Pianist and bandleader John Cleary joins Air Time to discuss his journey into New Orleans R&B, his collaborations with legends like Dr. John and Allen Toussaint, and the live-in-studio spirit of The Bywater Sessions. He reflects on Mardi Gras Indian traditions and why experiencing great musicians in the same room is, quite simply, “medicine.”
🎧 Listen to the episode above or read the full transcript below.
About the Artists and Event
Jon Cleary & the Absolute Monster Gentlemen and Cha Wa will perform on Thursday, February 26 at 8 p.m. at UCSB Campbell Hall. Tickets and information are available at artsandlectures.ucsb.edu.
Charles Donelan
All right, thank you Jon Cleary from New Orleans. Jon will be in Santa Barbara on February 26 at Campbell Hall with the Absolute Monster Gentlemen. Welcome Jon! Thank you for doing the podcast. How are things? How’s the weather there in New Orleans today?
Jon Cleary
We’re actually having very English weather in New Orleans today. Yes, it’s gray, cloudy, not particularly chilly, quite a nice temperature, but not the sunshine usually associated with New Orleans. But you know, we’ve had a long summer, so people here love weather like this
Charles Donelan
You’ve become an adopted son of New Orleans in a very serious, very fun way. When you travel now, like you’re going to come out to visit us, and then when you get back to New Orleans, what makes you feel like you’re home again?
Jon Cleary
Well, the food obviously, yeah, the tastes of New Orleans are undeniable. It’s always nice to come back and go around the corner to the neighborhood grocery store and get a really good US beef, a real, real good roast beef po’ boy. Smells of red beans on Monday, I’ve got my red beans cooking at the moment. It’s the whole package, really in New Orleans, just in the streets, the banana trees, the 19th century colonial architecture in my neighborhood, the sound of the boats on the Mississippi River, which I can hear from my kitchen, and the sounds of the trains, freight trains. There’s a freight train track a few blocks down the street, which holds up the traffic. Every now and again, big chains of freight trains come through. And it’s the accent, and just getting back in touch with all my friends, you know. And when I’m back home, it’s music. Being in New Orleans just, I mean, I think about music all the time anyway, but when you’re here in New Orleans, you’re at the heart of it, really.
Charles Donelan
I love it. Thank you. That was a beautiful, evocative description. It’s been a while now that you’ve been this sort of transAtlantic courier of culture and music, because I know not only do you go back to England, but you also entertain very distinguished guests sometimes. I read a very interesting sub stack post about a night with two distinguished gentlemen, the two sir Toms. Would you mind telling that story in any way that you feel like?
Jon Cleary
It was just a coincidence at jazz fest a couple of years ago, Tom Stoppard the playwright was in town with some mutual friends hanging out, and Tom Jones, the Welsh singer, Sir Tom Jones and Sir Tom Stoppard, the two Sir Toms. Tom Jones was in town, and he’s sat in with my band before – we have mutual friends – and so I had a gig, and it happened that they were both at the show and sitting next to each other by coincidence, at separate tables. And it was a nice night, a good memory. And one memory was brought back to me, of course, with the news last week, Stoppard had sadly just passed away.
Charles Donelan
And you got a number out of Tom Jones that night, correct?
Jon Cleary
Oh, yeah. He wanted to get up and sing. He likes singing so much, he’s irrepressible. Yeah, you don’t discourage a chance to have Tom Jones coming up. So he was good, man. He sang some R&B stuff. I did a thing with him years ago for a movie called Red, White and Blues, which was a session that was recorded and filmed at Abbey Road with Van Morrison and Jeff Beck and various other people. And so that’s where I’d first met him. So I’ve known him for a few years.
Charles Donelan
When did you first discover your affinity for this New Orleans music? Was it in London? Or where was it?
Jon Cleary
It was certainly as a child in England, and it was a gradual love affair with different aspects of New Orleans music that came to me from different directions at different times. And it took me a while to put the pieces together, but I grew up in a musical family, and my mum was passionate about New Orleans jazz. And in England in the 60s and 70s, every little village had this – well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration – but all over the country, there were enthusiasts who put bands together playing traditional New Orleans jazz. And so we’d go see New Orleans jazz. I’d go with my mum and dad. English musicians that played New Orleans jazz would be around at the house all the time, and it was tied in with skiffle stuff, so the jazz thing was just always there and and then my uncle lived in, and would travel around the world, and he lived in New Orleans and came back with suitcases full of R&B 45s. So I got a good grounding in the sound of 1950s and 1960s New Orleans rhythm and blues from him.
