Why I Moved To America.
I still can't believe I became friends and colleagues with the heroes I owe everything to.
It has been a very special week in New York cutting the new Steve Smith/Vital Information record. It has encompassed everything I love about being able to take time making a record, and has allowed me to achieve a childhood dream. This is the story of how the journey to meet my biggest musical heroes unfolded over the past 30 years, and how it was completed just this week.
When I first started playing bass around the age of 14 or 15, I was incredibly fortunate to meet and be mentored by some very special musicians in the London scene. Laurence Cottle was my biggest influence and the person I hung out with the most in the early days, and there were other incredible bass players, in particular Phil Mulford and Geoff Gascoyne, that were great influences along the way.
They all helped open my ears to an incredibly wide spectrum of music. It was Geoff that hipped me to my now favorite bass player Meshell Ndegeocello, and Phil that would point out all these incredible things Anthony Jackson was doing on recordings.
The thing that really pushed me over the edge into total obsession with jazz, fusion, and improvised music at the time though, was when Laurence first told me about the Brecker Brothers and Steps Ahead.
I was a huge Jaco fan from day one, but the more I got into the music the more I realized every bass player on earth was a huge Jaco fan. He was the biggest and most original voice in the history of the instrument. A one-of-one, and no matter how badly I wanted to sound like him and play all those licks every chance I got, I knew it had a limited shelf life if being an original sounding bass player and musician was what I wanted to do with my life.
As my music collection grew, and I shifted from my initial diet of Weather Report and Return To Forever to The Brecker Brothers and Steps Ahead, I filled every possible moment of practice time I had with either listening to, transcribing, or practicing that music.
The specific Brecker Brothers concert was live in Barcelona in 1992, and the Steps Ahead show was a live album recorded in Tokyo in 1986. I had the Brecker Bros on VHS which eventually just gave up and disintegrated because of the literal 1000’s of times I watched it. I would rewind phrases over and over again to transcribe what Mike, Randy, and Stern where doing in their solos, and would play certain sections of Dennis Chambers, James Genus, and George Whitty on repeat because the grooves were so face-melting.
The Steps ahead concert has two of the same musicians (Mike Stern and Michael Brecker) with founder Mike Manieri on Vibes, Darryl Jones on bass, and Steve Smith on Drums. I dubbed the CD onto a cassette tape because I couldn’t afford a CD player for my car back then, and I would play the Brecker solo on Sumo over and over and over on the way to every gig for a year. I’m talking about hearing this record 1000’s of times in the first two years of playing the bass.
As my obsession for the instrument and the music came into sharp focus, I realized I needed to figure out how I was going to go from idolizing these people to actually playing with them. I knew it was going to take a herculean effort in terms of hours with the instrument, and an intense dedication to the goal if I wanted to have even a faint chance of meeting any of these musicians, never mind making music with them.
My first big break came when I was able to get a job at Ronnie Scott’s in London as an assistant to the sound engineer. It sounds fancier than it was. I coiled and uncoiled cables, and plugged things in during soundcheck. I made runs to the corner store for Monty, Jimmy, Ricky, and Fred, and I was there late into the night after a band finished for the week, breaking down the stage and getting ready for who was coming in next.
Every band played at least a week, sometimes two, and a few times a year four weeks straight! Setup and soundcheck was always Monday afternoon, and bands played two shows a night, Monday through Saturday, with a house band that changed every week also playing two sets.
I could still make a gig on Monday after soundcheck if I had one, and whenever I wasn’t gigging I got to see every band as many nights of the week I wanted for free. Even with breakdown on a Saturday after a band’s run was over, if I had a gig I would hustle back to Soho at 1am to work the shift.
I met so many people in that 18 month period: Bob Berg, Dave Kikoski, Gary Novak, Chucho Valdes, Dave Weckl, Billy Cobham, Arturo Sandoval, Monty Alexander, and tons more I can’t remember off the top of my head. It was incredible exposure to some of the best living jazz musicians, and daily motivation to work harder at getting to play with them in the future.
