Phillip Johnston and the Greasy Chicken Orchestra
Jeremy Rose
Sydney-based saxophonist/composer and New York expat Phillip Johnston leads the 8-piece miniature repertory ensemble, The Greasy Chicken Orchestra, through innovative arrangements of jazz of the 1920s and 1930s, as well as his original music reflecting that musical language on their new release,  I
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Earshift Music
Within that style, the repertoire traverses a wide variety of this rich time period, from New Orleans trad (Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong/Lil Hardin) to tight small ensemble arrangements (John Kirby Sextet) to the great early small big bands (Ellington, Don Redman), as well as modern arrangers, Forrester, Dasent & Johnston, which pay homage to the music of this era and turn it inside out.

The band is led by Phillip Johnston, an American saxophonist-composer who lives in Sydney while still maintaining a musical life in his hometown of New York City. His original music and arrangements range from the traditional to the avant garde, and his homage/re arrangement projects have featured the music of diverse artists including Jelly Roll Morton, Thelonious Monk, Steve Lacy and Captain Beefheart.

“Saxophonist/composer Phillip Johnston’s music embodies all that’s good about jazz. It’s honest, original, and inspired, above and beyond the typical. It’s also some of the very smartest and best-humored music to have found a home under the jazz banner.” – Chris Kelsey, Jazziz.

Personnel

Phillip Johnston - soprano saxophone

Peter Farrar - alto saxophone

Tim Clarkson - tenor saxophone

Jim Loughnan - bariton saxophone

Peter Dasent - piano

Tim Rollinson - guitar, banjo

James Greening - sousaphone

Nic Cecire - drums

About the Music

Phillip Johnston discusses the music:

To me, the 1920s and 1930s were one of the greatest periods of American music, especially for composers. You had Jelly Roll Morton, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin, Louis Armstrong and Lil Hardin, John Kirby’s band. Raymond Scott, Satie, Varèse, Bartok, Ravel, Stravinsky. (OK, I may be juggling the odd biographical date here and there.) While you had star soloists, like Bechet, Armstrong and Tatum, jazz then was really an ensemble music, and particularly rich in musical narrative. The sophisticated structures, the advanced harmony and modernist melodic lines, the humour and the rhythmic complexity combined to form a music that was both danceable and dreamable: you could write your own Betty Boop cartoon in your head. It ran from spookiness and menace, to sheer joy and wild energy, to melancholy blues and regret, to positively literary narrative.

Tunes like Ellington’s “Hot and Bothered” (1928) or Kirby’s “Zoomin’ At The Zombie” (penned by Charlie Shavers) feel like they come from another planet–because they do! When the spotlight began to focus more exclusively on soloists, and compositions began functioning primarily as a vehicle for those soloists, it moved away from the world of tight ensemble playing and dazzling arrangements. I’m no Luddite: there’s been tons of fantastic music created since, up through today–in New York and in Sydney and beyond. But what a joy it is to pause and dip ourselves into this incredibly rich era, and to pay homage and reinvent it in our fashion, to play.

Zuzilla Strut (Johnston) is an original tune that I wrote in the 1980s, but never recorded until now. Like many of the originals here, it combines stylistic elements from several eras that are not usually put together. In this case, I’d say it combines the arranging ideas of the John Kirby Sextet, with the harmonic and motivic ideas of Thelonious Monk (as if the tune Thelonious were played/arranged by JK6). (Johnston)

Grandpa’s Spells (Morton) – Jelly Roll Morton is one of the most important figures of early jazz. Whether he “invented jazz” or not is beyond my ability to say but his composing and arranging combined elements whose diversity and originality can only be compared to Duke Ellington. The GCO plays quite a few of his pieces, and this tune (first recorded in 1923 as a solo piano piece, and then 1926 by Jelly Roll Morton’s Red Hot Peppers), features Tim Clarkson (tenor), Tim Rollinson (guitar) and Peter Dasent (piano). The opening reflects the loose expression of early group improvisation, whereas the out chorus reflects a more modern style of harmonised ensemble playing–in this case of the cornet solo by George Mitchell and clarinet solo by Omer Simeon, from the 1926 recording. (Johnston)

