North Shore Jazz: Jon Cleary and the Absolute Monster Gentlemen, Sunday, July 3 at 8 p.m. at the BlueShore Financial Centre for the Performing Arts at Capilano University, in partnership with the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival. Tickets: $35/$33, visit capilanou.ca/blueshorefinancialcentre.
Jon Cleary draws an analogy: “It’s like having a radio on in the background.”
“If you start playing music when you’re young. … I think it molds your brain in a certain way - in a good way. I need to play music, it’s a mental function and a bodily function. I’ve been doing it for so many years and I started so young that even when I don’t have an instrument in my hands the music’s still going on. If I have an instrument then at least everybody else can hear what the music is doing, but the music doesn’t stop when I walk away from the instrument,” explains the keyboardist, vocalist, guitarist and songwriter.
For Cleary the music continuously running through him is steeped in the rich traditions of New Orleans, a place he’s called home for the last 35 years. Born and raised in the United Kingdom in Cranbrook, Kent, as soon as he was old enough, in 1980, he hightailed it to the Crescent City. The draw had been the result of the influence of his musical family, including his uncle who, after visiting Louisiana, returned with suitcases full of local 45s, which Cleary couldn’t get enough of.
“It’s a great place to be from musically. You’re not limited to playing traditional New Orleans music, but if you come from New Orleans, or if you grew up in New Orleans like I did, it stamps an imprint on what you do. It doesn’t matter what music you play … there’s just a certain joie de vivre that comes through in the folk music of New Orleans, which is jazz, and funk, and rhythm and blues, and it informs how you play everything else,” he says, reached Monday by the North Shore News in Ottawa.
Cleary is in the midst of a busy North American and European tour, dedicated to spreading “the gospel of good New Orleans rhythm and blues,” he says. The tour will bring him to North Vancouver Sunday night for a performance at the BlueShore Financial Centre for the Performing Arts at Capilano University, in partnership with the TD Vancouver International Jazz Festival, on now through Sunday.
Supporting Cleary on the tour are members of his band the Absolute Monster Gentleman, including A.J. Hall on drums and Cornell Williams on bass.
Cleary goes on to explain that in New Orleans a lot of emphasis is placed on being an artisan and honing your craft in addition to just being a musician.
“It’s not just perfunctory playing of music, or reading music from a piece of paper, it’s a city full of eccentric characters and it’s required that your playing has personality as well as just the nuts and bolts,” he says.
When looking at New Orleans through the lens of the European perspective of where he started out, it’s a small city with a relatively short history.
“For a city that’s only been in existence for a few hundred years and it’s so small, it’s generated so much good music and music with such power to move people. The music from that little city changed the way people play music all over the world. Jazz was the ethnic folk music of New Orleans. It had such an appeal beyond its city limits that it was embraced by the rest of the United States in the 1920s and in the 1930s and 40s and the post-war years it became hugely popular all over the world and it changed the way people played music. American music became predominant.
“I think if you grow up in New Orleans you grow up surrounded by all kinds of different music and not necessarily all of it typically New Orleans music. It’s one of those parts of the world where music is an essential part of your social activity, it’s a soundtrack to your daily life down there. Every generation in New Orleans takes what the previous generations have done and adds something new to it. So you have not just traditional Dixieland jazz but you have the rhythm and blues from the ’40s and ’50s and you have the funk from the ’60s and ’70s too and it covers quite a wide spectrum. So if you can move around in all those circles and you’re fluent in those dialects then it’s good grounding for playing anything really,” he says.
2016 has been a big year for Cleary. While he’s received countless awards and accolades over the years, this year marked his first Grammy Award win, honoured for best regional roots music album for his 2015 release GoGo Juice. The record was a follow to 2012’s Occapella, which was an experiment of sorts seeing him rearrange compositions by the late great New Orleans musician, songwriter and arranger Allen Toussaint.
“Having made a record of somebody else’s songs I was ready to do a record of my tunes. They’re all original compositions, some written especially for the record, some were songs that I’ve had sitting around in notebooks and on cassette tapes and hard drives for several years. If you’re a songwriter I think you should write all the time,” he says.
Cleary is grateful for the opportunity GoGo Juice afforded, giving him the chance to work with Toussaint before his recent passing.
“I’ve admired his stuff since I was a kid. My uncle first handed me an Allen Toussaint record when I was about 10 and said, ‘I think you should listen to this.’ He’s been a part of so many great records that I really, really liked, records that the DNA of the music fit me perfectly. I’ve admired him from a distance but he was always there. A very shy person, not unapproachable, but very private, so I never got to know him that well.
“I’ve heard from his family that he really dug the record that I made and I think his way of expressing that was when I asked him if he was interested in doing horns, he said yes and he loved the material and he did all the horn arrangements for me for nothing, which was a very kind gesture. It’s an honour to have his name on a record of mine,” he says.
