With the debut studio album release of Renaissance Man, Jaimoe’s Jasssz Band finally establishes itself as an act with a recorded legacy that should endure. Jai Johanny Johanson, aka Jaimoe, an original drummer and percussionist with the Allman Brothers Band, sat down with Jambands.com at the dawn of the release of the album to discuss his band’s origins, the nature of their evolution from live work to the new studio album, his other bandmates, his early influences, and his feelings about what it is like to be considered not only a fine journeyman musician in a very tough profession, but one that makes a difference, too. Jaimoe is a serious yet playful man, while being a humorous and grounded soul that appears to take flight behind his drum kit, his true calling in life, while always keeping an ear out for what sounds just right in the mix.
RR: Congratulations on the recent announcement that the Allman Brothers Band are to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2012 Grammy Awards.
JJ: Thank you, man. That’s quite a step there. We in the business now, man.
RR: How does that make you feel, while you continue on down the road making fairly fresh and vibrant music?
JJ: It makes me feel great. I hope it makes my partners feel as great. I know Gregory will. My partner, Butch will possibly have something to say about it, but deep down inside, I’m sure he feels the same way, so I won’t speak for anyone except myself. We have one Grammy from a live session I think in South Carolina, or Virginia, for “Jessica.” It was a Dickey Betts song, an instrumental. Interesting thing was that I think I was in Mississippi at a funeral, and my friend Paul Riddle played on the record.
But when you get a Lifetime Achievement Award, man, that’s like [whistles]...that’s like really saying something. Neil Portnow at the Grammys called me. But, first, my manager had told me I had an interview with Rolling Stone. So I called him up and said, “Hey, man, are you going to the Grammys, you know, to support Gregory?” And he said, “Well, you’ve got an interview on Friday with Rolling Stone. After you talk to them, talk to me, and I should know by then.” I said, “Oh, O.K.” (laughs) And Neil called, man, and after talking to him, he started stringing me on, man—ran it like a carrot on a line. I was thinking, “What does this guy want?” And then, I had the thought: “Is he going to ask me to play at the Grammys with my band?” Things just started going all over in my head. I said, “Wait a minute, man. Is this Portnow?” And he said, “Yeah. Who did you think it was?” I said, “I don’t know how many Neils you got over there. I know only one Neil there, and I never met you, but I know who you are.” And he kept stringing me on, and then, I figure he thought, “Oh, I’ve strung him along enough.”
He said, “You know, we used to do this by mail, but now, I thought it would be much more higher class to call people and tell them. And the other thing, I didn’t know what their reaction was. You won the Lifetime Achievement Award.”
I said, “GOD DAMN!” (laughter) Man…after all that stuff he said, stringing me along, and he finally told me, it was worth him stringing me along. (laughter) That’s one hell of an award, man.
RR: Let’s talk about something else worthy of praise—your new studio album.
JJ: I need to clear up something before we continue.
RR: Sure, man.
JJ: Jambands.com.
RR: Yeah.
JJ: We are a jamband. (laughs) We are a jamband. The Allman Brothers. On my part, we are a jamband. I wanted to clear that up. We were doing it, not before anybody else, but we were one of the great disciples that has brought it quite a ways. We’re a jamband with a little class.
RR: Cool. Renaissance Man. How did the ideas for the debut studio album start?
JJ: It started when the guy that is Gregory’s assistant/valet, Hewell Middleton, known as Chank, told me about this guy and asked me if I knew Junior Mack. I said, “Junior Mack? No, I don’t know him.” He said, “You don’t know Junior Mack? ” I said, “No, man.” He calls me Frown, so he says, “Frown, Junior Mack is a hell of a guitar player. He plays slide and this and that and the other and the rest of it.”
So, one night, Junior Mack comes to the Beacon. Chank said, “Hey, Frown, come here, man. I want you to meet Junior Mack. I said, “Hey, man, how you doin’? You got anything I can listen to, any CDs I can listen to?” He said, “I’ve got one right in my pocket here.” He pulls it out and gives it to me. He was accompanied by, basically, what was Dickey Betts’ band. They did a gig together, and he recorded it. That’s what he used for his CD. It had Dave Stoltz on it. Dave is the bass player in my band. He also had Matt Zeiner and Mark Greenberg, who was one of the drummers in Dickey Betts’ band. He had two drummers in that band. Dave, Junior and Matt are on the first CD I did, Live at the Double Down Grill in Avon [Connecticut]. Matt is the keyboardist on there, and Kris Jensen [saxophone] who was in [Dickey’s] band, and is also on Double Down.