A defining moment in my decision to move to the US came in early 1998 when Airto Moreira and Flora Purim arrived for soundcheck for the start of a 4-week run at the club. The moment I heard the music I was hooked, and stayed for both shows that night to try and learn the repertoire. I came back the following night to tighten up my understanding of the song forms and band dynamic, and by Wednesday I brought my bass with me and knocked on the dressing room door before the first show of the night.
The interaction at the dressing room door as I stood there with my bass over my shoulder went something like this:
Me: **Knock knock**
Flora: Oh hi. Janek from the soundcheck right? what can I do for you?
Me: I want to play in your band.
Flora: **awkward laughter** Okay… but it’s really my husbands band. You should speak to him. Airto…!!
Airto: Hi. How can I help you?
Me: I want to play in your band.
Airto: Hahahahahaha. **sees I’m dead serious and stops laughing**. Ah, well… we have lots of music that is very arranged, we rehearsed, and we already have a bass player.
Me: Are you going to play anything different from the first two nights?
Airto: No…
Me: Then I know all the songs you have.
Airto: What’s the form on “Ombro”?
Me: After the solos you play the melody, then the tag is three times, but on the second set last night one of the keyboard players missed the cue, so you played it four times.
Airto: Flora…!
I remember, and cringe at, how over-confident I was in that moment, but I know it basically altered my course forever when they said yes and told me to come back on the second set with my bass.
I sat in and played one song, and Flora invited me to play with them for the rest of the four week run. I would drive them back to their apartment after the show each night and sit in the kitchen while Flora made food and told stories about Jaco, and Airto told me about playing with Miles and living in New York City, playing loft sessions with legends like Monk and Cannonball between tours.
It was Flora that told me I had to move to America, and that I should audition for Berklee where her old friend Kenwood Dennard was teaching. I already knew the US was where I wanted to be at this point, but it took meeting and hanging with Flora for the reality of moving to take shape. There’s nothing like hearing about the life you’ve dreamed about from the source. It was one of the most inspiring moments of my life.
The next two years really went by in a blur. I auditioned for a scholarship to Berklee and got one. Not a full-ride unfortunately, but enough to make going a little less painful. I left the Royal Academy of Music after just one year, and in August of ‘98 moved to Boston.
As instructed by Flora, I found Kenwood’s teaching room and knocked on the door. He actually had a student at the time, but once I told him Flora had sent me, he kicked the student out and we played for about an hour. I had spent the preceding two years wearing out the Jaco “Modern Electric Bass” VHS, and rolled the dice on throwing my bass at Kenwood over the drums. He caught it just like on the Jaco video, and at that point I was convinced I was living in some parallel reality.
I had gone from playing £20 duo gigs at a wine bar in Wandsworth, to playing with Jaco’s drummer seemingly overnight.
Things, as I was about to find out, were only just beginning. A few months later Kenwood called me to say Hiram Bullock was coming to Boston and needed a bass player for a show at the Berklee Performance Center. There was going to be a clinic during the day where I could meet him, and then the show that night. No rehearsal. No set list. No advance warning of what we were going to play. He handed me a sheet of paper with a list of songs on it in the dressing room about an hour before the show and said “You know this stuff right?”. I said yes (I of course didn’t know most of it), and ran to the media library upstairs to listen to and learn as much of it as I could before the gig.
I’m amazed this clip made it out of the Berklee vault. Most of my early career, and so many landmark moments like this that I wish I could see again, were pre-YouTube and pre everyone in the audience having a cell phone camera. The uploader doesn’t credit me (and in fact credited Tony Grey who was at Berklee with me when it was first uploaded), and spells Kenwood’s last name wrong. You can see babyfaced me getting roasted, and somehow managing to still enjoy every second of the gig.
In mid-2000, having played in Kenwood’s band for almost the entire time I lived in Boston, I quit school and moved to New York City. I had zero gigs, practiced 10 or more hours a day for the first year, and got really good at Goldeneye on the N64. More importantly though, I went out to shows. A lot.
