wasn’t thinking about that, but it started coming out like that at certain points. So he said: ‘If you can do half of what you say you can do, you shouldn’t be waiting two years here, I think you’re needed in NY now.’ So I thought, ‘It’s February, maybe I should go to NY in August.’ I thought about it some more and I left six days later.

When and how did you finally get a tuba?

Howard Johnson by Catherine Sebastian

A couple days after I arrived in NYC, I went up to Manny’s on 48th St. to start looking around for tubas. They all cost over $1,000. A guy who was actually a painter had this really big tuba and I tried to play it but I was just hopeless. He sent me to Walter Sear, who had one that was $900. So I said I’d like to try it out. I was so excited to have a tuba in my hands, I didn’t warm up or anything. I just started blowing all the shit I knew and he was knocked out. He said he’d like to see me play his horn because he designed it too. Actually he modified it, it was a basic Belgian manufacturer’s design but he changed a lot of things on it. And he let me have it for cost, which was $450. So I did what I had to do to get the $450 together and the next day I went to a jam session. In those days, people who could play—even great people—came to jam sessions and that’s how I met Roland Kirk (Rahsaan Roland Kirk), Paul Bley, Carla Bley, Joe Albany, Jimmy Wormworth, and I played until I just couldn’t play anymore. My chops were sore and I couldn’t play in my usual register so I said, ‘Ok, I’m started.’

What was your first big break?

I guess the big break came about a year and a half later. I was coming from somewhere and I had my tuba and wanted to stop into the Five Spot on the corner of 4th St. and the Bowery. I went to hear Charlie Mingus’ band and I was trying to be unobtrusive, trying to look small in the back in the dark. I heard the band coming out from the back and Jaki Byard played piano in the band and I sort of waved to him. Now In ’64 Mingus had a triumphant concert at the Monterey Jazz Festival. That was in September, and this was late October. He had it recorded and pressed and sort of out in the world by mail order. He took some musicians from the east but he also used some who live out in California, including his first bass teacher Red Callender, who was also a tuba player, a very good tuba player. They’d just done the Mingus in Monterey thing and they wanted to do that same music at Birdland here. Red Callender was supposed to come out and play the tuba part. Mingus was mad at the two New York tuba players who purported to be jazz musicians, but he had just gotten a call from Red Callendar saying that he couldn’t come east, he couldn’t get away from his studio commitments. So Mingus was pretty unhappy about that because rehearsal was supposed to be the next day. Jaki Byard was from Boston and I had met him before but he didn’t really know my playing on tuba, he just knew I was a good baritone sax player. He told Mingus, ‘There’s your tuba player back there.’

Now Mingus called every group he had The Jazz Workshop. One of the reasons was it gave him license to do anything with the music and the musicians on the stage. When he addressed the musicians, he did it on the microphone. When Jaki said, ‘There’s your tuba player,’ he went on the mic—he always had a built-in suspicious look, his brows were always knitted—and he said, ‘You mean that kid back there?’ By this time, the audience was looking around and Mingus said, ‘Well, he seems to have a tuba but can he play it?’ And Jaki said, ‘Yeah, I think he’s pretty good.’ And Mingus said, ‘But does he play behind the beat like other tuba players?’ and Jaki didn’t want to commit to any more so he said, ‘Why don’t you ask him?’ So now the audience is fully engaged, right? And he looks at me with that suspicious look and he said, ‘What tunes do you know?’ Now I didn’t understand this question, because what tunes do I know? I know everything I need to know! I’m a jazz musician, right? I knew the bridge to everything by then. So when he said what tunes do you know, I was confused. I wanted to answer so I said, ‘Well, what tunes do you want to hear?’ And the audience went whoooa…and I’m like, oh shit, what did I do? And Mingus was known to punch people out. It wasn’t really true, but he was known. But he said, ‘Oh, you bad, huh? Come on up here and let’s see about this.’ So it was Jazz Workshop and he auditioned me right there. I wasn’t too worried about that because I knew that even if I didn’t play that well, it would exceed expectations. But he started getting really detailed.  We started off with some blues tune and when he stopped the band, he said, ‘In your last chorus, you started doing some doubling up,’ in other words, not playing eighth notes, playing 16th notes in my improvisation, in my solo. So he said, ‘You couldn’t play an up-tempo tune like that, could you? You couldn’t play a tune like ‘Cherokee’?’ That was a standard fast tune for jazz musicians in those days. And I said yes, so we counted off ‘Cherokee’ and I did a couple of choruses of that and he stopped the band again and said, ‘Ok, you’re hired. Rehearsal is here at the Five Spot tomorrow at 2.’

So that was your ticket.

Howard Johnson by Catherine Sebastian

Playing at Birdland, I got to know a lot of people. No one knew anything about me at all but even just playing Mingus’s parts, they were hearing something they had not been hearing before. That’s where I met Jerome Richardson—he took down my number for studio work—John Coltrane, because he was on the bill, and an unknown comic named Flip Wilson, his first gig of that type in New York. Mingus didn’t take the big band everywhere, but in November we were going to play that same music in Toronto, Canada for the CBC. Mingus had gotten work visas for the other New York guys and he called and said he wanted to bring his new tuba player. They said, “It’s not possible, you’ve already got six Americans and even if all the rest are Canadian, it’s too many visas.’ He said, ‘Ok, just find me a Canadian who can play tuba and baritone sax.’ So I went to Canada, my first time out of the country.

In 1965, Mingus had written a lot of new music and he also had done a reductive score of some of the Monterey music. He was working with a new band, which wasn’t a real big band but it had three trumpet players—all specialists—his usual alto sax player and the great Julius Watkins on French horn. There were six horns altogether, bass and drums. We did a couple of weeks in each of the summer months at the Village Gate. The first one was opposite Thelonius Monk and his Quartet, the second one was with Cannonball Adderley’s Sextet and the third one was with the Les McCann Trio, so these were pretty great shows.  I think it probably cost $6 to get in. Even in 1965, that wasn’t too much. So that was my first couple of years in NY.

Got any Thelonius Monk stories?

One time Mingus came in the room, and Monk stood up with a big smile on his face and said, ‘Hey Ming, what’s happening baby?’ They were obviously very fond of each other.  Monk was holding a cigar box and he came over and shook Mingus’ hand and he said,  ‘Hey Ming, ya wanna get high?’ And Mingus was not any kind of druggie but this was an example of pure peer pressure. So he said, ‘Yeah, Monk’ and Monk said, ‘Me too!’ And he opens this cigar box and he has a variety of colors, sizes, shapes of pills and he reaches in, takes a handful, doesn’t even look but throws them in his mouth and chokes them on down. And he says, ‘Yeah, Mingus come on.’ And Mingus was looking to identify something, and finally took a handful and threw them down too. I was like oh shit! Mingus says, ‘Man I don’t know what that shit was, I don’t know what it’s gonna do to me. You guys keep an eye on me and take charge if I start getting too far out.’

Did you ever get to play with Miles Davis?

I did occasionally. But the day that I came to NY, I called Tony Williams—we left Boston the same week: I went to Chicago, he went to NY—and woke him up.—And he was hardly awake but he said come on over. So I go over and when I got up there he was putting his coat on, and when we got on the sidewalk he said, ‘Man, I’m about to explode. Something happened that I can’t tell anyone about. You’re the only one I can trust with the information.’ I thought he was going to say he had cancer or something, but he said, ‘I’m opening at the Vanguard Tuesday with Miles Davis.’ Now this was his dream job from the time I knew him when he was 14, he wanted to play with Miles. The previous year, we’d been hanging out with Jimmy Cobb, Miles’ drummer, all week. Tony wanted to sit in with Miles, but Miles never acted like he was interested at all. Finally Jimmy Cobb said, ‘I don’t want to discourage you, but Miles said the last thing in the world he wants to hear is some 16-year-old kid fucking up the drums.’ So Tony went backstage to talk to him about it and Miles wouldn’t talk to him. He said [in Miles’ voice—HJ: Most people do his voice when they quote him]  ‘Sit out there and listen.’  And Tony said, ‘But I just…’ and Miles goes, ‘I said just sit down there and listen.’ He said, ‘But can’t I…?’ and Miles is like, “Motherfucker did you hear what I said? Sit out there and listen, you might learn something.’ And that was going to be it for Miles. This was less than a year later, and Tony said, ‘I don’t want anything getting back to Miles that I’m saying I got the gig or anything like that, that will ruin the deal. And I said, ‘I won’t say nothing to nobody but I’m going to be in the front row at the Vanguard on Tuesday.’ So that was beginning of a long association with Miles for Tony. The only things I ever did with Miles in those days were studio presentations, and Tony was on those.

Later that year, I got invited to the second annual Berkeley Jazz Festival at UC– Berkeley with Gil Evans. Miles’ people had put this whole thing together without talking to Gil about it, and Gil was miffed about being handled like that so he didn’t want to do it. I huddled up with Darlene Chan, who put on the festival, she was a junior that year. I’d played that festival a year earlier with Gerald Wilson’s band from LA and I knew that Darlene was totally competent. And I wanted to go and play with Gil! So I got Gil and Darlene together on the phone and they worked everything out. And that was the first time I played with Miles.

Is there one of these musicians who you consider your mentor?

If we’re talking mentors, I have to say Gil Evans. He came to a gig that Mingus had and I thought, ‘Oh wow, Gil Evans, here’s my chance to meet him.’ I took my horn in the back and when I came out, he was gone! What I didn’t know was that he had asked Mingus for my number. He called me a few days later for a gig. And for the next 22 years, I did most of what he had to do.

Who else did you play with in your early days in New York?

I did a lot of playing with Archie Shepp, and also Hank Crawford, the great Memphis alto player who played with Ray Charles a lot. He played baritone sax and then moved to alto and was section leader of Ray’s first big band. He had a nice band, playing real soulful stuff. I was in the high-energy avant garde band of Archie Shepp when out was really “out.” I went in there with this thundering headache and had to play high-energy tuba and just not even let up for a good hour and a half. I found out that when I was blowing the tuba, the pressure equalized and the headache abated. And as soon as I was taking a breath, it would come crashing back in. And so I started blowing again. As long as I kept blowing, that headache was gone. And the guys in the band said, ‘Man, you were furious tonight!’ I never had another headache like that and I rarely have one now. When I say rarely I mean maybe two in the last four years.

Did you live anywhere else before settling in New York for good?

I went to LA at the beginning of 1967. I had a two-year plan then too, but I only lasted nine months. And I tried living in LA another time in 1972 and I said I’d give myself eight months this time, but I only lasted two. It’s not the place for me. When I was living in LA, I practiced a lot and developed my high register even more and I realized that if you’re in a big band and in the trombone section mostly you don’t have to play as high as what I was playing. I started thinking about a tuba choir.

So that was the beginning of Gravity?

That was the beginning of Substructure, my first tuba band. Dave Bargeron, when I had last seen him, had just started playing the tuba. He had a couple of kids and kept teaching jobs to help him stay out of Vietnam. He spent a lot of time playing that E flat tuba. I knew Jack Jeffers was starting to play tuba so I thought I could probably pull together some New York players. It was the spring of 1968 and I had met Bob Stewart by then. I went into one of the old banjo clubs—Your Father’s Moustache—where I used to play, and saw they had a black tuba player! I wondered who he was, it turns out to be Bob and we started hanging out. So I decided now is the time to get this ensemble together. The first time we heard the sound with these instruments playing harmony we realized: There’s nothing like that. There’s been nothing like that, ever. The sound seemed to get inside you and vibrate along with your body.

At first we just had four and there was always one guy who wouldn’t show up and I’d need Bob to help out. I couldn’t put him in the band because I wanted to have regular rehearsals and I couldn’t ask him to come from Philly. But he asked if I would mind if he just showed up anyway. I said, ‘If you feel you want to but there might not be anything for you to do.’ Well, there was always something for him to do. And he did it better than expected. I was staying in a loft in Chelsea and Bob would drive in from Philly on Friday and then go back home and drive in again on Saturday to play those two nights. So I let him stay with me and we did a lot of playing. I could see that he was able to do anything but hadn’t asked himself to do some of it. I kind of pushed him in a couple of directions like that and he responded very powerfully. But a record, that didn’t happen until 1996 with Gravity, a long way from 1968.

Gravity, 1977 — Photo by Armen Kachaturian

You have quite a long history with the Woodstock area.

The first time I went to Woodstock might have been when we were rehearsing the horn section for Taj Mahal’s The Real Thing—the record with the horns and the tubas—in January of 1971. We went out to a house called Pooh Corners on 212 out in Shady. As it evolved into an east coast/west coast band, the west coast cats all stayed up in Woodstock. Of course there were some Woodstock residents in the band—John Hall, Greg Thomas, and John Simon. Later in 1972, I had a nice place in New York but thought I’d like to find a cheap rental in Woodstock. Turns out it was possible in those days, so I took over a place up there and kept my NY situation too.

When and how did the connection with Taj come about?

That was in 1970. There was a guy who wanted to manage me—he had heard the tuba band and decided it could really be popular and wanted to get in on whatever we were gonna do. He’s one of the guys who thought Taj would be interested. Another friend of mine also knew Taj in Massachusetts where he was going to school brought him down to a rehearsal we were having. I had no reason to think that he would be interested in us at all. He got very excited and energized and said ‘I’d love to have the sound of the tubas but I don’t know if we could make a whole show.’ So then I got excited and started encouraging him. I said, ‘Well, some of us can play other instruments and we can get a lot of sound varieties with these same guys because I also play saxophone and tuba guys are very good trombone players. Bob Stewart and I can get enough out of our flugelhorn playing, we wouldn’t have to turn into Dizzy Gillespie or anything, we just have to play these parts.’

Then Taj went on tour to Europe and he stayed over there after the tour was over. He hung out on Ibiza and sent me these seemingly cryptic letters about what we’re going to do in the future with the horns and I’m saying ‘Yeah, man, we’re going to do that’ and sometime in December he called me and said – breathless as he always was – ‘How long would it take to rehearse before we could do an actual gig?’ And I said, ‘With my guys, two weeks tops.’ And he said ‘Well, we should probably start rehearsing on Jan. 1 because we open at the Fillmore East on the 15th and we’re playing the 15th and 16th and then we’re going to go open for Little Richard in Pittsburgh and then we’re going to the west coast to play the Fillmore and the whole west coast Fillmore circuit.’

I’m like, ‘wow, that’s really great!’  But the thing is, not only was I not ready to do it, I didn’t have a band! The guys were all doing other things, in fact Joe Daley and Earl McIntyre were not even in my band. We just played together every week. We had gigs sometimes—we played the Fillmore that summer, but didn’t go out on tour. One of the guys had become an assistant conductor on some Broadway show. Another one had one of those Johnson Administration War on Poverty gigs that he was not going to leave until that money was gone. Bob Stewart was teaching school. I just didn’t have the people!

Earl and Joe had come to rehearsals and they did very well on their tubas and I knew both of them already as being able to play the trombone. Earl was only 17. He was a kid bass trombonist, and a well-developed player. I called Bob Stewart and he said, ‘That would have been great, but here I’m stuck with the Board of Education.’ So the only one I could rely on was Dave Bargeron. I called Dave and he said, ‘Well, I guess you heard the good news!’ And I said, ‘What news?’ And he said, ‘I just went with Blood Sweat and Tears.’ And I said, ‘Oh shit, man.’ And he said, ‘What kind of reaction is that?’ And I told him and he said, ‘Man, that would have been great!’ but he’s making big money with BS&T. So I had nobody. And just as I was about to fall into a deep depression, Bob Stewart called back and said, ‘I’m in. We’ll let the Board of Ed figure out what it wants to do, but I came here to play.’ So that made me feel a little better.

I still had to chase down Earl and Joe. Earl had just started at Mannes School of Music and he had just finished his semester. I thought this would be a great time to take a break from that, go out on the road, make a little money, have some fun. But because he was only 17, I had to get around his mother. So I talked to her and she wasn’t downright suspicious, but she didn’t want anything to be going wrong. Not only was he not 18, but she had no idea what he’d be facing with us (everybody in the band was in their 20s. I was on the far end of that.) So I was talking and tap dancing and she kept saying, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s all very fine’ and I said, ‘He’s gonna have nine big brothers looking out for him.’ And she said, ‘That’s all fine what you say, but if anything goes wrong, he’s coming home.’ So we kind of had Earl. And I went and found Joe. Joe was thinking about not playing tuba anymore because he didn’t think he did very well when he came and played with us. But it’s a very specialized ensemble and nobody’s just going to walk in and cut everything right away. Nowadays, with a tuba ensemble, people have a better idea of what sound they should shoot for. But ours was the first one ever, so people had to find their place in those notes however they could.

Howard Johnson plays at a Midnight Ramble, photo by Paul LaRaia

You rehearsed in Woodstock?

I was making arrangements on the fly, I never wrote anything down. I taught the guys the parts I wanted them to play and put it up to them to memorize it for the next time. I told them, ‘Listen, we’re playing trombones and flugelhorns, we have to have mics in front of us and playing tubas we’re gonna have mics over us. So I’m not going to bring any music stands or paper or anything you can knock off. I want people to be able to see us and hear us without all of that.’ They agreed to it. And I’d go over certain passages I’d given them to play to fit in with the rhythm section.

The bass player was the great Bill Rich who’s still with Taj playing bass. John Hall was the guitar player, with Greg Thomas on drums. And we had an African drummer from Ghana named Kwazi. We did that string of gigs and David Rubinson, who was working for Bill Graham’s office out in San Francisco, said ‘Let’s do a live recording with this.’ And that’s where The Real Thing came from. I guess we did three tours and three appearances at the Fillmore.

What did you think about Taj?

I didn’t know what to expect from Taj, but I wasn’t ready to be impressed. I took him too lightly when he was talking about what he wanted to do with us. And after I kind of pulled that out of the fire by getting the band ready for the first Fillmore gig, I understood that Taj generally means what he says. And he’s more focused and resolute than I ever knew. But he’s always been ahead of every curve, you know? He’s political in that way. He’s not a political activist but he’s a political guy in that he checks out what’s going on. And for instance, when we were touring with The Real Thing, he was telling me about something called reggae and that it was built on ska and gave me an example of the kind of beats and I went, ‘Well, ok that ain’t going anywhere.’ [He laughs}

And he was the first one to tell me about this banda music that’s current in Mexico that uses tubas. It uses lots of horns of different kinds and uses a tuba for the bass and I thought ‘Oh, isn’t that nice?’ Because traditional Mexican stuff has a polka quality to it. He said, ‘No, these guys are playing some hip stuff.’ And when I finally got around to hearing it, it was really a revelation. Those guys are so good, they don’t sound individual at all, it seems like one guy is doing everything—one great guy—they just have real high standards like that. But I heard about it for two years before I ever came across any banda music. So he’s always a forward-looking guy—as I would like to think of myself—but he’s on top of it more than I am.

How do you rate him as a musician?

He’s a very intuitive musician, there’s nothing he turns his hand to that he can’t really do. On The Real Thing, listen to how much harmonica he plays, and how he plays the fife. That was where I got my pennywhistle concept from, but I can’t make that transverse embouchure so I have to do it on the pennywhistle that has another kind of mouthpiece. But that’s totally Taj, like the difference his banjo playing makes to other banjo players. With the banjo, you can’t change a lot of keys and he’s figured out all the ways to use those keys—especially with that one ringing G all the time—and he’ll write a lot of things that just fit that. We did a duo on the record called ‘Tom and Sally Drake’– tuba and banjo—and that G is ringing throughout the whole thing although it changes through several keys. And he plays his National steel guitar, fender electric guitar and all of this is on that record—he changes it up. He’s just a pretty amazing guy all around. Those concerts we did in ‘71 they seemed to have a big impact on a lot of people. Nobody expected to see anything like that—‘What about those tubas? What’s this gonna be?’

How did you make the connection to The Band and Levon Helm?

John Simon was in the band, and he was the connection to Levon. When Robbie Robertson said he wanted to do a horn section for Rock of Ages, John, who had played horns on the record he produced, said, ‘Let’s get some real guys, let’s get these guys,’ putting it on me to put the horn section together and get Allen Toussaint to do the arrangements. We started doing those rehearsals late in December 1971. The Rock of Ages record was done in about five days, the last of which was December 31 going into 1972. So we came down a little earlier than that to rehearse Toussaint’s arrangements.

At this point, I didn’t know what The Band was really about. I hadn’t paid close attention to the lyrics, which I came to love, and I just thought they were a bunch of Canadians trying to sound like hillbillies. And so I wasn’t expecting too much. But when we came to the first rehearsal, it was revealed that Toussaint, when he was writing the arrangements, had a cassette player that had weak batteries so he wrote everything in the wrong key. When we started to rehearse, we realized there was a problem immediately because we were playing a tune that was supposed to be in G and we’re playing it in F# because that’s what’s on the paper. We all recognized immediately that there was a problem, but the guys in The Band said, ‘Well look, can we get this recopied overnight? For the rest of this rehearsal, we’ll play it in your key.’ Now, to move something that you’re used to playing in the key of G to the key of F# is more than just moving down a fret. After all, with two piano players, they had to do a whole different thing in a whole different way and you don’t find many rock bands who can transpose like that. You don’t find that many musicians who you can count on to just change the key of something that they know. So I started getting impressed. And then I paid a little closer attention to the lyrics and found out that the drummer really was from the Ozarks, or thereabouts, and that he had a fat beat. A lot of guys who came up in that background, they’re just kind of pattin’ the drums to keep everybody on the right beat. But he’s saying something, he’s making a statement and driving the band from that chair. So that was a lot better experience than I was looking forward to. In fact, I’d say it was beautiful.

Did you stay in touch between Rock of Ages and The Last Waltz?

In those days, me and The Band didn’t see much of each other except at the Grand Union or somewhere…the ones that shopped. So I didn’t really come in close contact with Levon again until The Last Waltz tour. Most people don’t know there was a tour for that. We played some great concerts—we played in NY, Philadelphia, Boston, Austin TX, a few around the west coast.  Earlier in 1976, when they were playing in New York, Robbie asked me to come up and talk about putting a horn section together for The Last Waltz. And I said, ‘Instead of just rehearsing it, why don’t we have horns on the tour?’ I would say things like that, unaware of the realities of the financial thing. But Robbie and Rick said and it would be a good idea, and we did it. It’s the same kind of attitude that made Levon put a full horn section in his Ramble band. Whatever money we made, he could have been putting in his pocket. And there were those who thought that by our very presence we were taking money out of Levon’s pocket. But Levon was doing that sound that he wanted to promote. I think these days the attitudes are different, but not many people can understand that. I don’t know how many gigs I’ve done where managers were saying, ‘What do you need all these horns for? The Rolling Stones don’t have any horns.’  Many have the feeling that horns are expendable.

Were you aware of the drama that was going on with The Band during that time?

Some of the individual members had problems of different kinds—you know, substances and drinking and there were some rocky moments for some of the people. You had to make an effort to get people onstage every now and then. But we didn’t see any real internal strife, we saw it much like it was portrayed in the film. There was a lot deeper stuff going on that never made the film. But I wasn’t terribly aware of that. They knew what to do. I think it was one of those occasions that everybody rises to.

Then you kept playing with Levon in the RCO Allstars.

When Levon started talking about having the RCO band, I didn’t necessarily think that was going to happen either. But he wanted to keep his own momentum going, and in 1977, he pulled it off with the people he wanted. He had this really super band but I don’t know how much the audience knew who Steve Cropper and Duck Dunn were because their biggest gigs were not on the Fillmore circuit —they were on the chicken circuit with Booker T and Percy Sledge and Otis Redding. They also had Paul Butterfield and he had during a certain time been identified with the blues scene but the straight-up rock people hardly knew him. We recorded first. During that time, I was in Woodstock and I could drop over to the barn but it would be sort of momentarily. We did a Japanese tour in July of 1978.

Had you become friends at that point?

Howard Johnson by Catherine Sebastian

I’d have to say no, we didn’t become close friends. We knew and appreciated and admired each other but it didn’t translate into hanging out or anything like that unless it was for sushi. But I wasn’t doing the rest of the stuff that he was doing anyway and we didn’t get really close until I started playing with the last band. He knew that I was a cancer survivor and he feels very close and protective of other cancer survivors. He often spoke about how we’re still going on against all odds. And that was some kind of cachet that other people didn’t have with him. So between that and our musical history, we were a lock. I was the last one to join the horn section. That was about 7 or 8 years ago. When I got there Larry (Campbell) was there and so was Jimmy (Vivino). Jimmy and Mike were doing Conan but they were mostly there all the time. It’s meaningful that a guy like Jimmy Vivino thought that was a worthy endeavor and put as much into it as he did. The Rambles were, quite simply, a blessing.

Howard Johnson plays with Levon Helm at a Midnight Ramble, photo by Paul LaRaia

Did you realize how sick he was?

We all wanted him to take care of himself better. He wouldn’t and he couldn’t. He did everything he could to keep that same ball rolling until he just really couldn’t anymore. By the time he really submitted to the idea that he needed to take a look at his situation more closely, and I think he did, he was really too far gone. But it was impressive to me that he got off coca-cola. He never gave it up completely but before he was chain drinking. It isn’t often that I can look at people who are destructive in a way and say, ‘Well, he was doing what he wanted.’ But that’s what I say about him. He did what he wanted to do and he carried it as far as he could. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have been meaningful at all to be given a few more years of life without having something to it. And that includes the band, that includes the whole idea of the horn section and everything.

Tell me about your time with John Lennon.

Between the thing with Taj and The Last Waltz I did a record with John Lennon. He had this idea that horn players and jazz players were ‘real’ musicians instead of like, rockers, who just didn’t have the skills. I don’t subscribe to that, I think that everybody can contribute when they’re in the right setting. Yeah, there are some cases where people are just trying to be popular and not trying to have anything to say but John was never that crass. He got Steve Madeo, who had played trumpet in Paul Butterfield’s band, and Steve called me to play baritone. Bobby Keys was already on board because he played on ‘Whatever Gets you Through the Night.’ So it was Steve, Bobby, an alto player named Ron Aprea, a real special tenor saxophone player named Frank Vicari and me. It was John’s idea that we would just go into the studio and listen to the track and make magic happen. Now I was a little suspicious of one or two of them for doing stuff like that and we were there for nearly six hours and got nothing. We couldn’t decide on anything and John was getting very frustrated. I think he was about to boot us all out. I finally spoke up although I didn’t want to say anything because some of those guys didn’t appreciate anyone taking over and saying ‘let’s do this’ so I was kind of cautious. But I finally said, ‘Listen, at this point I know the track pretty well and I have some very definite ideas so if nobody minds, why don’t we try my ideas?’ And before anybody could answer Lennon said ‘For God’s sake, yes!’ So I did much like I did with Taj’s people – you know, you play this, I’ll play that, and that worked pretty well. There was some strain on me doing it that way and John, after said, ‘Come back tomorrow at the same time and we’ll work on it some more.’ At the end of that night, May Pang handed me a cassette with the rest of the tunes that he wanted horns on. But she said ‘You can’t let this get out.’ And I said, ‘How would this get out?’ And she said there were people who would sell it— the basic tracks for John Lennon’s new record! Who would want to do that to him? So we finished it that way and without too much trouble.

We ended up doing, I think, seven tunes for Walls and Bridges, probably his worst-selling John Lennon record but the one that he liked the most. He said it was the most musical thing he’d ever done on his own. Those are my horn arrangements. On a tune called ‘I’m Scared,’ John even gave me a baritone sax solo. Coming back from a gig that we did upstate recently, I played it in the car with Tony Leone and Jay Collins and they were pretty knocked out listening to it from that perspective. John was very pleased with my work. He said, ‘You’re gonna get an arranging credit on this.’ But I said,  ‘I was actually thinking about that, and I wouldn’t like it to say ‘Horns arranged by Howard Johnson.’ And he said, ‘Why not? It could do you a lot of good.’ I said, ‘This isn’t the way I would have done it. I do have a slight career as an arranger, but I would have done this differently.’ He asked what I would do and I said, ‘For one thing, I would have worked more closely with you because some of the best ideas really came from you.’ There’s a line that sounded something like God Bless America and when it came to that, he would sing God Bless America and we voiced it and incorporated it into the horn section. But he said, ‘I’m going to have to acknowledge it in some way.’ So when the record came out, I was very pleased with the acknowledgment I got. It said: ‘Special thanks to Howard Johnson for his hornspiration.’ I like that, he coined a word for me.

What were your impressions of John Lennon?

He’s a person who’s very kind of correct, I would say, probably because he can afford to be correct. He doesn’t have to shout people down or fight for his views. He was just a really nice person and I had the feeling, especially when I got back with him years later, that we were probably going to be friends. He had great ears, but what he didn’t know how to do very well was voice harmony. If a chord had a name and he knew the fingering for that chord name, he was fine. He would put up two fingers on each hand and play the notes of the chord with those four fingers on the piano. Then when the chord changed, he would bring all four of those fingers up to where the other chord was. So he didn’t voice anything. And I asked him, ‘Is that how you wrote all your tunes?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I don’t know how to voice. ‘And I said, ‘You can learn this in about 45 minutes. It’s all very logical and it follows the same rules as the chords you know on the guitar. There’s a reason for where the fingers are placed where they are, for the convenience of your fingers.’

John was a great rhythm guitar player. That instrumental ‘Beef Jerky’ is kind of a celebration of his great rhythm guitar playing. He wasn’t George Harrison, but he really could put something into the thing. On ‘Beef Jerky,’ listen to what he’s playing on the guitar—that’s some nicely set-up stuff. On that song, there are no words, and the stuff that I put in became part of the conversation. I spoke for co-authorship and he had about a 30-second freak-out and then said, ‘Wait a minute, you’re right.’ His first reaction was as if I had somehow manipulated something and that I had a hold on him somehow. And then he said, ‘You’re right, but I want to tell you one thing: The government is already trying to throw me out of the country for having been busted for marijuana in Canada. I got bad immigration problems, Yoko is gone, that whole part of my thing has been destabilized and I don’t know what the future is going to hold. The Beatles are all fighting each other and Allen Klein is in the mix trying to get his and if I put this in with your name on it, you will get exactly nothing except a bunch of lawyers’ bills that you’re going to have to pay fighting off people like Allen Klein. You don’t want Allen Klein in your life. You don’t want Paul McCartney in your life, not in the middle of this.’ He said, ‘Listen, I know what you did and if things ever start coming out right for me, we’ll definitely do it’ and we shook hands on it. We did almost a formal British handshake to seal the deal. The next time I saw him in 1980, when we did the horns for Double Fantasy, we talked about a lot of things and that never came up. I didn’t remember it. I didn’t remember it until a few weeks after he died.  And I thought, there’s probably no way I can ever get this straightened out. But I am going to try at some point. Probably make a lot of people hate me, because people love to say ‘this guy is pulling a fast one’ but I’d like to put it in the hands of Yoko, who I do trust. I think if she listens to what I had to say about it, I’d count on her to know the difference. I saw her a couple of times after John died because I did her records—Season of Glass and another one. She was the one who called me for the horn section.

Howard Johnson by Catherine Sebastian

I guess it had been a few years between your projects with John.

We hadn’t seen each other in six years. One day John and I were in the booth just kind of talking and I asked him, ‘What label is this record gonna be on?’ and he said, ‘We don’t know.’ And I said ‘What do you mean you don’t know?’ And he said, ‘Well, we’re going to make the record and then look for a label.’ I said, ‘What? What about all that stuff hanging off you – Apple Records and EMI and Allen Klein and Northern Songs and the rest of the Beatles? And he said ‘It’s all cleared up. It’s all completely taken care of. I own 100 percent of my ass for the first time since I was 17.’  I said, ‘How did you do it?’ And he said, ‘I did nothing. I stayed home with the baby and Yoko did everything.’ And I said, ‘Well, what did Yoko do?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know and I don’t care. She did it! There isn’t anybody else on earth who could have done it.’ And I was shocked because he had told me about all the tangled up shit he had going on. She dealt with the immigration thing and all the business.

When I went in for the Double Fantasy dates, I was also rehearsing for a tour with Paul Simon. Another story I like to tell is when John said, ‘Tell me, what kind of show is Paul doing? How is he setting it up?’ John hadn’t toured in I don’t know how long. And he said, ‘How many tunes do you know?’ and I said, ‘Just the ones from this film that’s coming out One Trick Pony.’ We’re doing the standard hour set, 15-minute intermission and then another hour set.’ And John said, ‘Two hours? Paul’s doing two hours?’ And I said, ‘That’s kind of standard.’ And he said, ‘Really? We used to go out and do big stadiums and do one 40-minute set.’ And I said, ‘A 40-minute set? That shit went out with the Beatles!’ I laughed and he laughed and the rest of the group in the booth (who didn’t know me yet) was like, ‘Who the fuck is this guy?

When did you last speak to John?

I spoke to him the night he died. I was going to bring John and Yoko a recording I had of Pam Windo—she’s married to a saxophone player named Gary Windo and she sang, frankly, something like Yoko did. She and her husband and another tenor player from her hometown of Bristol in England had a way of playing unison parts —the same notes but having it sound very strange because the pitches were dirty on one or both of them but their phrasing was exactly right. So it just ended up being a great sound that I thought John would like because these guys could also play in tune and John had talked to me about taking a horn section on tour. So I called the studio. Yoko answered the phone and passed it to John. I said, ‘I brought that record with the tenor players I’d like you to hear, should I bring it up to the studio?’ And he said, ‘We’re going to leave a little early tonight, bring it in tomorrow in the afternoon.’ And I thought, ‘Well, that’s good’ because I wanted to watch Monday night football. And Monday night football is what told us that he had been killed.

From Charlie Mingus to Paul Simon! What made you want to play with such a wide range of musicians?

I only did things that resonated with me. And I wouldn’t have done any of it if I didn’t believe in what we were doing. I’d rather have people —especially young people—listening to that music than some of the stuff we encountered. We opened for bigger name bands that could hardly play, in our estimation. Musicianship is more than genre or how many feathers they’re wearing. In that pattern, we also found some bands that were really happening. We met people like Mississippi Fred McDowell and Papa John Creech, who was just dazzled by our band. Some people were surprised that I was doing the stuff that I was with the rock figures because I’m supposed to be a stone jazzman, and people divided up their territory. But there’s always more music, more ways of expression.

Featured image; Howard Johnson by Catherine Sebastian

To find out more about Howard please visit his website:
www.hojotuba.com/merch/

Amy Helm with Adam Minkoff at the Rockwood Music Hall — photo by Ahron R. Foster

Amy Helm has released her latest album of songs and it is a stunner. Appropriately named for the beautiful opener, Hiss Golden Messenger’s “This Too Shall Light,” the collection of lovely melodies and uplifting lyrics illuminates all its shadowy places. Featuring only one up-tempo number – Levon and the Hawks’ “The Stones I Throw” — the rest are stately and soul-soothing in message and/or delivery. These include Allen Toussaint’s “Freedom for the Stallion,” Helm’s original “Heaven’s Holding Me” and the majestic closer, “Gloryland,” a song she performed a handful of times with her father before he passed in 2012. She is ably assisted by a band of brilliant musicians and a trio of gorgeous voices. The band’s cover of the Milk Carton Kids’ “Michigan” is getting some attention in the press, but the one I listen to again and again is the haunting “Long Daddy Green.”

On Labor Day weekend, I caught up with Amy before her performance at the Four Corners Folk Festival in Pagosa Spring, Colorado, to talk about the new record, the inaugural Dirt Farmer Festival, what’s happening these days at Levon’s Barn in Woodstock and the announcement of some December shows with Ollabelle.

Nine of the 10 tracks on This Too Shall Light are covers, but Helm said the choices were made organically.

“I recorded more than that, but every project takes on a life of its own,” Helm said. “Listening back, my producer Joe Henry and I picked the songs with a certain tone and atmosphere to them — a feeling and a story that felt right. We decided on 10 songs, one of which I wrote, and the rest are some obscure and some not-so-obscure covers.”

Mike Taylor from Hiss Golden Messenger and Josh Kaufman wrote the title track for Helm to sing.

“I love that song,” she said. “That one feels special. I think it all sounds good because I have such a kick-ass choir on it: Allison Russell and JT Nero – they’re in a band called Birds of Chicago — and Adam Minkoff, a friend of mine who I play with every chance I get. He’s come out with my band many times.”