When we did that gig, it was like no rehearsals or anything. I called this guy, and I said, “I want to rehearse my band, but I want a dress rehearsal.” He said, “O.K.” I said, “I want
to play and I don’t want to disturb your business, but if there is people in there, tell them we’re gonna be jamming and rehearsing, so we don’t run nobody off.”
Halfway through the gig, we take a break. I said to Junior, I said, “Hey, man, you play different.” He said, “Different?” Junior’s like this. He acts like when [someone] acts like they want to know something, they kind of like look stupid. (laughter) He had this look on his face like he was surprised. It was like he was glad that I paid him a compliment and he was surprised, too. I said, “Yeah, man, you play different.” He said, “How is that?” I said, “You play different than Warren. You play different than Derek. You play different than a lot of cats. Not just white boys, but black boys, too. Only one person have I heard play similar to what you are playing and that is George Baker.” George was from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and he was Marvin Gaye’s musical director for 12 years.
I hadn’t heard anybody play like that since I left Mississippi, and that was 1968. I had never heard nobody play like that. Everybody played blues, but a lot of it was so over whatever with rock stuff until it wasn’t that interesting. The only reason it wasn’t that interesting was because it was something that had been developed by only a few, a few had become pretty close to mastering it, like Hendrix, and like Duane and Betts did.
Freddie Hubbard is a trumpet player. When Freddie Hubbard started playing funk things into his Bebop licks, he really wasn’t that good at it because he didn’t really know how to get to tie that thing together. He tried, and, sure, he got better later on, but I never heard anything where I thought he had achieved what he tried.
So, that was the first live CD, Live at the Double Down Grill.
The second one [ Ed Blackwell Memorial Concert ] was at a church in Middletown. It had to do with raising money for an organization that my friend had going on. And I tell ya, it’s the most different thing that I’ve ever done in my life, playing that concert because it was like a real jazz concert, man, with a few bands that used to have featured singers—Joe Williams with Count Basie’s band, singing “A Change Is Gonna Come.” Junior sings “A Change Is Gonna Come” and “People Get Ready,” because he wouldn’t sing anything else in that church. Junior has been in a men’s vocal group that sings spirituals for 25 years. He goes to church damn near every Sunday. He’s a very religious person.
Now, we come to the third one, the debut studio album, Renaissance Man. We started the day that we opened at the Beacon last year. I think it was March 10 because I went in the studio about 10 o’clock in the morning. We got one or two down, and I had a 3 o’clock rehearsal at the Beacon Theatre. So that’s basically what has happened with all of that. Dave Stoltz and I have been playing since December 17, 1990. That is basically when I moved to Connecticut with my now wife, Catherine. She put a bunch of those guys together, and Dave was the bass player. Dave and I have been playing together ever since on pretty much every gig that I’ve played in Connecticut. One of the things I was trying to do was I was trying to pick out the musicians who could play and go in as many directions as I could go in. Dave was one of them. And the rest of it didn’t really start until around six years ago when we recorded Live at the Double Down Grill. Kris Jensen. I’ve known Kris for 20 years. We’ve done quite a few gigs together.
That’s about it for everybody that I’ve been playing with for that long that’s in the band, Jaimoe’s Bebop Band, and that’s what it was. It was no [Jaimoe scats a chunky thick rhythm]…it was none of that stuff, man. It was like Bebop. And a lot of people liked the band: “Hey, you’ve got to take that band on the road, man.” And I was like, “Wow, man, you can’t take no band like that on the road. It costs money. You have to pay people.” Because I didn’t have a vocalist, and, to me, you either play some raunchy stuff, man, or you have a vocalist. So I finally got a vocalist in Junior Mack.
