By Michael Jeffers
John Bany is one of Chicago's best and most interesting bass players. His bass playing, in addition to his unique vocal style, has delighted audiences everywhere. He is a, veteran bass player, John has played at a number of festivals including: the original Big Horn (Ivanhoe, Illinois), the Chicago Jazz Festival (9 appearances), the Mid-American Jazz Festival (St. Louis, Missouri), Elkhart Jazz Festival (13 appearances) and the Atlanta World Music Fest.
John has studied bass with Charlie Medcalf, Harold Roberts and Richard Topper (all bassists with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra) and holds a degree in music from Miami University, Oxford Ohio. After winning the United States Air Force Worldwide Talent Contest in 1964, he went on the road with the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra and has subsequently served as jazz editor for the International Society of Bassists Magazine, 1984-1988.
Mr. Bany has recorded with Joe Venuti, Bud Freeman, Eddie Higgins, Bonnie Koloc, Chuck Hedges and Don DeMichael (The Swingtet).
He can be heard on the Grammy Nominated album, The Real Bud Freeman 1984, Principally Jazz Productions (PJPO1, CDO1), which received 4 and a 1/2 stars in Downbeat Magazine. He can also be heard on the Grammy Award winning album, Tribute to Stevie Goodman.
John Bany has played with Buck Clayton, Freddie Hubbard, Wild Bill Davison, Don Goldie, Ira Sullivan, Benny Goodman, Benny Carter, Scott Hamilton, Red Wolf, Butch Miles, Barrett Deems, Art Hodes, Herb Ellis, Bob Wilber, Jerry Fuller, Kenny Davern, Jimmy McPartland and Marian McPartland, Eric Schneider, Franz Jackson, Eddie Johnson, Johnny Board, Bobby Lewis, Cy Touff, Norm Murphy and Ron Dewar, Cal Collins, Billy Butterfield, Doc Cheatham, Buddy DeFranco, Benny Powell, Yank Lawson, Red Holloway, Peter Appleyard, Glen Zattola and many others.
John grew up in Ohio but moved to Chicago and has called it his home for over 30 years. I sat down with John and his wife, Nancy, and we talked about how he came to be one of Chicago's great bass players.
A.A.J.: How did you end up in Chicago?
John Bany: Well, Nancy was pregnant with Martin in 1970; I was on the road with the Bany Brothers. Every time I came through Chicago, it had the largest number of swing musicians. I am not a modern be-bopper at all really. So if we were going to settle down somewhere, it was going to be some place like New York or Chicago, probably not LA. So we came here and found our place and settled down. Chicago to me is where Jazz started. The first recording was made in Chicago with Louis Armstrong and Earl "Fatha" Hines. That is the first time two people spontaneously co-created with music on a recording. That to me is the first time "jazz" was recorded, and it happened here in Chicago.
A.A.J.: That was a Dixieland type recording. What do you feel is the difference between New Orleans and Chicago Dixieland music?
J.B.: The difference between New Orleans Dixieland and Chicago Dixieland are two things. New Orleans used Banjo, Tuba, Trombone, Clarinet and Trumpet. In Chicago, we use the String Bass, Piano, Clarinet, Trombone, Trumpet and Drums. That to me is my favorite way to play and hear Dixieland. A regular rhythm section with a strong front line.
A.A.J.: Didn't Barrett Deems play a lot of Dixieland Music?
J.B.: Sure, Barrett was the greatest Dixieland drummer probably of all time. He used to play it with Louie Armstrong, and when he would get going, the power he created felt like a locomotive. What a great sound.
A.A.J.: You were in a group with your brother Dave that toured around. How did that come about?
J.B.: The Bany Brothers was the name of the group that Dave Bany ,my older brother, and I started. We performed a scattering of show tunes, jazz and other things. It wasn't really a jazz group, more like a Vegas Show. It was myself and Dave along with a drummer and some other musicians. We got the band started when I came home from being on the road with Don Goldie. I was on the road with him for about 2 ÃÂÃÂ
ÃÂÃÂ years. This was right after Nancy and I got married. She came with, and it was like a 2 ÃÂÃÂ
ÃÂÃÂ year honeymoon. Everywhere we played with Goldie was either a really nice nightclub or a resort. We played in Niagara Falls for 8 weeks. Jobs like that don't exist anymore. So then I came home, and Dave had a gig for us at the Holiday Inn in Middletown Ohio. That was 1967. During that year I went back to school at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio and got my diploma. My degree is a bachelor of arts with a major in Music and a minor in Russian. That year, on top of all the other things happening, I had my first child.
