Jim Campilongo and The Brooklynites, West Vancouver Memorial Library, Friday, June 23, 7:30 p.m., as part of the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival, free admission (coastaljazz.ca).
In a time that never existed but probably looked a bit like 1935, a strong wind swept Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys around the panhandle and into Kansas City, MO.
Inducted into the city’s jazz scene, the swinging hillbilly fiddlers and mandolin players stomped and one-o’clock jumped their way through 12-bar blues riffs alongside Count Basie and Duke Ellington.
That alternate timeline might be as good an explanation as any for Campilongo and his 1959 Fender Telecaster.
“The Telecaster has … a human-like sound to it and – if you will – some sassiness,” he says. “A Telecaster sounds a lot closer to Louis Armstrong than a Gibson ES175 through a Polytone amp.”
Campilongo’s comments are liberally peppered with guitars and guitarists as he talks about Brooklyn, bandmates, and the Telecaster sound.
Whether he was playing a Japanese-made Teisco guitar sold at Sears or a ’62 Stratocaster, he was always trying to get at a certain tone, he says. It was the sound he could hear behind Merle Haggard when his country twang dipped into something gothic and it was the joy he got when Roy Buchanan stretched steel strings.
When he finally got his “tele,” which he pronounces like English slang for television, he felt like he’d found a home.
Having guitar, Campilongo travelled, eventually switching his base of operations from San Francisco to New York, where he moved shortly after 9/11.
He had a “romantic vision” of New York as a teeming metropolis of musicians and gigs followed by pizza followed by late-night jam sessions that preceded more gigs.
“By the design of the city, it’s a community,” he says.
The subway and the way clubs are centrally located make New York something different, Campilongo explains.
“Not only do you have a brotherhood with your fellow musicians, you do with the audience.”
In 2014, a New Yorker piece chronicled a Campilongo gig that drew an audience of 11 – including the band on stage and the band that just got off stage.
But it was in exactly those small shows that Campilongo, Luca Benedetti and Roy Williams played every week, experimenting, expanding, and eventually becoming Jim Campilongo and the Honey Fingers.
“We did what some people might consider a silly gig and we got better and better … finally we said, ‘Let’s make a record.’”
That record was Last Night, This Morning, 12 tracks of original instrumental country swing along with two covers that sound like originals.
The album includes “Splitsville,” a tune he’d recorded years earlier with the 10 Gallon Cats. The older version swings, but there’s a frantic energy that makes the track feel about one sip of moonshine from full blown rockabilly. The new version is slower and more nuanced, sweeter and sadder.
Campilongo’s musical evolution is observable when he’s stage, sharing knowing looks with his bandmates like teenagers passing notes in class.
The West Vancouver Memorial Library show will lean heavily on that last album, Campilongo says.
As “the Honey Fingers proper” couldn’t do the show, Campilongo opted to call the new band the Brooklynites.
“I’m not sure if I regret that or not,” he says. “It was actually the first thing I thought of and sometimes I go with that, especially when I’m naming songs … because it saves me three days of obsessing and crossing out 200 other things and maybe going with the first thing I thought of.”
While Manhattan is held captive by long money and high fashion, Brooklyn still has the musical community that compelled Campilongo to cross the country.
Campilongo has toured with both Norah Jones and Martha Wainwright, playing for audiences who “liked us before we even started playing.”
But he’s been on the other end of the spectrum, too, he says, recounting a show in a Czech Republic mining town.
“These people did not know who I was, hide nor hair,” he says, comparing the experience to the mining colony on a moon of Jupiter in the Sean Connery movie Outland.
Looking over a crowd that was about 80 per cent male, Campilongo remembers thinking: “What the hell have I gotten myself into?” He knew he had some songs that were delicate and vulnerable.
“We skipped over those,” he says.
And while he didn’t bust out “Smoke On the Water, he did pick high energy songs that won the crowd over.
“They loved us,” Campilongo reports. “I can break through that fence of people not knowing who I am or what our music is.”
Audiences have a chance to find out who Campilongo is June 23.
