Part I is : https://silverstadt.wordpress.com/2010/08/16/joe-blaxx-interview/
HAVE STICKS, WILL TRAVEL (PART II OR HOW I MET MAURICE ‘MOBETTA’ BROWN)
Joe Blaxx left the New School at twenty-two and caught his first big break when saxophonist Wess “Warmdaddy” Anderson saw Mr. Blaxx perform during a jam session at Cleopatra’s Needle on Broadway and 92nd Street. Three months later, in the summer of 2004, he was backing Mr. Anderson at the Village Vanguard. This led to increased visibility for Mr. Blaxx on the downtown music scene. Fate crossed his path one evening at The Jazz Gallery when Roy Hargrove hosted a week of nightly trumpet sessions. Mr. Blaxx was with his friend, the saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin, when a stranger gave him a fist bump after he left the stage. “This guy was coming through the audience and shook my hand. That stuck out, because I didn’t know the guy.”
Mr. Blaxx, always the spiritual believer, recalled thinking, “I’ll bet you I’ll wind up playing with this dude.” The “dude” in question was Maurice Brown, the Chicago native who was tearing up New Orleans with his trumpet. They saw each other again at a jam session at Sweet Rhythm and “Maurice was mad cool to me.” Mr. Blaxx’s good friend, DJ Center (Emil Herscher), was about to bust the music world himself with his first “official event” at a club in the West Village. After DJ Center’s show, Mr. Blaxx went out with him to a club and by chance, met the pianist/vocalist Chris Rob, another Chicago native who was exiting his role as musical director for John Legend. A month later, Mr. Blaxx was with DJ Center again when they crossed paths again with Mr. Rob and Mr. Brown at Small’s. Mr. Brown, as his wont, took out his horn and played. “I felt like we were long lost brothers”, Mr. Blaxx remembered.
This was a few months before Hurricane Katrina forced Mr. Brown to relocate to Brooklyn. Mr. Brown’s “Soul’d U Out”, a loosely knit collection of musicians he began in New Orleans, had reformed again in New York. The hip-hop/funk band needed a drummer. In early 2006, Mr. Rob was in a yellow cab heading uptown when he looked out the window on 6th Avenue and saw a drum kit stacked in the backseat of the car Mr. Blaxx was driving parallel to the cab. Fate again had hit Mr. Blaxx in a positive manner. Though he had never heard him play, Mr. Rob, a master of the correct hunch, told Mr. Blaxx about the Nu-Blu club late night sessions on Avenue A in the East Village. Mr. Blaxx went as a paying customer to a Sold’ U Out show at Nu Blu and by the end of the evening was banging his drums on stage with Mr. Brown, Mr. Rob, keyboardist Ray Angry, bassist Taurus, several rappers, and most memorably, for those lucky to have attended one of those shows, the unforgettable go-go dancers inside cages.
“I stuck around, even when I wasn’t playing, just to let them know I was into the music.” Mr. Blaxx recalls. One jam session led to another until finally, Mr. Brown asked in his inimitable manner: “Blaxx, you wanna be down, let’s do it.”
They’ve been together ever since.
A tiny irony is that while they came together via these hip-hop/funk jams, Mr. Blaxx remembers “I wanted to get away from the groove stuff and concentrate on jazz and along comes Maurice, who’s a classically trained jazz trumpeter.” Thus, began the jaunts to Brooklyn where Mr. Brown was forming a new quintet. “I started going out to Brooklyn where Maurice and Chris lived. I’d take the subway to work on things. They saw something in my playing so they kept me around” he recalls with a laugh.” I was eager to work on my talent. I needed that constructive criticism and I also wanted to feel comfortable with my peers, something that happened very quickly. And eventually, if I had a moment of doubt or wasn’t comfortable, Maurice or Chris would just say, “This is the groove, just do your ‘Blaxx’ thing.”
Word of Mr.Blaxx’s talent caught the ears of his peers, leading him to play with Bruce Williams, Marc Cary, Meshell N’degeocello, Wynton Marsalis, and Walter Blanding. Yet, his heart and soul was intertwined with Mr. Brown’s trumpet majesty and Mr. Rob’s eclectic, beautiful piano. The Maurice Brown Quintet was formally reborn as a jazz group. Solomon Dorsey, the innovative Kansas City bassist, joined as did Mr. Brown’s long time New Orleans saxophonist, the subtlety explosive Derek Douget.
Most of the quintet’s early shows relied heavily on material from Mr. Brown’s 2004 debut, the critically acclaimed FROM HIP TO BOP. One reason was Katrina (some of Mr. Brown’s music washed away) and the trumpter’s re-inventing himself as a local now living in Brooklyn. Yet, Mr. Brown’s new material eventually resurfaced into their shows. A calculated decision by Mr. Brown was to take his band on the road as backing musicians for Atlantic Record’s Laura Izibor. Ms. Izibor, signed as a teenager in her native Ireland, had her own material, thus putting Mr. Blaxx in a unique situation: Jazz chops were replaced by pop grooves, limiting any real improvisation by the musicians while performing live. The upside for Mr. Blaxx was touring the world as well as the opportunity to play several shows a week for a period that extended almost 18 months into 2009.
