One of the live music scene’s most captivating piano players is Marco Benevento. Between his solo work, his collaborations with Joe Russo (including Joe Russo’s Almost Dead) and so much more, there’s very little that Benevento hasn’t done. Writer Adam Troisi caught up with Benevento about a month before his performance in Brooklyn Comes Alive, a day of musical collaboration across Williamsburg, to chat about the various threads of his prolific musical career.
L4LM: So first things first, I heard a story that you played Live For Live Music’s launch party?
Marco Benevento: It was so funny, my manger was like “this young kid really wants to put on shows, he is a huge fan, and he told me his name is Kunj.” I was like, oh yeah, seen him in the front row for like the last year and a half. This smiley Indian looking dude. And he was like, “yeah, he wants to give you some money to play at a private party in Queens or somewhere at his Dad’s Dentist’s office.” But I think my manager failed to mention the dentist office part. But Kunj had a party bus for us and dude, that was really nice. He treated us like we were playing at Carnegie Hall but we were literally playing above a dentist’s office, ya know.
L4LM: Was it your trio?
MB: Yeah. It was like my band and we played all our tunes because that is what he wanted, which was really great, because at that level of our band we were not playing bigger size rooms like we are now. We were a little bit smaller, so to have some fan say “we want to hear all your music for our private party” was really great, it was like, “wow cool, someone really likes our music.” It was sort of reassuring that our music isn’t weird and it’s reaching out and doing a good thing.
L4LM: So the Brooklyn Comes Alive Festival was just announced and you are anchoring one of the Super Jams. For a gig like this, where you are playing with a group of people that may not have ever played together before, what kind of preparation goes into it?
MB: We are deciding if there are some clever covers that maybe we want to do. So you try and find a cover that you can connect to the audience with or that the special guest might really shine on. My favorite is to just sort of wing it and just play and see what comes out. So it’s like two different sides of the spectrum, one where you are trying to pick a tune, and one where you are like okay man, I will see you there and we will just jam and we will figure it out, which is equally as good and surprising, but it’s nice to have the balance of both worlds for sure.
[Marco & Eric Krasno ~ Funk N Bowl at Brooklyn Bowl ~ Photo by Djivan Schapira]
L4LM: Right, to have a little bit to fall back on in case the winging it dries out a little bit. So you graduated from Berklee and then you moved to Brooklyn after graduation. How do you feel the Brooklyn “scene” has affected your music career or shaped the way you play or your approach playing?
MB: Well, I think first and foremost, when I moved to Brooklyn, it was 2001, and I just had to figure out how to survive. I would take any gig I could get, and that would be like a $50 gig at the Knitting Factory or another $25 gig wherever. So living in Brooklyn, you have a lot of options for gigs for the evening if you know what’s going on out there or if you have some friends out there. And it was like alright, I just have to play every night for however much money I could get a night. Getting a $100 gig was awesome. Joe [Russo] and I had a gig where we played and we got $50 each, so it was $100 guarantee for band each night. If you could get $50 a week from that, that was good because that was grocery money for the week. So a lot of it was about survival and playing all sorts of different places.
It was also really inspiring because there were so many different scenes of jazz and funk and hip hop and rock and so on in Brooklyn that were all really flourishing and doing really well, and having a lot people involved in different scenes almost created little microcosms of little worlds — little pockets of people who know each other. So it’s really cool for you to get connected to all these different personalities and people, from total jazzers to full on African drumming world music to just full on rock music or studio work or session work. I mean there are so many different kinds of options for musicians to flourish and make some money. So I liked that. You are just a nobody. You open the door and you are just like boom, you are a no one. You are another one or another zero amongst a bunch of other ones and zeros. There are a ton of different people out there.
[“At The Show” ~ Official Music Video]
L4LM: Do you think that kind of attitude of coming out of school, having to hustle and take whatever gig you can get expanded your musical vocabulary? Were the gigs exposing you to styles you weren’t otherwise steeped in?
