It’s interesting to me that you guys are about to get married and you’re going to leave. You could be together on the road and now you’re going to be apart.
Durkin: We’ve been together the last five years.
Kalb: Jen needs to get off the road mostly for health reasons. It’s been non-stop for the last couple of years. It’s kind of a blessing because I think our relationship is going to get even better. We’re always together 24-7.
Durkin: We get along pretty good for people who constantly work together.
Kalb: So that space that is needed in a relationship is going to come into play. I love playing with Jen, and I’m sure we’re going to do many projects in the future together. And she’s going to come back and sing with Deep Banana from time to time as a special guest. If the paths meet up again, everyone in the band is in agreement that that door is open to come back. In the meantime, Deep Banana Blackout is going to go on and continue to write new music in the same style that we’ve been pursuing. It’s going to be great. Tell us a little bit about Hope (Clayburn)?
Kalb: She’s from the band Baaba Seth She’s a multi-instrumentalist. She plays flute, alto saxophone, keyboards.
Durkin: She has a soulful voice, but she’s definitely different from me. She’s her own person. She’s not going to come into the group and be a replacement for me. She’s got her own thing happening. Her own sound and style. I think it’s going to be a very refreshing change to the group that I think people will be excited about. I’m excited about sitting in with the band with her in it. I think she’s going to really stimulate things.
Kalb: She flew up from Virginia and sang most of our original tunes. They sounded great with Hope singing. But that’s just the start. I think one of our main objectives is to write new music with Hope in mind, to start things fresh after the Berkfest.
It sounds great, but I gotta say, I’m really going to miss you, Jen. I’ve been covering music for 20 years and there have been very few vocalists who’ve blown me away the way you have in that you’ve been able to combine the raw sound of Janis Joplin with as much soul as, say, an Aretha Franklin.
Durkin: Thank you. Those are two major influences. And certainly, Janis was influenced by Otis Redding and Howlin’ Wolf and Tina Turner, and those are huge influences of mine. I feel that Janis and I are kindred spirits in that sense. Those are the voices of her time that she would go see live. She was really impressed by them. Those are people I wish I could have seen back in the day. The kind of energy that they have on stage, particularly Tina Turner and Otis Redding, has influenced me greatly, as well as a Aretha. If you talk about a triumvirate of people, they are the three that are in my head when I’m on stage being the ringleader of this group of people who can improvise and play jazz, soul and funk and make it even a little harder edge with electric guitar stuff.
It’s been a really great experience being in this group, but I really need to be able to explore another level of being a composer and a writer on my own, to be able to stand on my own a little bit more. I do plan on having my own group at some point in the future that obviously would not gig and tour as much as Deep Banana because I don’t want to be on the road that much.
Kalb: Can I be in that band too? I think I’m the first choice for any records she’d want to do.
Durkin: Yes (laughs).
Kalb: And I’d love to play with her live as much as possible.
Jen, you may be the only grassroots performer to leave a band to pursue a solo career. The fact that you’re able to do so indicates how successful music can be at the grassroots level.
Kalb: It’s interesting because this isn’t your typical story you see on VH-1 ‘Behind the Music’ (laughs). Everyone in this band is becoming open to new people. Something as great a focus in the group as Jen leaving, most people would think, that’s it, the band’s done. But we wanted to keep it together because we like playing together, and we think there’s more music that we can create as Deep Banana Blackout. And at the same time, Jen feels the need to do her own thing, and everybody is comfortable with that. I mean, we’ve had a long time. Jen let us know almost a year ago that this was going to happen so we’ve had a long time to become comfortable with it. Everybody’s really supportive of each other.
What is the one thing about or experience with the band that at times gave you second thoughts about leaving?
Durkin: The fans begging me not leave (laughs). ‘Don’t leave!’ I get pretty overwhelmed and little veklempt at times. I have a blockage in my connect-o-gozoid (all laugh). It kind of chokes me up a little bit. They love the group so much so it’s hard.
But I had this vision of what I wanted to accomplish in leaving the band on a good note and have it so that people would accept what we’re doing and understand that it’s not going to destroy the group. I’ll have a successful spinoff of my own, kind of like a hit TV show. You know what I mean? Like ‘The Jeffersons.’
I want to start my own hit TV show spinoff (laughs). I want to have some sort of spinoff of all this hard work we’ve done together, and then I’d like to be able to do guest appearances now and then. I’ve been trying to get people accepting of that. They come to the show and see it the way it is now and say, ‘It’s great don’t change a thing.’ But the thing is it can only get better with the addition of someone like Hope and a side project because then there’s more gigs to go to. Maybe my band could even open for Deep Banana and stuff. It’s more music. It’s more gigs. It’s more entertainment.
Kalb: It’s an open thing. She has her band and she can fly in and out (of Deep Banana). Even when I went out with (John) Scofield, they had a great drummer named Mark Balling who played on Fuzz’s record sit in. It’s that kind of openness that everybody can get involved in. It’s kind of like what P-Funk became with all the different players and guys coming in and out doing their own solo projects, then coming back to the group. Really what it’s all about is music and having fun and making a living.
Durkin: And as things change, it can only get more and more exciting for people. The idea of trying to constantly reinvent Deep Banana Blackout and constantly having an influx of new music is one of way changing and evolving.
What will that project be like?
Durkin: You know it will be very blues/soul-oriented. That’s my thing. I come from a blues/gospel-base when it comes to singing. That’s the stuff that I really connect with, that really gets me going. I’ll always be influenced by that. I would just really like to have a huge body of work five to 10 years from now that I can say I was a part of. Some of it will be Deep Banana Blackout music and some of it will be my own.
Eric, comment on what it was like playing on Scofield’s record (‘Bump’). He’s a big jazz cat. It’s sort of like the studio version of the Newport Jazz Festival gig. How did that lend to the credibility of you and Deep Banana Blackout?
Kalb: It was a dream come true. What else can I say? I’ve been listening to Sco’s music for years and years. He turned out to be such an amazing guy on top of all this great music he’s put out.
Durkin: He’s so down-to-earth.
And he loves this scene.
Kalb: Yeah. He really sees a lot of the greatness that’s coming out of this scene, the improvisation. He really enjoys it. It was just a really amazing experience to hang out at his house and make music freely with him. He’s very open to ideas. He wanted to bring me into the studio. We just kind of went with it. Before you know I’m playing in the studio with Sco.
Jen, your brother, Johnny Durkin, also was on ‘Bump.’
Kalb: Yup. He played percussion. A friend of mine, Dave Livolsi, we go way back to Berklee days …
Durkin: … We played in Tongue ‘N Groove together.
Kalb: Yeah. Then, of course, there’s Chris Wood (from Medeski, Martin and Wood) who played bass on three tracks. At one point when it was me, Chris and Sco, I was in heaven (laughs).
It was fantastic, some really magical stuff. Then to be able to go out on tour with Sco and do those dates. I’m thankful that Deep Banana afforded me that time and it worked out because that was a great opportunity. We had so much fun out on the road. We just took the music from ‘Bump’ and then all these extensions came out of it. There was a lot of improvisation.
It’s kind of like what Jen was saying. There’s certain things that you crave that you’re not really getting from playing in the band. Although playing in a band like Deep Banana Blackout is satisfying a lot of your needs, there’s things that you want to explore that you can’t really get. So Sco satisfied that in me. I’m still satisfied now (laughs).
One final question, how do you think the addition of Hope will change the energy level of the band?
Kalb: Well I don’t think it will decrease. I would like to see it taper off because sometimes, to be quite honest, the energy level is too much for me. Between what I’m doing and Fuzzy’s doing and Jen and then the crowd gets insane, it’s almost too much. It can be overwhelming.
Durkin: It’s good having levels to the music. It’s great the crowd is screaming, but there’s also greatness in the silences, when they’re standing there with their mouths open, amazed, like, ‘That’s a heavy musical thing happening right now. I’m not dancing my ass off now’ because it’s tuned to another level.
Kalb: The energy mania of it all is really effective
Durkin: It’s nice to end the night with that.
Kalb: But the other level, where we come down to a pindrop and do something really slow and soulful, that’s another energy we haven’t tapped into enough. We’d like to get to do things like that so it’s equally effective. You don’t want to be too much of the same thing. Durkin: You want to use a lot of different colors in the painting.
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Bob Makin is an entertainment writer for Gannett NJ.
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