I would head downtown around 8pm to grab a slice (best food on an out-of-work musicians non-existent budget) and head to any number of spots like Fat Cat, Smalls, 55bar, Detour, the Blue Note, the Village Vanguard, Groove, The Bitter End, or the Zinc Bar. You could see 5 life-changing gigs in one night back then, all in a 10 block radius.
After hanging at enough gigs and going to jam sessions, the phone thankfully started to ring. About a year after moving to NYC Hiram Bullock called me to play a week at Sweet Basil. The core band was Raymond Angry on keys, Kenwood Dennard on drums, and Casey Benjamin on sax. The guests that came down during that week really gave me an unforgettable reminder of how deeply stacked the world-class pool of musicians in New York is. Legend after legend would come by to sit in with the band.
I had just returned from Europe opening for Herbie Hancock’s Future to Future tour, and had purchased my first video camera while on the road. This was the start of the archiving process, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. That week’s guests on Hiram’s gig included Lew Solof, Chris Hunter, Brad and Elliot Mason, Victor Lewis, and the first person on my list of heroes from the two live concerts that inspired this post: Randy Brecker.
I don’t remember when I played my first gig with Randy’s band, but it happened because of this meeting at Sweet Basil. And that in turn would open me up to meeting all the other people from Steps Ahead and The Brecker Brothers. Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t like that all happened in a matter of weeks. It took until literally this week to really complete the journey.
I had been in contact with Mike Stern for a while. He was maybe the only person I ever approached by sending a demo. Before I moved to the US, in the summer of ‘98, I recorded a track produced by my buddy Richard Niles. Richard had been at Berklee with Mike in ‘73 and suggested we record something and send it to him. He arranged the track for just bass and drums, and we had London studio drum-guru Ian Thomas come in and cut the track.
By the time Mike got round to checking out the track and calling me in the UK I was already in Boston. Apparently my mum answered the phone and almost fell over when he said who it was, as she’d been listening to me transcribe all his solos for the past two years and couldn’t believe that guy from those records was calling our house in Mitcham from New York. He ended up calling me in Boston and we did meet sometime in 1999 when he came to Berklee to give a clinic. It would take moving to NYC and a few years of hanging out at the 55bar to finally make the connection to play with him.
I played with him regularly between about 2004 and 2015. After a ton of shows at the 55bar, often subbing for Anthony Jackson, Richard Bona, and Mike Pope, I finally went out of town on the road with him for the first time to Miami. We played three nights in Arturo Sandoval’s brand new club at the Dauville Hotel. Arturo was there every night and sat in with us. The band included studio legend Bob Malach on tenor, and Lionel Cordew on drums.
I went on to tour in the US, South America, Asia and Europe with Mike, as well as having him record on my albums The Space in Between and Theatre By The Sea in 2010 and 2014 respectively. Although we haven’t played in a while now, we still keep in touch and talk on the phone every couple of months. He was one of the kindest people to me during my time in NYC, and with his stories alone, taught me more about the music business than I thought I would ever know.
One of the major milestones on my list of cats to play with from these two bands was Dennis Chambers. Not only was he the drummer on the Brecker Brothers show I knew inside out, he was simply a legend. Parliament, John MacLaughlin, John Scofield, Bob Berg, and so many more. He was on everything I was listening to at the time.
In mid 2007, Stern called me kind of last minute to hit on the west coast at Kuumbwa in Santa Cruz. Lincoln Goines had something come out of nowhere that he couldn’t get out of, and Mike had this one-off trio show with Dennis on drums. I fell to the floor of my apartment, slumped up against the bed. I almost cried. This was the moment I had been waiting for since I started playing the bass, to play with Mike Stern and Dennis Chambers TRIO! and I couldn’t take the gig.
I’d committed to about 6 weeks in Europe and Asia with Jojo Mayer’s band Nerve. At the time there was just no way I could afford to turn down 6 weeks of work and go play 1 gig in its place. This was on one hand heart breaking because it was exactly what I’d been working towards for almost 15 years, and on the other, it was kind of insane that I got to go play all these amazing shows across Europe and Asia with one of my other drumming heroes who also happened to be my great friend.