MB: Yeah. Totally. I did a lot jam sessions where you were playing with full on jazz musicians and you were totally getting blown away by the way certain people were playing. Or you would just talk to somebody and have a drink with them in the bar and they were really cool and they told you to check out a certain record you never heard about and you were just like, oh fuck, how about that Herbie Hancock record, it’s amazing. Then on the other side of things you play with your friends that you know and you are sort of playing your weekly Thursday night gig where you are in the background but somehow you discover some really cool cover that you play, or you know there are all these little places to learn about your instrument or your art or about music in general.
It’s really cool, when I lived in Brooklyn, when I think about it now it was just endless, stay up until 6:00 a.m., sleep until 3:00, practice until 8:00 and then go out to jam sessions until 6:00 in the morning again, sleep until 3:00, practice and then there is this whirlwind of like, shit, I got to get better and play a lot. Ya know, I came from Berklee College of Music, so moving to New York I was like, I got to figure out how to be the best I can be at that point I guess. I did like it because I met a lot people, audience members, fans and friends that have come along the way that are like taping shows and telling you about shows where they had seen you in back in the day. It just reminds you how long you have been doing it.
L4LM: I’m sure at times seeing those familiar faces at the same shows, you develop your own little following, and it’s encouraging to have people coming out night after night to see you.
MB: Totally. I remember when the first taper came to our Knitting Factory show to tape Joe Russo and myself I was like, “oh my god that taper tapes Soulive and all these other people.” We’re like this guy is coming to tape us, this is great. Like I said, in small little worlds of certain scenes and our scene back in the day was a scene where there were names and record labels and venues and people that were really helping out the scene.
[Catskill Chill 2014 ~ Photo by Jessica Giovannetti]
L4LM: Speaking of the New York jam scene, did you guys ever play the Wetlands?
MB: Joe and I played the Wetlands, yes. As a matter of fact our very first gig was playing at the Wetlands. Believe it or not we were hired because it was just the two of us, and it was a Madonna tribute night.
L4LM: And they thought you guys were familiar with it or they were like …
MB: No, no, no. They didn’t think we were familiar with at all. There were about 20 different bands that played Madonna songs throughout the night as a tribute to Madonna. I don’t even know why, if it was her birthday or something, and Joe and I played “Cherish” and two other songs that I can’t remember right now. But Jake Szufnarowski, the guy who runs Rocks Off Boat Cruises, hired us to do that gig. I think that was one of those $500 gigs where Joe and I were each offered $250 and we were like, this is amazing! Yeah, our first gig was playing Madonna songs at Wetlands. That was in 2001, and in 2002 we played the Knitting Factory.
L4LM: Going back to the Brooklyn Comes Alive Festival, as you know the concept arose from a desire to recreate the experience of being on Frenchman Street in New Orleans, hopping around from venue to venue, seeing a million artists participate in one-time collaborations, etc. New Orleans is really a piano city, between James Booker and Professor Long Hair and Dr. John and Fats Domino. When were you first introduced to the New Orleans piano tradition, and how did it from there on influence your playing?
MB: One of my earliest memories in New Orleans is of Jeff Raines, the guitar player from Galactic. At that time the Benevento-Russo duo was doing some shows with Galactic and we were close. Jeff handed me a CD of James Booker called Spiders on the Keys in 2002 when I made my first visit to New Orleans. He gave it to me and was like, “you never heard of James Booker?” When he handed me that CD I felt like I was being handed something special.
At that time Joe and I were touring around a lot so there was a lot of time to listen to music in the Subaru Outback. Every time I listened to Booker, I was like, it sounds like there are four hands, it sounds like there are two people playing the piano. It just sounded amazing. It’s the kind of music that, at that time for me, you had it on in the background with a car full of people you would just be like oh that’s piano-ey , New Orleans-ey kind of music in the background. But if you actually cranked it up and listened to it, I was blown away. I was like wait a minute, is this real, what is this?!
Then I sort of dug deeper into the Booker catalogue and since then I’ve been trying to learn that stuff and trying to play like that. And then it goes into just in general the feel of New Orleans music, but specifically the piano element of it is something I am totally drawn to and it’s something you can’t write out, it’s something you have to feel and listen to. There is a lot of James Booker live things that are out there, and when you feel a whole crowd clap along to Booker’s feel and you feel that sensation of New Orleans blues piano take over a room, it’s intense.
