In his nearly sixty year career, George Benson made his mark with R&B-inflected smooth jazz, taking side-trips into swing and straight-ahead combo jazz. On occasion, he would experiment with rock fusion, taking a walk on The Other Side Of Abbey Road, or re-imagining “White Rabbit” as a fantastic jazz bolero.

On his newest album project, George deconstructs rock down to the founding-father roots of Fats Domino and Chuck Berry. On Walking To New Orleans, he reconsiders these two "rock and roll Mount Rushmore" figures as scribes in a new American Songbook that picks up where the mid-century masters left off, and carries us on to the great electric age of guitars, singer-songwriters, and youth as pop culture.

George reminisces with Paul Cavalconte about his own early days, and how the Berry-Domino canon now speaks to him, a lifetime after these songs first spurred the rock British Invasion and American Soul. George may have been steeped in jazz, and discovering his own unique skill set as a player and scat-singing vocalist, but he was listening-- to everything. Walking To New Orleans brings him back to a great home base of American music.

 

The following transcript has been edited.

[music]

Paul Cavalconte: Paul Cavalconte with you 93.9 F.M. WNYC. The Songbook now focuses on a couple of composers that I don't think get their due because they really are founding fathers of what we might think of as the Rock 'n' Roll song book and the guy who's going to lead us to them is someone who has been brought back to this music after what I dare say was a career-long break from it. George Benson: what drew you back to Chuck Berry and Fats Domino?

George Benson: It was those gentlemen themselves that did that. They are such powerful characters in the music world. Each one of them has a very strong identity. From the moment you hear the first two bars, you know who you are listening to. And that is true for Chuck Berry and Fats Domino.

So we decided to bring back their contribution to music (so to speak) or to remind people of how great a contribution they made to music.

Paul: Walking to New Orleans: Remembering Chuck Berry and Fats Domino is the brand new album released by the legendary George Benson who started out in the age of Chuck Berry and Fats Domino as a 'dyed in the wool jazzer'. You were 100% blue-note back in those days. So, how did the music, when it was happening, impact you at that age? Did you have a deaf ear to it or were you into it but it just wasn't your thing for performance? Tell me about your relationship with this music when it was new.

George: I'll tell you. What people don't know about my career is that I started off as Little Georgie Benson, the singer who happened to play a ukulele from the age of 7 and from the age of 9, I switched to guitar. I walked street corners in Pittsburgh and my cousin used to take off his baseball cap and collect quarters and 50 cent pieces. And that's how we made extra money in those days. But now, as I moved into the teens, this new music called 'Rock 'n' Roll' started to gain power and the guitar was was brought forth in a big way. If you didn't have a guitar in your hand, you weren't playing Rock 'n' Roll. Chuck Berry was one of the founders of that. He made the guitar stick out like a sore thumb.

[music]

George: But it wasn't a negative thing. Very positive. The lyrics to his ingenious songs that he created or made popular are still with us today and we decided to to remind people how great is.

Paul: As a songwriter, Chuck Berry is one of the very first kind of rock philosophers. I loved how his songs were, in some cases, little morality tales or plays. Or they were a little handbook for teenagers to navigate the adult world. And he also had a lot of relatables that he dropped into his songs. He really knew how to load his songs with things that would make a young person go "oh he understands me!"

George: You know I never really thought about it from that point of view, but that's exactly what he did. I mean, first of all, all of his songs were interesting and relatable to the kind of lives we were living. Only he took taboo ideas and brought them up to the edge and made you think about them. And he did it in an ingenious way.

Paul: As a guitarist, your technique is a lot more sophisticated than Chuck Berry's. But at the same time, Chuck Berry had this incredible burst of energy and he had rapid-fire ability in coming up with those riffs. You both grew up and have an ear for the Swing Era and big bands. And I think that a Chuck Berry song is built like a big band song because it's got the intro riff and it establishes a few verses, a chorus, has a bridge, you know, that kind of the thing.