Spoiled for choice was definitely a good place to be, and I had to just keep telling myself that the call would come again. I didn’t realize it would be another 7 years until that specific call came to play with Dennis for the first time, but it was well worth the wait. We became good friends, had an instant connection onstage, and got to travel all over the place together playing with Mike.
I must point out that there were three people on my list that I never got to work with. Two of them are quite obvious because they’re bass players. I met Darryl Jones at a bass event in New York in the mid 2000’s. We never got to hang much, and he’s not someone I really know that well to this day. I really dig his playing though and was not just a massive Steps Ahead fan, but also wore out the Bring on the Night movie all through Berklee.
James Genus, the bass player with The Brecker Brothers, was someone I was actually convinced I was just never going to meet. Despite us living in NYC at the same time for 10 years, playing with a bunch of the same people, and with my great friend Clarence Penn being one of James’ closest friends, we didn’t meet until 2019 in Chicago. I was there to play for the Drum Fantasy Camp, something James had been the bass player for in the past, and he was on tour with Herbie Hancock and had the night off. He came to the show I was playing with Steve Smith and Dennis Chambers, and I got to hang with him a little afterwards.
It was very cool to have James and Dennis there at the same time. It was like they hadn’t aged at all and had simply walked out of the screen from that VHS I destroyed as a kid.
The third person I got to meet on many occasions but never work with, was Michael Brecker. Probably the single biggest influence and hero I’ve ever had in music. When Mike was playing in NYC it didn’t matter what I had to do to get the money for a ticket, I was always there. And once I started going on the road I would get to see him at festivals we were both playing on.
The St. Lucia Jazz Festival in 2003 stands out as one of the highlights of seeing him live. The band was Clarence Penn, Adam Rogers, and Larry Grenadier, and it was the only time they play with that lineup. I recorded the show on my minidisc recorder, and just hearing the announcer say “the Michael Brecker Quartet” every time I listen to it takes me back to that room instantly. Having my brain melted for almost two hours and then getting to talk to Mike backstage briefly even though he was pretty sick that night and wasn’t feeling 100%.
I met keyboard player and Brecker Brothers musical director/producer George Whitty in the early 2010’s in Los Angeles. I had been playing with Randy for so long at that point I think we both kind of knew it was just time to meet up because our paths had inexplicably not crossed yet.
He’s one of the deepest, most underrated, and cool cats I know, and I’m very proud of the work we’ve done together. Check out my interview with him from during the pandemic. The stories are what keeps us all bonded together and in search of the next one, and george has a lifetimes worth to share.
And so we arrive at the final stop on this journey to meet the people that shaped my musical path so fiercely in the beginning of my career, and who have continued to encourage me, employ me, and mentor me in ways I’m sure a lot of them will never fully understand the impact they’ve had.
Steve Smith, the drummer on the Tokyo 1986 concert, was someone I initially met very early on. We actually just talked about it on the drive out to the studio one morning this week, as it has been over 20 years since it happened. We didn’t play together until much later though with Mike Stern in 2015 on a pretty epic tour in Europe that also featured Randy Brecker. The experience was very similar to that of playing with Dennis for the first time. It was an instant hook up, and something that just never stopped growing over the course of the tour.
When he called me at the last-minute to fill in for the late Baron Brown in Vital Information in 2020, I had no idea I would actually end up on a new Vital Information recording, or that it would be the 40th anniversary of the band. Well here we are, after 5 days in the studio in New York, and I’m not only on the new Vital album, but I got to meet and play with my final hero on the list Mike Mainieri. He’s one of two guests on the album, and we got to hang a little and chat a couple of nights ago which was incredibly inspiring. He’s 84 years old, hasn’t been in the best of health at times, but is back to playing, said he’s feeling great now, and is talking about being back on the road possibly playing his music with Steps Ahead again.
I can’t begin to think about being 84 right now. That’s 40 years away for me, but the more I get to spend time with these legends of the music I love so much, the more it motivates me to stay in the best shape I can, and never give up on what I love.
Janek
I do hope all of this blog this is going to end up in a book at some point
WoW! ❤️❤️❤️