This Renaissance Man. I wasn’t going to call it anything, except Jaimoe’s Jasssz Band. And Junior kept going, “You need to have a name.” And I said, “Why does it have to have a name? It’s Jaimoe’s Jasssz Band.” I can think of a number of records that didn’t have a name, per se, and it was whoever the artist was. Junior said, “Why don’t we call it Drifting and Turning [second track on the album]?” I said, “Eh.” I thought about it, and he called me back up a couple of days later and asked, “What are we going to call the album?” I said, “You want to call it Drifting and Turning, go ahead and call it that.” My wife was sitting there, and she said, “Why don’t you call it Renaissance Man ?” And I went, “ Renaissance Man ?” The only thing I could think of when she said “ Renaissance Man ” was Rod Steiger (laughter) with the tattoos all over his body. So I thought about that for a couple of days, and Junior went to Paris with somebody, some people he had recorded with, and they were getting ready to print up the cases for the CD. I e-mailed the cat and said, “Man, change it to Renaissance Man. ” I went online and looked up Renaissance Man, and saw what it meant, and I said, “That’s a perfect name for it.” So, my wife was right about that one. My daughter did the cover on the CD. The black writing in the beard is my daughter’s signature. She hadn’t even signed the thing, and I said, “Put your signature on there.” (laughter)
We are a jamband, too, yes, and we play jazz, which is American music. We haven’t gotten any hillbilly in there yet, but we play just about everything. I guess as soon as we get that Hank Williams, Sr. tune down, I guess we’ll be hillbilly: chili bop, billy gumbo, we got somethin’ somethin’ somethin’ down on the bayou. They said the Allman Brothers invented Southern Rock. Well, shit, what is that? (laughs) You know? The alto saxophone player that was really hot in the 40s that did those songs about the chicken house— fried fish, Friday night, the chicken house, and all that stuff—that is basically what he was doing. So I don’t know what this is about the Allman Brothers inventing Southern Rock. Shit, it’s been around since all of us have been in our parents’ salt, if they had any. (laughter)
RR: Let’s follow that line as we go back before the Allman Brothers. You played with Otis Redding in 1966. Does his influence still impact your playing today?
JJ: Yeah, now, I halfway know what I’m doing. When I was in Otis’s band, I didn’t. (laughs) Otis used to show me stuff that he wanted me to play on the drums, which was just funky and loud with definition. Otis was a great guy to work with. Otis Redding was like the College of Music. That’s how I looked at all the different people I played with. That’s not disrespectful to them, or anything, but that’s what it was. I didn’t make any money. Made enough money to pay your hotel bill and get your food. Until I started playing with Percy Sledge, I graduated to…and Percy recognized, by the advice he had been given, about the only thing that he didn’t need to pay was, I guess, a ticket home for somebody if they decided to leave in the middle of the concert on the tour. (laughs) He paid for hotels, he had transportation, and he gave us a food allowance. It was like Joe Tex—the College of Joe Tex. The Allman Brothers, man, was a university of going on. (laughter)
RR: Jaimoe’s Jasssz Band is opening up for Gregg Allman beginning in early January. Tell me about the specifics for rehearsals for this particular run.
JJ: We’ve been doin’ ‘em for the last three or four years. (laughter) When we rehearse, it’s basically to learn a song, or to learn something like “let’s try this chord right here in this section here, instead of what we were doing.” That’s basically how rehearsals go.
Being able to go out on the road with Gregory, the greatest thing about it is that we are getting to play, which in the years gone by has been the least thing that we did was what we did, and that was playing. A gig here…we made some pretty good money on weddings and birthday parties. We made real good money, better than three or four times what we made in a club. There are times when they want to pay you $700 to play a gig in a club, and I made as much as $7,500 playing a birthday party. And the only thing they said was, “Do you want a check or cash?” No kidding.
All those people who think that, you know, playing weddings and birthday parties is belittling themselves, hey, they’ve got another thing coming.
RR: I have to ask you about another musician who plays on certain songs on the new album, Bruce Katz on the Hammond organ and piano.