But at the same time I was independent from that. There were tunes that actually sometimes somehow managed to make it through on the airwaves in the UK. Most of the stuff in the 70s was dreadful English pop music, but there’d be American tunes that would sometimes come through. And there were three tunes in particular that really, really pressed all my buttons. One was “Lady Marmalade” by LaBelle, “Sneakin’ Sally Through the Alley,” Robert Palmer, and one was “Brickyard Blues,” Frankie Miller, so Robert Palmer’s English, Frankie Miller’s, Scottish, obviously LaBelle were American, but that was a big, big hit. But there was something about all three of those records that just did it for me. And I didn’t realize until I came to New Orleans that they were all from New Orleans. They were all by Allen Toussaint,and that connected with me.
Charles Donelan
It’s interesting that you mention that Robert Palmer record because that was one of my favorites as a teenager as well, growing up in New England. And I believe that the band on that, at least some of those musicians were New Orleans musicians.
Jon Cleary
It was basically the Meters, just the Meters, yeah, and Lowell George was in town at that time, and he guested some.
Charles Donelan
Of Little Feat. Lowell George was a major proponent of a kind of a New Orleans sound. Even though the band was really based in Los Angeles, they still had that kind of syncopation.
Jon Cleary
Two of the guys in the band had New Orleans roots, and Richie Hayward, the drummer, really dug New Orleans grooves. So that “Dixie Chicken” thing, that’s, yes, basically an outside impression of the sound of New Orleans, which is that rumba pulse, you know, Professor Longhair, all that. I had some stuff through my family and some stuff I’d stumbled across independently, but I think I had an innate personal preference for New Orleans black soul and funk and and I was lucky to be born into a family where that music was accessible to me, and then the rest of it, I had to go out and find for myself. That’s why I left England and moved to New Orleans
Charles Donelan
In the early 1980s when I was living in New York City, I think my introduction to the sort of deep cuts, the people like Willie Tee, Huey “Piano” Smith, Lee Dorsey – a lot of that came to us as New Yorkers through British reissues, Ace records. Chiswick. Chiswick, I’m not sure how you say it, but, yeah, you know. And people like Charles Gillett, you know, that was actually, it was a long, roundabout, black Atlantic transfer.
Jon Cleary 9:14
Yes, ironic, isn’t it? Charlie Gillett was amazing. Yeah, the radio show, Radio London every Sunday in the 70s, at a time when you couldn’t really hear anything that wasn’t top 40 mainstream, there was a pirate radio station broadcasting from a ship on the North Sea called Radio Caroline. That’s where I heard the Robert Palmer stuff. But Charlie Gillett would dig deep. He had James Booker on his show, and James Booker was in Europe. He played all kinds of stuff you couldn’t get anywhere else. Alexis Korner was another one who had a good show. And these guys are, like, music archeologists. I mean, they really went deep.
And you mentioned Ace records, that was yes, Ted Carroll and John Broven, who gave me my first record deal, and who wrote the book on New Orleans R&B. He came to New Orleans in the early 70s, and wrote a book called Walking to New Orleans, which was my bible when I arrived at the age of 18. And these guys really went the extra mile. John Broven – I have copies of his interviews with Earl King, Deacon John Moore and Marshall Seahorn and all the various people in New Orleans. And this was incredibly important information that was, I mean, diamonds of information that were sitting here on the doorstep of everybody in New Orleans, and that no one was really cherishing or acknowledging. So they went about that task, and they dug deep in the vaults and reissued things that had become unavailable.
We all owe them a huge debt of gratitude. And I was lucky enough to benefit from all the hard work they did, because that was where the information was out there, and from the outside. And when I got here to New Orleans, I was able to get the information directly, and I played with Earl King and Ernie K-Doe and Jessie Hill and I would bore them to tears asking questions. And they were actually delighted to get to find someone that was interested, because that style of music, for a lot of young New Orleanians, was old fashioned and passé.
