Johnnie Bassett | The Gentleman Is Back

JOHNNIE BASSETT
“THE GENTLEMAN IS BACK”
FIRST ALBUM IN NINE YEARS
SET FOR JUNE 30 RELEASE ON SLY DOG RECORDS

        “Hey fellas, I got a message for ya. Listen up…”

That’s
the first thing Johnnie Bassett has to say on The Gentleman Is Back,
the legendary Detroit guitarist and singer’s new album – just before he
delivers the lightly stinging licks that are his playing trademark.
With his voice and his strings, Bassett hints at the rough road ahead
but with a warm, mellifluous tone – “a unique ability to combine jump
blues and Delta stylings” praises the All Music Guide – that lets you
know you’re riding with the right guy.

That’s how a gentleman
does the blues – and has done them for more than five decades, amassing
a career that’s crossed paths with some of the greatest artists in the
field, including John Lee Hooker, Smokey Robinson and Jimi Hendrix.

“I
got that tag because of my playing and my character,” Bassett notes,
adding with a chuckle, “You know, I’m not a teenager. I’ve been in this
business over 50 years. I treat everybody like I would want to be
treated. I never put anybody down. I’m always encouraging younger guys
when they’re coming up. That’s what I try to be…a gentleman.”

That
civilized touch is all over The Gentleman Is Back, an 11-song set that
finds Johnnie, at 72, in prime form as a player and singer. Recorded in
Detroit and co-produced by longtime Bassett collaborators Chris Codish
and Keith Kaminski, the album includes a richly rendered cover of the
Hoagy Carmichael and Gorrell Stuart standard “Georgia” and a batch of
originals penned mostly by Codish and his father, Bob, another regular
in the Bassett camp.

The range is wide – from the R&B
groove of “A Woman’s Got Ways” to the jump-style swing of “Keep Your
Hands Off My Baby” and the jazzy touches of the lengthy album-closer
“My Old Flame” – but it’s held together by the distinctive and
definitive touch that Johnnie brings to anything he plays, a gift for
making his performance sound like the most natural and, in fact, the
“only” true version of the piece.

“We were very careful in
picking songs for this album,” Bassett explains. “We try to pick
something that’s telling a story. It all relates to real life,
basically. I wanted something that felt very real…and close to me.”

Producer
and keyboardist Codish echoes that. “The songs have to be true to who
he is, something he can get behind, that he feels. He’s such a great
blues player. He’s refined. He plays with a certain elegance and style,
and he’s just a real smooth guy. So it was all about finding stuff that
worked for him, and that he liked as well.”

That style and sound
is the result of a long and rich lifetime of musical experiences. Born
in Florida, where his father was a bootlegger during prohibition,
Johnnie was surrounded by music. His mother, sisters and aunts took him
to church and surrounded him with gospel spirituals. But in the summer
he’d head out to his grandmother’s famous fish fries, where the likes
of Tampa Red, Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup, Lonnie Johnson and others would
set up and play while folks ate and danced. “They were my dad’s
friends,” Bassett recalls. “He would meet them on the road. I didn’t
know they were gonna be big names ’til I got to be a teenager and we
moved to Michigan. I’d hear them on records when I was 13, 14, 15 years
old and go, ‘Hey, these are the same people I heard play when I was
just a little kid.’ And dad said, ‘Yeah, that’s them.'”

Johnnie
started playing guitar himself at that time, “framming around” on an
old arched-top instrument of his sister’s and taking informal lessons
from a neighbor on the front porch at night. “One day he let me take
his guitar home, which was just next door,” Bassett remembers. “I’d
work at it for three, four hours at a time. That was the start. I just
fell in love with it.”

An older brother bought Johnnie an
electric guitar and small amplifier from a pawn shop, and he never
looked back. He met Uncle Jessie White at a record store on Detroit’s
Hastings Street and started playing with him. He formed the Bluenotes
with keyboardist Joe Weaver, which led to gigs with John Lee Hooker,
Big Joe Turner, Ruth Brown and Eddie Burns and a tenure as the house
band for Detroit’s Fortune Records label. Bassett and company also
spent a bit of time at Chess Records in Chicago and played on the first
sessions by The Miracles, which resulted in the single “Got A Job.”

“It
was fun, just fun – that’s all we were having,” Johnnie recalls. “They
didn’t ever pay us. They sent out and got some lunch meat and some
crackers and some pop, fed us some lunch, and we went right to
playing.” He notes with a laugh that, “They still owe us for that
session!”

A stint in the army sent Bassett to Seattle during the
late ’50s, where he remained for a bit and played around the local
scene – including jamming with a “talented” young Jimi Hendrix. By the
end of the ’60s he was back in Detroit, working a series of day jobs –
from dispatching cabs to the requisite auto factory position – but
never putting down the guitar as he continued to lead his band, the
Blues Insurgents. He recorded a series of excellent albums such as I
Gave My Life To The Blues, Bassett Hound, Cadillac Blues (nominated for
five W.C. Handy Awards) and Party My Blues Away, but his last label,
Cannonball Records, went out of business. He kept working and
eventually became a hometown legend and treasure, receiving a well
deserved Lifetime Achievement Award from the Detroit Blues Society in
1994.

In recent years, however, Bassett and his supporters have
had but one goal; “We really wanted him to get a new label deal,” says
Codish. That transpired when Mack Avenue Records owner Gretchen
Carhartt caught Johnnie in live performance during a four-night stand
at the Dirty Dog Jazz Cafe in the Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe. She
was particularly taken by his soulful rendition of “Georgia.” “On the
break I was talking to her, and she looked at me and said, ‘Do you have
a label?'” Bassett remembers. “I said, ‘No,’ and she said, ‘Well, you
do now,’ and that was that.”

Johnnie didn’t have to think twice
about what The Gentleman Is Back would sound like. “I like doing fun
music – fun jump music and fun blues music and stuff like that,” notes
the father of two and grandfather of five. He really does like some
“Meat On Them Bones,” as the song says (“Not too much,” he notes, “but
enough to keep you warm”), plus there were plenty of real-life tales to
draw on for “My Old Flame.” And he fully understands the allure of the
“Real Gitchieegumee,” which noted jazz drummer Leonard King wrote for
this record.

Johnnie also works with a formidable group of
musicians on The Gentleman Is Back; a potent ensemble of Detroit music
makers that includes all three members of the Brothers Groove
(keyboardist Chris Codish, bassist James Simonson and drummer Skeeto
Valdez), The Motor City Horns (saxophonist / arranger Keith Kaminski,
trombonist John Rutherford and trumpeters Mark Byerly and Bob Jensen)
and special guests such as James Morris, whose pedal steel adds silk to
the aching “I Can’t See What I Saw In You.” Duncan McMillan (writer of
“I’m Lost”) sits in on Hammond organ for two numbers and drummer Sean
Dobbins smacks the skins on “I Love The Way You Look.”

“Oh
man, all those guys were so excellent,” Bassett notes. “It made
(recording) this album such a pleasure.” And, as an even greater
pleasure for fans, many more than these 11 songs were worked up during
the recording sessions -meaning that the Gentleman (who never really
went away) is here to stay for a while.

“I just love to play,”
Johnnie says. “People come out and enjoy it and the guys I’m playing
with are enjoying it and having fun with it. As long as that’s
happening, I’ll keep on doing it.”

TOUR DATES

June 27, 2009
Jazzin’ on Jefferson
Detroit, MI
www.jazzinonjefferson.com

July 8-11, 2009
The Dirty Dog Jazz Cafe
Grosse Point Farms, MI
http://www.dirtydogjazz.com/

DL Media

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