A.A.J.: Do you know what your first jazz recording was?
J.B.: The first real Jazz album I was ever on was a Joe Venuti record called " Joe and Chicago." There were two days of recording. On the first day, there was John Young on piano, Barrett Deems on drums, myself on bass and of course Joe Venuti on Violin. Then on the second day, two guys came to the session. One played mandolin, Jethro Burns, and the other was Stevie Goodman; they were both old friends of Joe's. These guys had played with Joe a bunch, so they had all their licks worked out. Stevie Goodman played just great in the pocket rhythm guitar. The three of them together played really tight and really swung. That was a really great album. That was the first jazz recording I was ever on. So I took my kids to the record store and bought the album. I looked on the back and it said " John Vany," not Bany. I said "Well, I am on a Venuti album; I guess that's ok".
A.A.J.: So you got to town and started working right away?
J.B.: I started working at the Backroom almost immediately. I look back on it, and somehow I was the new thing in town that everyone was crazy about. I started working the Back Room, and they made it my job. I think because I sang a few songs and talked on the mike. I started working the Back Room, and that lasted for 5 years. That was a great place for me; I played with Ed Higgins for the first time there, Roland Kirk, Eddie Picard, and many others. When I first got to Chicago, I played an 8 square block radius in downtown and never went anywhere else. That's how Chicago used to be. When I first got to play with Eddie Higgins at the Back Room, I remember he called me up from Florida and asked me if I could play the dates at the Back Room with him. I was really calm and collected and said, "Sure Eddie, I am available for those dates." Then I hung up the phone and went "Yahoooo." I was so excited that he had called me and that I was going to be able to perform with him. Eddie is one of my favorite musicians ever. Because he is not just chops, he is so musical. More people seem to care about having speed rather then being musical.
A.A.J.: Who were some of the Bass players that influenced you?
J.B.: I have 500 bass players, and I can tell you about each one of them. I have heard most of them in person. Slam Stewart, Milt Hinton, my dad. Francois Rabat, he is such an incredible technician. George Duvivier. Truck is a Chicago Bass player; he was a pro football player, so when he digs into the bass he really digs in. Many other bass players have influenced me as well. There have been so many.
A.A.J.: So Did you know Milt Hinton well?
J.B.: Yes, I first met him at the Big Horn Jazz Festival. When they moved that fest to the Holiday Inn in Rosemont, I really got to know him. I would see him at the Elk Hart Jazz fest, along with his wife, Moana, and my wife, Nancy, we would go out to dinner and just have a great time. Milt always made you feel like the most special person in the room. At the Chicago Jazz Fest this year, I am getting a tribute to Milt together. There is going to be 4 bass players and 1 drummer. Milt not only used to play bass, but he also used to sing. One of the tunes he used to vocalize was called "Old Man Time," but I don't know if I am going to do any singing at the tribute.
A.A.J.: How did you get started singing?
J.B.: When I was 6 years old, Dave, my older brother, and I started singing on the street corner while my mom was in a store buying a dress. All of a sudden we started getting money from different people. This was a small town in Ohio where everyone gossiped. The two of us kept it up long enough to get big handfuls of change. We took the money and went into the dress store to find her. Imagine the embarrassment she had when her kids came running up to her with the change and said, "here is the money for the dress mom." That is when I started singing, and I have kept it up all these years. Lots of musicians used to sing until it became un-hip to sing. Lester Young used to tell young players to know the lyrics. Everything is in there; the phrasing, you can't get lost if you know the lyrics.
A.A.J.: So your dad was a bass player?
J.B.: Yes, he also played rhythm guitar, but mainly bass. He played all over the country; Willard Alexander and MCA booked them. Willard Alexander booked the Basie Band, as well as The Dorsey Band. My dad had a Quartet, and they would play the same venues as a big band, like the Edge Water Beach Hotel and get away with it somehow. I have no recordings of him whatsoever. I know they did a little comedy along with playing. They wore white tie and tails. The instrumentation was guitar, bass, vibes. The vibe player used to double on piano, accordion and violin.
A.A.J.: So he started teaching you bass?
J.B.: No dad got me a private teacher, Charlie Medcalf, a bassist for the Cincinnati Symphony. He would come over to my house and teach me in the basement for $5 per lesson. My dad was a hell of a salesman. Then I started playing right away. I knew what the bass was supposed to sound like, but I had no idea of what I was playing. Everyone I was playing with thought I did. I started playing with Jimmy Ryan in 1960. Recently, we were sitting together and were talking about how we got started. He said to me, "I thought you knew what you were doing?" And I said, "I thought you knew what you were doing?"
