How did you become a jazz guitar musician ?
Art Johnson : "When I was 7 years old, I played the accordion - it was a big fashion in the USA at the time - and I didn't like it very much. I played it for about two years.
The guitar came very late, I didn't really have the desire to play until I was fifteen or sixteen years old. I had to go to hospital for an operation on my leg, and it came out I was going to be in bed for six months. A friend of mine brought me a guitar so I could mess around with it and it kind of started that way.
Then I heard some very famous guitarists on the radio and I was really knocked out. I always tell people "I didn't find music, it found me."
What was your first encounter with jazz ?
Art Johnson : "I have an older sister and she had a record collection of jazz as it was the popular music of the 50's. So I would go into her boudoir and put on a Miles Davis' album... It was curious to me, I liked it, but still I was really young and nothing really grabbed me.
Like I said, it was listening to the radio one day - when I was sixteen or so - when I heard Wes Montgomery, Barney Kessel and the great classical guitarist from Spain, André Segovia. I didn't know who they were, but I wanted to know "how did they do that?".
It became a puzzle in a sense. And as far as having a career as a musician, it is one of those things that kind of fell into place. I was in my town, my sister was dating a bass player who heard me practising in my room and asked me to join his band. It started out that way, it was never anything planned, there was no school.
In fact I tried to major in music later on. When I was eighteen or nineteen I went to a college in San Diego and after one semester the Dean of the music departement asked me to come in his office - of course at the time jazz was not accepted as a study at all, so I was trying to play classical guitar but I wasn't that good - and he said "You know, I really think you should find something else to do with your life, you're not talented enough to play music".
I just left his office, took all my books and threw them in the trashcan and went home to practise. The funny thing is they've asked me to teach at that college twenty years later !"
Musical encounters and start of your career in Los Angeles?
Art Johnson : "My first encounter was another kind of accident. I had moved to Los Angeles and I was trying to make some contacts and not much was happening.
Gabor Szabo was a very famous guitarist, particularly at that time, 1969, but he had a habit of disappearing ! He was to record an album for Mercury in Los Angeles and they couldn't find him. The group did not want to use somebody already famous to take his place because it wouldn't look right, and they were trying to find somedy unknwon that could play professionally with them. I went to audition, got the engagement and entered their recording studio doing the entire album. A famous jazz critic of the time, Harvey Siders wrote a huge article about me in the LA newspaper after hearing me at the studio, and right after that, the phone started to ring !
The next thing I knew I was in five or six very famous ensembles at the same time !"
In 1994, you started playing the violin? Can you tell us why ?
Art Johnson : "I had a flirtation with the violin when I was 23. I had moved to L.A. at the time and there wasn't much to do. Like I said, I was trying to make contacts.
I was going to the library a lot and I found a biography of Mozart who had writen all of his violin concertos by the time he was 24 years old. And I thought : "I have to get a violin and find out about it".
So I got an old violin, a bow and a case for about 25$ and I was too stupid to know that probably it had been in the shop for years and that it needed to be fixed. I just came home and started playing it. It was horrible ! I struggled with it for a while and gave it up.
Years later, again an accident. I had a cheap guitar I'd given to a little music store to sell for me. I wanted 250$ for it. So I went in the store one day to see if they had sold my guitar. They had sold it, but the guy didn't have the money. Instead, he had a violin worth 250$, so I took it home. I didn't have a bow, but then a very strange story : I was playing a jazz trio and a guy who repairs violin's bows walked in. He listened for a while then came up and introduced himself. He told me : "you left your violin bow with me and you never picked it up." and he handed it to me and left !
It is a very difficult instrument, very demanding. You should really start when you're five years old. It's an in and out instrument. I think the violin is the most living of all musical instruments, more so than the guitar would ever be. It talks to you, it tells you what it wants you to do and you have to listen. I'm not just talking from my standpoint. A lot of great violonist have said that. Then, there are little secrets about how to play and everybody has to find their own - because technically speaking it is impossible to play this instrument in tune and it has never been played in tune. We think it is in tune, our ears tell us it's in tune but you have to be able to hit something that is less than 1/10th of a millimiter with something that is 3 millimiters cross, how can you ? It is impossible. So by pushing it and hitting the note not quite right but by having your ear correct it in 100th of a millisecond, everybody thinks it is fine.