Charles Donelan
Oh, but it’s terrific, and just musical genius. People like Allen Toussaint, Mac Rebennack, just extraordinary. Maybe you could reflect a little bit on how that music is part of the way that you perform and present New Orleans to the world today.
Jon Cleary
Well, there’s lots of different styles of music that came out of New Orleans. We have 100 years of documented music. The first jazz record was made in 1917 but of course there was a lot of music going on from day one, really, in New Orleans. New Orleans is one of those places that has a disproportionately large amount of music. And music is the soundtrack to your social life, and it plays a greater role in social life than perhaps it does in other places. I don’t know why particularly, but New Orleans has many different threads, many different flavors. It’s not just one thing. And so if you love the city and love the music, it’s a lifetime’s job to delve deep and learn and identify where all these different threads are, and then put them through your unique set of filters.
So I get my information from wherever I can. And sadly, the old guys are all gone. Now I’m one of the old guys now, ironically, but when I was 18, all these guys were still around, and they were still gigging, and I was able to play with them, as I say, and get anecdotal information, and ask questions and and learn by example from how they performed, how much work went into it, how rough and ready it was, the reality of playing. And I got here at the tail end, I think, of something. You know I was playing with Walter Washington and Johnny Adams and some of these people in small black bars, in black neighbors to black audiences playing New Orleans music. And that doesn’t really exist anymore, I’m very sad to say.
But the people I was playing to were way older than me, but they were the Dew Drop Inn generation who were middle aged at that time in the 80s, and for them, you know, this is the generation that gave the world rhythm and blues and rock and roll, yes, soul music and funk. I mean, arguably that stuff disproportionately comes out of New Orleans. I mean, there’s great bands all over the United States, but New Orleans has always been the sort of the soul battery that generated all that stuff. And so when I play, I’d get information wherever I could get it. So I played guitar in Dr. John’s band, and I would lean over his shoulder and try and figure out what on earth he was playing. I was on tour with Alan Toussaint. I’ve listened to him practicing, rehearsing, and writing songs. I was on studio sessions with guys, and saw how they approached making music. And I was around New Orleanians when music was being played at street parties or in nightclubs or whatever. And it was a very, always a very natural thing.
And you have to understand, I make this point quite often, that what we think of as funk and R&B and jazz, this is the folk music of New Orleans. If people talk about folk music for example, and they collect and record folk music all around the world, this is the folk music of the people of New Orleans. It’s just that it’s so good that it became the template for the way popular music was played all around the world, not just once in the days of 1920s and 30s with jazz, but again, in the 1940s and 50s and 60s with R&B and funk. And there was a whole other thing that happened here in the 90s that I wasn’t particularly interested in, but which was bounce. In it, which was bounce and bounce music really sold more, generated more money, and spread further than either jazz or rhythm and blues. As I say, it wasn’t my cup of tea. But there’s a different world.
So yeah. So all that stuff informs my playing, really, in the same way as you know any musician anywhere, the windows are open and the sounds come in, and you decide what you like, you just distinguish between what moves you and what doesn’t move you. And then you start to refine your tastes and get the information. And if you’re someone that plays music, who has a brain that is cursed with, afflicted with musical ability, then it just goes round and round in your head all day long. When you sit at a piano or an instrument, it comes out and everybody else can hear it. But that’s yeah. I mean, I just, I’ve had a very, very satisfying, full diet, with all the music I’ve been able to ingest in a lifetime living in the city
Charles Donelan
I was someone who discovered this music at a time when music was everything to me, also in the 1980s, and when these older R&B records were not familiar from the radio. Maybe some of them I’d heard, like Clarence Henry, you know, that song “I Ain’t Got No Home”, people knew that, but as more of a novelty number –”Ain’t Got No Home” or “Sea Cruise. But then to be immersed in that, thanks to these wonderful reissues, and then finally, to come to my research for this conversation and hear The Bywater Sessions was special. When did you record that? 2024?
Jon Cleary
It was the end of 2024 and we finished early this year.