JJ: Oh, man, Bruce…[Jaimoe whistles] what a blessing. There’s another piano player on there, Jon Davis. Jon was in my Bebop band, and he’s a hell of a piano player, hell of a piano player. Most of the piano on there is Jon, with the exception of “Hippology” [which is also written by Katz, who guests on a few songs on Renaissance Man ], which only has organ. There were organ parts on “Dilemma,” which was Jon, but we took them off, and put Bruce on that because Bruce played a little more funky and what Junior wanted on it. Yeah, Bruce, man…I’ve known Bruce, shit, since he was playing in Ronnie Earl’s band when I met him about 20 years ago. We never played together, but we did a CD [ The Colour of Love ] with Ronnie Earl, and the guests on that were myself, Gregory Allman, Hank Crawford, and Marc Quinones was on that.
RR: Speaking of poignancy, I wanted to talk about the covers on the new album.
JJ: Yeah. (laughs) My friend told me that Junior sang “Rainy Night in Georgia” better than Brook Benton. This guy, his name is Charles Otis. He was my mentor. I was 16 years old when I met Honey Boy. We all called him “Honey Boy.” He told me, he said, “Junior Mack sings “Rainy Night in Georgia” better than Brooke Benton.” He has polyps, or something, on his throat. I think it happened because of stress, but it has been there now for almost ten years. He said, “[Jaimoe imitates Otis’s hoarse tone] Junior Mack sings “Rainy Night in Georgia” better than Brook Benton.” I said to myself, “Nobody sings “Rainy Night in Georgia” better than Brooke Benton.” Shit, man, I knew all of Brook Benton’s songs like “The Boll Weevil Song” he did with Dinah Washington. All of that stuff was recorded when I was in high school. Boy, in those days, I knew all of those tunes, all of those songs. And I really didn’t hear a lot of what Junior was singing just because of being behind the drums and not having the right monitor and everything.
This lady came to an annual party for Hittin’ the Note that they have. This lady recorded part of the gig with a cell phone. And somebody started telling me about YouTube and “Rainy Night in Georgia” and “Congratulations, what a great song,” and the rest of it, and I went, “Oh, yeah?” So, I went on there, and I listened to it, and that’s when I realized that Honey Boy was right. Junior did sing…I’ll say did a great job, a very great job on “Rainy Night in Georgia.” I won’t get into who is a better singer…maybe, that’s a different category—who is the better singer…it is more who performed this record of this song more to your liking? (laughs) Because I tell you what, what Honey Boy said…
My version of it is “Leaving Trunk” [the third track on Renaissance Man, which was written by John Estes]. Back in July, Taj Mahal…we did the thing for the liver thing that Gregory was doing. Taj Mahal came in, and he sang “Leaving Trunk.” And I said to my partner, I said, “Taj might have to get him another song because that song belongs to Junior now.” (laughter) It does, man, it truly does.
RR: You seem to have made “Melissa” your own, too.
JJ: Yeah, that’s a great version of that [track 8 on Renaissance Man ]. It’s a bossa nova; that’s the only reason; that made it different and really unique. We tried not to do any covers, but, again, “Rainy Night in Georgia” was so unique.
We still have five tunes in the can that didn’t make the record. We will record them over, but they are sitting in there, and didn’t make the record. I am sure that by the time we get ready to do another one, our expressions will have changed.
RR: Will you play some of that unreleased material in the live setting?
JJ: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Bruce has a tune that’s on his album, Crescent Crawl. Kris Jensen has got one that is also a New Orleans-inspired instrumental. There are three instrumentals and a couple with vocals.
RR: Thinking of that work that is unreleased, and what you are about to perform live with your band on tour, while looking at the title of the new work brings to mind this idea—what does the phrase ‘Renaissance Man’ mean to you?
JJ: Well, I asked my wife what did it mean because if I’m going to put it on there, what the hell did it mean? Like I said, the only thing I could think about was Rod Steiger. I can’t remember what she told me but it was like “If you really want to know what something means, someone could tell you, but go to the dictionary, and read it yourself, and you’ll get a better understanding of it.” And it said so much as ‘one qualified to (basically) do more than one or two things’. I would have thought that a lot of it meant ‘one who has existed from Caesar to Bill Clinton’. (laughter) Or, Caesar to George Bush, with all due respect to George. (laughs)
RR: With all due respect to you, thank you for all the great music, Jaimoe.
JJ: Thank you. That’s quite a compliment. I knew people would like the music once they got a chance to hear it, but, you know, you always know a lot of things, but, then when it actually happens, you’re knocked out more than all of your thoughts. Thank you, Randy.
