What’s the point of making music that doesn’t surprise you? You could either follow a trail that has already been blazed or you could back up your cement truck and pave a new path with your fresh ideas — or some other corny metaphor like that. Throughout his long and acclaimed career, piano virtuoso Marco Benevento has experimented within forms and flipped them from the inside, out.
The ever-evolving sound of Marco Benevento
While attending Berklee College of Music, the New Jersey native met his longtime musical brother in arms, drummer Joe Russo, and started the experimental instrumental jazz combo Benevento Russo Duo. They became a hit with not only jazz fans, but rock fans, and a staple on the jam band circuit. Benevento and Russo have maintained their fruitful partnership throughout the years with the hugely successful soulful reimagining of the Grateful Dead’s catalog, Joe Russo’s Almost Dead, and various other projects. But Benevento has been really letting his creative freak flag fly on his own solo records.
While other musicians who possess the level of chops that Benevento has tend to make lifeless records that showcase their technical abilities at a masturbatory level, Benevento’s pop songs brim with creativity and hooks that are accessible to all. His new record out in September, “Let It Slide,” is full of surprising moments and takes the listener on a journey spanning from rock and soul, to New Orleans jazz and psychedelia — sometimes within one song. Benevento sat on demos of these new songs for two years before partnering with producer Leon Michels at his studio Diamond Mine in Queens in 2017 to record the album along with musician Nick Movshon. Keeping this tight creative trio helped Benevento stretch into brand-new territories on the record.
“I felt like I was super prepared for this record,” said Benevento over the phone. “Because I had been sitting with the demos for close to two years. And when we got together and realistically meeting those guys for the first time in the studio, when we got together for the first time, it was kind of like, ‘Oh s—t, right, I mean I got these demos down but I’m up for anything.’ But also like, s—t, we got to figure out how this song’s going to go. It was like this slow motion of all these songs that, like I said, that I thought that I totally knew. It was kind of like, oh s—t, we’re going to totally rediscover and rearrange these tunes and turn them into well-written and well-arranged tunes that make sense to the listener and of course to us. And it was like this opposite dichotomy of going in there and being like, ‘Yeah guys, I have all these tunes that are done, let’s just record them.’ We would listen to them and we would totally change them all. You know, slightly, but enough to make you feel like you were starting from scratch.”
The trio felt free to experiment within the studio, and this kind of free-flowing recording process led Benevento to develop a new kind of sound through his piano which he has now dubbed the “Gaffiano.” It all started when Benevento would reach inside of his piano to mute the strings live, creating a sound more similar to a muted Japanese stringed instrument. In the studio, he went a step further to cover the strings of the piano with gaffer tape, thus giving the new instrument its name.
“What I did is I put gaffer tape on the piano to cover all the strings and to mute all the strings on the piano and I started playing,” explains Benevento. “I didn’t even tell the guys, we just started recording and they’re like, ‘What’d you do to the piano?’ I was like, ‘I put gaffer tape over it because it was sounding too piano-y. I wasn’t feeling like the piano was actually a good sound in this song, but I wanted to play the piano,’ and they’re like, ‘Oh man, it sounds awesome.’ That’s where the Gaffiano was born … So the Gaffiano was a big invention, new sound that we used a lot. Since then actually, Leon’s come over a bunch and we’ve recorded a little snippets of new song ideas and it’s always like, ‘Gaffiano, never piano’ (laughs).”
Make sure to grab tickets to see Marco Benevento when he plays the City Farm Presents Summer Series in Industry City on Wednesday, June 26.
