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| Marco Benevento |
Here is a link to and text of a music feature for the Providence Journal about Marco Benevento. To see story layout in Journal, click here.
DEFYING DESCRIPTION
Jazz, post-jazz, jam-rock. These are some of the labels slapped on keyboard player Marco Benevento’s work.
Benevento himself simply prefers to call what he does “music.”
“At this point, there’s no label that seems right,” Benevento says when reached by phone earlier this month. “I did play a lot of jazz rooms when I started, but then it got too loud for the jazz rooms.”
What would you expect from a guy who has a side gig playing Led Zeppelin covers? More on that later. Benevento is playing at Fete in Providence on Thursday with bassist Dave Dreiwitz and drummer Andy Borger.
Benevento recently released his fourth studio album, “Tiger Face.” He builds on his patented stylistic fusions by adding vocals to his list of sonic ingredients. Rubblebucket singer Kalmia Traver appears on two tracks, and Benevento explains that bringing her into the mix was not exactly something he had planned on.
The song “This is How it Goes” began as an instrumental, but, as Benevento explains, “I could hear syllables to the melody.”
“I wrote some words quickly. My wife and I sang the words over the track, and it was my first time doing something like that,” he says. “I listened to the demo and thought, ‘I should get a real singer.’ I saw Kalmia with Rubblebucket and think that band is at a peak.”
“Tiger Face” includes both the instrumental and vocal versions of “This is How It Goes,” providing insight into how Traver’s ethereal vocal sprinkled a haunting quality across the pitter-patter of the tune.
“Limbs of a Pine” is a fuller collaboration between Traver and Benevento, as she cooked up the impressionist lyrics and sleek melody for the more uptempo and funkier one of the two vocal ventures.
After graduating from Berklee College of Music in 1999, Benevento became active in the jazz and experimental-music scenes in New York City. Performing on piano, organ and electric keys, Benevento conjured an array of tones and styles filtered through such projects as the Benevento Russo Duo with drummer Joe Russo, Garage a Trois, Coalition of the Willing and GRAB, also with Russo and Phish’s Trey Anastasio and Mike Gordon. Oh, and then there’s Bustle in Your Hedgerow, the Led Zeppelin cover project he started about a decade ago with Russo, Dreiwitz and guitarist Scott Metzger; that band is actually making an appearance at this summer’s Bonnaroo festival.
In 2008, Benevento released his first studio album under his own name. On “Tiger Face,” he brings aboard various conspirators, such as drummer Matt Chamberlain, sax player Stuart Bogie and violin player Ali Heinwein.
Benevento says he is virtually a producer once he gets his hands on the original tracks from a recording session and begins adding keyboard parts to provide each song with a rich texture.
“It gets tricky because you don’t want too much ornamentation,” he says.
Likewise, when it comes to the live show, Benevento says he thinks like a DJ, mindful of how songs flow one into the next. And thanks to loops and electric keys, he can replicate the various parts he plays on a particular recorded song. In concert, Benevento and his rhythm section will work through a bunch of songs before landing on one that opens up to a swath of improvisation, then head back into more neatly arranged numbers.
“You can really lose your focus if you just concentrate on the music,” he says. “I think I’m better now at putting on a good show, playing the right things at the right time.”
Scott McLennan can be reached at smclennan1010@gmail.com . Follow him on Twitter @ScottMcLennan1
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