A Conversation with JB Baretsky – HuffPost 12.9.11

Mike Ragogna: Hey JB, are you there?

JB Baretsky: Hey, I’m here.

MR: JB, tell us a little bit about yourself.

JB: I’m from Long Island, New York, I love jazz and just about anything that has to do with things that happened fifty years ago.

MR: And all at four in the morning.

JB: (laughs) Yeah, I was up a little late playing black jack last night in Atlantic City. I’ve been working hard and I wanted to wind down a little. Sometimes, the cards go in my favor.

MR: Do you like to hang in Atlantic City?

JB: I really just come down here because it’s a really quick drive–two and a half hours. I come down here when I need one or two days to take for myself. I’m not a huge gambler, I like to do it, sometimes come down and meet a girl on the weekends or something, but I’m not a habitual Atlantic City visitor.

MR: What are your some of your favorite jazz standards that you are performing?

JB: One of my favorites is “Mack The Knife” and I’m always surprised about how many people love that song when I perform it. The song’s about somebody getting murdered, which I think shows the true nature of people, that they just want more violence. Other than that, I really like “That’s Life,” that’s one of my favorites, I like the message in that one.

MR: Where did your jazz chops come from?

JB: It’s really funny, I sang in a lot of bands and we did a lot of acoustic rock. Then my grandfather was asking me to do some stuff Sinatra did, so I went in the studio one day and I tried it. My manager said, “That’s something right there, you’ve got a jazz thing going,” and I’ve been doing it ever since.

MR: You’ve been listening to older artists as you’ve been developing your repertoire?

JB: Oh yeah. I love Sinatra, Dean Martin, and probably my all time favorites were the all time best stage performers that ever lived–Sammy Davis Jr, and Bobby Darin. You combine their musical talent and on stage talent, they were heads and tails above anything we have today.

MR: I’ve been rediscovering Bobby Darin. What an amazing human and musical force.

JB: Oh yeah. Have you seen the movie Beyond The Sea with Kevin Spacey? He did an unbelievable job at portraying him and all of the facets he could do with the singing, comedy, and dancing. To think the guy only died when he was 36 or 37, and he did his whole career with a serious heart condition is amazing.

MR: There’s a song on YouTube, “Once Upon A Time,” where he’s asking his accompanist to keep replaying the intro because he’s having a hard time catching his breath. But the performance is awesome regardless of his health.

JB: I know the video, I’ve watched it a thousand times. It’s one of my favorite renditions of that song. You’re right, and the way he plays it off is, “I just need to catch a breath.” You don’t see subtle nuance in performances anymore, it’s all about lights, fog machines, and backup dancers. You don’t have that one-on-one communication with the performer and the audience.

MR: Do you think that was the superpower Sinatra, Dean, Davis, and Darin had?

JB: Absolutely, to be able to have one person on a stage and capture an entire audience’s attention for however long they played. To feel the whole audience’s attention like that? Think about how attention spans have gone down over the generations…it would be almost impossible in this generation now. That’s something that they had, and it was special to them, but unfortunately we don’t really see it anymore.

MR: How would you try it?

JB: I would really try to be myself. I love to make people laugh, I love to show as much emotion as I can. I think if you’re emotional and the audience can feel it, they will pay attention to you. I just want to be somebody that people love to watch and people love to watch perform. I’m going to try and give my emotion to ten people or a hundred people. I just want to give everything to everybody, every time I go on the stage.

MR: YouTube is your biggest outlet right now and one of your videos is a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” What brought you to that song?

JB: I was still in college and I was doing a jazz band course there. Me and my guitarist Tom Sheridan, who I still play with today, we were fooling round after class and I started playing it on the piano and he started playing it on the guitar and I ended up playing it at the end of the semester’s jazz concert. The reaction I got from the crowd we had was pretty big, so I did it again at one of my house performances. I like this song because on YouTube, I dedicated it to the soldiers and their mothers…it’s just a really touching song, I feel. It was something I could convey–a good amount of emotion because I felt hurt–and I could put that into the lyrics of that song. I know people have done it a lot, and I wanted to put my own spin on it. You don’t really have somebody trying to do a jazz spin of that song.

MR: Was it Tom accompanying you on “Hallelujah” and “Mack The Knife”?

JB: Yeah, he was.

MR: While we’re here, what did you feel was the connection between “Hallelujah” and the troops?

JB: It’s not an old war song, but it was just an emotional thing with me. The lyrics of the song and the pain it can convey just really hit home with me, with people fighting and the mothers who have to deal with the fact that their loved ones are overseas.

MR: You also covered “Dynamite.”

JB: I was doing a show for St. Joseph’s College and I wanted to do something that would bring them in with their attention, so I did a medley. We went from “Run Around Sue” to a couple songs from the nineties and I decided to throw in “Dynamite,” and the reaction from the crowd we got was huge. So, me and my manager sat down and discussed that maybe we should do an actual jazz piano cover of the song, and that’s how that came across. Now the problem was that when I record a song, I print out the lyrics and read them like a poem so I can get some kind of emotional connection with what the writer was trying to convey. It’s kind of hard to do with those lyrics–kind of bland, not a lot of emotional thought in them–but I was really happy with the way the cover came out.

MR: And you did “Last Kiss.”

JB: Yeah, that’s one of my favorite songs. I know it was made famous most recently by Pearl Jam because they did a great cover. I remember hearing the early version from the sixties. It was a song where I was able to play a little bit of harmonica on at the end of the track too, which is something my grandfather taught me when I was five year old. That was another emotional special thing.

MR: We’ve been talking about covers, but you’ve also posted some originals. Can you go into your creative process when you write?