Chant of the Weed (Redman) – One of my very favourite arrangers, composers, bandleaders, singers and soloists (despite his own modesty) is Don Redman. This tune is known as his theme songs and he carried it, in different arrangements, with different bands, including McKinney’s Cotton Pickers and The Chocolate Dandies. Back in the early 90s, I was an admirer of Kurt Hoffman’s Band of Weeds (after the end of The Ordinaires, of which I was also a great admirer). Their name was derived from the Redman tune, but they never recorded it, but when I began writing new arrangements for the GCO I asked Kurt if I could see his transcription, and he generously let me adapt his arrangement for this recording. (Johnston)

Everyone Deserves Everything All The Time (Johnston) is another one of mine, clearly an homage to advanced-for-its-time harmonic language of Redman, Ellington and Coleman/Henderson (‘Queer Notions’, anyone?–don’t miss Sun Ra’s amazing deconstruction!). This tune combines both diminished and augmented chords, and features soloists Peter Farar, Tim Rollinson and myself. Again, the John Kirby Band lurks in the DNA of the arrangement. (Johnston)

Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning (trad.) – You may know this country blues style hymn by Blind Willie Johnston, the Reverend Gary Davis or Mississippi Fred McDowell–or from Hot Tuna who I saw play it at New York’s Academy of Music in 1972. Here I reimagine it as a TV noir detective theme, a la Johnny Staccato (great music by Elmer Bernstein: the on-camera jazz band featured hip jazz pianist Johnny Williams, later known as film composer John Williams). Tim Rollinson blays banjo here, and other soloists include. James Loughnan, & Tim Clarkson. (Johnston)

Potato Head Blues (Armstrong) – One of Louis Armstrong’s great compositions from the f1927 Hot Seven recordings, this arrangement again features more modern styles of harmonising his cornet solo, and expanding on elements of the stop time technique used when playing for dancers. This style of harmonised ensemble playing reflects the ‘progressive Dixieland’ style of the late 50s Dixieland revival (one of my favourites is the Whitey Mitchell group featuring Steve Lacy), and ‘West Coast’ jazz. (Johnston)

Longing (Johnston) – Like my tune 12 Angry Birds on the Microscopic Septet recording Been Up So Long It Looks Like Down To Me: The Micros Play The Blues (Cuneiform), this tune is inspired by Duke Ellington’s endlessly creative reinvention of the blues and spooky storytelling . For a jazz saxophonist there is loneliness–but there is the occasional company of the saxophone section. Soloists: Rollinson (guitar), Greening (sousaphone). (Johnston)

Jazz Lips (Lil Hardin) – Many are paths through life in jazz, and many are the great tunes by Lil Hardin. From tunes like Jazz Lips, Struttin’ With Some Barbecue, Yes! I’m In The Barrel and You Run Your Mouth and I’ll Run My Business, to Ray Charles’ Just For A Thrill, as well as pianist/composer on Louis Armstrong’s Hot Fives and Hot Sevens, she is a major figure of early jazz. There are no solos on Jazz Lips, it’s ensemble all the way, mixing group improv with tightly arranged breaks. (Johnston)

My, What An Ugly Baby! (The Unattractive Child Two-Step) (for Joel Forrester) (Johnston) – When I met Joel Forrester in the early 1970s, he had already been playing ragtime piano for silent films, and free jazz with Keshavan Maslak and others. We hit it off immediately, and he has remained a friend and teacher for the last 50 years or so. The tune reflects one of the most distinctive elements of the trademark style of the Microscopic Septet: combining wildly different genres/rhythms in a single tune. It makes sense to me. (Johnston)

Awful Sad (Ellington) Originally recorded in 1928 by the Cotton Club Orchestra, the melodic invention in this composition is out of this world–does it bring to mind Weill or Bartok?–yet at the heart of it is a gentle expression of melancholy. The soloists are Tim Clarkson on tenor, Tim Rollinson of guitar, and James Greening on sousa. (Johnston)

