A Conversation with Earl Klugh – HuffPost 11.8.13

Mike Ragogna: Earl, we’ve spoken many times before, so let’s try something a little different. Let’s have new artist/jazz guitarist Jonnie Cohen, a recent graduate of the University of Iowa’s music department, chat with you first.

Earl Klugh: Okay.

Jonnie Cohen: Thanks so much, I really appreciate it! Earl, do you think Yoga has affected your music at all? [note: Jonnie just finished participating in Earl’s Yoga class]

EK: I kind of think that it has. We do a lot of traveling and airplane travel is the worst because you’re sitting down so many hours and when we’re on tour every day–we spend four, five, six hours on the plane–that gets really hard. Most of the guys who are out on the circuit with us, they kind of feel the same way. I try to keep myself going as much as I can. When we get to the hotel, I try to go to the gym wherever it is so I can keep everything up.

JC: How does it affect your musicality and ability to play?

EK: Well, my hands and everything are fine. The biggest problem is doing an hour and a half or two-hour show and standing and playing all of that time. Your audiences want you to generally be up and around and very mobile. What really helped was when we finally got electronics where you didn’t have to be plugged into an amp, it gave much more mobility and it made the show much more visibly better for them. So I’m very happy that things have turned around so well.

JC: So it’s about bodily health.

EK: Exactly.

JC: One of the things I was really interested in when I was researching you that your mentors were Chet Atkins and George Benson. I was wondering if you could tell me how somebody like Chet Atkins picked you up and how that effected your playing and your ability to learn better.

EK: With Chet, I was very lucky because I signed a record deal very early and Chet Atkins was always one of my favorite guitarists. He and George Benson were my favorite players. Being able to spend time with Chet Atkins and record with him, and from a very young age, see all of the opportunities and possibilities, I think Chet just probably got a bit of a kick out of me because I enjoyed it all so much. So we became good friends. The same thing is true with George Benson. I met George in Detroit before he got very famous. Every two or three months, he played in a club in Detroit, Baker’s Keyboard Lounge. That place was a turning point for me because at that time, I was a really great player and that was the only place in Detroit that had a real jazz presence, so I got to meet everybody–Bill Evans, Dexter Gordon, Les McCann, Grover Washington. Just from watching the shows and learning everything about the artists who were really, really on top of things and the artists who were partiers but great players anyway, it showed me a really wide, wide spectrum of the acts.

JC: So you hung with Chet from a young age.

EK: I was sixteen when I first started working with Chet. That was a complete, lifelong thing after that. We’d both do shows from time to time. He’d call me up–Chet is so matter of fact–but he’d call me up and say, “Earl, what you doing?” I’d say, “I’m not doing anything, I think I’m going to go to the movies tonight,” and he said, “Man, why don’t you cancel that and let’s go play over at the so-and-so club?” It’s all the Nashville heavyweights and wannabes. It was a nice initiation into that world.

JC: Do you consider yourself a serious musician?

EK: I’ve always considered myself a really serious musician, but not serious to the point where you must understand my music. I get a kick out of it, I really enjoy it, I just wake up and pinch myself. I’ve worked a long time for this, but it’s still a bunch of fun for me. I can’t imagine doing anything else.

JC: What’s been the high point of your career to this point?

EK: Right now, really. I really feel that way. When I started out, I was just fresh and now I’m getting older and people are starting to give me lifetime achievement awards. I’m not that old, I’m like, “No, please!”

JC: How does that feel? Getting lifetime achievement awards?

EK: I’m not old enough yet! But it’s cool.

JC: So going back to the relationship with Chet and George, you would describe them as mentors, right?

EK: Yeah, they were both very much mentors.

JC: So what defines a “mentor”?

EK: Gosh, that’s a very good question. In my case, I was very shy but I wanted to get information from some of the players, so I tried to be really nice. There were a couple of artists who were really great. Once I was eighteen, these two men will remain nameless, but I got them to listen to my record, I gave them some alkie-hol, and they were friends to the end, boy.

JC: That resulted in a record?

EK: Yeah, that’s when my first album came out.

JC: Why do you think people want to mentor?