JB: I start with a basic idea of a song, then I will try to write chords around it and get the mood of that idea. Once I get the chords done, I work on the vocal melody next and once I get the vocal melody down, I take about a month to think and prepare and write the lyrics.

MR: Do you then get to the studio to get it down?

JB: I let my manager know that I’ve been working on a song and it’s almost done. I tell him from a week or a week and a half from that point we can make a studio date. We don’t want to rush things, because we want the product that we put out to be satisfactory to us.

MR: On your video “One Nighter,” you have this press photo where you’re wearing glasses. You’ve obviously had lasik. Can you tell us what the procedure was like? (laughs)

JB: No, I’m supposed to wear them all of the time, especially when I drive, because I have a distance problem. I really never wear them. When we record, it’s late at night and I have to wear them to drive, so I just forget to take them in the studio and the pictures just come out like that.

MR: So, being a fellow wiseguy New Yorker, what else do we need to know about JB?

JB: Well I’ve got to tell you, over the summer, I got to play Lincoln Center in New York City. It was a small little thing that happened, but it gave me a taste of what it would be like to be famous. I was doing a performance, and here comes this guy just charging at me from the audience. I look over at the side of the stage where my father was sitting and he was giving me a look of panic because he didn’t know what to do. The guy stopped at the foot of the stage and just started staring at me for about fifteen minutes. Then he reaches into his bag, and I’m freaking out because I think he’s going to pull a gun out or something. He takes out a camera, zooms in on my tie, takes four or five pictures of my tie and my hands, and then runs off in the opposite direction. Only in New York would somebody sprint from a hundred and three feet away, take pictures of your hands and tie, then sprint off in the other direction and not even say a word.

MR: And this was some kind of surprise?

JB: For me? Yeah! You see a guy running at you from fifteen rows back it’s a little daunting. Really, I don’t know what he was thinking. Also, that day, somebody was wearing an umbrella as a pair of pants, so go figure. When I go to New York it’s a whole different world for me.

MR: Right, you’re a Long Islander.

JB: Yes, I am.

MR: Of course, one of Long Island’s patron saints is Billy Joel. How much of a patron saint is he to you?

JB: I wouldn’t call him a patron saint. I’m not taking anything away from him. I don’t have a little shrine in my closet or anything. I did see him in concert a few years ago when he had an amazing run at The Garden. It’s incredible…every song he did was a hit. Now that you mention it, he should be a patron saint. I admire his piano skill alone, which was incredible; his songwriting ability was incredible; his voice…he really is up there in my shrine of people that I need to start worshiping.

MR: Yeah, get prayin’, man. And how about “New York State Of Mind”? How many times do you play that a night?

JB: There was a point about five years ago, I listened to that song at least twice a day. That was the anthem for everything. Every car ride I took started with that song.

MR: What other artists are you into?

JB: One of the more obscure bands I follow and have seen about five times in concert is Hootie & The Blowfish. For some reason, I just love Hootie & The Blowfish, and I love Darius Rucker. As far as recent people, I’m in love with Taylor Swift as is the rest of the country.

MR: It’s like she walks away with every award she’s nominated for.

JB: She wins everything. Somebody interviewed me a couple of months ago and asked me if she was going to win anything, and I said of course she’s going to win something, she wins everything.

MR: Everything. Always. JB, do you have any advice for new artists?

JB: Well, I always say the same thing said on The Tonight Show: “If you think you’re going to make it on talent alone, you’re fooling yourself. You’ve got to have some luck.” I happen to know a guy from high school who was in the industry–that’s my manager–and he knows how to get into the business and he’s my luck. My in was him. I got lucky and now we’ve got to see if I have the talent to make it. If you have the talent, just keep persevering and wait for a stroke of luck to come, if you work hard, it will come. Good things come to those who wait, I know it’s cliché but it’s true.

MR: What is your immediate future looking like?

JB: Well my immediate future, I need to get out of bed at some point. Other then that, I think I’m going to do a short tour in late March, early April.

MR: You’re also working on an album, right?

JB: I’m working on an album, I want to at least get two more originals on there, and release it with some more covers. I’ve got a song right now, it’s really close to being finished. I don’t have a title for you because I do that last and I’ve got another original coming out quick. I just want to get that album out as soon as possible.

MR: Let’s see. What haven’t we covered. Okay, tell me your whole history from birth.

JB: I mean, I’m only 24, but I have some stories.

MR: Okay, go for one.

JB: I’m going to finish with one that’s not funny at all, it’s the reason I really went after this. My uncle, who’s my godfather and basically my second father, got diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s Disease in November of 2008. I sat back and thought how here’s a guy that did everything right–he got married, he had the kid, he had the solid job, and in the end, here comes this disease and he can’t do anything about it. I just realized that life can be so unfair and I don’t want to be in that situation, thinking in the bed I wish I had went after that thing that I wanted since I was five years old. I want to leave you with I’m going after something I wanted since I was five years old, and whether I make it to whatever level society thinks is fame or not, I’m going to be able to live with no regrets because I’m going after it now. That’s what I’m going to leave you with.

MR: Keep going…

JB: Yeah, my whole thing is I want to get this out to a younger generation, someone who hasn’t heard it. The only other person they’ve heard it from is Michael Bublé, so I do colleges that will have me.

MR: So how big is your head now that Pulse, and Jazz Times and other major mags have endorsed you?

JB: I have to tell you, people have worried about that, I will tell you my parents keep me in check. I still mow the lawn, I still rake the leaves, I work a nine to five, forty hour a week retail company. I’m not just kicking it in Atlantic City all of the time, I keep grounded, my parents keep me grounded, and my work keeps me grounded.

MR: All of the best on that, and of course, in the future we have to do this again.

JB: Thank you very much Mike, anything I can ever do for you let me know.

Transcribed By Theo Shier