Charles Donelan
I just feel like that record is absolutely true to the original feeling and style. It’s just as authentic as these records that were made in the late 50s. Was that intentional? I mean, clearly, you love this music, but did you have a way of thinking about how to set up? It sounds like it was all recorded in, in a – well, it’s a session, right? You were all together.
Jon Cleary
Yeah, yeah. We recorded it the way they used to record that music. Everybody in the room playing together. We put the horns on afterwards, because there simply wasn’t enough room in the studio to fit everybody in. It was done in my home studio, but the idea was to make a New Orleans record and to really capture the sound of my band as it is, or as it was at that time, what you would expect to hear on a gig.
You know, when you make a record these days, you have lots of options. In the early days of recording, you would record a performance, you’d get as good a performance as you could, and that was the record. And then things got more interesting with multi track recording in the age of the Beatles. And now you weren’t limited to just recording a performance. Now you could use the technology to record a piece of music in an entirely different way, and that’s the way most music has been recorded since the 1960s, and so most of my records have sort of been done like that. It’s just a different discipline.
But I wanted to have the band, as it is sounding so good. And I feel that at a time when there aren’t that many good New Orleans rhythm and blues bands continuing the tradition, I thought it was just very important I should get the band in the studio. And a bit of a backstory was that my studio got creamed in hurricane Ida a few years ago, and it took two years to build everything back, to deal with everything, and once it was basically up and running, this was the test to see how the studio was functioning. So everything sort of came together. I got all the fellas – they were all available – for two days, and they’re top session musicians, so they’re often all the way on tour, playing, doing that, doing other jobs, but I managed to get everybody together in the same room, and we just basically played our live show and rolled the tape.
And, you know, it’s piano based; it’s heavy on percussion. I think it contains essential elements of New Orleans music, but without attempting to be retro. I don’t know that there’s much… it’s fun to play old music, and they did it so well back in the day that it’s wonderful to play the way they did. But Professor Longhair wasn’t copying somebody that came before him. The idea was to take it and do something different with it, cook something new with the same ingredients, or whatever new ingredients might be available to you. So it’s important to write new songs. Most of the songs on the record are mine, one or two songs I’ve actually recorded before, but have changed in the interim arrangements. So it’s just a slice of a New Orleans R& B band at work. That was the idea.
Charles Donelan
Fabulous. You know, this is a wonderful city for people who have experience playing music and knowledge of music history, and I know that this night is going to be very special for a lot of them. I’ve already spoken to several people who are excited about it, and I know as we get the word out, it’s going to spread the excitement about being able to hear not just your band, but also Cha Wa, and they are fronted by a full-on Mardi Gras Indian. Is that correct? Should we talk about that tradition a little bit? Because I don’t know that it’s… I mean, I’m familiar with it. Obviously, you’re very familiar with it, but I’m not sure people are entirely aware. Oh, and by the way, you know, this show is February 26, so I guess you will have had a couple of days to recover from Mardi Gras, but not a long time. I’m sure you’ll be in fine shape, but we hope to continue that tradition. But tell me a little bit about the Mardi Gras Indian element in the New Orleans culture.
Jon Cleary
Well, they’re called Mardi Gras Indians. They’re not really Indians, right? Although one of the stories goes that runaway slaves were taken in by Native Indian tribes, and there’s always been a debt of gratitude or a sense of affinity or respect. In Mardi Gras time people dress up. It’s an old European tradition that goes back hundreds and hundreds of years. Yes, in the church calendar, it’s the last day before the 40 days of Lent, where you’re supposed to stop doing everything and make sacrifices and deprive yourself of pleasures. So the days leading up to Lent are your last chance to get your fill before 40 days of abstinence. And traditionally, people would go completely bonkers. And it’s called Fat Tuesday. It’s also called carnival, which literally means that it’s Latin for farewell to the flesh. So you’d stop eating meat, stop fornicating, stop drinking that alcohol, stop running around in the streets, carousing and getting up to mischief. And so as you can imagine, as the deadline ramps up, people just go completely nuts.
