Estuary funk
from Mojo Magazine - January 2003

ON LOCATION: the pianist in New Orleans is a 38-year-old from Kent. Nik Cohn likes the sound of him.

New Orleans has always been piano man’s heaven. Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Domino, Archibald, Professor Longhair, James Booker, Allen Toussaint, Dr. John – the list of gods goes on and on. Today, the tradition lives on through stalwarts such as Art Neville, Willie Tee, and the great Eddie Bo. But the most creative keyboardist in town, for my money, is Jon Cleary. The odd thing is, he’s English.

Commercially, he’s a well-kept secret, but other musicians revere him. He anchors Bonnie Raitt’s touring band and has recorded with the likes of Eric Clapton, Taj Mahal, B.B. King and D’Angelo. His band, The Absolute Monster Gentlemen, are among the top funk groups on the South. And this year he’s release a cracking CD, Jon Cleary, by far the richest and most dynamic of his three albums to date.

I first met Cleary a few years back, wandering through the Faubourg Marigny one hot and sticky afternoon. As I passed a joint called Snug Harbor, I heard a solo piano improvising on Longhair’s Tipitina and, what’s more, playing the shit out of it. The sound was classic New Orleans; pure Ninth Ward. When I checked to see who was responsible, I found a bloke in an ancient tweed coat, with ginger stubble and a noble growth of a nose. “Hello, mate,” said Cleary. “Have a Guinness.”

I asked what had brought him to New Orleans; he said it was in his blood, more or less. The whole Cleary family was music-mad. His grandmother used to sing in the music halls, billed as Sweet Dolly Daydream; his dad was in skiffle groups in the ‘50s; and his uncle John, a guitarist and songwriter, became a wandering hippy in the ‘60s, lived in a cave in the Sahara, and then found his way to New Orleans. “He sent me a poster of JazzFest for my bedroom wall, and I thought of New Orleans as everything exotic and wild, the essence of excitement. When my uncle came home, he brought suitcases full of 45s, stuff that very few in England knew at the time – Clifton Chenier, The Meters, Longhair. I ate them all up.”

His early teens were spent playing guitar in punk bands, but funk was his great love, and he soon headed for New Orleans. His only contact there was a matchbook for the Maple Leaf Bar. When the taxi from the airport dropped him off there, he found himself outside a clapboard shanty with banana trees and a Laundromat in the back yard, and Earl King tuning up on the bandstand: “All I could think was, What took me so long?”

The owner gave him a job painting the bar – “$5 and hour, with free drinks while I worked, and half-price any other time. Classic New Orleans logic” – and he made sure it took him six months. James Booker was the house pianist on Tuesday nights. As often as not, Booker failed to show. So Cleary came crawling down his ladder, splattered with green paint, and deputized.

By the time Immigration caught up with him and kicked him back to England, he’d played with Wolfman Washington and George Porter of The Meters, and he couldn’t readjust to London’s rigors. One night, in a pub in Deptford, he found himself playing Going To The Mardi Gras, as the November gales lashed at the windows. Next morning, he bought a ticket back to New Orleans.

Basically, he’s been there ever since. When not on the road with Bonnie Raitt or making one of his periodic pilgrimages to Cuba, he is to be found in the French Quarter, where he rents the slave quarters to an old Spanish mansion that looks like the set for a remake of Pretty Baby. There, in the shade of a tea olive tree, he has fashioned his own shrine to funk, complete with the sleeves of countless vintage LP’s and a full-length mink coat, much the worse for wear, that once belonged to Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson, his ultimate hero.

Sometimes a Monster Gentleman drops by. The band – Jellybean Alexander on drums, Cornell Williams on bass and the brilliant Big D Perkins on lead guitar – used to be a black gospel group called The Friendly Travelers. Like most of the young musicians in New Orleans these days, they knew nothing about their city’s musical heritage, and cared less (Big D, for one, is into hip hop and has his own rap label). So Cleary had to teach them funk from scratch: “Ironic,” he says. “An Englishman teaching homeboys about their own music.”

The lessons obviously paid off. The new album makes a perfect showcase for the band’s talents, and for Cleary in particular, as pianist, guitarist, arranger, composer, and sometime drummer. Apart from a scorching eight-minute reworking of The Meters’ Just Kissed My Baby, the tracks are mostly self-written, and their mood ranges wide, from Cuban-flavored ballads to second-line barn burners. Whatever Cleary touches is informed by innate musicality.

“Music to me has always been about problem-solving, an exercise in pure logic,” he says. “However hard you bring the fonk, there’s a mathematical beauty in unraveling a new song. It’s like a marriage between the two sides of your brain – instinctive feeling and applied maths.”

Sitting in his shady courtyard, spinning records and sipping Barry’s tea, he seems a man fulfilled. As he says, “When I was 10 or 11, if you’d asked me what I wanted in life, I’d have said: go to New Orleans, find a place to hang my hat, surround myself with good musicians, and play until I die.”