A gypsy jazz country rock bluegrass guitar virtuoso comes to town
John Jorgenson plays Dietz Brothers Music in Manhattan Beach Friday night.
John Jorgenson has lived one of the strangest and greatest musical lives ever lived.
He played clarinet with Benny Goodman when he was only 14. He later played guitar with Elton John, Luciano Pavarotti, Barbara Streisand, Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan, and Johnny Cash. He won a Grammy with country star Brad Paisley and was nominated for one with bluegrass legend Earl Scruggs. He scored five number one hits on the country charts with the Desert Rose Band. He shared the silver screen – wearing a wispy French mustache and playing guitar exactly like gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt – with Penelope Cruz and Charlize Theron. Of late, he has composed and performed classical works with a Nashville orchestra and sang a Leonard Cohen song at a California casino.
“It surprises me sometimes, really, because I don’t necessarily think about it in overview that often,” Jorgensen said in an interview last week. “But when I do, it’s like, wow, it’s been a lot of stuff.”
Jorgenson, one of the acknowledged guitar virtuosos alive today, adds another stop on his diverse musical journey this Friday when he plays a free workshop/concert at the Dietz Brothers Music store in Manhattan Beach.
It should perhaps come as no surprise that Jorgenson, though classically trained and a graduate of University of Redlands University, served perhaps his most formative apprenticeship in an unexpectedly appropriate and completely unofficial musical academy: Disneyland.
Jorgenson, the son of a professor/conductor father and piano teacher mother, began playing piano at the age of five and clarinet at eight. But he rebelled against his parents in two respects – the first being his attraction to the guitar (“They thought it was just a fad,” he recalled), and the second his desire to escape academia and become a fulltime performer.
As two lifelong musicians who understood the importance of a steady gig, his parents appreciated it when Jorgenson landed a job playing at Disneyland. He signed up to play in both a bluegrass band and a Dixieland jazz band for Disney, and eventually he and his fellow musicians formed a third band – this one gypsy jazz outfit. They played for seven hours a day at three different areas in the park.
“It obviously isn’t a musical academy, but it certainly is a performance academy,” Jorgenson said. “Because people don’t come there to hear performance — they come there to ride rides and see characters and all that kind of stuff. So if your job is to try to entertain them with music, that is hard, and you have to really figure out how to grab their attention and how to hold it.”
Jorgenson started out playing mainly mandolin and clarinet and eventually played a little bit of everything, particularly guitar (he plays ten instruments, including sax, bassoon, dobro, bass, keyboards, percussion, even a little bit of banjo). He played at Disneyland for six years, even as he became a member of a band co-founded with former Byrd Chris Hillman called The Desert Rose Band.
“I didn’t quit until I had a number one single,” Jorgenson said. “I think it was 1988, Chris Hillman called and said, ‘Hey, you’ve got your first number one single. I thought, ‘Okay, I think now it’s time. I can give my notice now.’”
Prior to taking off with the Desert Rose Band, Jorgenson had made an acquaintance with a long-dead legend while playing at Disneyland – the gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, who quickly became Jorgenson’s favorite guitar player. He sensed that his musical direction was about to dramatically change, and so he made a record that had one side devoted to Django and another to Benny Goodman (who he’d met and played with through his father). The record was called After You’ve Gone. “I made that record because I didn’t think I would ever really play that music again,” he said.
The Desert Rose Band had a successful run until parting ways in 1993 and left a lasting influence. “Even though we weren’t as massively successful as Alabama or something like that, we left a lot in the style and people are still influenced by the band to this day, like noticeably Brad Paisley,” Jorgenson said. “He says when he first heard the Desert Rose Band it changed his life.”
While with the Desert Rose Band, Jorgenson caught the attention of a certain mad Englishman. Elton John caught one of his shows in 1988, and, out of the blue, called Jorgenson up in 1994 and asked him to go on an 18-month worldwide tour. It lasted six years and took him around the world several times.
By the time he stepped off the six-year whirlwind, a funny thing had happened. Django Reinhardt had returned.
In part because of the Internet, a musical community of Django followers had formed. Festivals and gypsy jazz guitar enthusiasts sprang up around the world. Suddenly, it seemed possible to actually make a living playing the music that Jorgenson loved most. And now the composer in him also came to bear on the music: rather than just imitating Django, Jorgenson began adding to the repertoire. Franco American Swing, a record he released in 2004, was critically considered a true addition to some of the most beloved jazz songs ever composed.
Jorgenson had done something that one of his musical heroes – Leonard Cohen – had once sang about. He’d added to the “Tower of Song.” That same year, Jorgenson was asked to play Django in a movie called “Head in the Clouds”. As they discussed how to go about recreating Django’s sound, the director was shocked to learn something. Django’s style was built around the fact that he had only two functioning fingers on his left hand; Jorgenson had figured out how to play his music the very same way.
“The cool things about learning Django’s style is it forces you to learn the neck in a completely different way than you already know it, so by the time you can play his style, man, you can play all over the neck,” Jorgenson said. “It’s almost like training with weights or something.”
Jorgenson ended up in a café scene with two famous actresses.
“It was amazing,” he said. “…. Not only get a chance to get paid to replicate his music but also pretend to be him on camera with Charlize Theron and Penelope Cruz….That is one of those days I looked around and went, you know, my life does not suck.”
He has since continued to expand on his evolving gypsy jazz repertoire and play songs from every part of the tower of song. A reviewer in England last year wrote in awe of a show that began with a George Harrison Indian-flavored raga and ended with a ripping version of the bluegrass standard Orange Blossom Special.
The thing that makes Jorgenson special is that every note played, while touching on what has come before, is very uniquely his own. Jorgenson has a quality in common with his guitar hero. He is a virtuoso whose playing transcends mere virtuosity.
“I think the thing for me is Django’s music is so fiery and so full of life and energy,” Jorgenson said. “And I never heard anyone get that kind of sound out of an acoustic guitar. It’s almost the electric energy of Hendrix…virtuostic, but it never loses sight of the emotion or the humor or the melancholy of the music. And I just gravitated towards being able to get that much emotion out of an acoustic guitar.”
John Jorgenson plays at the Dietz Brothers Music store, 240 S. Sepulveda in Manhattan Beach, at 7 p.m. June 4. The event, which also features guitarist Brad Davis (who has played with Willie Nelson, Sheryl Crow, and Emmy Lou Harris), is sponsored by Takamine Guitars. ER