But the well to do folk of the city couldn’t be seen to be misbehaving in front of their minions. So the tradition evolved over many hundreds of years, where people would get costumed up and in costumes they’d be incognito. And in the black neighborhoods, this evolved into this tradition of masking up as an Indian tribe. They were really gangs of adult males from different black neighborhoods of New Orleans who would get together and on Mardi Gras day, would go out as a gang with names like the Wild Squatulas or the Yellow Pocahontas or the Red, White and Blue, or the Golden Eagles. The tribe nearest me is called the Monogram Hunters. It’s been going on for over 100 years, and they still do it to this day.
And then, in the weeks leading up, on Sundays, they get together, and it’s based around drums and chants, and arguably, this is one cultural tradition under the aegis of which African traditions have been maintained in a direct, linear fashion for over, over 100 years, right? So when you go and see the Indians practicing on the Sundays leading up – it happens all over town – you’re really witnessing something that is the most African thing you’ll see in the United States, and it has more in common with Haiti and Cuba. It’s an Afro Caribbean tradition, and the Indian tribes have been doing it very much undercover for decades and decades and decades. And in the 1970s there were two tribes that were joined up with musicians and went into the studio, and they put musical instruments to the drums, and they made two or three really, really good records. One is the Wild Tchopitoulas record produced by Allen Toussaint, which is really the first Neville Brothers record.
And then another tribe was called the Wild Magnolias and the Golden Eagles. And they teamed up with Willie Tee and Snooks Eaglin and Julius Farmer and went out to another studio in the country, in Bogalusa, around the Mississippi-Louisiana border. And they did the same thing, but they took these drums, raw drums, and put Indian lyrics, the songs that they sing, but more importantly, wawa guitars, clavinettes, electric bass, keyboards, horns, and they sort of organized this thing that was just completely wild. And then they look amazing on Mardi Gras day. They come out with these suits that they spend all year making, and they are splendid. And it’s once again, you can see direct links to Africa and to junkanoo celebrations in Jamaica and traditions in the Caribbean. And so it really is a little window into the past and a cultural thing that’s been left over from the days when Louisiana was a French colony and then a Spanish colony and a very – and still the most – African of American cities.
Charles Donelan
Certainly, yes, great.
Jon Cleary
On Mardi Gras day, you see the Indians coming out. They look incredible,and it’s been commercialized, but some of the Indians feel it’s a very sacred thing. That was quite a religious thing for a lot of people, right?
Charles Donelan
This is what I was going to mention. Go ahead, yeah, finish your thought.
Jon Cleary
I think there are some of the older generation of Indians that would, perhaps, would have frowned on the way that it’s being presented now, almost as one of the, you know, one of the tourist attractions, right?
Charles Donelan
And yet, I feel like there’s so many facets to this culture. You know, I think of a song that I listened to while getting ready for this interview called “Thank You John” by Willie Tee, and it’s irreverent. You know, it’s quite a sophisticated little tune, but it’s kind of bouncy. You don’t necessarily notice what it’s about until you’ve listened to it maybe more than once. But then, in another totally different mood, there’s something like “Walk On Gilded Splinters. I think that song has a real mysticism, or it communicated the sense of a spiritual existence to me when I heard it as a young man, and it still carries that kind of mystery.
Jon Cleary
Well, yeah, that was a Dr. John tune. And that’s right, he was very interested in the culture and the history. And there was a book that fascinated him, which for many years was out of print, but you can get it quite easily now, called Gumbo Ya Ya, and it contains folk stories of old New Orleans that were collected by, I believe, Lyle Saxon, and I think Mac Rebennack, Dr. John, devoured this book. With all the stories, they’re great. They’re like sort of adventure stories from a children’s book, almost, you know, but tales of voodoo and sorcerers Marie Laveau and one character, John the Conqueror, or Dr John, and he was the Night Tripper, a Senegalese voodoo doctor, and it resonated with Mac Rebennack, because the story tells of his arrest. Dr John Creole was arrested for cavorting with a white woman which was just absolutely forbid at that time, and her name was Pauline Rebennack. So of course, you know young Mac Rebennack, seeing this name leap out of the pages at him, was bound to be completely fascinated by all those stories. So “They Walk On,” all those lyrics, all those lines, come from that book, from these old stories. So it was his, his adventure. He invented the Dr Jon character, actually, for Ronnie Baron, who didn’t want to do it. And it seemed like such a good idea, I’ll be Dr John. Then, yeah, it was theater. And the rest is the country evoking, evoking some of the old stories of a very early, early, early New Orleans, when it was a wild malarial town on the bend of the Mississippi River and surrounded by cypress swamps, with all the amazing combination of cultures that were here, African and French and Spanish.
