Smitty: Yeah, but you gotta love that because if you just hear the same guitar all the time, it’s like okay…
JC: (Laughs.) Got any other tricks in your bag there?
Smitty: Yeah, well, it kinda helps you to keep you in that little suspense of “I wonder what the next song is gonna sound like, and I really got into that.
JC: Cool.
Smitty: And I love “Come and Get It.”
JC: (Laughs.)
Smitty: That is so cool. I love that guitar. You’ve gotta talk to me about some of the guitars you used on this record because you really mixed it up great.
JC: Okay. We did use a lotta different stuff and on that track, you know what I love? My favorite thing about that track is I love Jay’s B3 solo.
Smitty: I know!
JC: Organ solo. Oh my God! I love that solo he takes. It’s got so much personality. I don’t know why, but I love it. I’ve loved B3 since I was a little kid.
Smitty: Yeah, it just grabs your soul.
JC: Oh, God, and I grew up around Newark, New Jersey and the whole B3 tradition going on there….I came up going to all those clubs and again, too, they didn’t care about age. They didn’t care if you show an I.D. to be old enough to get into the club, so I heard everybody. I heard Jack McDuff, Jimmy McGriff, I heard Jimmy Smith, I heard, oh, everybody came through that circuit.
Smitty: It was such a melting pot for great musicians.
JC: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Smitty: But, yeah, I love that B3 solo too in that song.
JC: Yeah, it’s great, he takes a great solo. I love it. It’s got a lot of personality and heart, and that song was kinda dipping back to my Newark, New Jersey days where it’s a shuffle and it’s not to slam dunk that style by any means. It’s a little, you know, it’s different, but it’s got the little tinge for me of that stuff that I used to listen to. Even though it’s not that style, it’s definitely influenced by it. So, yeah, that was like a really fun track for us to do. That was kinda like, again, that warp we keep talking about, brought me back home. It’s like warm and friendly to me.
Smitty: Yeah. Well, talk to me about “Jesse’s Bench,” the title, because first of all, the song is great, very cool song, but I just wondered “How did she come up with that title? There’s gotta be a story behind ‘Jesse’s Bench.’”
JC: There is, there is. Jesse was a neighborhood guy and he’s since passed on, but he was a guitar builder in his day and he ended up struggling with some things personally and he was on the street quite a bit, but he was one of those guys that…everybody loved him. He was one of the most beloved guys in our neighborhood. And he always sat in the same place on the street.
We’d Come by, “Jess, you hungry? Need a cup of coffee?” or whatever, and he was an extremely bright and soulful guy. People would sit down and talk to Jesse for hours on end. It seemed like he sort of, like, preached is not the word at all for Jesse…he gave solace to people, people would talk to him about stuff, he always read the paper so he was up on every current event. People just sat and talked to Jesse. He was there for years and always sat at this one place, at this one bench, and when he died, it was sad because he was struggling with being indigent and it was the kind of thing where….I don’t know the whole story about it, but he got moved from one hospital to another because he didn’t have insurance, you know, that whole story.
Smitty: That’s a shame.
JC: But yeah. But everybody missed him and so there was this shrine put up and even now people, like, left things and made things and they’re kind of glued to his bench, and so I thought, hey, “Jesse’s Bench.”
Smitty: How ‘bout that? Well, that was very cool of you to do the song.
JC: Everybody loved Jesse, you know?
Smitty: That is so cool. Well, this is such a great record and I love the way you began this project with “Mildred’s Attraction” too. (Both laughing.) I missed that song. Oh, what a great record to open with. Please talk to me about some of the guitars you used.
JC: Okay. I have my big ol’ fat jazz guitar that was on, oh, a lot of the tunes like on “Mildred’s Attraction” I used my bigger guitar. “At the Modern” is my nylon string guitar, but my nylon string, that’s an acoustic-electric. So that’s like a different one than, say, on “In Case of Rain,” that like solo nylon guitar piece.
Smitty: Yeah.
JC: Brazilian percussion on it.
Smitty: Yes.
JC: That one…I have a friend who’s got the most amazing guitar. Matter of fact, we just had dinner with those guys last night and I just love his guitar and I just said “David, you gotta lend me this.” He said “Oh yeah, take it, take it as long as you want,” so I took it and it’s this beautiful handmade classical guitar, and I brought it in to the studio and I wasn’t quite used to it so I had to kind of work with it for a couple weeks to get used to it. So I just went in and did that tune on David’s guitar and sadly I had to return the guitar.
Smitty: (Laughs.)
JC: Sucks, sucks, sucks. Then I used another acoustic nylon guitar on “One Again,” the very last track of the CD, but it’s funny. “One Again” is about my aunt and uncle, and Smitty, they had one of the only true, true love affairs I’ve ever witnessed. Not all this stuff like “Oh, I can’t live without you, baby” and, you know, that stuff is like, oh my God, you’re just like counting the days til the divorce.
Smitty: (Laughs.)
JC: I mean the real deal. These guys were a team, they were best friends. I mean, it was just a great love affair and everybody loved being around them.
Smitty: That’s beautiful.
JC: That uncle was a guitar player and he kinda gave me my first start in music, one of ‘em, and way back when he also, later on, after he retired from the road and traveling, and he had five kids and lived in New York, in the city. And when he retired he opened a guitar store, and he hand picked….he played through hundreds of guitars….hand picked all these really inexpensive but beautiful guitars, and so I call it my beach guitar. It was like a $30 guitar.
Smitty: Wow.
JC: I love that thing. It’s my oldest guitar. It’s the first one I ever played, the first one I learned on, and it was supposed to be for the family but I kind of confiscated it. “I’ll be taking this, thank you.” And so I thought why not, since this song “One Again” is written for them, why don’t I play his guitar that he gave us back then. So I did, I used that original guitar on that track. Yeah, so it’s not like a fine handmade instrument, not at all, but it was one that he hand picked, and to this day it’s still my favorite guitar. I love that thing. If I’m just gonna like pick up and play some chords or write a little thing, that’s always the guitar I go to. It’s always been.
Smitty: Yeah. Well, you know, you are true to your words when you said that this was the most personal project you’ve ever done.
JC: By far.
Smitty: Because you kept it so personal in so many of those little ways that mean so much, I think that’s really cool.
JC: At least to me, and I hope someone else can glean something intimate from it, you know what I mean? Something personal.
Smitty: I truly think so because this is the kind of music that causes you to reflect and to really think about yourself, and at the same time you can get into a nice little groove too.
JC: Oh, good.
Smitty: I mean, yeah, there’s dance music on here. Come on!
JC: Yeah, well, no, there is, there is some dance stuff on there. No, I know what you mean because that’s a part of life too. It’s all a part of it and the other thing is, this one I felt so different when I was making this CD than any other CD. I’m struggling to put it into words. I guess because of the whole mental illness thing, and Jay and I are gonna donate a portion of our proceeds to NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness), and I’m not doing this to shine a light on me at all. This is not about me, this is about the cause. But the reason I bring this up is that I think when a person, or maybe I should just speak about myself, me, I’ll just speak about myself and see if anybody else feels this way. When I’m doing something not like out of the realm of me, I’m stronger.