So you're talking the same language but you're miles apart as guitarists, or are you?

George: That's a good point. I don't think we are that far apart. I think our main purpose is to communicate. That's what music does so well.

And I think that his way of communicating was very simple, but very strong. Very powerful. He did it with not only just the rhythm of his songs, but the lyrics that he presented. He got people from all sides and good colors that he presented along with that great energy that he had. And that's what I try to do when I play. You know, bring energy and try to bring a good story. My biggest songs in my show are the balance of this masquerade. Things like that. And then the way we present it. We would do orchestration  and things that give it the emotional content. So, Chuck had all of that even in his small rhythm section presentation.

[music] 

Paul: The album is George Benson Walking to New Orleans: Remembering Chuck Berry and Fats Domino.

Let's talk about Antoine. He was a pianist, not a guitarist. He wrote a simpler kind of song. In many ways, he was far removed from the other 'great fats of music': Fats Waller, who was wry and clever and playful. Fats Domino was sweeter and more simple and his music still grabs you. And he did go back to the American Songbook a little bit by doing things like, for example, Blueberry Hill. So, tell me about your affinity for Fats Domino.

George: Well his power, for me, came from the kinds of songs that he presented which stayed very simple, such as in the case of Chuck Berry. But, his vernacular, his phrasing, his pronunciation of lyrics were uniquely his own. So, when you heard a song of his on the radio, you automatically knew instantly it was Fats Domino because nobody else sang like that from this part of the world unless they were in New Orleans. And you got the point. That's the main thing.

[music]

Paul: George Benson: your career has embraced a lot of different styles of music.

I had the pleasure some years ago of visiting a recording studio in New York City where you were cutting some tracks with the Count Basie Orchestra. It was amazing to see you hold your own in front of a big band with those kinds of arrangements. You also have always had an ear to the ground for rock. There's your wonderful record Another Side of Abbey Road which is coming up on a half- century now since the end of the Beatles.

There's your re-imagining of Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit and the Creed Taylor adventurous stuff that went on.

So you've always been stretching this very basic expression of Rock 'n' Roll. It's actually kind of a new thing and an interesting place for you to land after all of your musical adventures all these years. 

George: It couldn't have been better said by myself. Thank you for reminding me of all those good points that brought me to where I am today. I can tell you this. Each one of those projects was presented to me as if they already knew I could perform them and I had never performed them before. Beatles songs- I had never done them before. And I had never recorded with a big band like The Basie Orchestra. So, they put me in the middle of that and expected me to perform and I said, "Well here we go again. Let me see what happens with this" because I've never been afraid to try anything new.

Paul: One of the most important things in the timeline of this music and the story, especially of where Chuck Berry and Fats Domino join, is the way that the color line can be dissolved after the breakthrough of Chuck Berry and Fats Domino. We must remember that as kind of an unfortunate byproduct of attitudes at that time:  Fats Domino.  You had the cover records. You had Pat Boone. That was something that because of the way the charts were organized was necessary up to a point and then it all just melted away. And these guys, I'd like to think, broke down some barriers. How do you feel about that? 

George: It's amazing how it has worked out. 

In many cases. People would not know Fats Domino or Antoine.

And Chuck Berry, although he was a crossover artist of his time, not everybody knew of his music. And the thing about the Caucasian artists who duplicated their music, and made the music viable to different audiences in different parts of America and indeed the world. They played a part in their popularity. 

And when the Beatles endorsed a lot of blues artists in America, that was a big step. Could we have gotten as far as we've gotten with those great blues artists who came out of the South or the Midwest and, you know, made this country alive with blues music if it wasn't for the Rock 'n' Roll people from Europe or Great Britain who endorsed them in a big way? I don't know. 

But I can say, I'm glad that it happened that way. That they fell in love with the music and endorsed it. And indeed today, I'm friends with a lot of those guys who did that. Paul McCartney and from the Rolling Stones, Mick Jagger. People like that who endorsed our music. 