EK: I think in the case of both George Benson and Chet Atkins, George was really fascinated with me playing the classical guitar and not the electric guitar. He thought that I was going to be a great acoustic guitar player because there weren’t many. He said, “If you keep going in this direction, you’re going to be the best guy on this instrument.” We did some shows together. I did some shows both with Chet and with George and then we did some shows together, all three of us over time. There’s a lot of video on us. I think we just had a mutual admiration.

JC: So you came up with your classical guitar style, you weren’t trying to sound like anyone else and they liked that.

EK: Exactly.

JC: Do you have any advice for new artists?

MR: Hey, that’s MY question! [laughs]

EK: Some people like jazz or blues or country. With me, I really try to embrace all of those styles and find something that I like out of all of them. When I first heard country music, I was like, “Oh, I don’t like this music.” But then I go to the record stores and I check out the albums and I buy a couple of things and almost every time, you find songs that you love. That’s what kept me moving on, trying to find more repertoires and more ways to play.

JC: So, one, you had your own sound that they liked, and then two, you also pushed yourself to learn other styles and other peoples’ sounds.

EK: Exactly.

JC: Are they both very important?

EK: They’re both equally as important as the other. That’s very definite.

MR: Earl, how does an artist keep growing, in your opinion? What are some actual fundamentals for an artist to keep growing?

EK: Well, for me, after a while I kind of knew what I liked, the type of music that I embraced. I’m very passionate about Brazilian music, and I did a lot of country stuff with Chet. On the CD I have up now, I did a song with Vince Gill. So I try to keep all of those things going on in my career because it’s very interesting. You never know who you’re going to meet and people that you can collaborate with.

MR: What’s also interesting about your latest album Hand Picked is that the material ranges from Burt Bacharach to Vince Guaraldi to “Betcha By Golly Wow.” Loved your solo performance of that, by the way. It was shockingly touching. Do you keep teaching yourself the basics by going back to those songs you loved, maybe now looking at them differently than you did back then?

EK: Oh, absolutely. That is completely it. A lot of songs I played twenty or thirty years ago, I’m returning to now because I’ve found new ways to make it happen. Just like when you were talking about “Betcha By Golly Wow,” I happened to hear it on the radio while we were in the airport. I had no designs to do the song, but I worked it out in my room and then I thought, “This will be a good one.”

MR: It almost made me cry, and it was a sweet ending song to a pretty full concert. Who would have thought to do that song and who would have thought to rediscover its emotional depth?

EK: Yeah, yeah.

MR: What practical things can someone like Jonnie do at this point his young music career?

EK: Gosh, I don’t really know. To me, it seems that there are so many new jazz guitar players and saxophone players, I think we could topple this boat with them, I’m telling you! And they’re all great! It’s really amazing. When I was a kid, there weren’t that many great players. We had Stan Getz and Dizzy Gillespie and Grover Washington. It’s all changed up so much.

MR: You grew up in Detroit, which obviously is partly musically defined by Motown. Was there any time growing up when you thought you wanted to be a part of that whole scene instead of jazz?

EK: Oh yeah, I love the music. But by the time I really got going, I really saw what I was trying to do and where I wanted to go musically. So I’m really blessed for that because a lot of people were great players and sometimes, they just don’t see the possibility. There’s this guy, he’s an unbelievable pianist, but he had some bad habits and it never really came around for him. He was too busy drinking. I’d try to take him on the road and the first couple of weeks were pretty good, but the next thing you know…

MR: That’s unfortunate, especially when “breaks” don’t come that often. Earl, what comes next for you?

EK: Gosh, I don’t know what to tell you. I’ve been doing it for so long I just really enjoy what I do, playing in shows and touring around the world. We did a ton of touring all around the world the last few months. We’ve literally gone to Africa four times, full-blown country shows four times in two months. We do these shows and then I come back home and they want more shows. I’m like, “Okay, it sure doesn’t happen like that in Detroit!” They love the music. I was kind of thinking that maybe I need to cut them down a little bit because they’ll get tired of me coming over, but then I talked to my agent and he said, “Oh, don’t worry about that. They do that all the time. You’re not going to go away.”

MR: It’s one of those things where it almost feels like you as an artist are being very benevolent, like how you’re giving us this interview and you’re playing for them because they want you so much.

EK: [laughs] Exactly, yeah.

MR: All right, we took up a lot of your time and I appreciate it.

EK: No, this is great, this really helps me wind down. They’re killing me over here. [laughs]

MR: [laughs] Yeah, I’m afraid of that!

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne