It’s about 1:30 on a sunny afternoon, but by all rights Marco Benevento should be falling asleep in his snow boots. “I just got back from a West Coast tour, at, like, 3:30 this morning,” he says, crunching through the drift between his West Saugerties house and the outbuilding that serves as his studio/rehearsal room. “And then my kids woke me up, after I’d been to bed for about three hours.” You’d never know it, though. While laughing about and praising his two young daughters’ eagerness to welcome their daddy home, the bearded keyboardist is more animated than most of us would be after 10 hours’ slumber and a pot of high-grade espresso. Throughout the course of our interview, he’s a free-flowing fount of energy, color, and endless ideas. Exactly like his music.
Called “a musician so original that he can only be judged by his own standard” by All Music Guide, Benevento is a player whose continuously surprising, mainly instrumental art bleeds across multiple genres, juxtaposing jazz, rock, and experimental styles with an organic, unforced, it-is-what-it-is panache. Besides making five official albums as a solo artist and playing in the band GRAB with Phish’s Mike Gordon and Trey Anastasio, the funk-rock quartet Garage A Trois, and the Led Zeppelin “reinterpretative” ensemble Bustle in Your Hedgerow, Benevento is famous as one half of the Benevento/Russo Duo, the keyboards-drums unit he formed with percussionist Joe Russo in 2001. Like Benevento’s friends and neighbors Medeski, Martin & Wood, the Benevento/Russo Duo came together in Lower Manhattan’s avant-jazz scene and was able to make the more lucrative leap to the jam band circuit—without changing a note of integrity in the process.
Benevento, 35, grew up in Italian-heavy Bergen County, New Jersey. “My dad came to the U.S. from Italy when he was 15, and around the house he’d sing all these Neapolitan songs he’d learned when he was a kid,” he recalls. “My uncle played guitar, and after pasta dinners and wine there’d be campfire-style singing.” The budding musician started piano lessons at seven (“I hated them,” he says with a laugh), but didn’t really get excited about playing until he got a Kawai synthesizer and a four-track recorder in sixth grade. And despite his later reputation as a jazzer, it was rock that captured his ear first. “Of course I loved the Beatles,” Benevento says. “And the Who, I loved the synth stuff on ‘Baba O’Riley.’ The Doors were really a big deal too—Ray Manzarek’s whole style of playing the bass parts on electric piano with his left hand.” He soon put the same technique into practice with his first band, a bass-less 1990s keyboard/guitar/drums trio that played “Zeppelin and Alice in Chains covers at sweet 16 dances.” At 15 he discovered jazz—Oscar Peterson and Jimmy Smith were early revelations—and ended up musically bonding with Russo in a high school detention hall. “We were both in for just being goofy in class,” Benevento remembers. After graduation the two went their separate ways, Russo to Colorado to join jam outfit Fat Mama and Benevento to Boston to study jazz at Berkelee College of Music under pianist Joanne Brackeen from 1995 to 1999.
“I get why a lot of people think the term ‘music school’ is an oxymoron,” Benevento says. “But, looking back, I’m really glad I stuck it out. A big part of why I stayed was because I was also playing in a band, the Jazz Farmers. We had a residency at a little bar, doing Charles Mingus, Horace Silver, Joe Henderson, that kinda stuff. We’d pack the place and still somehow only make, like, $20 each, but I learned a lot.” Yet as musically fertile as the Jazz Farmers were, Benevento knew that Manhattan was the next stop. “My teacher always said ‘Boston’s just the bullpen,'” he recalls.
So by 2001 he was in New York, where, almost right away, he ran into Russo outside of a Medeski, Martin & Wood show at late, lamented Lower East Side creative hub Tonic. The two began performing as the Benevento/Russo Duo, doing gigs that saw Benevento adding circuit-bent toys (manipulated effects boxes and electronic children’s games) to his arsenal of Hammond organ and Wurlitzer electric piano. After two self-released albums, the pair signed to indie label Ropeadope Records, for whom they made the acclaimed Best Reason to Buy the Sun (2005) and Live from Bonnaroo 2005 (2006), the latter featuring Phish bassist Mike Gordon and taped at the titular Tennessee jam band summit.
So with all of this jazz/jam crossover action, what differentiates a jazz band from a jam band? Is there even a boundary? “You could easily draw a line between the bands that are more jammy and the ones that are more jazzy,” Benevento believes. “Medeski, Martin & Wood is definitely more jazz, that’s the foundation for those guys. But jam bands, like Moe, Phish, or the Disco Biscuits, they’re more all over the place, musically. They might play some Latin-sounding thing, then some funny, Zappa-style thing and then go into a one-chord jam and come out doing barbershop quartet vocals.” And on which side does Benevento see himself? “Neither, really,” he replies. “I mean, what my bands do definitely has elements of both jazz and jam stuff. But the rhythms we go for don’t have as much of the swing that jazz drummers tend to have. And most of the tunes we play are in the four-to-five-minute range, whereas jam bands can go for 20 minutes or longer on one piece. We’re more on the straighter side of rock than jam bands usually are. I guess I’d describe the music I play as ‘experimental instrumental rock.'”
After the Benevento/Russo Duo’s most recent release, Play Pause Stop (Reincarnate/Butter Problems Records) appeared in 2006, Benevento unveiled his solo debut, 2007’s Live at Tonic (Ropeadope Records). But following the release of his next disc, 2009’s Invisible Baby (Hyena Records), he experienced a business epiphany. “About 20 seconds of a Benevento/Russo tune got used in an episode of ‘CSI: NY’ and they paid $18,000 for it, but the label got half,” he says. “So my manager and I thought, ‘Wow, if we had our own label we wouldn’t have to split the money with anyone!'” Thus, with Benvento’s next effort, 2009’s covers-heavy Me Not Me, he co-founded the Royal Potato Family, an imprint that’s also home to releases by Yellowbirds, Neal Casal, Super Human Happiness, the Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey, and others.
At the same time he and his manager were launching the Royal Potato Family, however, Benevento and his wife were launching their own family, and outgrowing their Brooklyn apartment. The clan moved into their Upstate digs (complete with egg-providing chickens) in April 2010, a month before the label released Benevento’s dazzling Between the Needles and Nightfall. Immediately, the keyboardist found his footing in the local musical community. “Right after we got here I ran into [Medeski, Martin & Wood bassist and Saugerties resident] Chris Wood at the farmers’ market,” he says with contented disbelief. “Then I got to play with Levon Helm at one of the Midnight Rambles and did some tracks on A. C. Newman’s new album [2012’s Shut Down the Streets]. It was just, like, ‘Yeah, this is the place!'”
Benevento’s newest album, TigerFace (Royal Potato Family), is a mind-blower, easily his best yet. Recorded partially at Woodstock’s Applehead Recording and Los Angeles’s East West Studios (where the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds was cut), it amazes with the loping, gospel psychedelia of “Going West,” the Baroque dub of “Fireworks,” and the pastoral “Eagle Rock.” Besides being a big departure in that its pop-leaning pieces are his most concise, song-oriented compositions thus far, it also introduces another new element: vocals, by Rubblebucket’s Kalmia Traver, who sings on the softly lilting “This Is How It Goes” and the pounding dance-rock track “Limbs of a Pine.” “It was all just a totally natural growth,” says Benevento about the new approach. “When you’re starting to play to 500 people at somewhere like [New York’s] the Bowery Ballroom and they’re shaking their booties and getting more into it when you’re doing these simpler, groove-oriented tunes than they do when you’re doing all the piano balladry, you start to think, ‘Hmm, maybe we should do more of the groove stuff.’ Which is a lot of fun, actually. So some of it came out of that, but some of it just came from my taste in music expanding. I’ve really gotten into Can, that whole hypnotic style. Some nights I just like to put my looper on and let it go for a while, instead of always trying to play so much.”
In addition to Traver, TigerFace‘s numerous other contributors include drummers Matt Chamberlain (Bill Frisell, Pearl Jam) and John McEntire (Tortoise) and bass players Dave Dreiwitz (Ween), Reed Mathis (Tea Leaf Green), and Mike Gordon. “It’s not often one meets someone as full of life and music as Marco,” says Gordon via e-mail. “On one end of his personality, we find a virtuoso pianist all ‘studied-up’ on jazz, classical, and other such idioms, and clear on the other side there is the circuit-bending, melody-molding radical, with real neon glowing out of his tiny parlor piano.” The Phish bassist adds, “And yet it’s all one and the same, since shooting right down the center is the most smiley, joyous, kind, hypercreative jolt of spinal juice you’ll ever do a shot of.”
At this point in the afternoon, the keyboardist needs to prepare for a Mardi Gras-themed tribute to one-eyed New Orleans piano legend James Booker that’s happening the next day in Brooklyn—with Benevento in full costume. “I’m wearing the eye patch and everything,” he says with a chuckle. “So right now I have some serious Booker-shedding to do.”
Hopefully, he’ll make room for some sleep in there somewhere too.
TigerFace is out now on The Royal Potato Family Records. Marco Benevento will perform at the Midnight Ramble at Levon Helm Studios in Woodstock on March 2 and at BSP Lounge in Kingston on March 30. Marcobenevento.com.
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This article appears in March 2013.