Charles Donelan
Well, Jon Cleary, you have been wonderfully generous with your time and your knowledge and your folk music wisdom. Maybe you could take us to a close here by telling us what you hope, when people come out to hear this music, when they come out to join with you, what do you hope people come away thinking about, or maybe singing or dancing about or just feeling when they’ve seen the Absolute Monster Gentlemen?
Jon Cleary
Well, with so much music everywhere, now, in the supermarket, in the back of a taxi, everywhere you go, you ignore it; it’s noise pollution, almost. And I think a lot of people have forgotten, or perhaps in the past have never even known or experienced, what happens when you’re in the same room as gifted musicians who use instruments to move columns of air, eardrums, and it’s a very mysterious science, but in the hands of gifted musicians, something, some chemistry happens in the room, which changes your brain as a listener.
And we’ve known this. There’s no society on the planet that anthropologists have ever discovered who haven’t had music. It’s a very important part of what we as animals require, along with oxygen and food and all the other things. So to be in the room with musicians who really know how to make a joyful sound, as they say in the church down here, it does you good. It’s good for you, and it makes you feel good. And it’s really just as simple as that. It’s a bit of a backlog, a bit of a lengthy explanation, but you have to remember, if you’re in the room with guys who really know how to do it – and not many people do – and people here in New Orleans have made a fine art of this, it’s a craft, and it’s a skill that’s much appreciated locally, but you utilize an instrument that does perform a scientific thing of moving columns of air that jiggles people’s eardrums and then gets inside their head, and it makes you feel really, really good. It’s a drug. It’s what drugs do. I think it releases endorphins, or I’m not, I don’t know that. I’m not a biologist, but good New New Orleans music is good time music, and it’s medicine, and I think a large part of its role throughout history has been to act as medicine.
When life is hard, you know you need whatever relief you can get, and if people playing music can lift your spirits, then that’s the best medicine you are ever going to get. Doesn’t come in a jar, doesn’t come in a pill bottle. You have to be in the room with guys who know how to do it, and that’s why I hired the best guys, the best, most talented, gifted musicians, because it’s not just playing notes. Music in the hands of all ordinary musicians is interesting. When you get really top talent, something else happens entirely. It lifts you up. And my job, really, as I see it, is not so much to preach to the choir, to people who already know this, who come to New Orleans and know what it’s like to be in front of the Gospel tent at Jazz Festival or in a bar room and the Indians are doing their things, or at Tipatina when a band is playing. But really it’s all those people who are brought along by their friends who say, you know, you’ve got to come check out the South, and those people that walk out going, wow, I didn’t even really know that that happened, or that you could do that.
I don’t want to sound like I’m making it out to be more than it is as an experience, but it really is good. It just does you good. And I usually sell CDs at the end of the show, and I get to speak to everybody that’s there. Everyone gets a CD signed. I chat to people every night, so I’m interested to hear what people have to say. And very often it’s people who say, wow. I’ve never done anything like this before. My dad brought me along and my friend brought me along. That was wow. I was just completely blown away. They didn’t even know it could happen. And as I say, in an age where we’re surrounded by music everywhere, for its currency to have been devalued so much by its constant presence, it’s very important to remind people that actually, there’s a difference between background music and music on your Spotify music and on your phone, and actually being in the room with people who are creating a sound that will exist for an instant and then vanish into the air and then it’s gone. You’re witnessing something that’s right there in the present, in the moment, and you have to be in the room to experience it. That’s why everyone should come out to the gig. Yes.
Charles Donelan
Well, wonderful, lovely. And thank you. You’ve done me some good with just talking about all this. Thank you. Jon Cleary & the Absolute Monster Gentleman, will be in Santa Barbara on Thursday, February 26 at Campbell Hall for UCSB Arts & Lectures. Thank you again, Jon, it’s been wonderful talking with you.
Jon Cleary
Thank you very much. Looking forward to coming out to California and seeing you. Take care. Bye!
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