A.A.J.: So then you were in Chicago and playing all the time on Rush Street, how did you decide to start running Jam sessions?
J.B.: When I was real little, my dad used to have jam sessions in our kitchen. He would have them at night. Although I was supposed to be in bed, I would sneak down and listen to them play. To me, it was the most exciting sound. Whatever they were doing in there, I just loved it. That has a lot to do with why I run jam sessions now. To me a session has so much drama going on during a tune if you just know what to look for. It is like watching a baseball game. If you don't know anything about the game, you still enjoy it, but not as much as if you really know what to look for.
A.A.J.: How did the Weeds gig get going? (Weeds, is a little bar on Weed street in Chicago. This is not a jazz club but around town it was well known that on Thursday nights you can hear John's band playing there. You can also sit in if you know the band.)
J.B.: Sergio Myora, whose family owned the place, kept bugging us to play there. So finally, Martin Bany, my son, Bobby Roberts and myself started playing there. There was nobody in the place for about 6 months, and then we added Karl Leukoff (vibes),Carl Wright (harmonica) and George Bean (Trumpet). The place started getting packed, and a couple months later, you could not get in the place. That lasted about 5 years; the gig lasted 14 years all together. We had a bunch of drummers as well, Martin Bany, Rusty Jones, Charlie Braugham, Barrett Deems, Paul Wertico, Phil Grauttea. Guitarists included Bobby Roberts, Curtis Robinson, John McClean and my brother Dave.
A.A.J.: How long have you been playing at, another great jazz club, "Andy's?"
J.B.: The first band that started playing at Andy's started at 5 pm, the Ted Butterman band. I played the first two weeks of that gig because the regular bass player (Truck Parham) was in New York with Pearl Bailey. Then about two months later we started with a swingtet on Wednesday nights at 5pm. That went over big; you couldn't get into the place. It was really a strange phenomenon that people pick then to all of a sudden start going to Andy's, but it worked. From that point on, slowly but surely, they added a slot and a slot and a slot, until now they have music 7 days a week. Music 3 times a day: noon, 5 pm, 9 pm Mon-Fri, two groups on Saturdays and one on Sundays. 80 musicians a week they hire, Chicago is so lucky.
A.A.J.: You also got late night music into Andy's how did you do that?
J.B.: Originally Andy's catered to third shift workers, so they opened early in the morning and closed around 9pm. As I was leaving I started seeing about ÃÂÃÂ
ÃÂÃÂ dozen people, or even more, trying to get into the place. So I told the owner I would put a trio in the place for $60 dollars a night on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. I couldn't do Thursday because I was at Weeds; otherwise, I would have played there Thursday night as well. So Martin and I started playing their for $10 each, and we paid the piano player $40. It took off right away. Those time slots have been happening for about 13 yrs, and they seem to be some of the best time slots as far as business goes. So it really worked out.
A.A.J.: You have had some articles published in the International Society of Bassists magazine. What inspired you to write articles?
J.B.: I went to the bass convention at Northwestern in 1984; it was a six day convention. There were great jazz players but also great recitalists. I had never seen to many bass recitalists. These were guys that go around the world with just bass and piano and perform concerts. So I hung out at the convention and really got to know people there. I felt there was such brotherhood between the bassists, but throughout the whole week, I did not run into one person who knew who Slam Stewart was. I had begun collecting material about Slam for 5 years. Slam was a great influence on me as well as a great friend. Then Jeff Bradetich asked me if I would write an article about Slam Stewart. I said yes, even though I never did anything like it before in my life. I took journalism classes in high school and college, but I never really wrote anything for a publication. It took another 5 years to write the article, but I got it done. The editor didn't really edit too much, and it ended up on the cover of the International Society of Bassists magazine Vol. XI, no 2 winter 1985. After that article, they asked me to write some more articles, so I did a couple more. The best part was the research end of it, going to the library, looking on the backs of records. I learned a lot by writing those articles.
When John goes and does different clinics with young people, he tries to explain jazz in a very interesting way.
"Jazz isn't possible until you have J.S. Bach crystallize the rules of music, then Thomas Jefferson, through detailed study of government, and the Magna Carta, finding a way to have freedom within the laws of man.
This is a way that the kids can understand jazz. Yes very simplistic, but the kids know about the Magna Carta because they studied it in school and if you get any more detailed you will loose them.
The final thing I tell them is "If you apply freedom, to the laws of music, then you have jazz."
Mike Jeffers is a well known drummer/percussionist and educator within the Chicagoland area. He has performed in Chicago and around the world in many different venues. He is also a co-founder of ChicagoJazz.com.
