JASON RICCI & NEW BLOOD Source: Blues Wax - Part 3 Date: 06/2009 Writer: Stacy Jeffress

Part 3
Ten years of sobriety, more than 300 shows a year, and a healthy respect for both God and the devil have helped fashion harmonica ace Jason Ricci into one of the most unusual Blues phenomena since Little Walter. In the third part of a three-part interview, Ricci tells BluesWax's Stacy Jeffress, "I believe there's a God, and I also believe there's a devil. And it's not because of something I read in a book." His metaphorical dance with those two extremes becomes the perfect vehicle for an eclectic, at times flamboyant, style on his latest album Done with the Devil, his second for the Eclecto Groove label.

Stacy Jeffress for BluesWax: What is so appealing about your playing on your live performances and the only CD I have, Rocket Number 9, is that you can play the down-home Blues, and then you play amazing, cutting-edge Fazz fusion edgy-thing going on which kinda blows your mind.
Jason Ricci: I think it's too much for some people.

BW: It might be. I'm insisting that my son come see you next month. He's not a Blues guy. He probably wouldn't be able to relate to Lil' Ed and the Blues Imperials, but you I think he's going to love.
JR: It's great that you're bringing him, and I hope that he does, and he tells his friends, not just for our sake for the music's sake.

BW: You're like the ambassador to the next generation.
JR: There are a couple of us. It's good that there are so many young people. That's another great thing about the Internet because it is bringing in that group. Kids are starting to get fed up with music. Mainstream music as a term is really starting to dissolve because the Internet is so powerful that marketing is becoming so washed out, so diversified. Twenty years ago you were told, "This is the hit record and here's what you buy." Nowadays there's a lot of music, and it's all free. It's everywhere. How do you find it? People stumble upon it. Word of mouth is as powerful as ever.

BW: I saw that in 2006 you did 319 shows. For somebody who's "lazy," how do you sustain? How do you do 319 shows in a year?
JR: You have to want it; you have to have a band that wants it with you. One of the reasons we did so many shows was because in 2006 we weren't getting paid very much, so it was necessary to do. That's one of the reasons our touring schedule has slowed down. It's not because we don't want to work more or we want to work less, it's because we are now getting paid more, and when you get paid more what happens is the amount of venues you can play at that price diminishes.

BW: You're going on ten years sobriety?
JR: Yup

BW: That's quite the achievement. I wondered about the title of the new CD, Done with the Devil, if that was a way of celebrating the 10 years of sobriety or didn't it have anything to do with it.
JR: It's more complex than that. The title is Done With The Devil But The Devil Ain't Done With You. To a degree it is one person's resignation from that lifestyle, but it also an acknowledgement that there are forces both internal, being natural self-destructive urges, even supposing external on a spiritual level. I am supposing through much of the lyrics on this CD that there are at work forces that are both good and bad and that have nothing to do with psychology that are every bit metaphysical. That is my personal experience.

I'm a firm believer in the spirit world, and I wasn't always. It is through experiences that I've had that are described in this song and other songs on the CD that have made me a believer in the demonic, which is nothing I've subscribed to in my past life. I had a ghost story, that's a really light way of putting it. I had a really strange paranormal experience that changed my mind, changed my life, and I've never been the same. I wrote a lot of the songs or decided to pick a lot of the songs on the CD based on that experience.

BW: Do you want to talk about that?
JR: Not really. I'm pretty much an open book with everything in the entire world, sexuality, my past, everything other than that. I believe there's a God, and I also believe there's a devil. And it's not because of something I read in a book. 

BW: Will there be all originals on the new CD that you or your band wrote?
JR: Either I wrote them or [guitarist] Shawn [Starski] wrote them. Todd Edmunds, my drummer, wrote them, or all four of us wrote them. In most cases the latter.

BW: It's so uplifting when you describe in the liner notes how "I'm A New Man" came to be: "I wrote this on my way to jail and finished it six months or so in."
JR: There's another one on the new CD. It's musically nothing like that, but it is uplifting. We have a couple of tunes on this record that I think are going to be potentially more accessible to the listening public whereas Rocket Number 9 has a lot of Jazz fusion on it. We still have retained that element, however I believe we have toned it down quite a bit. I would say we refined it and we're not quite as reckless in the likes of which we do it, and how we do it. I would say we've grown a little. We've sophisticated a hair.

