Auszüge aus einer lesenwerten Rezension des aktuellen Albums von Johnathan Blake:
In both his personal and musical lives, Blake credits the foundational influence of his late father, violinist John Blake, Jr., best known for his long relationships with saxophonist Grover Washington, Jr. and pianist McCoy Tyner. Johnathan dedicated Passage to his father, whose previously unrecorded composition serves as a title track. Whatever John Blake meant by that title, in his son’s hands it strongly suggests the passing of torches and traits from one generation to the next.
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I interviewed John Blake, Jr. about his career in 2006, at an Asian restaurant near his Germantown home. The philosophical echoes between father and son suggest as strong a family resemblance as their broad, beaming smiles. The violinist celebrated his own parents for instilling a reverence for the arts in their children – both John and his sister, storyteller and librettist Charlotte Blake Alston.
“The arts were really a big thing in our family,” Blake, Jr. said. “My father was a writer and a great lover of literature and poetry, particularly the great African-American poets like Paul Laurence Dunbar and James Weldon Johnson. We used to perform in church as a family, and he would always [recite] poetry.”
Early in our recent conversation, Johnathan expressed similar sentiments. “I’ve always told my kids that the arts were going to be an important aspect in their lives, but I try not to push it on them,” the drummer explained. “They were chilling in the playpen at The Jazz Gallery at an early age. My father was the same way: he never tried to push music on me, but he definitely made us aware of it.”
At the same time, both men described the balance that they sought to strike between their two passions. The elder Blake said that he’d resisted the urge to leave Philly in part to help maintain the balance between career and family that he so valued. “When I started having kids, I hated going out of town,” he told me. “I think that’s challenging for any musician. I remember one time we drove by the train station and my youngest daughter shouted, ‘Daddy!’ She thought I lived there.”
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"Don't play what the public want. You play what you want and let the public pick up on what you doin' -- even if it take them fifteen, twenty years." (Thelonious Monk) | Meine Sendungen auf Radio StoneFM: gypsy goes jazz, #158 – Piano Jazz 2024 - 19.12.2024 – 20:00 | Slow Drive to South Africa, #8: tba | No Problem Saloon, #30: tba