Helm said that none of the members of her touring band play on the record.

“Joe Henry, like a lot of producers, uses his own stable of go-to players,
 she said. “So there’s Jay Bellerose on drums, his wife Jen Condos on bass, Doyle Bramhall on guitar, and an incredible keyboardist named Tyler Chester from Los Angeles. We recorded the tracks in four days. I went out to LA, and I don’t think we did more than two or occasionally three takes of anything. I didn’t overdub a single note, we left it all there, other than putting some vocal pieces together. For the most part it, was all done in the moment.

Amy Helm and the band at the Dirt Farmer Festival — photo by Ahron R. Foster

“At Joe’s request, leading up to the record I didn’t rehearse any of the songs,” Helm said. “I didn’t even sing them more than once or twice. A couple of them I just sang in my living room, sitting at the piano or at the drums by myself and kind of practicing a little bit. But Joe didn’t want me or any of the players to get too familiar with the songs. And that made for a very interesting spontaneity and chemistry when we got to the recording session.”

Helm’s second big project, the inaugural Dirt Farmer Festival, was held on August 19th in a large field in Accord, NY. It was sold out. Helm said the inspiration for the festival came from her father, the late and dearly missed Levon Helm.

“A long time ago, my dad did a free concert at Gill Farm,” Helm said, “and he always wanted to build that into a bigger festival. So for a long time now, I’ve had this dream of building a festival in his name. I thought Dirt Farmer was a perfect title.”

Dirt Farmer Festival — photo by Ahron R. Foster

Helm said she had no experience putting together such an event but she had plenty of help.

“I’m very lucky that Drew Frankel, who is part of my management team, is extremely experienced at organizing festivals and helping them come to fruition,” she said. “I couldn’t have done it without him. He booked Mountain Jam for years so he had the skill set to do it. With his help, along with a village of other people, we got Jackson Browne and William Bell and Mike Taylor to say they wanted to come and be part of it the first year.

“I was so proud of the variety of musicians that were there,” Helm said. “I wanted a festival that was genre-less, with both urban, young, upcoming artists and established artists: a space where new musicians can meet icons and vice versa. One of my favorite moments at the festival was watching Jackson Browne listening to Mike Taylor do a beautiful acoustic set of his music. Jackson was singing along, just completely digging his melodies and his songs.”

Helm said she would like to make the festival an annual event and will start planning the next one soon.

“I think people saw when they arrived that there was no pecking order, no scene, no pretension,” she said. “I wanted it to be like The Barn, and I think we were able to bring the feeling that is so unique to the Barn and put it on that stage and in that field.”

There have been some recent changes at the Barn, with more and different shows being added to the burgeoning schedule.

“We’ve been wanting to open up the Barn and really let it become the landmark spot that it is,” Helm said. “We have a new team there booking and running the day-to-day management and we’ve been working really hard to expand into other genres with different kinds of artists and targeting different demographics. It should be a place that can hold all of that and that’s what my dad wanted it to be. Christy Newman, our new day-to-day manager, is taking charge of everything and Drew’s doing a great job booking.

“Some of the folks who had worked there for a long time decided that it was time to step down and pass it on to the next generation. So I put together a team of people that I really, really believe in, and my stepmother really likes, so the whole thing’s really unified and invigorated. The proof is in the vibrancy of what’s happening there now.”

Fans seem to have taken note: A recent performance by Lake Street Dive sold out in hours.

“There are so many musicians like Lake Street Dive who want to come play at the Barn and connect to what my dad built and who he was as a musician,” Helm said. “It was just a matter of putting the word out, sending the invitation and letting people have the opportunity to see what it’s like to sing and play there. It hasn’t been a difficult job because a lot of people want to make that pilgrimage. It’s a bit of a sacred space for players.”

Helm’s busy touring schedule makes time with her sons, Lee and Hugh, particularly precious.

“They’re so big and doing great,” she said. “My older son loves the Rock Academy, my younger son loves everything – Legos, soccer, he’s just starting first grade. Lee really loves music. He keeps asking me when can I quit school and go on the road with you,” she laughed.

Kay Cordtz has been fascinated by music and musicians since elementary school when she ran home from school every day to watch American Bandstand. Since then, she has been a newspaper reporter, political spokeswoman, government science writer and freelance chronicler of local music scenes during a 30+-year career.  She is a graduate of the Columbia University School of Journalism

Photos by Ahron R. Foster

The performance will feature clips from Buffett’s film, television, and philanthropic work, tracing the evolution of his life and career. He will take questions from the audience throughout the show.

Buffett began his professional musical career in San Francisco in the early 1980s. He composed the score for the Fire Dance scene in the film Dances with Wolves and wrote the music for the CBS eight-hour miniseries, 500 Nations. He and his wife, Jennifer, serve as co-presidents of the NoVo Foundation. They said they are “dedicated to resourcing organizations, projects and people that are preparing to meet the conditions of an ever more complex set of collapsing systems.” Buffett’s book, Life Is What You Make It, published in 2010, has been translated into 15 languages.

The performance will include conversations about the work of intensive-style class called “Fundamentals of Grant Writing” taught by Professor of History Rebecca Edwards. The new class is funded by the Community Engaged Intensives in the Humanities grant through the Andrew Mellon Foundation. These “intensives” are envisioned as innovative learning opportunities that build sustainable and equitable collaborations between Vassar College and organizations in Poughkeepsie, and other parts of Dutchess County and the Hudson Valley that address specific community needs and opportunities as articulated by the college’s community partners.

“Mr. Buffett is visiting in conjunction with this course, which pairs Vassar students with small, start-up non-profits in our community,” Edwards said. “Working together, the students and non-profit leaders are researching grant opportunities and the students are learning to write all parts of a grant proposal. The organizations provide prenatal care, after-school and summer camp programs, college preparation, job training, and other supports for disadvantaged youth and families.

“Because Mr. Buffett is not only a major philanthropist but someone who thinks deeply about money, power, and the role of philanthropy in American democracy and culture, it’s a tremendous honor to have him here,” Edwards continued. “The students and community partners will be ready to engage with the big questions he raises, about how we support one another in accomplishing meaningful work and achieving a more just society.”

The event is open to the public with general seating, but tickets are required. For ticket information, go here

Individuals requiring accommodations about accessibility should contact the Box Office in advance. For ticket inquiries, email boxoffice@vassar.edu or call (845) 437‑5599.

Vassar College is an independent coeducational liberal arts college founded in Poughkeepsie in 1861.

Performances start at 7:30 pm with an open mic format (sign-up 7pm) before and after our featured performer, Sloan Wainwright.

About Sloan:

Defying standard categorization, singer/songwriter Sloan Wainwright, consistently demonstrates her easy command of a variety of American musical styles — pop, folk, jazz and blues — held together by the melodious tone of her rich contralto, with the end result being a unique and soulful hybrid.

Her family tree (brother and folk-music luminary Loudon Wainwright, nephew Rufus Wainwright, nieces Martha Wainwright and Lucy Wainwright Roche) reads like a who’s who of contemporary folk music. Sloan’s incredible gift is not only her unique songwriting ability but also her dramatically voiced rendition of original songs.

“She’s folk influenced, but the real star here is her voice. Warm and smoky and smooth, it makes her earthy, ominous lyrics seem all the more intense.” ( Boston Globe )

With a solid and impressive discography of 10 original CD releases to her credit, Sloan continues to write, sing and perform live and has won two songwriting awards at the annual EmPower Posi Music Awards. In addition, Sloan has written numerous musical compositions for theater and dance and teaches at many of the best-known master songwriter series and workshops.

Sloan’s open spirit and first-hand experience is welcome –year after year– in the musical classrooms of such prestigious song camps as Richard Thompson’s Frets and Refrains, The Swannanoa Gathering, SummerSongs, WUMB Radio’s Summer Acoustic Music Week (SAMW), Winter Acoustic Music Weekend (WAMW), Moab Folk Camp, Cape Cod Songwriting Retreat and emPower Music & Arts Totally Cool Song School.

Glen Rothel will be accompanying her for this show.

The open mic portion of the evening is a great opportunity for newcomers and seasoned performers with a welcoming, appreciative audience-All styles of music or spoken. Sign Up 7pm.

Admission to the coffeehouse is $6 general admission and $5 for Folk Guild members and seniors. For more information on the coffeehouse series, call 845–229-0170 or email hvfolks@aol.com.

Young Johnny — Photo by Betty Pisano

Were you always musical? What kind of kid were you?
When I was eight years old, I was a bit of an introvert. I would stay home like a hermit when all the other kids were out playing. It was kind of a phase I went through. When I was punished, my mother would kick me out of the house instead of keeping me in. I was always daydreaming. I would play hooky from school but while the other kids were out doing stuff, I would go sit on the top landing of my roof at the apartment we lived in and just stare at the wall for hours… just a very active daydreamer. And that kind of turned into being bullied in school, being the kid who got beat up. They’d take my lunch money and all that. I was afraid to go to school so I got left back in 5th grade. In 6th grade, one day I snapped! I literally saw black and when I came to, I was on top of one of them beating him up. From then on, my reputation was, that kid is crazy, don’t mess with him. Maybe a year after that I went to karate school, and became a Brown Belt, got into King Fu and Tai Chi and meditation and all that.

Photo by PS 163 Brooklyn, NY

Was that when the interest in music began? Was bass your first instrument?
Me and my friend Mike Buffa would sit in my bedroom with a boom box and blast KISS. I would pretend to be Gene with a baseball bat and he would be Ace with a tennis racket. When we were 12 or 13, Mike’s neighbor, Emil Criscitiello, had a wedding band. He played guitar and also taught lessons, so he recruited us. I loved the bass. Every time I heard a song, even though they’d be blasting loud guitar solos and all the other stuff going on, my ear would literally push these instruments aside. I would want to know what that bass player was doing to complement that guitar solo, or to complement that vocal. I was obsessed with it. So, when Emil said he would teach me bass and teach Mike the guitar at the same time, I went to the store and got a $90 Cameo, a Fender Precision copy. He taught us how to find the notes on the neck, a few scales and how to play songs we liked with a slight haze of marijuana in the air. He was awesome and still is.

I don’t remember taking lessons for all that long, maybe a couple of months. After teaching us the rudiments, he taught me how to use my ear and how to teach myself basically. He would teach me a bass line and I would say yeah, that’s great, but Sting is not playing that exact bass line every time. He does it different sometimes. Emil said you’re going to have to find that yourself. So I would sit home with my vinyl. But since you can’t rewind a vinyl, I would record it onto a cassette and sit there pressing rewind, play, rewind, play. I would take that little part of the song and I would search with my hand up and down the neck trying to find these notes. My ear basically developed from that. Once my ear started getting good, I learned stuff I would tape off the radio, usually WLIR the alternative station. All of Bob Marley Legend, and I loved the Police back then, like 1981, ’82. I just learned anything I could get my hands on with good bass: Iron Maiden, Led Zeppelin,The Who. I liked the anger of certain bands like The Who.

How did you get from those bands to punk?
Mike’s brother, Billy Buffa, was a drummer and he was in a couple of bands. He turned us on to punk. I said yeah, but there are no bass lines in it! But what’s that guy singing about? “Corporate death burger Ronald McDonald?” I don’t understand. Billy said just read the lyrics! And he was right. If you read the lyrics to these punk songs, it actually teaches you something that the news might not want you to know. So, I thought this is it, this is for me. It’s not just about music anymore, it’s about using the music to have a platform to say what you want to say. If you’re angry or frustrated about politics, if you’re angry about anything, you can stand up there and express yourself. Everything on the radio was about love in the same pop songs over and over. But being that young and being turned onto rebellious music…. I was already rebellious at that age! I just ate it up. Then I got turned onto The Clash. Joe Strummer was like the history teacher I never had and the band had great musicality too. And there are great bass lines! That band gave me the bass I desired as a beginning player and it gave me the passion and the lyrics and the admiration for these guys standing there with a platform to say something, to teach something. “The Guns of Brixton?” what’s that? I wanted to know. I wanted to learn it.