Paul: Well George Benson, it's very generous of you to say that because there are a lot of folks who would consider it to have been a kind of theft or an appropriation. But it was, I think, more of an absorption of music that didn't have an outlet until it got taken to this other place when blues and all of them kind of merged together into Rock which was not Rock 'n' Roll. 

You mentioned the Beatles and The Rolling Stonesk, wasn't Rock 'n' Roll. It was rock. It was a new thing and it was about blurring the lines of distinction in the original source. And jazz kind of has that back story as well. Doesn't it? 

George: Interesting, yes it is. But, it all comes together in the end. All of the things that happened below the line have something to do with what comes out on the top. And that's the thing. I'm into it. I like brotherhood, man. I like to see people get along and learn from each other. And that's what has helped me in my career. I've never been afraid to sit down with a person with a different idea.

And music is another language. It speaks all over the world because no one can explain the shape that the world is in today and how it got here. But, I can tell you this. From my experience, music has a great part that it plays in everyday life.

Paul: George Benson's wonderful songbook of Chuck Berry and Fats Domino includes some of the obvious and maybe some of the less obvious. I want to ask you about a couple of songs and one that doesn't appear on the recording. 

First, let's talk about the almost eerie and sad songs: Havana Moon and Walking to New Orleans. They're not the usual suspects, so to speak. What do you hear in those, in your approach to them? 

George: Walking to New Orleans is a natural. It's a crazy thought. Who the heck wants to walk to New Orleans? And can you walk over a levee? No. In my mind that's what I think of when I think of "walking to New Orleans".

I can imagine myself, because I do a lot of walking when I'm on the road. I walk down railroad tracks. I walk down on the side of highways and imagine "Where does this place go? And who's on this road besides me? Where would I end up if I kept walking for two three days on this place?" I'm thinking about those things all the time.

So Walking to New Orleans has a personal effect on me and brings back some incredible memories. And I'm thinking that just that phrase 'walking to New Orleans' would have a meaning to a lot more than just myself. So, I felt good about recording it. 

I had never heard Chuck Berry's recording of Havana Moon. When they first played it for me I said, "Wow. Why are we recording this? There's nothing from me that you won't hear?" because I'm looking for something I can build on and chew on and come up with something fresh and wonderful. But, you don't need to do that on every song.

Some songs are just classics in themselves. Like the song "On Broadway". I had the option to do it either way. I could have went straight with the original. Who knows what would have happened? Everybody already loved the song and it would've been another version of it. Yes, I decided in that case to use my improvisational skills, which I learned through jazz, and I got to use that. Because that's what jazz has done for me. It has given you another way of expressing myself. 

Havana moon was like that to me. It's a song that has a message. We decided to put a few more things in there. 

But it doesn't take away from the original. The original is a great story and well told by the great Chuck Berry.

[music]

Paul: One last question for George Benson, one of the great rock and pop and jazz and soul guitar stars of all time. How did you manage to bypass one of the greatest songs about a guitar star, Johnny B. Goode? 

George: I thought it would be asking a bit much on his fans to dismiss that great version that he had. I'm going to let Chuck forever be associated with his song. I did not want to be considered a copycat. Because to give it the true justice that it deserved, I would have to step on his toes somewhere on that song and I wasn't ready to do that. I didn't think it was necessary on this album. I think we had done what we set out to do and that was to remind people of how great these two artists were. 

Paul: Well we're gonna have to infer that when you were a little one just figuring out how to get beyond the ukulele, Chuck Berry's music spoke to you and maybe that song was saying to you "go Georgie go" and you ran with it. 

[music]

Paul: George Benson— thank you for all the music through the years and especially for this unexpected surprise. It's a real treat for music lovers and it's another side of George Benson, his rock 'n' roll roots and Chuck Berry and Fats Domino. George Benson: thanks for your contributions to the songbook. 

George: All right man. Thanks for those great memories, man. Those were great days in my life. 

Paul: Thanks again, George.

George: My pleasure, my friend.