Eva Radich: Today we’re looking at the local
saxophonist Lucien Johnson. Now I say local but he spends most of
his life outside the country doesn’t he?
Norman Meehan: Well these days he does, he grew up
a lot of the time north of Wellington in Pukerua Bay. His father was
the poet Louis Johnson, so he comes from a very learned, arts sympathetic
family and background. He spent time in Menton in France when his
father was on the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship. He’s travelled
around, he spent a lot of the last ten years in France where he’s
made music and he’s established himself on the Parisian scene.
ER: We don’t have too many exports from New
Zealand playing saxophone in France I wouldn’t have thought.
NM: No it’s a very small constituency!
ER: So tell us about his playing, how he’s
managed to do this so successfully…
NM: Well Lucien is a miraculous musician, I remember
him when he arrived fresh-faced at the conservatorium ten or twelve
years ago and even then he had greatness about him as a musician.
Very smart guy and a wonderful musician with a very nimble intelligence
and a terrific creative imagination and I can remember being dazzled
hearing him as a student. He played principally tenor saxophone then
but he expanded that to include soprano and other saxophones. He’s
a very good flute player and clarinet player and he’s become
a very versatile and very original jazz voice.
ER: And that’s what distinguishes him, the
originality of his style?
NM: I think so. One of the great things about Lucien’s
playing is that he’s listened very clearly to those who have
gone before him, so he’s considered carefully the music of people
like Paul Gonsalves and Ben Webster, the tenor players in Duke Ellington’s
band, listened carefully to what their styles, thought about how they
played, what they played, and has assimilated some of those influences
in his own style. There are hints of earlier tenor players such as
Lester Young as well, but certainly Paul Gonsalves…
ER: And we’re going to hear a little bit of
him now playing one of your compositions, “Good Friday”…
Musical Extract
Norman Meehan’s “Good Friday” performed by the
pianist and with the tenor saxophonist Lucien Johnson. Beautiful sound!
NM: Absoulutely stunning! He has really done his
homework and studied the tradition of this music, jazz, and there’s
magic about it, I think it’s beautiful, it’s very vocal,
he’s really telling a story when he plays a solo.
ER: What’s he like to work with?
NM: Fantastic, he’s fabulous, he’s very
mature, he’s very professional, and he’s smart, he’s
learned and he’s read a lot; I remember walking out of the music
building one day and finding him sitting on a chair in the sun reading
Herodotus! Now I just don’t expect jazz students to be doing
that!
ER: It’s almost a little too much, it wasn’t
you who told him to do that?
NM: Oh no, he was a great student, he took a diverse
programme of study when he was a university student.
ER: Well I guess the poet in his family helped to
steer him in the Greek direction. Tell me, what sort of work has he
picked up based in Europe?
NM: In Europe he plays mostly in small groups and
he said that in New Zealand you could have quite a diverse career.
He favours avant-garde music, music that’s a little bit freer
than what you’ve just heard heard, a little bit wild. When he
was in New Zealand recently he did a season of the Kurt Weill opera
“The Threepenny Opera” in Auckland for a month and that
required him to play “legitimate” music, reading the scores
and playing clarinet and other reed instruments, so he has very, very
good professional skills in this regard. In New Zealand you diversify
your career so that you can do all kinds of things, you play in shows,
you play on television, you might do some pick up work for dance bands,
whatever you want to, as well as your creative work. He found that
in Paris it was necessary for him to decide exactly what it was he
wanted to do and to work in that area exclusively in order to establish
a reputation.
ER: Because if you did too much no-one would take
you seriously…
NM: Yes, that’s partly it and because you can
be commercial musician but that’s all you’ll end up doing.
So he made a conscious decision to focus his energy on the avant-garde
aspect of the music and he got to play with some remarkable musicians
including a bassist called Alan Silva, who’d worked in the 60’s
with a pianist called Cecil Taylor. And in fact Lucien recorded on
a swiss label called Hat Hut with Alan Silva. Now no-one else in New
Zealand has done that, that’s groundbreaking stuff.
ER: And he’s not even thirty is he?
NM: No, not thirty yet
ER: Now we’re going to play next his own composition
“Westminster Jaguar”
Musical Extract
ER: a bit of the wildness of Lucien Johnson’s
“Westminster Jaguar” recorded at the Wellington Jazz Festival
a few years ago . Norman Meehan is looking at the works of, I guess,
one of his former students? Now he’s been based in Europe for
the last few years, not necessarily all in France though?
NM: Moving around
ER: And he’s obviously getting a chance to
compose quite a lot though?
NM: Yes Lucien’s a very fine composer and he
applied to Creative New Zealand for funding to support a composition
project a couple of years ago and it was a project based on the poems
and writing of Edgar Allan Poe. Lucien’s pedigree in this respect
is impeccable, his father’s a poet and he comes from quite a
literary family. He was succesful in winning that grant and put together
a stage show which was called “The Night’s Plutonian Shore”
in which took texts from Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories and
turned them into musical settings and pieces of music.
ER: “The Masque of Red Death” we’re
going to play which I imagine is stolen from Edgar Allan Poe.
NM: It absolutely is. What was fantastic about this
was that Lucien basically recruited Anthony Donaldson’s band
The Village of the Idiots to do this performance and he enlisted Chris
Palmer, who’s a terrific guitar player, a very interesting musician
to be the narrator and Chris dressed up in a frock coat. I know Chris
as quite a quiet, reserved sort of fellow but he was totally in character,
prancing around, as dark as cancer! He recited these huge stories
from Poe by memory. It was a completely arresting performance. And
the music was really wonderful too and we’re going to hear two
things, the first is “The Masque of Red Death” and this
is cabaret, sort of circus music.
Musical Extract
NM: That was Lucien Johnson performing “The
Masque of Red Death”
ER: You can just tell it’s a theatrical piece,
it’s got all that momentum, all that energy!
NM: It was a very theatrical show. There was a certain
Kurt Weill kind of energy to it. The music sometimes was redolent
of that. That particular piece also owes a debt to Duke Ellington,
the theme as well as how he orchestrated the ensemble to get the sound.
Ellington looms large in his musical conception, particularly for
these larger more theatrical works.
ER: We’re going to hear another from the same
album, “The Night’s Plutonian Shore”, drawing heavily
on Edgar Allan Poe. So all of the stories were narrated or just some
of them?
NM: Some were narrated. In some cases there was a
short narration followed by music, the one we’re going to hear
now is a narration with musical accompaniment. As you’d expect
for “Descent into the Maelstrom” this is a dark little
number so tuck yourselves in with a cup of coacoa!
ER: Lucien Johnson with some midday horror stories,
here’s “Descent into the Maelstrom”
Musical Extract
ER: Lucien Johnson with “Descent into the
Maelstrom” and the recitation of the Edgar Allan Poe story was
by Chris Palmer. This is a new release “The Night’s Plutonian
Shore” by Lucien Johnson with the Village of the Idiots.
