INTERVIEW: Joe Krown brings NOLA trio to Northeast

When one visits New Orleans for the dynamic musical culture, there are usually a few names one seeks out. Whether it’s the Rebirth Brass Band, Kermit Ruffins, Jeremy Davenport, Glen Andrews or the host of other brass, funk, jazz and blues musicians who make a living with regular gigs around the iconic city. One of those names that is much sought after is Joe Krown, the accomplished pianist and Hammond B-3 organ player.

Krown plays in several venues and offers different styles when bringing that unmistakable NOLA sound to life. One of his most successful endeavors is a Sunday night residency at the Maple Leaf Bar where he plays under the banner of the Joe Krown Trio with Walter “Wolfman” Washington and Russell Batiste Jr. The three musicians have been playing together for almost nine years, and the group has found so much success, they often take their music on the road. On Nov. 6, they will play at the Cutting Room in New York, followed by gigs at The Saint in Asbury Park, N.J.; Harrisburg Midtown Arts Center in Harrisburg, Pa.; Parlor Bar and Kitchen Newport in Newport, R.I.; Cafe Nine in New Haven, Conn.; Johnny D’s in Boston; Parish Public House in Albany, N.Y.; and Sportsmen’s Tavern in Buffalo, N.Y. Click here for more information on the tour.

“It’s an organ trio,” Krown said recently during a phone interview. “It’s designed in the way of a classic organ trio with organ, drums and guitar. So that format is a little bit different since there’s no bass player.”

Krown actually plays the bass line on the organ, and the resulting sound they make is that infectious, toe-tapping New Orleans funk. “I mean there’s a lot of bands gong out and doing funk and soul out of New Orleans, and original music and all that stuff, but I don’t really know of too many organ trios that are actually doing that style of music,” he said. “And we’ve got Walter ‘Wolfman’ Washington, who is one of the legendary New Orleans performers. He plays guitar. He sings. He’s got a southern soul kind of voice. He loves to do a lot of southern soul music. … Russell Batiste is our drummer. … He played [for] 25 years with Art Neville and George Porter and the Funky Meters, but he’s got a very unique style of playing funk drums. He’s definitely a master musician and drummer, and the band is very interactive. So we do jam a lot.”

Krown said he started the group because he had always wanted to perform in a classical organ trio. He had been playing with Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown & Gate’s Express from 1992 to Brown’s death in 2005.

“So I had a lot more freedom to explore some stuff, and I was looking for something kind of new,” Krown said about his post-Hurricane Katrina memories. “And I was playing around with Walter a bunch, and, you know, I would go sit in with them. … I presented the idea to Walter because I think, you know, obviously my background of playing with that style of guitarist, you know, from playing with Gates and all that stuff, Walter was kind of the next generation. So it was one of those things where it was a kind of a nice little fit for me, and it kind of worked out OK.”

Krown found the Maple Leaf in the Uptown section of New Orleans. The venue is world famous for hosting the Rebirth Brass Band’s residency on Tuesday nights. “So I found the Maple Leaf, put the organ over there, and we started doing it,” he said. “At first we tried a couple different drummers, but Russell was the guy that kind of clicked for us just because his style of drumming was reminiscent of … one of Walter’s longtime drummers.”

The organ player called Batiste’s sound as “funk with a jazz attitude.”

“And we started our little thing, and it was a lot of fun,” Krown said. “And, you know, next thing you know, we’re starting to write songs for it, and we put out a little CD, a live CD. And things just started snowballing from there.”

When a musician begins a project, especially in New Orleans, there seems to be “big hopes” and “no hopes” at the same time. Krown had been known around town already, but the trio instantly took off and dominated his gigs.

“I put this whole trio together, and it was kind of like, I wouldn’t say it was a goof or anything, but it was just kind of like a little side thing we do just to have a Sunday night gig and just to have some fun playing together and doing something different,” he said. “And the next thing I know every place that I was playing at, I would call them up for my regular monthly gig, and they’re like, ‘OK, we can do this date or that date.’ And they’re like, ‘What about that trio I see that you’re playing with Walter and Russell? Can I get that, too?’ And eventually it just kind of like overwhelmed my work, that everyone just kind of wanted that. As interest grew and everything grew around it, Russell and Walter, their commitment towards doing it, you know, grew and became more of something that they prioritized.”

Having these stars align into a cohesive constellation was not easy. Washington, for example, has his own blues band, the Roadmasters, and they themselves have found international acclaim and regularly play New Orleans and out-of-town gigs. “He’s a legend down here,” Krown said of Washington. “He’s in the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame, and the mayor has made Walter ‘Wolfman’ Washington Day on several occasions. He’s one of the reigning legendary guitar players in New Orleans.”

Krown called the famed guitarist the next generation after Allen Toussaint and Irma Thomas as far as famous New Orleans musicians go. He’s a guitarist who has played with everyone from Lee Dorsey to Thomas, the “Soul Queen of New Orleans.”

“And his [Washington’s] career as a front person started in the ‘70s, but he’s still respected down here as an amazing, legendary artist,” Krown said. “But for me and Russell … this is a priority. And Walter prioritizes it, it’s just that he has his own band that works, too. And we all have a delicate balancing act that we have to do, making sure that we’re not playing the same markets in the same time periods with Walter’s band. There’s a lot of logistics we have to constantly be focused on because we don’t want to kill anything, you know. If we played New York City, and then three weeks later Walter’s band played New York City, whatever draw he would have in that market is now just divided in half. It’s kind of like shooting yourself in the foot. You can’t really do that. We have to balance logistics a lot.”

When the trio plays, they find a variety of audience interaction. On their Sunday night gigs at the Maple Leaf, they are “definitely a lot looser.” When they are on the road, they are playing more traditional concerts with no guests sitting in for any songs.

