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Features Monster Funk Monday, February 04, 2008 Jon Cleary Brings His Absolute Monster Gentleman Back For Bluesfest.By Martin Jones.
Though New Orleans funk/soul pianist Jon Cleary was in town for last year’s Bluesfest, it was as a member of Bonnie Raitt’s touring band. Then Cleary returned for a whirlwind run of headline dates in October, a number of the dates having to be relocated to meet demand. It was a tantalising taste for Cleary fans - he and his Absolute Monster Gentlemen have not been to this country for a good five years.
The great news is, we certainly won’t be facing another five-year wait. The massive New Orleans musical parties that Cleary threw impressed more than one festival director and Cleary and the Monster Gents are returning this month to play Port Fairy, Bluesfest and more.
On the recording front, there’s still no sign of a new Cleary album. It’s been a trait of Cleary’s career that he records ten to twenty albums with others to every one of his own. I guess when you’re recording with people of the calibre of Raitt, Eric Burdon, India.Arie, Taj Mahal, Ryan Adams, CC Adcock, etc, you’ve got a pretty good excuse for being distracted.
Still, you gotta wonder whether Cleary isn’t sometimes tempted to just focus on his first true love, the New Orleans funk of The Absolute Monster Gentlemen.
“Well I get to do both, and there are times when it would be a lot easier if I could just clone myself and send the other one off to do the Bonnie gig,” Cleary laughs, “but I can’t complain really, it’s a nice dilemma to be in. It is tricky really playing with two bands. My love of New Orleans music and the fellas in the band, there’s a certain thing that happens with the Monster Gents and it’s qualitatively different from the Bonnie gigs, it’s a different kind of music. Though essentially with Bonnie I don’t really have to change what I do necessarily, but what we do is soul and funk and with Bonnie it’s R&B and blues and different influences, so I get quite a rich, varied musical diet which is great.”
Though his schedule has left him little time to work on a new Cleary album, he has put together a four-track EP, Do Not Disturb, so named because it was largely conceived and recorded in hotel rooms on tour.
“I get stranded in hotel rooms all round the country and ‘round the world,” Cleary reveals, “and I take a little recording studio with me, a little portable studio just to work on ideas and songs and sketches and kind of what you do as a musician you make sketches in the same way as an artist sketches before you do the finished painting. So often the sketches themselves take on a life of their own and you start fleshing them out and having fun with it and before you know it you’ve got a finished track. So four of the many tunes I recorded we decided to put out last year at the Jazz Festival so we made a limited edition of however many copies, just a couple of thousand copies of this little EP which we put online and people seem to really dig it. I basically played all the instruments myself and sung all the parts and engineered it and mixed it and marketed it and then put it out, but people seem to dig it so it’s kind of fun.”
Anyone who caught last year’s Monster Gentlemen shows will have seen the Australian debut of new drummer Eddie Christmas added to the familiar line-up of Cornell C Williams and Derwin Big D Perkins.
“We do a bit of everything really,” Cleary describes the band’s current set. “We play mostly new stuff we have written but we also have a fairly large tip of the hat to all the guys that came before us. I think a lot of local musicians agree that we’re all just standing on the shoulders of giants, amazing people who have changed the way New Orleans music was played, from Jelly Roll Morton to Professor Longhair and Fats of course and Dr John and James Booker, so we’ll play a couple of Professor Longhair tunes and a couple of Meters tunes and we like to mix it up. Mostly it’s our own stuff but the nature of the music here is that it’s been a very natural evolution so it’s not a big deal to switch from a 1990s tune to a 2007 tune and then hop all the way back half a century to Professor Longhair or even go back to the 1920s to do a little Jelly Roll Morton mix and it all fits in ‘cause it all comes from the same place. So it’s like a little broad taste of the history of New Orleans funk.”
“The idea is that it blows you away and you turn the room into a big old New Orleans party,” he concludes. “And that’s the plan.”
Sounds like a plan to me.
Jon Cleary and the Absolute Monster Gentlemen play Port Fairy Folk Festival and Bluesfest. Full national tour dates in the Gig Guide.
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