jazz music feature

Passing the good times: Jon Cleary

Chatting to him about his new album, his world tours, and 'passer les bons temps' beside the Mississippi.

Pianist Jon Cleary (pictured here with the Absolute Monster Gentlemen) was born and raised in the UK but was drawn to New Orleans to pursue his musical calling. As he took to the Jazz Festival stage this year, we chatted to him about his new album, his world tours, and 'passer les bons temps' beside the Mississippi.

TW: When did you decide you wanted to be a pianist?

JC: Well, I was lucky enough to grow up in a musical family where all the men in the family played music when they got together, so I just thought that's what you did when you grew up. I started playing music as soon as I was big enough to get my hands around the neck of a guitar, then they started showing me stuff. There wasn't really much thought involved, it was just a very natural thing to do. I started playing piano when I was about five and one thing led to another and I ended up going to New Orleans after I left school, because I'd developed a passion for that music and I'd heard so many exciting stories from family members that had lived there at one time or another. I didn't really have any long term plans or anything, I assumed I was going to be going there for a few weeks or a few months but I'm still there; nearly 30 years later.

TW: How often do you get back to the UK?

JC: Normally I come back at Christmas to see the family and often find myself over here in the summer months at some point or another. It gets so hot in New Orleans that some of the musicians leave for Europe to do gigs and I usually end up passing through for a couple of days in the summertime on something like the tour we're on now, for example. But I've lived in New Orleans since 1980.

TW: And you play a lot as a session musician out there?

JC: Yeah, it's part of the job if you're on the piano. I play in nightclubs and festivals in New Orleans and other places around the world with my band, and other people's bands, and you get to play on other people's records too if they need that style. So I've played on one or two records over the years.

TW: You've played with BB King, what was that like?

JC: It was a thrill, it was a real thrill for me. It was an album where they paired BB King up with some different artists, like duets. It was great playing with BB King though, for me, it was actually an even bigger thrill to play with D'Angelo [one of the people recording a duet] who is one of my favourite artists.

TW: Is D'Angelo, do you feel, a bit closer to your music?

JC: I really admired the one album he'd made at that point. He had made one album that I really dug. I suspected he was a brilliant musician but I couldn't really tell, so it was nice to get him in the studio and sit down with him and hear him play some Theolonius Monk and some Johnny 'Guitar' Watts and stuff, he was really great. So I'm lucky, it's a great job, you get to play with all sorts of musicians with different influences and there are certainly some that stick out more than others. D'Angelo was definitely one of the highlights.

TW: You've played all over the world. How is the atmosphere in New Orleans different from here in the UK and elsewhere?

JC: Well, it's a very hot place. I moved there in 1980 so I think it's changed a bit in 30 odd years. New Orleans is a very black city; a lot of black people have the cultural inheritance that comes from Africa, obviously, but by way of Haiki and Cuba as well, so that's reflected in the music. It's a city where people set out to have as much fun out of life as they can, so there's a lot of celebrations of the good things in life. And of course, every year the whole city has that big party called Mardi Gras. There's a lot of great music. Really, funk is the ethnic folk music of New Orleans, that's funk and syncopation. It's the element that goes through all the jazz music and all the R n B stuff that happened there later on. It's a very colourful, exciting place to live.

TW: How's it building up now? It must have been a bit sad over the last couple of years with all the destruction from Hurricane Katrina. Is it recovering now? Have you seen that happen?

JC: Yes, the progress is very slow but there is progress. It's very hard to come up with something that will sum all that stuff up in just a couple of sentences. What happened to New Orleans was absolutely enourmous. It is coming back; the rate is so slow that it's hard to get a feel for whether it's coming back as the same city or a very different city. There are still people who were evacuated before the hurricane struck who haven't been able to come home yet. A lot of people lost their homes and have had to move away, but the culture of the city is very strong so I think it's strong enough to withstand the effects of Katrina.

TW: How did the band Jon Cleary and the Absolute Monster Gentlemen come together?

JC: Well I'd been playing in New Orleans for several years and was enjoying the luxury of using all the top session musicians whenever I needed to put a band together. They have some of the best rhythm sections in the world there. But it came to a point where I needed to do something slightly different because I was writing a lot of material and I needed to have a regular band. So I got together with some friends of mine who were playing in a gospel band called the Friendly Travellers and asked them if they wanted to give it a go and they said 'yeah' and we've been doing it now for about 15 years. Musically it's a hybrid between my tastes, the New Orleans traditional R n B stuff, and their knowledge of more modern contemporary soul music and gospel. So it's a fusion of those things that's been working well.

TW: The new album's 'Mo Hippa', when did you start recording it?

JC: When did I start recording it? Well it's a live album... so, we started recording it at about 9.30 in the evening and finished recording at about eleven o'clock. So that was the recording – we turned the recording machine on before we started playing and then turned it off after we played the last song. It's all live. It's nothing that took months and months to make, the recording takes place over about an hour and a half.

TW: Yes, obviously, but are they all original tunes. Or had you recorded some before?

JC: Some of them are live versions of studio songs, some of them were original songs that we'd never recorded before but were still part of our live set. Some of them are mine, most of them are mine, but there are a few more traditional New Orleans R n B tunes that we've rearranged and turned into something different. So it's a nice broad cross-section of what you can expect to hear if you come to see us play.

TW: You're pretty busy at the moment. Do you do a lot of world touring? I mean, how many times have you gone back and forth across the pond this year?

JC: This has been a busy year so by the end of this year I will have been in Australia three times, Europe three times, Japan, Hawaii, Canada. So yeah, it's been non-stop. I've been on the road non-stop since the second week of February. We go touring within the States as well, so we go to California, New York, then back to New Orleans and around the south. It's a lot of travelling, a lot of touring.

TW: And you're well received everywhere you go I'm sure.

JC: People like it. We're not very well known, we're not famous, but we tend to have these small pockets of fanatical fans; usually music lovers or jazz lovers who made the pilgrimage to New Orleans and have seen us playing at a little bar round there and they tell all their friends. So we end up with audiences where there might be 15 people who are actually familiar with what we do and then another 200 people who have come along because it was well recommended. By the end of the evening, everyone's kind of on the same page and understanding what we do and digging it.

We're not really a blues band, the stuff we play is... I just like to call it New Orleans music. I guess we're a soul band or an R n B band but then what I try and let everybody know is that every individual in the band is a very accomplished musician, I mean the standard of musicianship is high, everybody has to really be able to play. But it's really about the songs. Something all New Orleans bands have is that you go out and work and, at the end of the day, generate a good time. They have an expression, they call it 'passer les bon temps' - passing the good times - and New Orleans music is there, really, to just make you feel good, that's the whole idea and it seems to work.

TW: How about the future, what's in the pipeline for you?

JC: Well, I'm going have to take some time off the road. I'm going to tour right the way through to December. We wind up playing New Year's Eve in Australia, I'll be going straight there from the European tour with John Scofield.

John Scofield is a pretty respected jazz guitarist, and I'm going to be doing a project with him to include Ricky Fataar and George Porter. George Porter is the bass player that used to be in a band called the Meters from New Orleans, quite important. So it'll be a quartet and we'll be coming over and playing in Europe in November. I don't know if we actually make it to the UK on that tour.

After that I'll be going to Australia. So it's touring all year long, really. Next year I'm trying somehow to not accept bookings for a little bit, and to just stay at home and have a semblance of a social life and remember what my bed feels like. I'm quite looking forward to that.

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Jon Cleary performed at the Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival 2008.

published: Aug-2008

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