BluesWax Sittin’ In With Jon Cleary
An Absolute Monster Gentleman
Part One By Phil Reser

“Yes, I'm walkin' to New Orleans" - Fats Domino

Jon Cleary and his band, the Absolute Monster Gentlemen, are becoming one of the funkiest bands on the planet. Bonnie Raitt calls him “the ninth wonder of the world” and says, “Nobody since Little Feat’s Lowell George has affected me like Jon.” 

His band’s live shows are an explosive funk party mixing old school Soul with the rhythms of New Orleans. Cleary, who also performs as full-time keyboardist for Grammy winner Raitt when not touring with his Monster Gentlemen, first heard the timeless sounds of Crescent City legends like Professor Longhair and Smiley Lewis while growing up in Kent, England, and after playing guitar in a succession of Punk and Blues bands. His affection for New Orleans Blues and Jazz brought him to the Big Easy and the city's fabled Maple Leaf Club, which convinced him to take up Blues piano, which he practiced for hours every day. 

On a brief return to London he founded a traditional New Orleans R&B band, but soon returned to Louisiana to work in clubs as a featured performer and sideman to the likes of Smokey Johnson, James Singleton, and George Porter Jr.  

For two years Cleary was a member of Walter "Wolfman" Washington's band before launching the Absolute Monster Gentlemen in 1994. Cleary’s funk-drenched band members were formally a Gospel group called The Friendly Travelers. The Gentlemen are Raymond Weber (drums), Cornell C. Williams (bass), and Derwin Perkins (guitar). 

Cleary’s piano style and unmistakable vocals have been included on the recordings of such artists as Bonnie Raitt, Taj Mahal, B.B. King, and Eric Burdon and his original compositions have been recorded by Taj Mahal on his album Phantom Blues and Bonnie Raitt’s on Souls Alike and Silver Lining. Cleary has produced four recordings of his own over the past ten years, including Pin Your Spin, Jon Cleary & the Absolute Monster Gentlemen, Moonburn, and Alligator Lips & Dirty Rice. 

Jon Cleary spoke with BluesWax from his home in the Upper Ninth Ward of New Orleans. 

Phil Reser for BluesWax: What do you like most about playing Funk music? 

Jon Cleary: Well, I’ve always dug syncopation. That’s something that always got my attention as a young kid; I liked syncopated funky music. And of course, the piano is the perfect vehicle for playing Funk because it’s essentially a percussion instrument. And one aspect of New Orleans piano playing is that it takes the percussion aspect and exaggerates it. So, essentially on a lot of tunes I’m playing Funk. You’re almost playing conga patterns. You’re doing two things at once. You’re playing harmony and melody in chord progressions and percussion. Funk is what makes you want to dance; it’s a way of creating tension, which is then released. All of music is creating tension and then releasing it. So that’s what fires up an audience and the band. 

BW: Between the guitar, which you started out on, and the piano, which you took up as your instrument of preference, what attributes of each instrument do you favor? 

JC: Well, I played guitar for years and years before I started to get serious about playing the piano. Guitar is a great instrument for solo, you basically concentrate on playing one note at a time and you deliver a message, much in the same way a human voice or a saxophone does. And of course with the guitar one of the really first things that I got hip to and pushed my button with was the idea of ending the notes. In Jazz music especially, there’s a certain effect you get when you play with what’s called the minor third notes of a key and the minor third and the major third is only a difference of a half a note, so it can make an enormous difference to the mood and feel of the music. And the beauty of the guitar is that you can add more to the third by bending the notes, by bending the pitch. And that’s something you can’t do with the piano. With the piano you get around that in various ways and that challenge of getting around that is how New Orleans, the Blues piano, evolved. I don’t know if I’m expressing this very well, it’s a sort of complicated musical contest among musicians.  

Both instruments tackle the same harmonic structures, but they do it in different ways and having grounding in guitar for me was good because when I started playing the piano I was able to take that information and then embellish it. And with the piano you can do something you can’t do with the guitar, well you can do it, but not to the same degree, and that is you can portray almost that part an entire band would play, you can play the bass part, the melody, you can suggest the rhythm, and you can play chords, too. So, you actually have control of a lot more stuff with a piano. With the two instruments you’re approaching the same musical information in essentially two different ways, but the piano allows you a great deal more flexibility is what I find. 

BW: As a young person in England, what was the magic that drew you to New Orleans music and how did you understand it at that time that might be different from the way it might define itself as someone that has spent so much time in it now? 

JC: Well, I had various sources of information when I first got hip to New Orleans music and it was able to provide me with a lot of information, but not nearly as much as I have now. I just think that I was born in the wrong decade and the wrong continent. When I heard New Orleans music when I was little it just pressed all my buttons. I can remember the moment when I heard one particular piano solo and I knew exactly that I wanted to learn how to play that kind of music. And I had heard a lot of stuff that I didn’t even realize was from New Orleans, but it had a strong influence from that music.  

Most people sort of associate New Orleans sound with, on the one hand, the Fats Domino sound and the other hand Louie Armstrong, the sounds of traditional New Orleans Jazz bands that you hear all over. I used to go with my mum and dad to hear these types of bands playing in our village pub. They were English guys that loved to play their version of it. But I was hearing stuff like this Scottish singer named Frankie Miller on a tune called “Brickyard Blues” that came on the radio when I was about ten or eleven years old. I loved it, the whole vibe, the whole feel of the piano playing. I didn’t know that songs like that were coming from New Orleans. There were lots of these types of songs I heard and didn’t realize that they were cats from New Orleans that were playing them. My education was in Professor Longhair, Clarence Henry, Fats Domino, Little Richard, and the like, and someone told me that stuff was coming from New Orleans. All I knew was it was my favorite sound. So in England, I suppose you’d say I got the skeleton version of New Orleans music from afar. And now I’ve lived here in New Orleans for 25 years and I understand a lot more about history and all of the elements that go together that make it up. You really understand what it’s all about after you’ve lived here and been surrounded by the culture and the people for a quarter of a century. 

To be continued...