Just being the "Third" in a familial line carries certain expectations, and it's not necessarily following in one's father's or grandfather's footsteps. Luckily for all of us who love this music, that's exactly what Benny Benack III has done. As a trumpeter/vocalist/composer, though, his influences extend far beyond his genetic elders. He is well served, since those influences range from Miles Davis and Wayne Shorter to Horace Silver and the Turrentines to Freddie Hubbard and Ahmad Jamal. We also find, though, that Benny is on his own path—certainly worthy of the title "rising star"—but there has been some heartbreak with that as well. He does remember first and foremost what his role is on any stage or in any studio. Find out what that is with this, my first conversation with him.
Third Time's the Charm was released June 30, and Benny and his band celebrated it on Monday, June 26 at Dizzy's Club in New York City.
Listen to our conversation, above.
Interview transcript:
Brian Delp: You're one of the very few thirds that I know. The only other one, in fact, is one of my oldest friends, who's also my lawyer in Oklahoma. We are speaking on the birthdate of probably the most famous third in the entire history of jazz. And that's Miles Dewey Davis III. Today is the 97th anniversary of Miles's birth. Did he have an impact on you like every other trumpeter that I've ever talked to?
Benny Benack III: He certainly did, but I would say I discovered my love for him in a roundabout fashion. I think for so many trumpeters, he's step one. And for me, I kind of came at Miles through the back door. I first got into the music through the hard boppers like Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard, Donald Byrd, Blue Mitchell and all those guys because I'm a Pittsburgh guy. In Pittsburgh we have Roger Humphreys and Roger Humphreys played with Horace Silver. In Pittsburgh, you're listening to Art Blakey and Horace Silver before you even have listened to Kind of Blue.
I ended up sort of bopping my way through the trumpet lineage. It wasn't until I linked up with Sean Jones, who was living in Pittsburgh at the time, commuting to Jazz at Lincoln Center and teaching at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. Sean got me on the path. He showed me what he saw. He showed me Miles’ Second Quintet. At that point I had already done my homework with bebop vocabulary and then I dove right into Miles' Second Quintet, exploring his vocabulary and that language and the compositions that Wayne was writing for that band at that time.
That was my first Miles awakening. My second Miles awakening was when I realized all the work that he had done with Bird and how he played when he was a younger man coming out of Dizzy. If you listen to him from that period, it is wildly different than listening to him in the sixties which is wildly different to listening to him in the seventies and eighties. He was such a chameleon, the way he always morphed his musical language. But I got there eventually. He just wasn't my first love.
The reason I ask is because I was listening to your new album this morning, Third Time's the Charm, which by the way is outstanding. Everything that I heard, I was just falling in love with immediately. But when I hit “Twilight Blue,” that's when I heard that influence of Miles—all of his various periods, but especially the one you were talking about, his second great quintet with Wayne, Herbie, Ron and Tony.
My point of reference for a lot of compositions that I write, some of which are on this record, I often will have a composer or a tune in mind as a jumping off point. That way when you throw it in front of a band, you can say, “Hey, do that Ahmad Jamal ‘Poinciana’ groove. Or do this Art Blakey ‘Caravan’ thing.” And then the rhythm section knows what to do. On that tune in particular, I think I had Chad Lefkowitz Brown in the studio and I said, “On the melody, we're kind of doing like a Miles and Wayne Second Quintet thing, so it can be loose. We don't have to be in perfect unison. We can kind of be phasing in and out and the time can get a little loose.” Then you say to the drummer, “Kyle, do like that Tony open thing on a Wayne tune.”
If you have musicians that have done their homework and understand the history of the music, you can tell Kyle Poole, Russell Hall, Emmet Cohen and Chad Lefkowitz Brown that we're going to do a Second Quintet thing, everybody hits that switch and can kind of get into that energy. You have a very astute ear. That's definitely what we were going for on that track.
The first thing that I listened to was not “Twilight Blue.” It was “Catching Drift,” which is another original of yours, yes?
Absolutely. That's the other tune that features Chad Lefkowitz Brown. Those are his two tracks with tenor sax.
Would you say you were in kind of the same mode then because I caught more of the influence of Freddie Hubbard or Blue Mitchell, on “Catching Drift” than Miles, in that tune.
It's a similar thing where it's kind of a minor blues in three. My reference point for that would be “Simone,” the Frank Foster tune, or it's kind of like “Joshua” on Miles Davis’s second quintet. I always have these totem tunes that I'll throw at cats when I put one of my tunes in front of them, just to put them in the right head space. On that particular tune, the language that I'm accessing is Freddie Hubbard who is definitely my North Star. If I get up whipped up into a frenzy, Freddie is usually what's deepest in the recesses of my mind, so that's what comes out.
In the right amount, in the right dosage, frenzy is a good thing. Let's talk about the fact that you really are a triple threat, Benny. You not only play trumpet well like Miles, but you do something that he couldn't do, and that is that you sing very well. You go way beyond the crooner mode in my estimation. Chet Baker was well known, for instance, for being a first-class crooner, and there's nothing wrong with that. But you're actually singing on this new album. I know you've sung on your previous ones, but I think the singing here has more power than I've heard. You're also, for instance, singing something that's very personal to you on “Thank You for the Heartbreak.” Tell us about how that song came about, because I'm fascinated by it.
I’ve been doing some pre-release touring and when I tell the story of the song, it ends up getting a laugh in spots that I was not actually intending it to get a laugh. Life can be funny sometimes. There are 14 tracks on this record which is meaty for an album. Many of them are sort of WBGO friendly if you will. They’re shorter tunes.
I was initially only going to have 12 tracks since every record I've done has 12 but we had this off the cuff duet with Mike Stephenson, “Pretty Eyed Baby.” There was a Dizzy and Roy Eldridge thing. That was fun. I wanted to keep that in. Then there was this other ballad, “Thank You for the Heartbreak.” That was a tune that was written at the very last minute, because I got dumped not long before the album was to be recorded. I had initially just envisioned Peter Bernstein to play on two tunes. He plays on a Bossa that I wrote, and he plays on a boogaloo that I wrote. He tears those up, of course. But I also realized that Peter Bernstein is one of the great modern practitioners of solo guitar. I would be doing myself a disservice if I didn't get some solo guitar on there.
Fortunately, Peter, the mensch that he is, was a very good sport and he was happy to do an extra tune. I threw it in front of him—a breakup song. You mentioned Chet Baker. When I'm performing this song live, I certainly name drop him at this point to kind of give the audience a point of reference as well. Even the way that I delivered this song, I was intentionally trying to get to some of those heartbreaking songs that Chet Baker could deliver.
It is in a major key, so it's not “My Funny Valentine.” It's major and it is heartbreak, but it's more the sentiment that I had not been in a relationship in a long time. I had not had a reason to be in love in such a long time prior to that relationship. It dusted off the cobwebs, if you will. It kind of reminded me, “Oh yeah, this is why people bother to have relationships in the first place” because it's actually pretty nice when you get going with someone that you love. It was sort of a goodbye letter, but not on the worst of terms and hopefully there's something to be said for getting into a relationship, even if it doesn’t work out.
There's something to be said for catharsis.
And you get to work it out on stage every night.
I'm sensing a certain theme here. You are Benny Benack the third after all, and your new album is called Third Time’s the Charm. You don't have to really connect too many dots there.
No one's ever accused me of being too subtle, Brian, so I didn't have to think too long about it. When I was plotting this record, I said, Benny Benack III, Third Time's the Charm. On each of my records, I sort of had a tune that I guess you would call a kind of a torch song or a Great American Song Book-esque. Just me trying to write a Cole Porter tune or a Gershwin tune. On my first record, the title track, “One of a Kind,” it was that vibe. The last album, A Lot of Living to Do, I had an original on there, “Irrepressible” that was me just trying to write something that would've been in a Broadway show, for Miles and Coltrane to cover back in the day.
That was the thinking behind Third Time’s the Charm. That will be the lead single that comes out when the album drops. I've been sprinkling in these singles for months now, but when the record comes out, “Third Time’s the Charm” will be the title track and it's sort of in that vein.
We've been talking about the originals that you have on this album and they really are super, but you also have some very surprising covers. What prompted you to channel your inner Guess Who and do “American Woman” with just you and the bassist Russell Hall?
It's funny, I often say I'm sort of like a mad scientist or something. Sometimes I just wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat and I think, “What if it was a Backstreet Boys, but it had like an Afro-Cuban montuno? It's just a product of being a child of jazz music with my parents and that always being the principle musical love. But being born in the nineties and being exposed to music that was on the radio for people my age at that time.