The same with Dr. John, I saw him recently in Philadelphia. New Orleans is a feel, it’s a soul, it’s a sensation, it’s deeper, it’s people talking to people. It’s real humans being humans and there is a feeling down there that you don’t get in New York City or LA or Austin or San Francisco or anywhere. It’s like there is something in the water. It’s totally shown through the music like Booker and [Allen] Toussaint and Dr. John and Professor Long Hair and all those guys.
L4LM: Because of how unique and challenging Booker’s style is, is it hard to incorporate it into your own jamming or writing without just playing it outright? It seems like such a singular style that it would be hard to kind of take a slice and not the whole pie, if that makes any sense.
MB: Right, right. I know exactly what you are saying, but at the same time, you trying to play it is still your own take on it, so no matter how true to the feel you think you are getting it’s still your own take on it. I can try to play like Booker and my show can sound Booker-esque and people might be like, wow that was cool, but if you really check out the feel of it all, it’s going to be different.
L4LM: I know you come down to New Orleans for Jazz Fest almost every year. Can you talk a little bit about your experiences down here for Jazz Fest, the late nights collaborations and how those go down?
MB: The best thing about Jazz Fest for me as a musician is that, when you are on stage, you’re in the most calm place you have been all day. You know, you are running around in the Fairgrounds and you are taking cabs and going to eat food and hanging out with your friends, always going somewhere, and then you got to go to your gig. And then you get to your gig and you are on stage and it’s like boom, sacred ground. And it’s like, hey dudes, Johnny [Vidacovich] or George [Porter Jr.] or Oteil [Burbridge] or [Adam] Deitch or Eric [Krasno] or Stanton [Moore] or Mike [Dillon] or whoever it is, and you are all finally in your sacred ground where no one can fuck with you, and all you can do is have the best time and try to make some entertainment for the people out there. The best thing about it is the fact that you are so free and you can do whatever you want. You could do all your songs that you wrote down, or just ditch your whole set and play whatever you want to do at Jazz Fest.
[Worship My Organ 2015 ~ Video by Royal Potato Family]
L4LM: When you are playing for an audience like that, people who come to town for Jazz Fest looking for a high level of improvisation, are you are more willing to go “out there” with the music?
MB: It’s all in the setting, ya know. I do a gig on the first Sunday at the Blue Nile called Worship My Organ that is the sort of gig where you just play and make up music and be your freaky spontaneous self and, since the beginning of that gig, that is how we have approached it, which is great. Then there are some other gigs where, say I play the following Sunday, the second Sunday with Big Sam, and Big Sam has his sort of certain tunes that he does that are in certain keys and you are more inside the lines. But all that being said, even with Sam you can stretch out and do some freaky ass shit for sure, and it’s super fun. But that gig is more of a Big Sam’s Funky Nation gig where he is trying to put out a certain thing, and all of the soloists and musicians are adhering to a certain thing where you are staying in one key for a while. And you are jamming, and you are soloing, and certain people are taking people up to a higher level with your solos. But with Worship my Organ, you are all soloing together and changing the chords a lot and dropping things out and adding things in and changing the groove.
[Worship My Organ 2015 ~ Blue Nile ~ Photo by Rex Thomson]
L4LM: Moving on, you don’t live in Brooklyn anymore, you moved up to the Woodstock area?
MB: Yeah. I have two kids and a massive piano collection, so living in the city was a little too tight for us.
L4LM: Has going from an area like Brooklyn, with such a thriving scene, to Woodstock, a more reclusive lifestyle, changed the way you play, write or work?
MB: The only thing that has changed is that I have been way more productive. I am doing so much more shit than I ever thought I would be doing because I have a good sized studio. I have a separate building from my house that is just my place to record and write music, re-amp stuff and send stuff to the tape machine and do all sorts of experimenting with sounds. Aside from my kids wanting me to hang, aside from my family and doing all those things. If they are in bed, which is the case right now, then I am hanging out in my studio and I can literally play the loudest drums and bass and anything right now than I have ever done before and no one would care. So I can be creative on the spot, which you’d think every musician has the ability to do, but they don’t, because in a city it is very difficult. With your own space there is no pressure, you can dial in your own room, you can create the environment that you want to create in. I have learned so much in the last three years as far as music recording goes.