“With Izzy (Ms. Izibor), her album had already been recorded, so I actually had to learn the material off her CD. Basically, my versions of the grooves were already laid down on the record. It took me about a week to nail it.” The tour was a big success as Mr. Blaxx, who had never been out of the country, played Paris, Tokyo, Rome, and countless other cities in Europe and Asia. “I spent almost 200 nights on the road in 2009. It was a great experience as I got to travel around the world and experience an R&B tour. It’s a different discipline than jazz, where you have more freedom on stage. With “Izzy” it was the same songs every night, a tight ship and you can’t get too crazy because you can’t get in the way of the artist.”
A tour break allowed Mr. Blaxx and Mr. Rob the honor of backing Stevie Wonder at one of President Obama’s inauguration concerts in Washington, D.C. Yet, Mr. Blaxx knew eventually that Maurice Brown’s new material would be his next full time situation. The life of the musician, regardless of how popular, is often the hustle and chase. Mr. Brown, Mr. Rob, and Mr. Douget dropped out of the Izibor tour during one of its breaks to focus on Mr. Brown’s new album, THE CYCLE OF LOVE.
In the fall of 2009, Mr. Blaxx and Mr. Dorsey rejoined the quintet, now dubbed the Maurice Brown Effect. Mr. Blaxx credits Mr. Brown with a musical education in the creative process. “Maurice writes with me in mind. Unlike many composers, he leaves spaces for the drums as part of the melody, spots open for the drums to fill in.” This all came to fruition when the quintet began devoting their entire set to the album, even before it was fully recorded in the studio. “It was very exciting to do a project live, before and after recording the songs. It was my first professional gig where I was on every song and then had the beauty of playing it live. It also helped being with my brothers as we’re all close, pushing each other on stage every night.”
He admits he felt like a “hired gun” while touring with Ms. Izibor, but enjoyed the experience. However, it doesn’t compare to “playing music you love and living out your dreams together”, in reference to THE CYCLE OF LOVE tour. “I’m totally blessed. I thank God, it’s his plan and I’m going through with the motions for him.” Although Mr. Blaxx consistently references his spirituality as the basis for his musical fortune and does attend church regularly when at home in Queens, he does admit to never going to church on the road. “A bit of the sinner must make me a better saint,” he jokes.
He describes how THE CYCLE OF LOVE was recorded in only 3-4 days, after playing the material live on stage for nearly a year. “Maurice always has the drummer in mind when he composes; it’s so organic for me. The creative door is open to do whatever grooves flow and the actual song is left for later. It’s Mo’s concept album where he wrote a lotta of the songs on his computer and would send me charts with melodies, something I had no experience with. At first, I definitely wasn’t hearing what Maurice was composing, but he gives so much space to the drummer, I was able to get the exact fills that he wanted. Playing it live before we recorded made it a helluva lot easier, also.”
A basketball fan, Mr. Blaxx likens the drummer’s role to the point guard: “I play through everyone’s solo, while trying to keep building or if needed, slow down the tempo. I keep all the cues as a compliment to the leader of the band. I don’t direct what they’re gonna play, but feed their inspiration with energy and set up parts or take it up another notch.” On the particularly hypnotic opening track, TIME TICK TOCK, which mimics the sounds of a ticking watch slit open by Mr. Brown’s piercing horn, Mr. Blaxx recalls how he and the pianist,Mr. Rob, were able to create such an effective sound. “Chris is such a perfectionist and that made it easier to get in synch with the piano and Mo just said ‘Blaxx’, I want to make sure that snare sounds like time ticking, while you have the whole groove thing around it.”
The creative process in any art form is often hard to decipher unless you have lived it. The music form, though, is another universe, simply because there is a specific musical language of notes, chords, time changes, and rhythms. Mr. Blaxx doesn’t seem to dwell on what constitutes the creative process because he is the creative process when he plays, as evidenced by his staggering drumming during Chris Rob’s Blue Note club show on August 16th. The Blue Note was a showcase for Mr. Rob’s recently released EP, MENTAL NOTES. In a set full of soulfully funked-out tunes exquisitely performed and sung by Mr. Rob, Mr. Blaxx kept the steady beat in the background and then rising to his own crescendo to meet Mr. Rob’s, especially on the song, “Sex, Money, and Drugs.”Additionally, Mr. Blaxx produced a song on Mental Notes, “Deep Inside.”
“Performing is therapeutic for me. We play and feed off each other’s feelings. Art imitates life, off and onstage because the love is always there.” He paused before saying softly, “It truly is the most exciting time of my life.”
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Live From Minutiae, Connecticut! 
Great write up!! Love Mr. Blaxx.