A Conversation with Jonathan Butler – HuffPost 11.8.13

Mike Ragogna: Jonathan, what do you think about the smooth jazz experience you had this week on the cruise?

Jonathan Butler: I think it’s getting better, it’s getting more and more exciting. It’s a week of people’s lives where something is happening at sea that’s not happening on land. It looks like there’s more happening at sea than on land. There’s an experience happening to people. They save up for their whole year, some of them are retired some of them don’t know who Jonathan Butler is or was and they come up and they’re new fans. They’re maybe sixty or eighty years old, but they’re new fans. It looks like there’s life for us musicians, we can still be out there doing it.

MR: And you not only have the interaction with the fans on the boat but also interaction with other musicians.

JB: Right. That too. The cool thing of that is how many times do you get a chance to play with Earl Klugh or share the stage with Oleta Adams, just amazing musicians onstage. David Sanborn and Marcus Miller… Everybody’s collaborating with each other and getting along with each other.

MR: And sharing creative experiences, right? Do you think everybody’s learning from each other on these trips?

JB: Well, one of the things I enjoyed last night was sitting and watching Earl Klugh. I think as an artist, it’s important for us to take a minute out of our schedules to kind of pay tribute to and honor our fellow musicians and sit through a show rather than watching it on TV. You get to learn some things that you might be able to put in your show, some things that make you say, “That’s kind of cool, the way he introduces the band.” I watched a guy in Mozambique, a great musician, and the way he sent the guys off stage when he finished the show was he had each guy do an amazing solo and as they take the solos, they leave the stage until it’s just him left. I thought, “Hmm, that’s a really interesting way to close the show.” You learn something. On this cruise, you sort of go from room to room and catch a glimpse of everybody’s shows.

MR: And as you were saying before about Earl Klugh, one of his performances ended with just him playing “Betcha By Golly, Wow,” possibly the best version of it I’ve ever heard.

JB: He played it in the dressing room for me!

MR: It was touching, the way he ended his show with the starkness of it.

JB: You don’t always have to end with a bang. It should start with Earl Klugh and it should end with Earl Klugh. That’s how it should be.

MR: Jonathan, “No Woman, No Cry is a Bob Marley song, of course. But you get associated with virtually everything you play.

JB: I hate that part! I have so many albums that if I had the time, I would do “Sing Me A Love Song,” I would do “Surrender,” I would do “Song For Elizabeth,” I would do “Do You Love Me,” “Lost To Love,” “Carry Me.” But you get sixty minutes to entertain, so you really just kind of pick the fun songs. For me, I’m an emotional guy so I pick songs that can carry that part of me across.

MR: I’ll bet you have an even harder time picking material because you have knowledge of international music as well, expanding your potential material exponentially.

JB: That’s the crazy part! First of all, I’m South African, so I want to take people on that journey and educate people that this is world music and it’s cool. I’m in different genres of music all the time, but I like to take people on the journey and sometimes that means I need three hours. When I play in South Africa, I play three hours. When I play at home, I have to play at least three hours. And then I’ve got to pick gospel material for the gospel show, which is different. That’s where I feel really deep emotion and can find the songs that will minister to people and speak to their hearts and speak to their situation. Gospel is good music anyway, so I want to make it fun, I want to make it happy, I want to make it so people can participate. That’s what it’s about. If we can collectively participate in the song, you kind of create a presence.

MR: You said the word “minister.” I thought that’s what I was witnessing when I went to your gospel show.

JB: Yeah.

MR: It was Jonathan Butler coming from yet another source of inspiration as you sang to and about God.

JB: Yeah, it’s like I’m outside of it, I’m just directing it. I’m just leading worship, so to speak, and then bringing people to a quiet place where they become introspective and it becomes time to just think about where you are. I think these cruises are kind of crazy because every year, I get more and more testimonies from people telling me that they came on the ship with cancer and they’re back again and they healed. I’ve heard stories on this ship of people talking about things that have happened to them, and the gospel, it just changed them. Something happens. I think it’s more spiritual than it is entertainment. There’s nothing entertaining about it, I think it’s more of a spiritual connection with each other on that level.

MR: Are those two separate things with you?

JB: It’s the same thing for me. I can never be separated from my spirit, you know? I could never be separated. If so I would just be JB the entertainer, I’ll give you hits, hits, hits. Just yesterday, Earl changed up his set a little bit and I think that’s what happens sometimes, I’ll walk in the room and think, “Maybe I need to do something different, maybe I need to approach the show differently.” For instance, Candy Dulfer will come in and it will be all funk and I come from a completely different place, so let me calm things down and then build things back up again.

MR: Do you think that’s important to people?

JB: It’s important to me because the people who’ve never seen me would have never seen me before Candy came on. That’s why I always start with something very small, very intimate like “Fire And Rain.” It also gives me a chance to warm up, a chance to fix any mic level problems or problems with my guitar. It’s just me and the engineer for that first song. “Dude, I’m giving you my voice, I’m giving you my instrument, they can’t be too hard to fix.”

MR: And that’s a beautiful and unusual guitar you’re playing.

JB: That’s an awesome instrument. I like it.

MR: Is there a history to it?

JB: I’m starting to play instruments made in South Africa by South African guitar builders. Some of these guys are amazing. I actually have another guitar in my closet here that broke on the way to the cruise. The bridge broke off. But it’s an unbelievable design. I’m kind of mad that the bridge broke because I was trying to help a lady on the plane push a bag and I think as I pushed her bag, I must have cracked the bridge.

MR: Oh man, sorry. Hey, can we talk about your Jonathan Butler Foundation?