It actually helped me in school. I was horrible in school but my thirst for knowledge came more from the songs, from The Freeze or Regan Youth, The Dead Kennedys —these punk bands that no one had ever heard of in the pop world. The Ramones is a given. Dee Dee’s lyrics are kind of juvenile but meaningful. “Blitzkrieg Bop.” What’s that? What is Blitzkrieg? Is it a word they just made up? I looked it up. I asked questions. That’s what made me want more.

What was your first real band?
Mike’s brother was in an original band, Pressure Pressure, and their songwriter, Blaise DelBianco, said he wanted to give us his songs, help us out, be our manager. He and the guys in his band weren’t that much older than us —like 19— but when you’re 14, that’s a big deal. To find musicians, we used the Village Voice. On the back, there’s a thing called Public Notices. If you bypass the women seeking men, men seeking men, man seeking Great Dane to complete threesome, all kinds of crazy shit, there are music notices. You could find drummers or singers and people looking to form a band, so we put in our ad. We were looking for a drummer and singer. We had a few auditions, and Blaise helped us name the band. We were called Bundle of Nerves and it wasn’t a punk band, it was more New Wave. For the ‘80s, that type of music worked. The singer we found, Carmelo DiBartolo, later played with a ska band called Beat Brigade who still play around town. He wrote great songs too. We keep in touch to this day. (I was just at his house for dinner the other night.) We lasted maybe a year or two, playing at places like The Dive on 8th Ave and 33rd. I remember it had stuff glued to the ceiling like tables and chairs and giant lobsters. We were way too young to get in and there was no faking it at that age so Blaise made a deal. And it worked!

Most players start out playing guitar and then go to bass and will start playing covers before they do original stuff. I played bass first and my first band was an original band. Billy Buffa, who was my mentor and turned us on to bands like Fishbone and the Chili Peppers before anyone knew who they were, he unfortunately died at 22.  I miss him to this day. He wasn’t in this first band, but we would all jam together in Blaise’s studio. Blaise is now unfortunately fighting off the grim reaper because he was a fireman on the bucket brigade after 9/11. He has the 9/11sickness and got bone cancer from that.

Was that when you became serious about playing?
I think I was always serious about playing and about wanting to be a musician, but I learned my chops in Blaise’s studio. Me and Mike had the keys to Blaise’s rehearsal space and we would go in and literally practice all night until 4 or 5 in the morning. We would be jamming on anything. It was just us stretching our creativity as far as we could. We were into King Crimson and weird odd time signatures and other psychedelic shit so we were just experimenting. And Blaise and Billy would jam with us with Blaise’s wife on psychedelic keyboard. Those were golden times.

Photo by Betty Pisano

Were you still going to school?
Just barely. I was never good in school. Finally, in the 10th grade, I just decided to stop going. I don’t know why, it just happened. I thought of going back to school, but I got a full-time job at 16. I was a building maintenance guy, started as a painter at a Navy base on Staten Island, Fort Wadsworth. My mother and a cousin worked there and helped me get the job since I needed one after dropping out of school. I started out painting alone for eight hours at night. There I am alone again. Then a year later, I got promoted to building maintenance and worked days fixing stuff: minor electrical and plumbing, building walls, fixing office doors —I became a bit of a handyman. Matt Hogan [Willie Nile’s guitar player] calls me Schneider, you know, the superintendent from the TV show One Day at a Time.  I go to his house and he says, glad you’re here, bring your tools up, my toilet’s not running right. So for 8 years, 1985–93, I worked there. I was never in the Navy and I had long hair so I kinda stood out amongst the military types. A year later, for some reason of my own, I went back to GED school, taking classes and I wound up getting my GED. It was a big proud moment for me and my mother.

But you were still playing music?
I was always playing, yeah. We had a punk band back then and we were doing Clash and Dictators covers and ironically, I was the singer. One band was called Rude Boy. We did Battle of the Bands and some parties. I was playing with drummer Roger Colletti, who now works for Sirius XM, and Alex Colletti, his brother, who was huge at MTV. He was one of the five people who invented Unplugged. Those guys ended up doing a lot for music. There was another band we created called Complete Control and the drummer in that band was in a popular punk band called the Sic Fucks, he called himself Harry Vederci, get it? Arrivederci? Tish and Snooky from that band became Manic Panic Hair Dye and they became super successful with it. It’s worldwide now. In the band, they were pregnant nuns. So, we were doing originals and covers and getting them on the radio, WFMU – the one station that was playing punk at the time.

L to R: Harry Vederci on drums, Brian Yurkins, Johnny Pi and Mike Buffa — Photo by Carol Buffa.

When did you start singing?
It just kind of happened. There was no one else who would sing, so I sang.

Did you know you could sing?
I was always making funny sounds, imitating cartoons or my mother and sisters’ voices to make fun of them, to the point where they couldn’t tell who was saying what. Since they forced me to watch that soap opera Dynasty, I would imitate the trumpet in the intro song loudly. I was also singing at home with my records. I could hit the notes, more or less in key. I didn’t consider myself a singer at the time, I didn’t really have my own voice —I would just imitate people. We wanted to get our music out and nobody else wanted to sing, so I said I’ll do it until we find somebody.

What was your ‘look’ like back then?
I was growing my hair long or shaving it or coloring it, doing something weird with it so as to not fit in. Everybody needs to show some individuality and my way was dressing different. But I was also working on a navy base so I could only go so far.

Were you ambitious?
I guess, but I didn’t really know what the term ‘making it’ meant. When I was a kid I thought, I want to be a rock star, I want to get girls, make tons of money. But what does that term ‘making it’ mean anyway? When I was a kid I thought if I don’t ‘make it’ by the time I’m 21, I’d better do something else. I’m going to try to find another trade because here I am building offices and fixing electrical sockets.  Well, 21 came and went while I was in a band called Crispy Brown. That was with Mike and Carmelo from Bundle of Nerves, Matt Kutner on keys, and drummers Mike Brenna and Al Veteri. From 1991–95, that band was our baby. We rehearsed a lot, and we played the Bitter End every two weeks and tried to branch out to Boston here and there. But while we wanted to ‘make it’ we wanted to do it our way. We played funk/punk/reggae. Whenever we tried to get a record deal they would say, you guys are really great but what category do I put you in? This song is punk, this one is straight up roots reggae and this other song is like Living Color meets the Chili Peppers, I’m not sure what to do with this. We just wanted to play whatever we wanted, why do we have to play everything in the same genre, why does it have to be that way? World music wasn’t popular yet, no one even knew what that was. So, I like to say we were ahead of our time, but we couldn’t get a record deal back then, and that was one of the excuses they would give us: We can’t market you, because your reggae song is really great and your funk song is really great and your punk song has a really good hook but we don’t know how to market you. In 1995, before we disbanded, we were playing a gig at the Bitter End when I had my first brush with anyone famous. We were playing and afterwards this guy came over to me and said, I’ve been looking all over the city for a great bass player for my band and you’re the guy. And I said, hi Woody Harrelson. It was Woody from Cheers! I was like, oh my god what do I do? I was so into our band, my buddies.

Did you still have your day job?
I got laid off from the Navy job in ’93 when they moved to Virginia, so in ‘94 I started working as a FedEx delivery guy in the Garment District. I wanted to take advantage of this thing with Woody, but I was also really afraid of losing my job. My father was a workaholic and I definitely have his work ethic, and I didn’t want to risk losing my livelihood. My mind started playing tricks on me, do I quit my job? What about my band? Woody said come upstate to Taconic, where he lived, we’ll take care of you, we’ll rehearse and we’ll tour. I was scared to death of everything. I drove up there and I lasted a day or two but I had to apologize and leave. It was such a weird, mind-bending thing that happened to me. To this day, I say to myself: opportunity knocked and I slammed the door in its face! I felt terrible about it. But it was also an eye opener – because somebody wanted to pay me to play music. And here we were, scrounging money to make up postcards to promote our gigs. After I said no, and came home and went back to work, I’d see these Natural Born Killers movie billboards everywhere – and my heart was bleeding… but everything happens for a reason. And even though playing with Woody and his band may not have been the right opportunity for me, (it turns out Woody didn’t tour much and nothing ever came of it), it was a cool thing to have happen and it made me realize how precious these opportunities are when they come around.

The Pisano family — Photo courtesy Johnny Pisano

Tell me about your family. Are there other musicians?
My mother and father weren’t musical. He was an oil burner mechanic, but his mother was an opera singer. My grandmother actually made a record – one of those records that break if you drop them, before vinyl. When she met my grandfather, he said we can be together but I don’t want you hanging out in these clubs. It’s either me or the music. So, my grandmother gave up her music career for my grandfather, one of those old-school things that unfortunately still happens in relationships. My aunt, my father’s sister, was a keyboard player in a band. So, if you believe it comes from blood, then any musicality I had came from them.

How did you hook up with Marky Ramone?
Crispy Brown was rehearsing at Rockaway Studios in Rockaway Beach, Queens, one day and the guy who worked behind the desk, Mark Neuman, was a guitar player for a punk band, Sheer Terror. He said he had been playing bass with Marky Ramone, and that they wrote a record together. Marky was looking to tour as soon as the Ramones retired, but Mark didn’t want to tour. So he introduced me to Marky in April of ’96, and we hit it off, and that’s how I joined Marky Ramone and the Intruders. It’s almost like opportunity knocked again within a year of the Woody incident. The Ramones were still touring – they were doing the last shows at Lollapalooza in ’96 —so we were hanging out and rehearsing during this time. Six months after they retired we went to South America. We played this festival, one of those Rock in Rio things. It was the Sex Pistols reunion tour so the very first time I played with Marky Ramone was in front of 20,000 people in Brazil. That was the biggest mosh pit I’ve ever seen and it was happening for us! The lineup was us, Cypress Hill, Silverchair, Space Hogs, Screaming Trees, Bad Religion and the Sex Pistols. Then we did it again in Sao Paolo and I fell in love with that place. Shortly after that, I wrote a song called “The Streets of Sao Paolo” that’s now on my new record.

What did you like about Sao Paolo?
It reminded me of New York in the 70’s when there was still garbage everywhere, and you had to watch your back a bit walking around. I like Sao Paolo for the same reasons. It just reminded me of when there were hookers in the street, transvestites doing whatever, it has character.

So, you had a pretty long run with Marky Ramone.
I spent four years with Marky. We went to South America every year for a month at a time. We’d go to Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, but mostly Brazil. The rest of the year, we toured around the states. We would do a little Canada and all of western Europe. We would go all the way from Sweden out to Croatia. We dipped into Italy. We would dip into the UK a bit. That four years was incredible and I kept my FedEx job the whole time.

How in the world did you manage that?
I’d get to the airport in Sao Paolo and people would be taking pictures of me just because my picture’s on the back of the record. And I’m thinking, this is crazy. My hand hurt from signing my name so much. We would do these in-stores in a mall where the kids would be lined up outside around the corner. I would fly home, and the next day I would be with FedEx, carrying these heavy packages to the garment district where some guy in a suit wouldn’t hold the door for me. My ego was kept in check by the reality of that. But it was my work ethic that wouldn’t allow me to quit. Because Marky Ramone wasn’t always busy playing gigs, it wasn’t enough to maintain life and rent and all that. So, I kept the job the whole time. We wrote together too for when we made a second record.

Was this the beginning of writing for you?
I wrote when I was a teenager too, just now and then, a poem here and there. I wrote a song called “Don’t Think” about a girl I was trying to forget at the time. Marky liked it and it was on the Marky Ramone and the Intruders second record. I re-recorded it for my new record and I added a bridge. With Marky, we were gonna do a third record, so I told him, I got this idea for a song, “All Fucked Up From Growing Up,” and he liked it. That’s also on my new record, so that’s how old that song is, we’re talking 1998. I also wrote “The Streets of Sao Paolo” and he liked that enough that we were starting to play it live. In 2000, we played that song in Sao Paolo people were digging it. We were going to put it on our next record, but then we disbanded. Marky just didn’t want to deal with record companies anymore. We were opening for the Misfits a bunch and they wanted Marky to tour with them as their guest drummer. He figured out that he could do better playing Ramones covers than original music. I don’t blame him. He didn’t have to deal with record companies, and it made his life easier. We maintain a friendship to this day, I love the guy. He’s got a band called Marky Ramone’s Blitzkrieg and he plays everywhere. He does guest DJ work and he’s got his own show on Sirius. He told me that he’d be playing my record on it, which would be great.

Johnny with Bruce Springsteen et al.

