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A lot of the jammers are getting into Wilco... Same with Radiohead. There is a general wave of change. People are interested in hearing something new. -Marco Benevento |
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Photo by Aaron Williams
That's a great room.
Yeah. So, the Tonic thing then came together as an album when Andy said, "Let's record it and release it." He called me in October, like three weeks before November. I said, "Well, sure, if you want to put out an album, I'd love to do that." And he was like, "It will be just like what we did with Christian McBride. It'll be a three disc live album." It really pumped me up knowing that it would be released and that I'd get some focused personal time. I got really into it and after it was recorded I went and weeded through it all to pick my favorite tracks. Actually, after my solo gig I called Joe and said, "Dude, I highly recommend doing the solo thing."
Is he considering it?
 Joe Russo by Kevin Quinn |
I hope so. I don't know if he is, but when I mentioned it to him he just kind of laughed and I didn't know what that meant. It would be pretty fucking cool if he did a solo drum night. I would go see that in a second.
I think a lot of people would.
You know, for example – this is on a higher level, of course – but Wilco has Nels Cline and Glenn [Kotche]. Those two guys are monsters as individuals. They make killing records on their own. Nels has ridiculous albums out, and Glenn has these amazing, percussive kind of Balinese gamelan albums. What I'm saying is, I think it's really important for musicians to sort of reach out from their comfort zone. It's easy to get in a zone of "This is how I make my money – this is my band. This is all I want to do and go home to chill." It's good to keep the gears going all the time.
Was it nice to find yourself on an acoustic piano for a change?
 Marco Benevento by Dave Vann |
Yeah, that's a big point. It was a different instrument, the piano instead of the organ. The piano is the instrument I started on, the instrument I practice the most on and the instrument I've studied the most on. To be in that space was great. I can't get enough of playing the piano. It's going to be an awesome experience this summer with Matt and Reed. It's nice to not have to take care of the bass lines with the left hand, and be able to play some chords. You know, I just realized I didn't mention the quartet night with [bassist] Dave Dreiwitz, [drummer] Claude [Coleman], [both of Ween] and Steven Bernstein. That was right up there with the trio mainly because we did totally free music. I'd known Dave for a while. He's in Bustle In Your Hedgerow, and when I asked him about that day he said, "Why don't we just do it with Claude?" Claude was a monster. He plays his ass off on free jazz.
In light of the stuff you've been doing with The Duo these past few years – building lush, textured rock arrangements – hearing you play the acoustic piano in a jazz context sounds pretty spare. That said, you're still filling that range of space with the piano that you usually cover with your organ and toys.
 Benevento by Quinn |
Oh, that's good to hear. It's interesting because a piano is like an orchestra. You can take care of the string parts in the higher register, the Wurlitzer parts in the middle, the bass line below. It's a great exercise in independence between the two hands, trying to do all those parts you imagine and kind of playing the whole keyboard. It's really cool. You really learn how to use the two halves of your brain and make them come together, which is a big thing with the organ, too - that independence with your left and your right.
I think your take on Monk's "Bye Ya" stood out most for that purpose.
You know, I've been trying to play that arrangement for years. I came up with it in 2000, seven years ago. Joe and I have performed it like that as a duo but it was nice to try it solo, covering all those parts, with that intensity, by myself. I could probably play that arrangement of "Bye Ya" until I'm 80 and still not be awesome at it. It's a great study in left and right hand independence as well as improvising over different time signatures. I think it received the loudest applause that night, which was kind of strange because it is a hard arrangement to follow.
Tell me a little bit about the song selection. Despite almost half of the material being improvised, the sets are filled out with these kind of obscure gems, like the Carly Simon cover ["Nobody Does It Better"].
Yeah. This is a pretty cool thing. There's a lot that makes a musician a musician. Number one: courage. Number two: your taste – you know, what you want to do with it. Number three: consistency. The tunes a musician covers say a lot about him. A total classic example for me, as a pianist, is [Brad] Mehldau covering Radiohead.
...or Nick Drake
 Marco Benevento by Jay Blakesberg |
Right, Nick Drake. That sort of stuff was always done back in the day. Oscar Peterson was covering Cole Porter – just show tunes that were happening back then. Herbie Hancock did an album where he covered some Nirvana. The Bad Plus is covering Rush.
It's cool to see that. I had the opportunity to study with Mehldau one day. I went to his house for like seven hours and he played that album Largo before it was mixed – the one that has "Paranoid Android" and some other covers. And I was like, "Oh, Dude, I knew you were cool." He was like, "Oh yeah, I used to listen to Led Zeppelin." We went off on Zeppelin and Rush for a while. It's just super cool to hear some badass musician cover a rock tune that everybody knows, because they're just people like you and I, not some magical geniuses. However, they are also these magical geniuses. But, they're not untouchable or unreachable. The Carly Simon tune, for example, is like the earliest memory I have of knowing what it feels like to love a song. My dad used to work for the [New Jersey] soccer team The Cosmos, so we used to go every Sunday to see a game.
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