L4LM: A lot of pianists/keyboardists that I see experimenting with sound are obviously doing it with a Nord or an electronic keyboard of some sort, but you are someone who has a lot of effects and circuits on your acoustic piano. Can you tell me a little bit about how that started and your kind of fascination with the technology?
MB: I guess it started a lot with the Benevento Russo Duo with a Wurlitzer. With the Wurli I used a lot of different effects like distortion, treble low and delay and got really heavy into that. It actually happened totally by chance one night. I was at home and I was getting ready to go on tour and I was kind of excited that all I had to bring was a piano, and I was playing with Reed Mathis and Matt Chamberlin and we were promoting our first record Invisible Baby, and I was like wow, this is awesome, I can just fly out to wherever and do our tour and I can just play the pianos in the room and that’s it. That is awesome. I don’t have to lug a Hammond B3 or Wurlitzer or distortion pedals or an amp or anything, I just get to play the piano and that’s it.
Then I talked to myself and realized that it’s going to sound real jazzy and not really like what the record sounds like, because on the record there is a lot of delay on the piano and a lot of distortion on the piano. There are all sorts of effects on the piano. I was trying to figure out how to do that, and I opened up my drawer in my desk that I was sitting at, and there was this really cheap acoustic guitar pick up that kind of sucks on an acoustic guitar which is why it was in my drawer. But then I decided to stick that thing on the piano and I ran it into this old amp that has tremolo on it. It just sounded so cool, and I was like holy shit, I have a quarter inch out on my piano, I can plug it into an amp and then I can just send the sound guy, and the sound guy can just mic up the amp, and you can get this crazy tremolo, distortion, a lead Wurlitzer sort of sound kind like the Duo and that’s when it all opened up. You go from the $30 pick-up to then finding that there is a $600 pick-up that sounds really good and works a lot better. So it’s grown significantly since the beginning, but it all started sort of by chance and by mistake.
L4LM: Are you experimenting with the piano alone or are you tinkering with all kinds of instruments and experimenting with other sounds?
MB: Oh man, I am doing so much shit. I am doing drum machines and drums and bass and synths and bouncing stuff to tape and I am barely using the piano. I am using tons of shit around here and then the piano sort of comes in at the end, which is sort of funny. I still have my practice mode. I like to just play the piano and have my own little mental floss here as far as the practice of my own piano goes. Yeah, I am deeply involved in engineering and producing and compressing sounds and distorting sounds and manipulating sounds to try and get them to sound like really good to my ears, and my next record is going to come from here.
[JRAD at the Capitol Theatre ~ Photo by Andrew Blackstein]
L4LM: Can you talk a little bit about your recording process?
MB: Yeah, we record at my studio, Fred Short, up in Woodstock. I have just been having Dave [Dreiwitz] and Andy [Borger] come up. They will show up around 5:00 at night, we have a big dinner, put the kids to bed, and then record from 8:00 PM until 2:00 AM. For those sessions we have recorded basically a whole record of stuff. We have done about 4 sessions like that and we have played some of the tunes on the road. So sometimes the guys know how it goes and it’s kind of easy, and then there are some sort of newer songs that the guys don’t know that they are sort of learning and recording at the same time. It is a really loose situation here with recording and with Dave and Andy.
Sometimes I will play them the demos that I have made an they will stick pretty close to what I have recorded and then add a little bit. For the most part, it is going awesome. My friend Kenny Siegel has been coming to help, and he has a studio in Catskill called Old Soul Studios. So the three of us are in here with our other friend who is acting kind of like as an assistant engineer/producer also who might have a fresh set of ears to be like, oh hey, why don’t you try it like this? We have a great dynamic and sometimes his ideas are great and sometimes my ideas are terrible or vice versa. It’s been really fun and I am excited to put out our single which also has a B side which is a cover of a song by The Crystals.
L4LM: On your last album Swift, you sing on a lot of the album. Is that a direction you are constantly heading towards or are these new recordings going back to instrumental tunes? Where do you see this new album you are recording in relation to what you have done in your career?
MB: Well, I am definitely hooked on the singing element. I have five records out on my own and there is one record that has singing on it, but for the most part the other records are kind of experimental instrumental tracks with some intense improvisation. So to balance things out a little bit as far as our live show goes, singing and adding these songs from Swift with that sort of element, drum machines and dancy, almost late night just let loose sort of jams, I feel like those are sort of nice to have in the mix in a night of heavy piano and improvisation. It’s nice to just lay on a riff or a chord progression of free symbol that has a pretty simple lyrical message as well.
L4LM: That a more casual fan can latch onto a little bit more than a complex instrumental…
MB: Yeah. I love improvisation and playing and I will be jamming on the piano my entire life and I love that part of the show when somebody really lets loose and plays their instrument. It’s such a great feeling to see a musician do that sort of thing, and I do love doing that with my band and jamming with Andy and musically conversing with Dave. And then on the other side of the spectrum, it’s also really nice to just set up a drum loop and play two or three chords for a while, but really get the party going, kind of almost in a Michael Jackson or Prince sort of way, where you are just sort of playing this long groove for a while that just gets people going. There are both of those elements in our show so there is only one part singing and dance party and four parts piano jamming and experimentation.
At the same I love playing those jams and improvisations, so there are a couple of improv tracks on the album as well, and there are a couple of heavy tracks with some serious piano activity, but then there are five or six songs that are mainly pretty dancy and singy and reminiscent of Swift. I really like that element of the band right now so I am sort of hooking on to it. The reaction from the crowd has been the same sort of thing.
[Mountain Jam 2015 ~ Photo by Greg Horowitz]
L4LM: Ok so now the million dollar question I’m sure your tired of hearing. Are there any plans for a Benevento Russo Duo tour or album moving forward?
MB: There is no plan as of now, but Joe and I are tight and love each other and dream of figuring out when that would happen. It seems like there is a lot on each other’s plate to figure it out right now. We are almost too precious about it. We are trying to find out the perfect time to do it. We are just sort of hovering within our own bands right now. I don’t know. So no plans as of yet, but there is definitely some total blue skies between Joe and I. We are not avoiding it.
Benevento Russo Duo Reunite For Surprise Set At Mountain Jam
L4LM: You also play in JRAD and this Summer was kind of crazy with all the Grateful Dead 50 stuff. Did you follow it, did you see any of the shows, what is your connection to it?
MB: I did not see any of the shows but I know that everybody loved it. I saw the Dead twice when I was in high school and I actually went to the candle light vigil in Central Park for Jerry when he died, which was twenty years ago. I listened to their tapes and loved smoking weed and loved listening to the music and would put them on frequently. Then I went to music school and listened to all sorts of different shit, and sort of did not become the full Deadhead that I should have become. I feel like now I am becoming more of a Deadhead.
L4LM: What was that process like of having to learn not just a couple of covers but a band’s entire catalog?
MB: I didn’t know all that shit, all the fucking heavy shit. I probably knew Truckin’ and Fire on the Mountain. I knew some of those tricky ones, Terrapin Station and what not. Joe was really the guy that showed me the ways of what to learn. It was all new to me and it seems like, in the group, the biggest Deadhead would be Joe and Tommy [Hamilton]. Tommy knows that stuff really well, played and sang it when he was a kid. I played some of their tunes when I was in a band in high school but never really got into the trading tapes and all that stuff. I had to do a lot of learning, writing out; I had learn a lot of music. But I played a lot with Phil along the way. He had charts for a lot of that stuff when I played with him at Terrapin Station and the Capitol Theatre, so I saved a lot of it. But then Joe was like you have to learn Saint of Circumstance, Prophet, Terrapin Station and Unbroken Chain, and these songs are like Jazz Odyssey. Some of the time I was like this is so much work, fuck this, but you learn it and then you get it. All you have to do is listen to it a million times like all the Deadheads have and you will know it.
L4LM: Another tour that you and Joe did was the GRAB (Gordon, Russo, Anastasio, Benevento) Tour, which was interesting timing because it was just a year or two before Phish got back together. How did that tour come about and what was your experience on it?
