INTERVIEW: Jon Cleary reflects on his 35 years in NOLA
Jon Cleary is one of the chief exporters of the New Orleans sound. His original songs, including his work on guitar, B3 and piano, have woven themselves into the fabric of the Crescent City, offering locals and visitors the chance to hear his original compositions. He’s a man who can play funky. He’s a man who can sing the blues. He’s a multi-hyphenate with a penchant for developing engaging new material, such as his latest album, Go-Go Juice.
His star has shown bright in New Orleans and attracted the ears of many other musicians. In December, for example, he joins his friend John Scofield on a tour that brings him to New York City’s B.B. King Blues Club & Grill. On the new album, Ivan Neville sits in, and Allen Toussaint arranges the horn sections on several songs.
On a regular basis, Cleary plays with his band, the Absolute Monster Gentlemen, in New Orleans. They cut some albums for Basin Street Records (a self-titled record and Pin Your Spin), and Cornell Williams, Derwin “Big D” Perkins and Jeffrey “Jellybean” Alexander offer background vocals on Go-Go Juice.
For Cleary, the record came together almost organically. It was simply time to head into the studio In the case of Go-Go Juice, that meant booking time at Dockside Studio in Maurice, La., and Funk Headquarters in New Orleans.
“It was time to make a record, and I’d various songs and bits of songs that I had waiting on scraps of paper waiting to be completed for the right time,” Cleary said recently during a phone interview. “It was just natural assembling songs that seemed to go well together, covered a few different styles, and tempos, and keys and moods — a variety. … I don’t know if it’s a New Orleans record. That’s for other people to say, but it’s funky.”
Go-Go Juice is somewhat unique in that each of the nine songs was written by Cleary. On “Boneyard,” he shares writing credits with John Johnson.
“Yeah, I feel very strongly about that,” the UK-born musician said of writing original tunes. “The job really, as I understand it, is you spend a lot of time learning how clever people in the past approached musical problems … And then you learn from all of them, and then you do something new with it.”
Cleary said it’s fun to play the standards on gigs because they are fantastic tunes. However, he’s not sure about recreating them on a record.
“[It’s] interesting to take from what’s been done and then try and write something new,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be drastically different I don’t think. It’s whatever comes out, you know, comes out. You’re like a sponge as a musician. You just absorb, and you listen to lots and lots of great musicians, and lots of lots of great records and great gigs, and you find the stuff that’s good, you like, that appeals to you … Then it absorbs, goes into your musical vocabulary and then ends up coming out. So I don’t think there’s anything particularly revolutionary on the record.”
Go-Go Juice includes the album-opener, “Pump It Up,” plus several socially conscious tunes, including “Brother I’m Hungry” and “Beg Steal or Borrow.” Perhaps the most intimate and revealing songs are “Step Into My Life” and the tribute tune, “Bringing Back the Home.”
“On this record we didn’t have any time for rehearsals,” he said. “So I demoed all the songs to give everybody a rough idea of how I wanted the parts to go. And then the person had to check the keys, and tempos and things like that. … And then we came in, and we cut the whole album in three days pretty much.”
Even though he’s now done with the recording, the songs will live on in a different form when he starts gigging them around town. “So one interesting thing that happens is, you know, you write some new songs, put it on the record and then you’ve got to start playing it now,” he said. “So you play it over and over again at clubs and festivals, and over the course of a couple of years, it starts to evolve, and gets refined and gets better and better. So you end up with a song ultimately that sounds quite a lot different from the earlier version that was on the record. That’s happened with all my songs. In an ideal world, I think you go out and play the songs for a year, and let them go through that process and then record them. The problem is nowadays whenever I do a gig, there’s always about five or six people with iPhones filming, and you can’t keep anything secret. I mean one of the other artists I play with is the same way. They want to try the songs out and work out all the bumps on the gigs before going into the studio, but it gets up on YouTube and everyone hears the songs. It robs the ability to surprise people in that respect.”
He added: “I’ve got so much better I think I almost want to go back in and do an album with just longstanding tunes that are popular with our audiences and just redo all the new versions.”
Perhaps some of those redone older tunes will make it onto the setlist when Cleary plays with Scofield on the upcoming tour.
“I played on a Jon Scofield record a few years ago, and it was called Piety Street,” he said. “And it was a collection of gospel tunes with a New Orleans band. We toured behind that record for a couple of years. … John and I had been friends through social contacts for a long time before. Actually we never got to play music together, but I really love what he does. And I think he really digs the kind of r&b that I play, and a while back we both were guests on a solo live gig at the Brooklyn Browl. And we elected to do one tune to sort of prepare us, and it was so much fun that we discussed it a couple of times. And then we booked some gigs. … It’s a lot of fun. It’s a great gig. I basically play some funky old r&b piano, and John’s there digging in and playing all of his great stuff on the guitar. It’s a lot of fun.”
For more than three decades Cleary has called New Orleans home. He plays regular gigs at the Maple Leaf Bar, Chickie Wah Wah and dba on Frenchmen Street. When he’s not recording and playing in the he’s called home for so long, he’s taking to the road, solo and sometimes with skilled partners. In every way possible, he’s living his boyhood dream.
“I am nostalgic, and it is mind-boggling to me,” he said. “I think I was so lucky knowing what I wanted to do so young, and I’m very grateful to my family members that kind of sort of steered me in this direction but made the path open. … It’s a bit mind-boggling sometimes. I’ve been here for 35 years, and it goes by so quickly. … My mom even found one of my first-of-day-school books when I was 11. … It said, what do you want to be when you grow up? I said, I want to be a session musician in New Orleans, but my dad won’t let me.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