Where did you go from there?
Within a couple of months, drummer Joe Rizzo said that Jesse Malin, the singer of D Generation, was looking for a bass player. Jesse was playing at Brownie’s on Avenue A and 12th Street. First thing he said to me was, ‘You look like a young Harvey Keitel!’ We laughed. Next thing you know we’re playing together and became great buddies. The name of the band was Tsing-Tsing and we did a bunch of shows. Then Jesse decided to change the name of the band to Bellevue and we made a record. We did a tour as Bellevue, to LA and back, and had a lot of fun. Ryan Adams produced Jesse’s first solo record. He got another drummer and guitar player, and Jesse Malin the solo artist was born. That was the start of recording the album The Fine Art of Self Destruction. Ryan Adams played guitar, sang background vocals, and produced the whole thing. I played upright bass on a song on that record.

Photo by Ehud Lazin

Did you have an upright bass then?
My mother was working in an office and the person who worked next to her said, your son plays bass? My son has a big thing in the attic, you want it? So I got an upright bass from that which was pretty cool. I put money into it fixing it up and I still play it. That’s the bass you hear on “Subway” on the Jesse Malin record. I was with Jesse from 2000 to 2005. Ryan Adams loved Jesse’s band, so he borrowed us for a couple of his records and I ended up playing a few songs on Love is Hell part 1 and 2 and Rock and Roll.

I look at Jesse as the mayor of the Lower East Side. He’s not just an amazing guy and amazing songwriter, he’s an artist and a bar owner. He is part owner of a bunch of cool establishments including Bowery Electric, Dream Baby and Berlin. He was also part owner of Coney Island High back in the day. He creates a scene. If he wore a blue hat for a month, I bet that soon after everybody would be wearing that blue hat. He’s always on point. Never needs caffeine, he and Willie Nile have that in common. They don’t need it because they’re already there, up and ready to go.

Did you still have the FedEx job?
I quit FedEx in 2003. I decided at that point that I just wanted to be a musician. It took 10 years for me to just say fuck it but living in New York you always have to have another job so I did other things even worked security in a brothel but that’s another story. So, I still do other things.

Playing a priest in a lineup on “Law and Order” Photo by Danny Pino

Johnny head shot from Boardwalk Empire

So were you able to support yourself as a fulltime musician?
At the time I started playing with a bunch of different people, including a band called Musiciens Sans Frontières. We did a tour of Europe and went to Hungary and Romania. It was interesting. It was an artsy kind of music, art-rock, I guess it would be called. There was a violin player in the band, Susan Mitchell. She is also an actress and said she could get me work in films. She said once in a while, they need upright bass players to fake-play in films. Great! Within a few months she got me a gig playing in the Metropolitan Opera House, one of the most prestigious places in the world to fake-play for this movie called Margaret. I’ve never even seen the film but not too much later, another friend hooked me up on another film. They needed music done and could I come to the studio and record “My Funny Valentine” on the upright bass and a Hot Chocolate song on electric. Someone from the film said, there’s a scene in the film that has a band, do you guys want to be in the film? So I worked another two days on this film Perfect Stranger with Bruce Willis, Halle Berry and Heidi Klum. After that, Susan explained how the union works. She said you got 3 waivers, you could join. So I wound up doing a bunch more films playing bass and was able to join SAG a year later. Ever since, in addition to music, I’ve been doing films and TV. That’s what I do. Shows like Law and Order, White Collar, and The Sopranos, either as an extra or photo double. I was a stand-in for John Magaro on a Wes Craven film. We also did Not Fade Away, David Chase’s film after The Sopranos. I got to eat lunch with James Gandolfini and Lisa Lampanelli a bunch. I was never in the film except at a distance, but as a stand-in you have to be there every day. As an extra, you’re there once and then they can’t use you in other scenes because of the continuity. I made a nice amount of money for a guy like me by being there 16-hour days for two months. I also had some really great experiences with the film. Right now, I haven’t done a film in about 6 months because music has kept me really busy, I’m happy getting hired to write bass lines to record on people’s records or play in other people’s gigs, but I mainly play with Willie Nile.

How did that come about?
When Willie was looking for a bass player in 2007, he went to Jesse Malin. He said Johnny is the guy you want. He comes prepared, shows up on time—he’s your guy. That’s one of the reasons that I love Jesse. He has gotten me gigs with Deborah Harry, David Johansen, and other really cool people. So, I met with Willie and had a gig with him opening up for the Counting Crows at the PNC Art Center scheduled for a couple of months later. At the time, there were Hurricane Katrina benefits going on and I was helping a friend of mine, photographer Kyra Kverno, who did the videos on my 5-day countdown announcing the birth of Johnny Pisano’s Punk Rock Pizzeria. She said if you wouldn’t mind being stage manager— ya know, getting bands on and off the stage on time on this particular night. It turned out Willie was playing that night and his bass player showed up at the wrong venue in Brooklyn! He was miles away in Williamsburg while we were in Park Slope. So Willie said, I know I told you the gig is two months away, but I don’t suppose you know any of those songs? I did learn a few. I borrowed a bass from one of the other bands and it was me, Jimmy Vivino, Rich Pagano on drums and Willie. So the very first gig we did was a fluke because the bass player didn’t show and I happened to have learned the songs already. I shocked them because I went through the songs and pretty much nailed it. I even started singing backgrounds. Not to toot my own horn, but I got the point across. Want to know the big secret? Show up on time, learn your parts, don’t be an asshole. That’s how you gotta be. When I’m creating bass lines for people and I hear a lyric go dark in the subject matter, I might write a darker bass line. The lyrics affect the mood. I’m not going to play a happy bass line unless it’s being sarcastic like punk. So I basically try to make my bass lines go with the subject matter. This was 2007–2008 and we ended up doing that Counting Crows gig at the PNC Arts Center with like 6 of us onstage. Then we started to do trio gigs: me, Willie, and Frankie Lee on drums, traveling in my car. And sometimes, because Frankie worked for ASCAP and couldn’t get off work, me and Willie started doing duo gigs. I was singing harmonies and because Willie doesn’t want to solo on acoustic guitar, I started doing solos on the bass. We still do these duo shows. People dig it as something different, more intimate. We just went to Anchorage Alaska for a couple of duo gigs. It was awesome!

Is Willie the only gig now?
No I still play with lots of other people. I played on Eljuri’s new record and K.O.’s new record, as well as on a few songs on Tommy London’s new record, just to name a few. But I’ve been mainly playing with Willie. He’s kept me really busy for the past 8 or 9 years. One of the other things I’ve done is a tour with Fred Armisen from Saturday Night Live. In New York City, we played Town Hall. It was incredible. He’s a punk, and he has fake bands. Because he’s a comedian, he puts on a blonde Billy Idol-looking wig and calls the band Ian Rubbish and he puts on this snotty fake English accent. He has another fake band that sounds like Steely Dan and he puts on a different wig. We play one or two songs, then we get off and there’s more comedy bits and video bits and then he puts on another wig and I change jackets. But he doesn’t mind schooling his audience on punk. He’s a great musician—no ego, amazing guy, always a pleasure. Doing that connected me to playing on Late Night with Seth Myers.

With Willie Nile — Photo by Ellen Astudillo

On the set of the video for “Life on Bleecker Street” Photo by Ehud Lazan

When did you decide to do your own record?
Some stuff happened in my life a few years ago, and I needed something. I needed an outlet for my brain. I always wanted to do my own shit, and I had these songs sitting here for 20 years. I know that Willie Nile fans are not necessarily punk rockers, and I do have some songs that aren’t punk songs. But I said fuck it, I’m going to make a punk record and I don’t care if anybody likes it or not. I was determined. So not every song on this record is punk. “Maloveilove” is more of a rock tune. There’s punk lyrics when I start cursing in the bridge, but it’s not punk per se. By the way, I sang alternate lyrics with no cursing for certain radio stations or people with kids. I did a reggae version of Willie Nile’s “One Guitar.” It sounds really beautiful, so I put that on the record too.

Cover art for Johnny Pisano’s Punk Rock Pizzeria Photo by Edward Aymat

Where did the Punk Rock Pizzeria come from?
I came up with this concept about how everybody makes fun of my name. I’ve been hearing that since I’m 8 years old. The whole concept of Johnny Pisano’s Punk Rock Pizzeria—I know it’s a long title but I just thought it was kind of funny. I didn’t want to make a comedy record where everything is funny but I just wanted to put some quirky things here and there. “The Know It Alls” is something that I had been working on since 2000 and I finished it in 2004. “The Streets of Sao Paolo” was written in 1998, “All Fucked Up From Growing Up” was written in 1998, and “Don’t Think” was also written in 1997–98 and was on Marky Ramone’s second record. I really only had 7 tunes and I didn’t want this to be an EP, I wanted it to be a full record. So I dug up “Don’t Think,” redid it and added a bridge. I also had “The Streets of Sao Paulo.” So, I wound up putting that on, making it a total of 9 songs. Then I had the concept of a pizzeria. But I didn’t have any songs about pizza, and I didn’t care. But we would be driving to some gig and Matt Hogan and Willie would say I was Pi-sexual or everything was Pi-riffic or Pi-tastic –  they get really creative with it in the car like two kids.

When Matt writes a joke, he runs it into the ground. I’d be standing right there talking to someone and he’d come over and say, you see this guy? Pi-tastic! Matt is the funniest guy I know. But then I thought, I can make a song out of that! But I can’t make a song about myself because that would be narcissistic and I hate ego, But I could write a song about pizza! So I came up with “Pi-licious Bitches,” just a play on words so people might think the song is about me, but then they put it on and they realize it’s not. I had another idea for a song about a girl dating a superhero about how amazing it would be, like that movie My Super Ex-Girlfriend with Uma Thurman. How great would it be to have sex with your superhero partner? Just think, they save the world and you’re with them! However, this superhero can do anything and everything. You can never tell one little white lie. He would know. What if he’s jealous? So now you’re on the phone and he’s floating outside your 17th floor window hearing your conversation. He can read your mind! It’s supposed to take you on a journey of thought: Dating a superhero, this is great! Oh wait, maybe not. I had an idea to put the Mighty Mouse theme at the beginning. That’s me singing with Arlene Feiles playing all the instruments. Then I made it sound small, like it was coming out of a 1940s television. I did 15 seconds of that, and then I did another version at the end of the record as a hidden track. Ten seconds after the record is completely over, if you let it roll it comes back. I had another idea for a song called “Midlife Crisis” about a guy dating an older woman. He wants to be everything to her but doesn’t want to be that.

Everybody Gets A Slice?
Matt, who makes fun of me about everything, would always say, “Johnny Pi, everybody gets a slice.” I’m a very friendly, easy-going guy and like to talk to people, especially the ones who come out of their way to see us play. So he named the record without even knowing it. He also makes fun of how when I talk to people, sometimes I touch their arm or grab their shoulder —ya know, to connect. I don’t do it consciously. Then Willie started to call me Jumping Johnny because I started doing these split jumps at live shows. So we created this little acting bit. I had Tommy London play Vito and Matt to play this guy Tony. According to Matt, Tony is supposed to be sitting in a bar, his wife and his mother-in-law dragged him to see this band, Willie Nile, but he’d rather watch the game. So his wife and mother-in-law are seeing me play and he’s across the street at a bar watching the game and not giving a shit and then Vito comes in. This is the beginning of “Midlife Crisis.” You hear a bar crowd, then you hear the television. It’s the crack of a bat, then you hear the announcer and you can tell it’s a bar scene. Vito comes in and says, hey Tony what are you doing here? Tony says my wife and mother-in-law dragged me down here to see this guy play —Jumping Jiminy, Jumping Jack Rabbit—I don’t know. But if he touches my wife’s arm again, I’m gonna jump down his throat. That’s the punch line and the song “Midlife Crisis” starts. Matt was very persistent, he said it has to be my wife and my mother-in-law. We wrote the script out. It was so funny.

Jumpin’ Johnny– Photo by John Borden

The split jumps….did you always do them? You know that people would be disappointed if they came to one of your shows and you didn’t jump.
Since I was a kid in punk bands, I would jump around. With Marky Ramone, I would just jump off his drum kit or whatever – I was always running around. Then I kind of started perfecting it a bit because as a musician, you don’t only want to jump, you want to land on the 1. It’s like 1, 2, 3, jump in the air for 4 and land on the 1. It’s kind of a trick. It’s not just getting up there and stretching your legs out. Photographers try and catch me doing it, so I tell them I only do it in certain places where I know I can land on the 1 — like the beginning of Willie Nile’s “House of 1000 Guitars.” people try and get it when my legs are horizontal, which is tricky because you’re only up there for a moment.

It has gotten to be a bit of a signature!
My friend John Favorite, who was the bouncer of the Scrap Bar back in the day, said I watched you since we were kids and I love that jump you do. He’s also an artist —spray paint, graffiti, all kinds of graphic art. He made this cool t-shirt design. It’s great what he did! He made a bunch of shirts of my jump, people wanted them so we had to make more. Now I have this logo, the jumping guy on the front and the name “Johnny Pisano’s Punk Rock Pizzeria” on the back. I also have a fork sculpture which came from when we were kids and would be in a diner at 3 am and there was cheap silverware. So this guy Chris Johnson and I would bend all the forks. Then this girl Danielle Redbird made beautiful pizza slices out of wood and stained them and used a different stain for the crust. I just put together an Etsy page, so all that is there, along with jewelry — a pizza pendant! Check it out at etsy.com/JohnnyPisano

I just have one more question: Whatever happened to Mike Buffa? Is he still playing music?
Mike and I met when we were five, learned how to play together, and were in bands together up to the late ‘90s. Then he started learning how to tech for bands which means you’re not only changing guitar strings, adjusting the neck, but if something goes wrong with the wiring, you pull out a solder gun and you fix it. He builds the effects racks for artists like Peter Frampton. Mark Snyder, who was working for Vernon Reid, Metallica, and Dream Theater, taught Mike how to do it. Mike has been touring starting with Alanis Morrisette and then Dream Theater. He’s out now with Maroon 5, has been on the road with them for the past five years, and doing great.

Might you do another record?
Once I forget how hard it was to make this record, I have a whole other one in my head and it’s not punk rock. It’s Flaming Lips, Gomez-y, kind of singer/songwriter-y indie stuff and who knows? I have a Christmas song that’s like Frank Sinatra style. We’ll see how it goes, but right now I can’t even think about it, it was so much fucking work.

At CD release show, Mercury Lounge NYC — Photo by Ehud Lazan

More shows?
After the show I did at Mercury Lounge, putting on a cape for “Superhero” and a chef’s hat for “Pilicious Bitches” and a Trump wig singing the Clash’s “I’m So Bored with the USA,” people are demanding it! If I do, it will be in the summer. Tommy London and Matt Hogan recorded Tommy’s solo record and he’s going to do a CD release show soon and he wants me to open for him. So my next gig might be at the Bowery Ballroom before the Tommy London show or maybe I’ll put something together at the Wonder Bar with other cool bands. We’ll see!

Featured image by Kyra Kverno
“One Guitar Mon’” Edited by Dave Stekert

For more on Johnny, visit Johnnypisano.com
His Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/JohnnyPisanoPunkRockPizzeria
Or his Etsy site:
https://www.etsy.com/shop/JohnnyPisano

Kay Cordtz has been fascinated by music and musicians since elementary school when she ran home from school every day to watch American Bandstand. Since then, she has been a newspaper reporter, political spokeswoman, government science writer and freelance chronicler of local music scenes during a 30+-year career.  She is a graduate of the Columbia University School of Journalism

Save the trip to the Blue Note Club in New York City or the Newport Jazz Festival and enjoy an afternoon packed with preeminent musicians on the Hudson River’s breezy shores, for performances spanning straight-ahead jazz to more contemporary and international interpretations. Women are prominent at this year’s festival, including bands led by Rene Marie and Mimi Jones. Joanne Brackeen, performing in the Javon Jackson Superband, was recently named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts.

ABOUT THE FESTIVAL

Jazz in the Valley is a daylong celebration held at two stages on a nine-acre green oasis in downtown Poughkeepsie. The main stage under the big tent at Waryas Park features the festival’s headline acts. The festival’s second stage for free performances by regional musicians has moved to Upper Landing Park directly adjacent to the Walkway over the Hudson.

Over nearly two decades Jazz in the Valley has presented a galaxy of star musicians, including several Grammy winners and National Endowment for the Arts “Jazz Master” honorees: Randy Weston, Ahmad Jamal, Ron Carter, Roy Hargrove, Cyrus Chestnut, Hugh Masakela, Kevin Mahogany, Bill Charlap, Cedar Walton, Jimmy Cobb, Delfeayo Marsalis, Curtis Fuller, Mulgrew Miller, Jimmy and Percy Heath, Eddie Palmieri, Arturo O’Farrill, Steve Turre, Michelle Rosewoman, Steve Nelson, Roy Ayers, Houston Person, Ray Mantilla, Lou Donaldson, and “Chocolate” Amenteros.

ABOUT THE FEATURED ARTISTS

Rene-Marie

Rene-Marie

Rene Marie was 42 when she began singing professionally, and her career quickly skyrocketed after she signed with the Maxjazz label in 1999. Vertigo, her second album with the label, was awarded a coronet ranking by The Penguin Guide to Jazz, at the time a distinction given to fewer than 85 recordings in jazz history. Marie made different waves in 2008 when she was invited to sing The Star Spangled Banner at a civic event in Denver and substituted the lyrics for Lift Every Voice and Sing, also known as the Black National Anthem. This arrangement forms part of the titular suite of Marie’s 2011 cd The Voice of My Beautiful Country (Motéma Music). Her most recent Motéma recording Sound of Red came out in 2016. Marie is also respected for primarily performing her own compositions.

Eddie Henderson

Eddie Henderson

Trumpeter and flugelhornist Eddie Henderson came to prominence in the early 1970s as a member of pianist Herbie Hancock’s band Mwandishi, and he went on to lead his own jazz fusion groups through the decade. After leaving Hancock, the trumpeter also worked extensively with Pharoah Sanders,Norman Connors, and Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, turning especially to acoustic jazz by the 1990s. The versatile Henderson also earned a medical degree, and for many years he worked parallel careers as a psychiatrist and musician. His newest recording Be Cool was released earlier this year.

Joanne Brackeen

Joanne Brackeen

Named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts in 2018, pianist Joanne Brackeen has over twenty albums to her name as well as having performed on dozens of other recordings. In 1969 she was the first woman to join drummer Art Blakey’s famed Jazz Messengers, continuing with the band for three years. Eventually she emerged as a band leader after stints with groups led by renowned saxophonists Joe Henderson and Stan Getz. In addition to her captivating improvisations, Brackeen has written intricate and rhythmically daring compositions in a wide range of styles. She is also a longtime full professor at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, as well as a guest professor at the New School in New York City.

Tenor saxophonist Javon Jackson came into international prominence touring and recording with the Jazz Messengers led by legendary drummer Art Blakey. He has gone on to release 14 recordings as a band leader, including six projects for Blue Note Records featuring collaborations with Betty Carter, Dianne Reeves, Cassandra Wilson, Kenny Garrett, Jacky Terrason, John Medeski, and Vernon Reid. He has joined in dozens of touring and recording projects with jazz greats including Elvin Jones, Freddie Hubbard, Charlie Haden, Cedar Walton, Ron Carter, and Donald Byrd. Jackson is also Chair of the Jackie McLean Institute of Jazz at the University of Hartford’s Hartt School of Music. And in 2014 he began serving as Artistic Director for the Jazz in the Valley festival.

Mimi Jones

Mimi Jones

Multitalented bassist Mimi Jones also has credits as a vocalist, producer, music label owner, and filmmaker over more than two decades. Musically she made her name as a sidewoman to numerous stars including Kenny Barron, Beyoncé, Lizz Wright, Frank Ocean, Dianne Reeves, Roy Hargrove, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Kevin Mahogany, Corey Glover, Toshi Reagon, Rachel Z, Ravi Coltrane, as well as Terri Lyne Carrington’s Grammy Award-winning Mosaic Project. She also founded Hot Tone Music in 2009, which has put out nine recordings including three led by Jones. Her ensemble project Black Madonna primarily includes Jones’ musical compositions, which typically blend aspects of jazz, funk, folk, and rock.

Donald Harrison

Donald Harrison

New Orleans-born and raised saxophonist Donald Harrison grew up in a home saturated with the city’s traditional brass bands, Afro-New Orleans culture, modern jazz, R&B, funk, classical, world, and dance music. His connection to New Orleans’ roots and a new American style of African culture was deepened by his father, a Big Chief. He went on to combine jazz with Afro-New Orleans traditional music on his critically acclaimed and influential albums Indian Blues (1991) and Spirits of Congo Square (2000).  Perhaps Harrison’s signature creation is a musical style called “Nouveau Swing,” that merges jazz with modern dance music like R&B, Hip-Hop, Soul and Rock. Over three decades Harrison has been on stage and on recordings with some of the most influential artists of the 21st century including Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Roy Haynes, McCoy Tyner, Lena Horne, Ron Carter, Dr. John, Digable Planets, and Notorious BIG.

Jazz in the Valley is presented by the Hudson Valley based non-profit organization TRANSART & Cultural Services. Promotional partners for the festival are Metro North, Dutchess Tourism, the Poughkeepsie Journal, and the Walkway Over the Hudson.

Featured Image is of Mimi Jones by Nicholas Carter

The new album features Jay Collins, Steven Bernstein, Andy Hess, Ellis Hooks, Aaron Comess, Matt Clohesy, Craig Dreyer and Tony Mason, and was recorded to tape at Brooklyn’s Mighty Toad Studio.

For more information, visit:  www.chrisbergson.com   or   The Falcon

On Chris Bergson’s tenth birthday, his parents gave the young guitar prodigy a pile of record albums. They included Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf’s Muddy and the Wolf, the Waters, Mike Bloomfield, Paul Butterfield and Otis Spann collaboration, Fathers and Sons, a Thelonious Monk disc and a couple of albums by Miles Davis. Bergson, who started taking classical guitar lessons at the age of seven, had just learned the modern blues scale so he could play along with Muddy and copy some Bloomfield riffs.

“Hearing all that music at the same time had a really powerful effect on me,” he said.

If you listen to Bergson’s CDs such as Fall Changes and Imitate the Sun, it’s obvious that he learned his lessons from the masters well – both those he heard on vinyl and those he had the privilege to know and play alongside. But you also hear a musician with the fire and intelligence to chart his own path and resist being classified as any one particular genre. That independence and drive has made him the beloved leader of a band that has played regularly at venues including Levon Helm’s Midnight Ramble and New York City clubs from Jazz Standard to the Rodeo Bar.

Fall Changes Cover, photo by Ahron Foster

Bergson’s journey through musical styles began early. “I didn’t stick with classical guitar for very long,” he said. “I was more interested in playing Beatles or Led Zeppelin songs, but I did learn how to read music, which has been a good thing.”

Born in New York City, Bergson moved with his family to the Boston area when he was very young, eventually settling in Somerville, where his father was general counsel for Boston University. His parent were both music lovers and he discovered The Beatles as a preschooler and remembers that he was always making up songs. His first guitar, a Spanish nylon-string classical guitar, was handed down from his uncle. Along with encouraging his own musical talent, Bergson’s parents took every opportunity to expose him to the best players.

Chris Bergson at the Rodeo Bar, photo by Ahron Foster

“They took me to hear a lot of jazz and blues greats when they came through Boston. I heard Dizzy Gillespie play when I was in the fifth grade, Miles Davis around that same time. When I was a little older, my dad took me to the Benson and Hedges Blues Festival at the Beacon Theatre in NYC. The bill that night was Buddy Guy and Junior Wells, The Fabulous Thunderbirds and John Lee Hooker. It was an amazing concert. He was pretty cool, my dad.”

“I heard Dizzy Gillespie play when I was in the fifth grade,
Miles Davis around that same time.”

Bergson’s school had a jazz band for eighth graders and above, but he was allowed to audition while still in seventh grade. He is convinced that it was his Pete Townsend moves that sealed the deal.

“After I played my solo, word spread and I gained some respect,” he laughed.

The older brother of one of his classmates asked him to join his band, The Lipstick Traces and soon his father was driving him to join the high school boys at weeknight gigs around Boston.

“I’ve always really enjoyed playing live, but I ended up leaving that band after a couple of years, as I was getting more and more into blues and blues-based rock like the Allman Brothers, Jimi Hendrix, and Led Zepplin.”

Blues to Jazz and Back Again

In high school, Bergson started studying jazz more seriously and began playing gigs around Boston, again with older players. As a senior, he got his first regular weekly spot playing at a local Ground Round in a jazz trio, where he quickly had to learn a repertoire of more than 50 jazz standards.

After high school, he attended Vassar College for one semester, thinking he would get a liberal arts degree and play music on the side. But he soon decided he wanted to become a fulltime musician.

“I just started just getting deeper and deeper into playing music until it became my career goal. I ended up gigging quite a bit when I was at Vassar. My grandmother was living in New York City and had a spare room. So I took some time off and moved to Manhattan, studying jazz fulltime and playing with real master jazz guitarists. It was a really exciting period to be in New York.”

He didn’t return to Vassar, but accepted a scholarship to Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio which he attended for a year, and then transferred to the Manhattan School of Music.

“I ended up gigging a lot when I was at school, so it was a pretty smooth transition from being in school to being able to support myself as a jazz guitarist.”

Another important milestone occurred in February 1999, when he met actor/director Kate Ross, who later became his wife. At the time, Ross was working on Wall Street and appearing in showcases, one of which Bergson attended with his 92-year-old grandmother.

“My grandmother was really incredible. She was immersed in the cultural life of the city until she died at 93. She had arthritis and I think it physically hurt for her to play the piano. But when I was living with her, she played every day for an hour. It was a pretty inspiring lesson.”

Ross immediately became Bergson’s biggest fan and supporter and helped find his first regular gig at Vintage, a restaurant on 9th Avenue, where he was hired to lead a trio two nights a week backing up singers including Norah Jones. The band became popular with the Broadway theater set who packed the club. Later, he had a weekly show with an organ trio at the Smoke jazz club on New York’s Upper West Side, where he recorded a live EP.

Anyone who has heard Bergson deliver a soulful blues vocal may find it hard to believe that singing wasn’t always part of his performance, but throughout this time period, Bergson was strictly a jazz guitar player. Ross is due some credit for convincing him that he should incorporate singing into his shows.

Kate, Chloe and Chris at the Met in NYC, photo by Ahron Foster

“One night in our apartment, he had a friend over and he played and sang an old Robert Johnson tune and our jaws nearly fell on the floor,” Ross said. “I said, ‘Why on earth are you not doing that?’ So that was the beginning of his focus on blues and on singing.”

Songwriting

Around this time, Bergson began seriously writing songs.

“I started getting really heavily into Freddie King and started checking out people like Son House, Lightning Hopkins, and Skip James. My first songs were just my own lyrics over more standard blues and gospel riffs and it stayed like that for a couple of years.”

Around that same time, Bergson made a few connections that proved to be pivotal in his career. Jay Collins had a reputation in New York City as a hot jazz saxophone player and Bergson had heard him play a few times. One night the two were on a gig together and had a conversation about Albert King in which Collins revealed that he had transcribed some of King’s solos.

“My first songs were just my own lyrics
over more standard blues and gospel riffs.“

“A lot of the jazz musicians that I knew didn’t seem to be that deep into the blues,” Bergson said. “It was like a breath of fresh air to me to meet a jazz player like Jay and we quickly found that we had a lot in common. We had also both just started to write original songs.”

In many ways, it was a perfect fit.

“I’m a jazz saxophone player who’s actually very familiar with a lot of blues guitar stuff because my stepdad played blues guitar,” Collins said. “I grew up with a lot of blues guitar records, so I already knew a lot of the stuff that Chris was into. I think we kind of clicked there. And then I moved into the same building as him and we got to practice a lot, work on vocal stuff, get that all a lot tighter.”

Collins had his own outfit, The Jay Collins Band, but before long, he was also playing in Bergson’s band. In the fall of 2004, they were given a residency at Jazz Standard. Every Monday night for most of the fall, Bergson and Collins, with Chris Berger on acoustic bass and Matt Wilson or Tony Mason on drums, would play instrumental jazz, as well as blues where Bergson would test out his vocal chops.

Collins recalled, “His band was kind of somewhere in between a jazz group and a rock group. We were still doing a lot of jazz tunes with a lot of improvising and no singing, and then we would pull out one of his vocal songs. He was still trying to figure out what kind of rhythm section he wanted and what kind of drummer, and I think I made him a little more aware of what was going on in the rhythm section and what kind of a sound he could go for.”

Collins’ gorgeous saxophone elevates many tracks on Chris Bergson records, and he still plays at Bergson’s gigs when not busy with his own band or other projects.

The Jazz Standard gigs were an especially important time for Bergson.

“We were able to really develop as a band and that’s when I really started writing,” he said. “We recorded the album, Another Day right at the end of our residency. It documented the tunes that we had been playing every week, and that was really the start of the Chris Bergson Band.”

Bergson credits the influence of The Band’s music for inspiring “High Above the Morning,” the first of seven original songs he wrote for Another Day. The beautiful love song was played at the Bergson/Ross wedding in May 2004 at the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture. By this time, Ross had also become a writing partner, contributing lyrics and arrangement suggestions to songs like “Three Sisters.”

“High Above the Morning” however was a total Chris Bergson creation. “I remember writing that very quickly,” he said. “It came in its entirety, which isn’t always the case with writing. The Band’s music just opened up a whole world in songwriting.”

Woodstock and Levon Helm

The next “seismic event,” according to Bergson, was meeting and playing music with Levon Helm. As luck would have it, Collins had begun dating Helm’s daughter Amy, who played and sang in her own roots/gospel group, Ollabelle, and came to some of their Jazz Standard shows. When Bergson was looking for a place to record the band’s next CD, she suggested Helm’s barn/studio. In the fall of 2006, the band, which now included drummer Tony Leone, also a member of Ollabelle, rented a house upstate and recorded Fall Changes in Woodstock at Helm’s studio. During those sessions, Helm heard Bergson play and hired him as a guitar sub for those nights when Larry Campbell and Jimmy Vivino weren’t available to play with the Levon Helm Band.

“That’s what we really loved about The Band,
how they took so many strands of American music,
blues, R&B, jazz, rock and roll, and put it all
together. Never anything flashy, just incredible.”

“I started subbing quite a bit and it just an incredible experience,” Bergson said. “There was something so pure about what he wanted from the guitar, real straight down the pike rhythm guitar. His groove is so deep, so powerful. It was sort of the beginning of his comeback and a great time. He had such an amazing group of musicians, and it was a place where all my favorite music kind of came together. That’s what we really loved about The Band, how they took so many strands of American music, blues, R&B, jazz, rock and roll, and put it all together. Never anything flashy, just incredible. I feel like I learned and grew so much.”

At a New Year’s Eve Ramble, he played for the first time with keyboard wizard Bruce Katz, who he used to hear as a teenager in Boston playing with Ronnie Earl and the Broadcasters. Katz’s brilliant organ can he heard on many tracks of Fall Changes.

Fall Changes was released to critical acclaim, and was named Mojo magazine’s Number 1 Blues Album of 2008. The fascinatingly moody title track was coauthored by Bergson and Ross. Ross also suggested including a cover of Jimi Hendrix’s “Are You Experienced?” Many characters from the couple’s Brooklyn neighborhood appear in songs like “Gowanus Heights.”

“Although I enjoy music, I’m not a musical person,” Ross said. “I would never have thought of writing a song. What would I have done with it? But Chris and I would always listen to music together and I credit him with opening my ears. I think one of the reasons that our collaborations work so well is that it’s very clear that they are his songs. If he doesn’t like an idea, that’s that.”

The Chris Bergson Band, now including Matt Clohesy on bass, began touring in Europe and was increasingly invited to play festivals in the U.S. and abroad.

“We felt like we all took a great step forward as a band on that first European tour,” Bergson said. “We played on bigger stages for bigger audiences, so we had to adjust a bit. I learned a lot as a bandleader.”

Another big step forward for the Bergson/Ross family was the birth of daughter Chloe in 2008. Like her father, the 4-year-old likes to sing and make up her own songs and has her own imaginary band, which includes Dora the Explorer.

Hubert Sumlin and Overseas Tours

Having played with one of his heroes, it was only a matter of time before Bergson was playing guitar beside another.

From left: David Keyes, Chris Bergson, Hubert Sumlin, John Conte and Tony Leone, The Ukrainian Cultural Center, Whippany NJ, May 2011. Photo by Tony Ferrari.

Chris Bergson with Hubert Sumlin, Bearsville Theater, Woodstock, August 2009. Photo by Tony Ferrari.

“The two people who I always really hoped I’d get to play with someday were Levon and Hubert Sumlin,” he said. Bergson first got the chance to play with Sumlin at a Bearsville Theater show in 2009 commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Woodstock Festival. A friend put together a band that could play Howlin’ Wolf material behind Sumlin and asked Bergson to participate. After that first show, Sumlin called on him again to back him up on shows and even occasionally sat in at Chris Bergson Band gigs.

“It was an amazing experience,” Bergson said. “Hubert was one of my all-time favorite guitar players and getting to watch him play up close was just incredible. His sound and the way he approached playing was totally unique. A total improviser and also one of the sweetest people I ever met, just a joy to be around. With both Hubert and Levon, I feel very blessed that I got to play with them.”

In November, Bergson had a close encounter with another of his all-time heroes, B.B. King, when he opened  for him at his New York club. “My parents gave me his ‘Live in Cook County Jail’ album and his playing on that album had a really huge influence on me,” Bergson said.

Chris Bergson & B.B. King, photo by Marc Lawrence

Bergson and his band recorded their third CD, Imitate the Sun, upon returning from their last European tour, where they notably opened for Bettye Lavette at the Blues in Hell Festival in Norway. They worked out some of the tunes at some club shows in the Netherlands, then went into the studio at Excello Recording in Brooklyn. The CD, which features five original numbers and covers of songs by artists from Bessie Smith to Bob Dylan, was named Number 2 Blues Album of the year for 2011 by Mojo magazine.

A more recent release is Play Date, a collection of jazz originals and a few covers with bass player Neal Miner, who Bergson first played with in 1995 at Birdland in New York City.

“It’s been really nice to go back and revisit some of these jazz tunes after so many years,” Bergson said. “Neal and I have been playing together for over 16 years now and it’s a complete joy playing with him. He’s a very soulful player, has an incredible deep groove and always a beautiful choice of notes.”

What’s cooking now is a new Chris Bergson Band CD
and other projects, including a collaboration with
soul singer Tami Lynn.

There is no shortage of musicians anxious to play with Bergson, who has a reputation as both highly professional and relentlessly positive. Drummer Tony Leone is particularly grateful for his years in Bergson’s band.

“He’s one of the most genuine people I know,” he said. “With the two records and the amount of gigs we’ve done together, we’ve developed a rapport that’s as strong as anything I’ve ever been a part of. Playing with Chris has provided a place for me to discover some things about myself as a musician in a comfortable space, just trying to make every night better than the last. When we play, we just go for broke every time.

“I think we have really developed together. He certainly has developed as a writer, as a player and singer. And as a bandleader, he’s just fearless, he’s always got stuff cooking.”

What’s cooking now is a new Chris Bergson Band CD and other projects, including a collaboration with soul singer Tami Lynn, recently a featured guest at Dr. John’s New Orleans Revue at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

“I’m a big fan of hers,” Bergson said. “One of the things that’s cool about her is that she sounds equally incredible singing jazz or R&B or blues, so I feel like she’s interested in going in a different direction.”

Bergson is also writing songs with Craig Dreyer, who plays organ and saxophone with the band when Collins is otherwise engaged. Bergson also plays the occasional club date with Collins, as he can jump in at a moment’s notice.

Wherever he’s playing and whoever he’s playing alongside, Bergson has only one basic requirement: “It’s all just honest music with soul,” he said. “That’s what we’re going for.”

Featured image by Ahron R. Foster
Kay Cordtz has been fascinated by music and musicians since elementary school when she ran home from school every day to watch American Bandstand. Since then, she has been a newspaper reporter, political spokeswoman, government science writer and freelance chronicler of local music scenes during a 30+-year career.  She is a graduate of the Columbia University School of Journalism