MB: Well Joe and I recorded with Trey for his record Bar 17 so that was the beginning of it all. It was amazing, it was so much fun. You go from driving your own van around, loading your own gear, playing for 500 people at the most most nights, and then all of a sudden you are on a tour bus, everything is all set up for you, you’re playing for 20,000 people, and that just felt awesome. We would do a duo set and then we would play with Trey and Mike and play a lot of Trey’s tunes and a couple of our tunes. It was so much fun and such a blast, it was really exciting and really easy to do.
L4LM: If you could play with anyone, dead or alive, just jam with them, who would it be?
MB: Paul McCartney and Ringo.
L4LM: A lot of those New Orleans piano players we mentioned earlier had residencies in the later part of their careers. Is that something you could see yourself doing?
MB: That is what I live for. Hell yeah.
L4LM: Be able to control the room.
MB: Yeah, just to be able to play or just know 200 or however many songs. To be able to play so many songs, just you at the piano, and just you singing and be able to play for a room all night and then do it again the next night and not really repeat too many tunes. That is something I would love to do. It’s so funny, you learn so much as a musician, you learn how to record music, you learn how to do tours, you learn how to get pedals and get amps and how to sing and you learn all sorts of shit, but really what it comes down to is how many songs you know.
Do you know New Orleans piano music? Then what can you sing and play for me right now. Alright well you know rock piano, what can you sing and play for me right now? Or you are into reggae, or you are into funk, what can you sing and play for right now? When someone puts you to that task in the moment, sometimes people are like shit, I don’t know, I can play one song or two. You think that so many musicians just know so many tunes, which is the case with a lot of musicians, but some musicians are like well I don’t know, I can just jam, do you want to just jam? And they’re like no, I want you to play me a song with the intro and a verse and then the bridge and the verse and the ending and then it’s over. Ya know, Booker was the man at that.
L4LM: There is something nice too about the idea that you are both the business and the band. You just walk in and sit down at the piano and you are the show.
MB: You don’t need a laptop, you don’t need pick up, you don’t need reverb, it’s just you and the piano and that’s it. I feel like every instrumentalist, every person should be aware of that and then practice that stuff because it’s fun and its human and it’s entertaining and it’s universal and probably what music is all about anyway. It’s just being able to sing and play a song to somebody. There are people who can play you something instrumental and inspiring as well but ya know it’s either one. My new thing is to be collecting words and chords to every song that I know. My personal goal in life is to hopefully live to 80 years old or something and to be at a place where we are all hanging out and there is a piano there and someone is like, “hey, do you know this song?” And I say “yeah,” and then another person says “hey, do you know this song?” and I say “yeah,” and I just say yes to anything that anybody asks me to play. That is my goal.
[Equifunk Late Night/Early AM Campfire Set 2013 ~ Video by cleantones]
L4LM: A musical encyclopedia.
MB: To be able to say that when anybody asks me a song in that certain room at that certain time, I know every song that someone asks me to play.
L4LM: Can you give us five people you’re listening to right now? If you turned on your iPod or your Spotify or whatever it was, who would be the five people you are checking out right now?
MB: Antenna, they are pretty cool. They have a record called Camino Del Sol, it’s so good. I listen to Bowie every day. The Man that Sold the World I love that record.
L4LM: Is that because he is your neighbor or you’re just a Bowie fan in general?
MB: He handed me my degree in 1999.
L4LM: Really. He was the speaker at your graduation??
MB: Yeah, it is awesome. So the Man that Sold the world, Antenna. I have been making mixes a lot. I have been collecting a sorts of vinyl. I like Lee Dorsey’s record a lot, Get Out of My Life woman and Ride the Pony. Have you ever checked out Galt MacDermot?
L4LM: No I have not.
MB: You got to check out Galt McDermott, the record is called Shapes of Rhythm. Say no more, you will freak out when hear that record.
L4LM: Am I going to lock myself in a room now for a week and just listen to this?
MB: It’s like a 13 minute record. It’s short but it’s so good. I like going down the old path of vinyl. Galt MacDermot, Lee Dorsey, Antenna, Bowie and I probably got something in there. I got a live Booker records from Germany.
L4LM: Well thanks so much for taking the time to talk to us! See you at Brooklyn Comes Alive!
Check out Marco’s fall touring schedule here.
[Cover photo by Jeremy Gordon ~ Bowlive 2015]