The funny thing is, I have a Burt Bacharach tune on every record I've done. On this album we do “I'll Never Fall in Love Again.” The story I tell on stage is that I learned who Burt Bacharach was because I saw him in the Mike Meyers Austin Powers movie when I was nine years old. I bought the Austin Powers soundtrack at a Borders store and that was how I discovered Burt Bacharach. I kind of came to a lot of this music in roundabout funny ways, but I’m thinking, “How can I combine jazz arrangements and elements of jazz and sort of repurpose that with other popular music?”
That’s how we got “I'll Never Fall in Love Again” meets Art Blakey’s “Pensative.” And then Tom Jones’s “It's Not Unusual” meets Ahmad Jamal’s “Poinciana.” In this case, I was just hearing that iconic bassline from “American Woman” and I was imagining kind of a Jimmy Garrison double stops, at the beginning of John Coltrane or something.
Russell Hall is such a character actor on the bass that if you give him an energy or you give him something to go off of, he's just going to take it off into the wilderness. I knew that he would have some fun with it and of course, as soon as the song starts, the first thing he does is detune the bass, two steps and just start smacking on it, going crazy. We had fun with that one.
Well, it sounds like you had fun on every single selection that you made, especially your duet with Bria Skonberg in “A Mellow Tone.” What would an album be without a Duke Ellington tune after all. Bria Skonberg is one of those people that has such incredible energy. I'm actually wearing the shirt today that I got on the day that I met her, which was last year when I was hosting the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival. There’s Bria, who's one of the opening acts of the show. I'm talking to her backstage while she's chasing around her toddler. We're both trying to corral her child and finally she catches hold of him and picks him up. We're just talking and talking and then she goes out there and gives one of the most electrifying performances I've seen in 20 years of hosting the Charlie Parker Festival. My question for you, Benny Benack III is where do you get your energy?
Certainly standing on stage or in the studio next to Bria is a big inspiration. Actually, there's a project that Jazz at Lincoln Center conceived that features Bria and myself. We actually did it at Dizzy’s last fall, and next year right after The Jazz Cruise in January 2024, Bria and I start a tour the day after that. We're going to be on the road all over the country for two months, 10 weeks.
It’s a show called “Sing and Swing,” and it's all the great duet partners of the music. We're both playing trumpet, so I can certainly siphon off some of her energy next year. That is something that I hear a lot as well. People talk about that energy, and I always say, it starts with me from the very beginning being a product of not only a jazz musician, but my mother, Claudia, who is a music theater and vocal professor.
Just last night I went to see this new Tony-nominated show on Broadway, Shu, which had a couple students of my mom’s from Carnegie Mellon that were in the show. I have the theatrical side, the storyteller side. Really the entertainer factor is coming from my mother and then also growing up playing gigs with my dad, Benny Benack, Jr. who grew up playing gigs with his dad, Benny Benack, Senior. My earliest musical upbringing was playing a wedding or playing a function at a country club where you have to keep people on the dance floor on top of playing music on a high level.
That sort of got ingrained in me, for better or for worse. If you ask certain cool jazz musicians in a club in the West Village, they would probably say for worse because how dare a musician try to have fun and be gregarious and an entertainer “bastardizing” their art in the process. But if you ask me, I think anytime we're up on stage is an opportunity to bring people into the music and show people all the things that diehard jazz musicians and listeners love about the music. Maybe for someone, this one inspiring concert brings them close to downloading the entire discography of Louis Armstrong. Maybe that is why I'm trying to incorporate popular music and find different ways to rework modern music because I'm always trying to bring people in.
You anticipate my next question because I was going to ask what really brought you into swing, because there are musicians in your age group that seemed to have forgotten the basic elements of what makes this music what it is. I'm wondering how you came to that. What was your initial inspiration?
I would say that it goes back to my theme of growing up in Pittsburgh, with such a rich legacy of all the jazz musicians that came from Pittsburgh. It's Art Blakey, it's Stanley Turrentine and his brother Tommy, as well as George Benson. You have that element where in Pittsburgh, if you go out to a jam session, it's like you have to swing basically or you're going to get Gong Show-ed off the stage. I've seen Roger Humphreys run a jam session in Pittsburgh, and if you take care of the music, everyone's very cordial, but if you don't, you learn real quick. I grew up in that environment and coming from the line of Benny Benack, my grandfather had a big band and he was really coming out of Harry James and Doc Severinson. They were his kind of guys.
