It’s not always easy to tell where a road begins. For
producer, musician, and songwriter Johno, the road to his first solo album The
Road Not Taken began imperceptibly. Its unconventional path proved long,
winding, and musically breathtaking, embracing music and musicians from around
the Mediterranean and Ireland and poetry from Shakespeare to Mahmoud Darwish.
The wild trip that led to The Road Not Taken might have
begun the moment Johno got his first producer gig in Albania or in the West
Bank. It might have started that moment in a library in Tunisia, when Johno
sketched out a setting for a beloved poem with a local friend and violinist. It
may have started decades before, when his parents, Irish-born, London-based,
shared verses close to their hearts, quietly inspiring their son.
This poetic inheritance unfolded for Johno over time,
revealing hidden melodies and songs. “When you read these poems, they have
these beautiful meters,” he reflects. “You just have to discover the songs in
them. Much like Michelangelo said about stones, that they were all waiting to
have a sculpture carved out them, these poems were begging to become musical
compositions.”
But the compositions he discovered were radical departures
from the poem’s origins, suggesting styles and locations for recording far off
the beaten path. Johno drew on a decade of close collaboration and recording
experience around the Balkans, North Africa, the Middle East, and Turkey, as
well as his ancestral stomping grounds of Ireland, to find astonishing
arrangements for the songs that sprang from poems.
As companions to his original pieces, Johno chose several
songs that fit the theme and resonated with the other works, and heard them
through the same unconventional filter. “It was important for me to have a few
key covers take a trip,” he explains. “So I didn’t just want to do the Beatles
track as a jazz number. Instead, I put it in ⅞ and recorded it in Jordan with a
Turkish orchestra. I recorded a really straightforward John Denver song with a
Tunisian orchestra with two hundred tracks of instruments, vocal harmonies, and
percussion. I loved these songs and simply heard them differently.”
Johno was trained as a jazz musician but found himself
increasingly in the recording booth on the other side of the glass. His skills
were coupled with a growing fascination with the sounds, styles, and musical
thought he discovered in other cultures. Over time, project after project came
to him. As he worked with more and more well-established musicians in far-flung
locales, their music and craft began to seep into his own writing.
It wasn’t, however, until recently that he resolved to step
in front of the mic. Johno realized he had enough material to make his first
album, songs he’d built up over years of travel and homecoming. The basis for
these pieces was the poems he knew from childhood, as well as poems by icons
like Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish that he discovered along this journey.
They influenced the way he crafted music.
“Like many writers, I sometimes start with a riff, but to
work with these poems, I chose a more theatrical way. You take the poem and
read it really slowly, repeatedly and theatrically. it’s embarrassing to even
demonstrate,” he laughs. “After you do that, you have the scale. You hear, for
example, that it’s kind of major but it has a flat two, which suggests a
certain mode you’ll hear in Arabic music. That scale is there, at the back of
your mind, and it just blends with cadence of the poem.”
Once a song had emerged, Johno decided where the song could
best be recorded, often fitting sessions into his travels as a producer. He
invited his favorite musicians to join him, from American jazz heavyweights to
Arabic hotshots. “Each song lent itself to the location. If you’re recording
something like ‘Country Road,’ in ⅞ with Arabic riffs, it needs to be recorded
in Tunis. Byron’s ‘Made for Loving,’ took a famous Arabic melody for the
chorus...You can’t do that and record it in Germany!” Johno exclaims. “That’s
why it was recorded in Jordan and Turkey. ‘Homeward Bound,’ the only song about
returning home, had to be in Ireland.”
The resulting tracks are steeped in the sounds and
approaches of these places, the bold horns of the Balkans, the elegant modal
melodies of the Eastern Mediterranean, the rippling percussion lines. “It’s
more than influence, really; the feeling of the place where I recorded--Jordan,
Tunis, Ireland--is baked in there,” Johno notes. “The album wound up weaving in
rhythms in 13, 7, 10, 5, as well as Arabic and Turkish modes, North African
tonality. I’m lucky to know the best musicians in each place, because I’ve
already had a chance to work with them.”
Some of these talents contributed directly to the
composition process, as in the case of “If,” the popular Kipling poem. Johno
handed the poem over to a close friend and talented musician Nikos
Mixalodimitrakis, who lives not far from Johno in Greece. What came back was a
wonderful surprise, a version in 5/4 with serious Greek traditional flavor. “If
I had tackled it alone, it would never have sounded anything like it,” Johno
says. “I love giving something to people you trust and then getting it back and
being delighted.” This different, delightful approach to classic poetry
promises to take listeners and literary buffs along for the moving ride.
50% of the album’s earnings will be put back to
community cultural development in Johno’s various philanthropic collaborations.