“Sometimes we’ll try songs, new songs at the Maple Leaf,” he said. “See, I won’t bust out any kind of new stuff or throw any curveballs on the band. One of the things that we all do is like, especially Walter, is he’ll pull out a song that we’ve never played together. He’ll just start playing it, and we would never do that when we’re on the road. … Like at the Maple Leaf, we do that kind of stuff all the time, and, you know, sometimes there’s some great stuff that’s born out of it. It’s … kind of like our house gig, and we get a little more experimental and looser about stuff whereas the road gigs are more of a presentation of what’s on the record and what we do best.”

Krown has a long history with music. He grew up playing piano, and that’s why he doesn’t play the bass pedals on the organ (“I don’t have the foot for it”). Age 7 is when the piano began, and he began the organ in his early 20s. In the early 1970s, there weren’t many options for portable keyboards. By pure coincidence, one of his earliest bands found him playing a B3 that was sitting in the corner.

“So I started playing organ, and I started getting more and more into it,” he said. “Next thing you know, I’m carrying it around and designing my life around owning one of these organs. It is a lifestyle to own it and to have try to move it. Imagine moving the piano. You have to have a system to move it. You have to have a place to store it. You have to have a vehicle to transport it.”

His mastery of the organ didn’t come overnight. Krown did a lot of a homework to absorb the roots of the iconic instrument. He didn’t simply listen to Dr. John; he listened to the musicians who influenced Dr. John, and then the musicians who influenced them.

“I talked to everybody,” he said. “I went and saw all the organ players. I was living in Boston at the time, and, you know, I saw Jimmy Smith about a half dozen times. … You know, I really wanted to learn it from the roots, and they were all alive back then. … And trying to figure out how they were doing a lot of the tricks that they were doing, I mean there’s a whole other approach to playing organ than there is to playing piano. … The piano is a touch-sensitive, mechanical instrument, and the organ is electric, where keys are just switches on and off. So in order to get the feeling of an organ you really have to understand the usages of the draw bars and the volume pedal, just everything because it’s all about coloring and dynamics with how you do things with the volume pedal. But I listen to them all. I mean I have a record collection that’s pretty deep with organ players.”

It took some time for Krown to find his way from Boston to New Orleans. Brown, known as “Gatemouth,” was coming through New England and heading into Canada for some gigs. The legendary performer needed someone to play the organ across the border.

“I was working at the time with another blues guy,” Krown remembered. “His name was Luther ‘Guitar Junior’ Johnson, and Luther was from the Muddy Waters band. He played with Muddy in the ’70s. … That was basically the last great Muddy Waters Band, and Luther was a Chicago blues type player. And Luther and Gate were booked by the same agency, and I knew the agency. I knew the guys in the agency real well, and they called me up to go do some dates. So I went up. I drove up to Canada because I was living in Boston. So I drove up to Montreal, which was, I don’t know, six or eight hours, something like that, played some shows with Gates, and we all liked it. … Situations would come up over the next year or so that they would need a keyboard player, and I would go out and play with them.”

Krown told Brown’s team that if they offered him the job, he would “jump ship.” The rest, as they say, is history. Krown found himself moving to Nashville, but the country-music capital of the world didn’t appeal to him as much as New Orleans, the jazz-capital of the world.

“I was just unfamiliar with country music,” he said. “I just really didn’t find any vibe from it at all. I didn’t know the music. I didn’t know the artists. I didn’t know any of the songs. People were talking; it was like a foreign language to me. I had some family living in New Orleans, so I went down to New Orleans. … And I walked down Bourbon Street the first night I got there, and I was like, I’m playing in that band. I can play in that band. Every bar I walked past, I knew every song they were playing, and I was like this is home.”

He added: “You can’t say a lot of things why you fall in love with the woman you fall in love with or your spouse or whatever it is. It just clicks, and New Orleans just clicked. I was playing the music before I came down here, and when I got down here, it was like I knew all the tunes. I really got really deep with it, the whole New Orleans sound, piano and organ-wise.”

Krown said that when he bought his house in New Orleans in 1996, almost 20 years ago, he knew he needed a garage for proper storage. He didn’t want any stairs that would be too difficult with the B3. Because of a tropical storm at the time, he also wanted that garage to be elevated and not at ground level. Little did he know that the house he settled on would save him several headaches when Hurricane Katrina and the breaching of multiple levees would dramatically impact his beloved city. For the most part, even though the house suffered damage from roof leaks, his home was intact and unharmed.

“I investigated flood levels, and I’m in a neighborhood that’s actually above sea level,” he said of that 1990s decision to buy the house. “I’m about five blocks from the river. … My house is above sea level and doesn’t flood ever, and that was a big issue for me. And we looked at some houses that were in flood areas, and I didn’t even want to look inside because they were just in flood zones. So, you know, that whole issue of taking on water was a big thing when I bought the house, and little did I know that nine years later … the levees would break, and the city would flood. And we were dry from rising water. I mean we had roof damage, so we had some water in the house from the roof problems. But as far as flood waters, we didn’t get a lick of it, and it kind of saved us. You know, I’ll tell you my wife was not a big fan of me owning organs and having all that going on, but after the floods, she was like, you know, I think I’m going to be OK with that whole decision.”

As far as the future, Krown wants to keep playing. Maybe one day he won’t work six nights a week with 10 regular gigs, but for now, he’s happy with his solo success and the popularity of the trio, which he hopes will keep going.

“The work is there, and I’m definitely grateful that I’m doing it,” he said. “That’s kind of our goal as musicians is to be immersed in music, and I’m totally doing that now.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

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