This record is much more Blues-based. It's much more of a Blues record than anything we've ever done before, even more than our independent release Blood on the Road, which was by far the bluesiest record we'd ever done. We even have an acoustic number on this CD with an upright bass, an acoustic guitar, and a harmonica and a snare drum played with brushes in one room recorded at one time, no overdubs, singing it, playing it like we're on the porch. I can't wait for everybody to hear it.

I've finally come up with an accurate description of Rocket Number 9 now that it's over with, and that description would be "Art Blues." They called the Velvet Underground "Art Rock," and I think that's what that album was. This album is not that. It's much more straightforward. And the cool thing is that nobody set out to do that. We weren't going, "Okay, we've got to please them. We'd better do some Blues or they're going to get mad." It's just not us.

The Blues community in general is so supportive of Rocket Number 9. We as a band really expected a lot more backlash than we got, so we were pleasantly surprised at how well we were accepted by the Blues community. The fact that they didn't really care about the funny hair, really didn't care about being gay, didn't really care about the jazzier rocky songs. They gave us festival slots. Blues societies gave us shows, gave us club dates, they gave us money in terms of buying the CD and tipping us.

I think the band got really excited about that, and it really put a good taste in our mouth about Blues in general. I think that's maybe why there were more Blues songs on this record. It's, okay, that's not going to bother you, so now we'll just do it your way. If someone came out and said, "We hate this, this is terrible, this isn't blues, and you don't know what you're talking about," I think the band would have been more tempted to go further, to even make it weirder that it was before. 'Cause we're like that. We're rebels.

BW: How did you meet [lead guitarist] Shawn [Starski]?
JR: I met him in Florida. I was in a local band called The Knucklebusters at a time. This was circa 1999-2000. He was in the rival local band. I was looking for a new guitar player and hired a friend of his from Florida to come up and do the gig. The kid who I'd initially hired couldn't do the gig because he had another job he had to do that paid more. He sent Shawn in his place as a temporary substitute. So Shawn came and the very first day aced the gig. The band no longer wanted to hire JP, as great as he is. We thought, "Shawn's perfect." Then JP called again and said he couldn't do it altogether, so it was sort of a blessing, and I offered the gig to Shawn, and it didn't even take Shawn a second or two, "Yeah I'll do it," instantly.

We moved him up here to Nashville like a week later, and it's been great. Working with him has been the most meaningful musical relationship of my entire life by far. And should he ever decide to go do his own thing or to take some time off, you can rest assured that I will be taking some time off as well because it will take me quite a long time to recover from the loss of a partner like that. I'm musically enmeshed with how he writes and how he does things, I've grown very dependent, and I hope vice versa on how he is as a songwriter, artist, and performer.

I feel privileged to be part of the nurturing process of an artist like that, that I have taken somebody like that from a local band and exposed him to a lifestyle that has allowed him to progress. I'm not responsible for his guitar playing. I'm only saying that I did get him on the road, and I did get him to where he didn't have to worry about anything else besides playing guitar. And in doing that, he has blossomed into I think the best guitar player I've ever heard.  

BW: How old is he?
JR: 29. When I hired him he was 24.

BW: Was it Guitar magazine that named him one of the ten best guitar players?
JR: That's exactly right, Guitar Player magazine["Top Ten Hottest New Guitarists," June 2008]. On this record he sings as well. He's a natural, much better vocalist than I am right off the bat with no practice.

BW: And then Buck Weed, also known as Todd, how long has Todd been with you?
JR: Coming up on four, four and a half years. Multi-instrumentalist: tuba, sousaphone, trombone, anything in the bass class, bass harmonica, piano. He is the brains behind the project in terms of if there's a question of what to do musically or what is the appropriate rule to break, he knows the answer. If somebody needs to figure out what key something's in, what time signature's in it, that's the guy we go to. He's very formally trained. He's done big band work his whole life, Jazz band in high school, marching band, Sight reads. Biggest Jazz freak in the band. When he's not playing with us and there's time off, he's doing Jazz gigs for a living.

BW: I think you have a relatively new drummer.
JR: His name is Ed Michaels. Ed won't really tell us where he's from. We don't know very much about him. We know he's played with Alvin Youngblood Hart, Commander Cody, and Roy Rogers.  When we found him, he was crashing at somebody's house in Phoenix. He has no place to live. He's a complete gypsy with no physical address.