Damp Rag (Johnston) – Another combination of disparate elements, and another transmutation of the melodic and harmonic language of the 20s jazz gone wild. In a fit of contrarianism, Damp Rag is not a rag (but Ugly Baby is), but what is it? Maybe klezmer jungle music with a little society jazz interlude. Jim Loughnan solos beautifully on bari sax, as does Rollinson on guitar. (Johnston)

In A Mist (Beiderbecke, arranged by Peter Dasent) was composed by cornet player Bix Beiderbecke and recorded by the composer as a piano solo in 1927, when he was only 24. It is an extraordinary one-off event in the history of jazz. The mélange of exotic chord extensions, chromaticism and straight ahead swing is unique for that period. We can only speculate how Bix came upon the sophisticated harmonic language used in this composition, which is more akin to that of the French composers of the period such as Ravel and Milhaud than any other music he would probably have heard or played. (Dasent)

Baby Steps (Forrester) The title “BABY STEPS” is meant to convey something literal: the constant alternation in weight-shift---left, right, left, right---one observes in both tots and totterers (such as yours truly). Is there progress? Oh, eventually; but it’s mostly marching- in-place. I’ll proudly parade its forbears. The debt to Ferd Morton is blatant: the piano lurks behind everything, the horns are given piano-lines to negotiate, whole sections recur and recur again (if oddly altered), with stop-and-go the order of the day, solo space is limited and always accompanied. And I think both Don Redman and Bix would dig the display of diminished chords. But, as ever, its principal ancestor is the MICROSCOPIC SEPTET. (Forrester)

Frog-i-More Rag (Morton) is sometimes known as the Froggie Moore Rag, (the first recording I know of is King Creole’s Jazz Band in 1923–which also featured Louis Armstrong, and Lil Hardin-Armstrong, and it is said to be for a contortionist who wore a frog costume, named Frog-i-More, that Morton accompanied. (Johnston)

Spanish Swat (Morton) – We end with a final Jelly Roll tune, which features Peter Farrar and Peter Dasent as soloists. These variations from a player-piano recording have been orchestrated to salute the compositional improvisations/variations of Jelly Roll’s solo playing. For a treat, check out Richard Trythall’s Jelly Roll Morton Piano Music (2002), which feature’s Richard’s performance of his own transcriptions of Jelly Roll. He includes Spanish Swat. (Johnston)

Press Quotes

“...Johnston is a composer of considerable wit and seemingly boundless imagination. The wit, which permeates the music like the smell of good coffee does a café, mostly manifests itself in the unlikely textural combinations he draws from his band, the Transparent Quartet. . . The music defies ready classification...Overall this has as much in common with, say, Erik Satie, as it has with jazz, and certainly the emphasis is on composition rather than improvisation–compositions which form a chain of constant surprises.” - John Shand, Sydney Morning Herald

“...As time‐defying as his genre‐juggling can be, saxophonist and composer Phillip Johnston (b. 1955) could rightly be classified as the H.G. Wells of the jazz world. His vocabulary is one of surprise and seduction: jump blues lead into waltzes; Dixieland marches become free‐edged blowing; and strangely familiar yet more often just strange melodies captivate, recede, and reappear.” - Ashley Kahn, The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Jazz

“...Johnston’s arrangements are almost unerringly enchanting and illustrate the luminous craft he absorbed from masters like Morton, Ellington, Monk, and Mingus and then refined into something all his own.” - Gene Santoro, Chamber Music America Magazine

“...One of jazz’s quirkiest and most delightful composers.” – Cineville (Netherlands)

“...One of the most distinctive sounds in contemporary jazz.” – John Shand, Sydney Morning Herald

Brian Morton in the UK’s Jazz Journal calls his music, “intensely beautiful, often poignantly amusing and utterly humane.”

Album: I Cake Walked With A Zombie

Release: 14 July 2023

Catalogue Number: EAR081

https://phillipjohnston.bandcamp.com/album/i-cakewalked-with-a-zombie