And to improvise on the instrument, that's where it becomes really difficult. It is not like playing a piece of Bach, where the notes are right in front of you. In jazz there are no notes, so you have to hear them. It's an instrument that demands that anyway, no matter if you're playing classical or Celtic Irish music or folk music... you have to hear the notes you want a split second before you play it - and that's a requirement in jazz, no matter what the instrument is.
Probably in some small way it was kind of my own intellectual rebelion against technology because you cannot push a button and play the violin.... a quiet revolution against the easy way."
How do you combine both instruments ? How do you decide when to play which ?
Art Johnson : "I answered it the other night because I had a wonderful quartet with my favorite musicians : Jean-Marc Jafet on bass, Jean-Luc Danna on drums and Jean-Yves Candela on piano. Jean-Marc Jafet had never heard me play the violin, Jean-Yves and I have played together the violin and the piano and Jean-Luc and I have played in trio with a bass, like the Coltrane style : violin drums and bass - no keyboards nor guitar.
I was thinking about it only maybe an hour before I went to play that night : Am I going to play guitar first and then play the violin or what ?
And I just decided no. I'll play violin first, that was the mood I felt like.
think the word mood has a lot to do with it. Sometimes I take the violin out and I can tell it is really going to be a struggle... How do I choose ? That night I decided I play violin first and I am glad I did because it was some of the best jazz violin playing I ever did...
The funny thing is after I started playing the violin, it started to affect my guitar playing."
Violinists who have influenced you ?
Art Johnson : "Didier Lockwood. I discovered him went I went to Paris for a vacation in 1997. He is a fabulous musician and a great composer. France should be very proud of him. He's opened a school for jazz. He's always helping young players.
Jean-Luc Ponty is the one who really showed me the way and left the Grappelli's style. Most people end up imitating Grappelli. I don't, even though I have 40 or 50 CD of him. I've listened to him a lot, he was a big influence but I didn't try to imitate him.
Jean-Luc Ponty did that album [H/L/P - Dreyfus Jazz] with Eddy Louiss on the organ and Daniel Humair in 68. He was only 19 or 20 years old - that was a whole new treatment of jazz violin playing. That was when the modern school of jazz wiolin was started. With Grappelli, Ponty and Lockwood, you have a whole series of great French violonist players."
What attracted you to come the South of France
 Art Johnson : "I first came to the South France when I was on a tour with Lena Horne and came back under my own name a year and a half ago.
My wife is French - from Nice - and I've always been a francophile amateur. I've read French poetry and I've always been attracted to the French culture. Debussy, Ravel and Satie, they gave us the harmony. America has a lot to do with jazz but the modern school of harmony comes from the French composers. Bill Evans thought that, I don't think it is a controversial issue.
I came here last summer with a real unusual quartet : two guitars and two percussions - no bass. We played in different places, festivals and clubs and I got a lot of newspaper coverage.
I came back in November just by myself and met a lot of musicians, did some more work and a couple of free concerts. 9/11 had happened and I wanted to thank France for some of the volunteers work they had done, so I did free concerts for the mentally handicaped children in Menton. That was a great experience. The kids were marvellous.
We kind of let music become a trash can in the last 30 years or so. It is unfortunate. There are so many amateurs who are famous because they have a wonderful image or they won a contest or something like that... we need to start correcting that quickly or we're not going to have any music left soon.
Real music - which is done by real disciplined people who have put the time in - does have a way of communicating on levels that are not sensorial. It's like Louis Armstrong answering to some guy asking him what kind of music he was playing : "There is only two kind of music, there is good music and bad music. I play good music."
And that's really what it's all about wheither it's classical or jazz or alternative or rock..."
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