INTERVIEW: John Papa Gros prepares new album, new adventures

John Papa Gros, the New Orleans pianist and organist, is heading out on the road in 2016. He will perform several concerts in the Northeast, including Thursday, Feb. 18 at Mexicali Live in Teaneck, N.J., and Saturday, Feb. 20 at The Hall MP in Brooklyn, N.Y. The man behind the legendary Papa Grows Funk band and frequent collaborator with Anders Osborne and other NOLA musicians is an ambassador of the Crescent City sound, bringing to life wickedly funky songs and exporting his hometown’s undeniable uniqueness.

“Well, when we hit the road, we have a pretty loyal fan base that comes in for Jazz Fest every year and also come in for like Mardi Gras, Halloween,” he said recently in a phone interview. “Then we have a ton of people who go to school at Loyola and Tulane that move back up to the East Coast where they came from. They’re in the middle of their lives, so when we get up there, all these people come out. It’s kind of like a family reunion, and we just kind of get back, bringing what we do and what they’ve already experienced. But instead of them coming to us, we get to go to them and do it in their hometown, and that’s what’s really cool about it. We get to do our whole New Orleans funk thing and bring that in because it’s a unique thing that we do, and people just love it.”

Traveling with Gros for the upcoming tour of the Northeast will be Chris Atkins on guitar, Graham Robinson on bass and Russ Broussard on drums.

Gros said he comes up with a game plan for the setlist but then loves when the band ventures off into different directions, a concept he first learned from George Porter Jr. of the Meters.

“This is the song,” he said. “This is how we want the song to be heard and presented. We don’t mess with the song, and then some songs are like, this is the song, but this is the song decomposed. … The way I was taught from George Porter Jr. from the Meters when I was with his band is you start a song, and all of a sudden doors can always open and give you opportunities to go see what’s in another room, investigate what’s over here, investigate what’s over there. So make sure we definitely have space in the set to do that because then that’s where the unexpected, that’s where the new energy is found, that’s what live music is all about.”

The energy of the music and the energy of the crowd are the same whether Gros is performing in New Orleans or New York City. The difference between the two is more logistical in nature.

“What’s different about being in New Orleans, from my perspective, is that I’ll wake up in my own bed,” he said. “I can sit down, and relax, have a cup of coffee, enjoy the day, and then go set up, and play, and then go home and go back to my bed. When I’m on the road, it’s pretty much the same schedule pretty much every day. Sleep as late as the drive time will allow you to sleep. You drive anywhere from two to six hours. You rush to the hotel to check in. You rush to the gig to set up. You try to find a bite to eat, and then it’s gig time. You do the gig. Have as much fun as you can on the gig, and then you have to break everything down. Get back to the hotel. You get back to the room at 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning, and the next day starts again. It’s just day after day after day like that, so it’s not as much relax time. So it is different, very different, in the overall shape of the day, but the energy when I’m behind my piano and my organ, and we’re playing the music, it’s the same, maybe not as rested.”

Gros’ father is a pianist, so there was always a piano in the house. In high school, he started playing in bands, like so many others in New Orleans, but he didn’t gravitate toward the iconic Hammond B3 organ until his early 30s. Before the organ, he would play keyboards and synthesizers on a variety of gigs, such as Mardi Gras balls for New Orleans high society.

“And then once I got into playing the clubs, and I was really getting to play the Meters stuff and all the Mardi Gras, all the funk stuff, then I was like trying to recreate these sounds on these digital keyboards,” he said. “So I remember my first gig that I played on Bourbon Street, and there was a Hammond organ in the club. I didn’t even know how to start it because it’s got a motor and everything, so I had to find another organ player down the street and ask him to come help me start it. So once I got it up and running, I started playing. I’m like, this is how easy it is to make an organ sound when I was using all these digital boxes and things trying to just get a sound that sounds like all the Motown sounds, and all the Neville Brothers sounds and things like that. … It really got to be a personal relationship that I have with the Hammond organ, which is completely different than the relationship I have with the piano, so it started at an early age. But the path and the road it took me to get me to where I was actually doing that all the time, decades.”