He played with Tommy Dorsey and the Raymond Scott Orchestra, right?
Yeah. Before he settled in Pittsburgh, he was on the road. My dad being a clarinetist as well as a tenor player, we were just as likely to play “Bourbon Street Parade” on a gig as we were “Mr. Magic.” So I was born in the swing. There was also the notion that music should be able to be studied in every style and really go in a bunch of different directions.
I also think going to school in New York, as I did at the Manhattan School of Music, you meet a bunch of other peers in your age group. I knew everyone who was at Juilliard at that time, everyone who was at the New School, William Paterson in New Jersey and SUNY Purchase. You meet your community.
It’s like the lunch table in high school. Everybody finds their musical group and then goes off and sits at their lunch table. For me, in high school, I was doing all of these national honors programs like the Monterey Jazz Festival had a student big band. The Vail Jazz Festival had John Clayton and the Clayton Brothers who led a workshop for students. There was the Telluride Jazz Festival All Stars led by Bob Montgomery, the Grammy Band, (which used to be the McDonald's all-American band). I was doing all these programs, and that is actually where I met Emmet Cohen when we were both 15 or 16 years old. That’s where I met Mark Whitfield Jr. at the same time.
All of these wonderful musicians from my generation were coming up in these summer band camps. You just find your tribe and here we are half of a lifetime later, and these guys that I've been playing with and playing swing with since I was 15 or 16, have now become the leading folks of our generation. We've all kind of stuck together.
It's pretty surreal to open up a DownBeat magazine that I've been reading since I was a kid and see the names of Veronica Swift, Christian Sands, Sullivan Fortner, Cyrille Aimee, Cecile McLorin Salvant. This generation of people that I've grown up with are now the ones headlining the stages. We've kind of stuck together and I'm really grateful for it because I've never been able to do much else than swing so I had to find the folks who wanted to do it with me.
Congratulations, by the way, because I know that the DownBeat critics—I'm not one of them but if I was, I would've voted for you—tagged you as Rising Trumpet Star and Rising Vocal Star in the DownBeat critics poll last year. Then of course you mentioned Emmet Cohen, who just received two awards with the Jazz Journalists Association just last week. I see that all of you are on the same trajectory. With that in mind, I wonder, “When are you going to start playing with Samara Joy?”
I don't want to take too much credit, but I will say Emmet had a New Year's gig at Dizzy’s Club a couple years ago—maybe the first New Year's out of COVID and Veronica, who had been working a lot with Emmet at that time, was booked up. We were all sitting around, because we all live up in Harlem, probably sitting outside at a coffee shop because you couldn't eat inside at that point.
We were kind of kicking names around and I said to Emmet, “Hey, Samara Joy, she's just graduating from Purchase. She's incredible.” Emmet was like, “I’ve never heard of her.” And Kyle Poole said, “You should get Samara for that gig. I'm telling you, she's really something.”
They did the New Year's gig together at Dizzy's and Emmet did a handful of things with Samara. We played a gig during COVID—Emmet, Samara and I—that was on a rooftop in Brooklyn. It was one of those deals where you couldn't do anything inside, so you spread out the tables. I just remember it was incredibly windy on top of this stage, and everything was flying around everywhere. But Samara sang her butt off and was just so gracious and humble. I might have played one brunch gig with her. I think she was in the brunch singer category for about five seconds before she just erupted into a global superstar. She said hello to all the little people on her way up, but we’re just so excited for her and what she means to the music.
I guess the only other selection on the new album I would want to ask you about is “Jade,” which really caught my ear as well. Now is that one of yours? Is that an original?
Yes. I was thinking what vibe would I love Peter Bernstein to play. I thought a beautiful Bossa Nova. He just plays so wonderfully on that.
You wrote the lyric as well. Was it about a specific person?
As I say in some of my early shows, it really was a banner season for me. Usually you get one breakup song on an album. But ladies and gentlemen, I was really working overtime. I have two breakup songs on the same record. One is kind of the aftermath of the relationship. This other tune, “Jade” is sort of more in the honeymoon phase. There's no great inspiration but you’ve got to have a muse if you're writing a love song so that is the genesis of that one.
This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.
