JoN Cleary & the monster gentlemen NEW ORLEANS FUNK MASTER 2016 is treating Jon Cleary well. He’s won his first Grammy Award, offBeat Magazine’s Artist of the Year, Songwriter of the Year, Song of the Year (for “Boneyard”), and Best Piano/Keyboardist, and was named New Orleans’s Big Easy Entertainer of the Year. We’re pleased to have him back on The WKC stage for the first time in ten years. Cleary’s love and affinity for New Orleans music goes back to the rural British village of Cranbrook, Kent, where he was raised. His maternal grandparents performed under the respective stage names Sweet Dolly Daydream and Frank Neville—she as a singer, and he as a tap dancer (“The Little Fellow With The Educated Feet”). His father was a ‘50s skiffle man and taught Jon the rudiments as soon as he was big enough to reach around the neck of a guitar. He took up the guitar as an all-consuming passion and tried his hand at boogiewoogie on the piano. By age 14 he was gigging on the UK pub circuit. His uncle, musician Johnny Johnson, returned from a sojourn in New Orleans in the early ‘70s with two suitcases of rare and obscure local 45s, which allowed the adolescent Cleary to pursue his study of R&B in depth, with special attention to the New Orleans sound that increasingly captivated him. At age 17 he moved to New Orleans and, with just a few interruptions, has lived there ever since.
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In addition to his decade-long association with Bonnie Raitt’s band, he is renowned around the globe for his considerable skills as a tunesmith, an accomplished keyboardist and guitarist, and a deeply soulful vocalist. His 35 years of intensive hands-on work on the Crescent City scene has made him a respected peer of such New Orleans R&B icons as Dr. John and Allen Toussaint. While thoroughly steeped in the classic keyboard canon—from Jelly Roll Morton to Fats Domino to Art Neville, James Booker, and beyond—Cleary uses that century’s worth of pianistic brilliance as a point of departure to forge his own eclectic style. Cleary’s sound incorporates such far-flung influences as ‘70s soul, gospel music, funk, Afro-Caribbean (and especially Afro-Cuban) rhythms, and more. Speaking about his recent (eighth) release, GoGo Juice (FHQ Records), he said, I love New Orleans R&B. I’m a fan, first and foremost. But there’s little point in just going back and re-recording the old songs. I think the greatest New Orleans R&B records are the ones that built on what went before but also added something new. By writing new songs you get to channel all the music you absorb through your own individual set of filters—and the fun is in seeing what comes out. Funk is the ethnic folk music of New Orleans, and I wanted to infuse this album with a sound that was true to the city I love.
Jon Cleary (lead vocals, piano) will be joined by “Monster Gentlemen” Cornell Williams on bass and A.J. Hall on drums.
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