For something a little different today, let’s talk politics. Not electoral politics; we’ve all had enough of that. No, let’s talk musical politics, which can be just as divisive and irrational. Just ask Max Johnson. He plays bass in various jazz contexts, including a trio with saxophonist Neta Raanan and drummer Eliza Salem that makes stops at BLU Jazz+ and in Avon Lake this weekend. But he also plays and composes bluegrass and concert music. It could drive a gatekeeper mad.
None of this was some sort of grand plan. “I don’t have one of those cool stories that a lot of people have,” Johnson admitted on a phone call last night. “I started playing the electric bass when I was 13 years old. I don’t recall why I wanted to.” Like most of his peers in northern New Jersey, he listened to rock, (“I was really into the White Stripes,” he said), but one friend turned his ears to bluegrass.
“He was like, ‘You should come see my dad’s band play,’” Johnson said. That friend was Sean Trischka, whose father, Tony, is a father of newgrass banjo. An inspired Johnson dug into that tradition from the beginning forward, but the process was reversed when his father introduced him to jazz via Charles Mingus’ landmark Mingus Ah Um recording. ‘I started in the ‘70s and went backwards,” he said.
Johnson’s early exposure to a more open conception of jazz was ratified when he struggled with learning the tradition at the New School. “I got a C in my first semester of private lessons and a D in my second,” Johnson recalled. “I was working hard, and it was really frustrating, and I was like, well, maybe I’m not cut out for this.”
It was at this low point that Johnson met and began to study with the late bassist Henry Grimes. On his first lesson with Grimes, the two improvised for two and a half hours without talking. “He treated me like a musical equal in that lesson, . . . and made me feel like I could actually do it.”
Concert music followed thanks to a formative encounter with the European tradition through the music of Arnold Schoenberg. “He made perfect sense to me,” Johnson said. “The way that Andrew Hill plays the piano, it’s the same kind of harmony as the second Schoenberg string quartet: tonal harmony pushed to its limits. It’s functional but it’s crooked and it’s so beautiful.”
Like Grimes and Richard Davis, another jazz bassist whose career included concert music, rock sessions (that’s him on Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks), Johnson can play inside and outside and seems completely at home in both contexts. His resume includes such names as Muhal Richard Abrams, David Grisman, Sam Bush, Kris Davis, and the Travelin’ McCourys.
You can hear traces of all these experiences in the music of the trio he will bring to northeast Ohio this weekend in support of a new recording I’ll See You Again. . It’s a newish unit that Johnson considers to be among his more “inside” projects. The band’s concept arose from Johnson’s pandemic-era exercise of playing along with classic “swinging jazz” recordings. From this emerged a growing book of tunes with simple melodic lines and chord changes that needed a band to bring them to life.
Johnson’s roommate introduced him to saxophonist Neta Raanan, and he was immediately impressed. “She’s one of those people that sight reads tunes and it just comes out exactly the way I’d want to hear it.’
Drummer Eliza Salem, who played with Marta Sanchez’s trio two weeks ago at BOP STOP (a concert that I previewed here) captivated Johnson with a willingness to take chances. “When people are sight reading a song for the very first time, they they’ll try to play it kind of straight in order to l make sure that everyone doesn’t lose their place,” he said. “Eliza did the absolute opposite, messing with it in a really beautiful fun and musical way.”
Good bass players always find work and with a presence in three distinct if converging musical scenes, Johnson is a busy man. “I always have projects or bands or recordings or tours that I’m working on, and that’s what keeps me working.”
NOTE: This article was written by a real human being. No artificial intelligence or generative language models were used in its creation.
Red beans and ricely yours,
jc