In case any of his fans were wondering, when Gros is on the road, he brings his own instruments. “I bring my own organ and keyboards, and I bring all that stuff from home,” he said. “We drive up, and we do the hard miles. I get to play my baby all the time.”

Gros has so many credits to his name. Fans can see him playing one day with Osborne, a frequent collaborator, and another day with Raw Oyster Cult, a super band made up of members from the Radiators, Johnny Sketch and the Dirty Notes and Papa Grows Funk. One of his most profound legacies is Papa Grows Funk, a funky band that tore up concert halls for more than a decade.

“I’ll tell you what with Papa Grows Funk it’s amazing how it changed my life for the better because really it started as nothing,” he said. “It started as five guys getting together on a Monday night with no preconceived notion of what it was going to be like. It wasn’t forcing any kind of thing. It was like we just started playing. We had maybe five songs we picked that we would play the first gig, and we made up the rest of the set on the spot. It involved 13 years, five records, traveling the world, playing with some of my closest friends, becoming … close friends with these guys who I admired. It became like a brotherhood, you know. It really is amazing what we were able to do. It’s 13 years of the best music I’ve ever had.”

The decision to end Papa Grows Funk, which included June Yamagishi on guitar, Marc Pero on bass, Jason Mingledorff on saxophones and Jeffery “Jellybean” Alexander on drums, was a difficult one for Gros.

“It was a tough decision for me to accept, but once I accepted it, it was very easy to move on,” he said. “I was so personally invested into the whole operation, just the musical part, doing all the business. I really was the generator of a lot of the stuff that we did, so that we could all play great music every time we got together. It was tough to let go at first. … We’ve done everything that we needed to do as a band. We could have made more money, and we could have been more famous, all that kind of stuff. But we made great, great music, and we had a great time doing it. It’s a good way to walk away.”

Since Papa Grows Funk, Gros is seemingly playing more than ever. His is a go-to organ player for so many musicians, especially during the annual Jazz Fest festivities in New Orleans.

“It’s a challenge and a thrill,” he said. “The challenge is how do you learn, especially during Jazz Fest, when all the worlds collide together, and you’re playing with 10 different groups. And each band has anywhere from 15 to 25 songs. All of a sudden you have to learn 150 songs to play in a week, and make rehearsals and all that kind of stuff. It can be stressful. It can be very taxing on the mind.”

He added: “I spent a long time learning how to play music, and you just put all these practices into action. And the best part is luckily I get to play with so many close, great friends. Each new band that I play with seems like it’s more like a get-together family reunion kind of thing. It’s a thrill just to be able to play great music with great friends, and having solid friendships is really what makes the music even better than playing with five guys that don’t know each other. It can be good. It can be bad, but when you get four or five guys who know each other very well, it’s a great conversation all night long.”

Papa Grows Funk had that constant “conversation” in which the players seemed to know one another so well. “When you lead a band for 13 years, that’s the kind of thing where you really know the color of the dirt that’s under your fingernails and what it smells like,” he said. “That’s the difference when you’re playing with a band for 13 years and then sitting in with a bunch of different bands all the time.”

On the horizon, Gros is working on a new record. He’s currently in the “mixing phase right now,” and his new band is heading “back into the fire.”

“I’m going to go back out and hit the road with the new band with the new material, try to marry the new material with my material from Papa Grows Funk and a previous solo record, and see where that can take us,” he said. “Still trying to find a way to retire in this business. That’s a tough one, you know. Life is good. I have no complaints. I feel so blessed that I’ve been able to do what I love to do and make a comfortable living at it. … That’s a blessing. I can’t trade that for anything.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

• John Papa Gros will play in New Jersey and New York in the coming days. Click here for more information.