JB: We just launched the Jonathan Butler Foundation in South Africa. We deal with music therapy, music education, drug addiction prevention, poverty, and violent crime in the communities of South Africa, so we have a lot of urgent things that we are dealing with. We’re funded by the government, we are self-sustaining, we have a lot of cities like Capetown, Johannesburg, Pretoria, and Durban involved and we are also going to start getting the Jonathan Butler Foundation established here in the States so that we can send Earl Klugh or someone to Capetown to do clinics. We are fully operating as we speak. It’s been an exciting year for me so far. I’m a patron of the Tshwane School Of Music in South Africa. We have about fifty students from age six and up. We are starting to see the freeborn South Africans emerge and create their own legacies and their own history so to speak. They don’t come from the old apartheid era hangups, so the foundation is allowing these kids to create their own legacies now. We just got started and we’re already up and running, people can go to my http://www.jonathanbutler.org website. We should have it up already, we’re working on the website.

MR: Are you going to be making regular contributions to keep it lively?

JB: Constantly. The concert stuff will all be part of it.

MR: And I’m imaging there’ll be musical creations from the students.

JB: The hope for us is that purpose kills addiction. The kids that are out in the street will now have a place to go and learn. We already have drug rehabilitation places that we are able to send kids to and then also to reintroduce some of these kids who come from very, very difficult lives into employment, working in school. So our premise was really awesome, we were just given a building by the government of Pretoria. This is a thirty year old prayer realized today.

MR: Beautiful. And you’re concretely adding to the positive aspects of their lives.

JB: I call it taking our kids back. Taking our kids back and giving them purpose.

MR: Nice. So you’ve got a new Christmas album.

JB: I’m excited! I just did my very first Christmas record. After all of these years, I’ve been touring and on the road with Dave Koz. I finally got off the ship in January; I think it was a Saturday that I landed in LA, and by Sunday I was in the studio. I actually recorded the record in one week. I had it done, I had it mixed, we came up with this concept, an album cover done with a collage of photographs of things that I like. It’s a great album, even if I have to say so myself. It’s a great record. I think it’s probably the most intimate I’ve made. It’s more guitar and voice than heavy production.

MR: Do you allow yourself to enjoy your own material? A lot of artists find that hard.

JB: I do. I have a couple of favorite albums that I like to play. I like to play Surrender and I like to play Story Of LIfe. There’s something about those two albums. I had a great time making them and I had a great experience with all of the songs. I remember who influenced the songs; Richard Bona from Cameroon influenced “Many Faces,” “Pata Pata,” Jerry Hey did the horn arrangment, and Paulinho Da Costa on percussion. I was in heaven in the studio. Then I did Story Of Life, which was a more singer-songwriter type of record.

MR: You have your fingers in a lot of pies creatively.

JB: Well it’s about being creative and not just sticking to “smooth jazz.” It’s just a bit too limiting for me. I could never live in that box of the smooth jazz genre. I think my palette is too open.

MR: To be honest, I think that “smooth jazz” isn’t couldn’t live in the smooth jazz box anymore.

JB: I think so. Hopefully, artists will take the lead here and direct traffic instead of having program directors decide what songs are their favorite thing to play when your heart and soul has been in the record since Day One. Your heart and soul is in it and they say, “Okay, this is the one we should play,” and yet the album is full of awesome material. So hopefully, we can take the lead. If I was to speak out about that, that’s the only thing I think has been missing the last ten years, the artists have played it safe. We didn’t take the lead.

MR: I agree totally. And this Smooth Jazz Cruise in particular seems almost like a cradle. I watched moments ago when Brian Culbertson came up to you and said, “Okay, I have this part for you on my new album.”

JB: Yeah, he offered me the part because he’s heard me sing world music. We’ve been working together, so he understands that I come from that South African world music background. To me, I like that. Besides, this is a “smooth cruise” cruise, but you’ve got Marcus Miller, you’ve got Sanborn, Adams, it goes beyond that.

MR: Well, whatever this smooth jazz evolution is, it especially seems to be happening on things like this smooth jazz cruise.

JB: There’s something happening at sea, I suppose, that’s not happening on land. It’s not that I’m not sure, but I like to touch the ground sometimes. I like to get off the ship and walk down the street. We’re starting to have new careers floating at sea.

MR: [laughs] Speaking of new careers, I’m an advocate for new artists and I’d like to know what your advice is for them?

JB: Man, stick to your guns, you know? Stick to your guns. Go sing in the coffee bar. If you’re a songwriter, take your guitar to a coffee bar or a little hole in the wall and try to turn people on to your music. I’ve heard this a thousand times, “If you sell two hundred records you have two hundred fans.”

MR: Jonathan, you’re going right from the ship to South Africa Saturday to host your third annual safari.

JB: I’m teeing off golf from a rhino’s back.

MR: [laughs] What?

JB: [laughs] I’m going to jump on the rhino’s back with my golf clubs and hope I hit an elephant on the head! Just kidding. This is my annual safari and we take about twenty-five or thirty American people from wherever. It’s a very enlightening, once-in-a-lifetime experience, much like the cruise, but it’s a different experience because I’m your host every day. You see me, I’m on the bus with you, we’re in the wild and the lions are right here. The jeep just stops in the middle of them.

MR: Wow. Any close calls?

JB: No, these game reserve guys are so well trained and they know the animals’ behavior, everything is safe. It’s a five-star experience.

MR: How long is the safari?

JB: It’s about two weeks. We start off in Capetown and we show people where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned, we go to Robben Island, we go to Table Mount and we go to the wine regions, so we do a lot of my hometown first and then I fly people out to Johannesburg and then off to the wild.

MR: Cool. It’s a safari of many things.

JB: Yeah, and it’s an expensive one, but I hear people here saying that next year they are fully ready to come and join me. It’s my break, really. It’s a time when I just kind of plug into the wall and get reenergized and reconnected.

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne