Jim Duffy FAQ
What is Jim Duffy?
Jim Duffy is a musician in Brooklyn, N.Y., who composes and records moody and bouncy instrumental pop tunes. His first collection, Side One, was released in 2005. The second, Mood Lit, was released in October 2009.
Does he play all the instruments?
No, he is not Stevie Wonder or Todd Rundgren. He plays keyboards, mostly an early-1960s Wurlitzer electronic piano, though in live performance he sometimes plays other keyboards. He also played bass guitar for many years and sometimes still does. His usual recording and performing combo consists of Dennis Diken on drums, Paul Page on bass and Lance Doss on guitars, plus special guests.
Why doesn’t he sing?
Duffy says, “Instrumental music engages the listener in a different way from vocal music. You don’t have to process verbal information on top of musical information. It translates better across language barriers. Not too many people are making instrumental pop music in a non-retro way, so the field is wide open.”
Wait, is this jazz?
No, not really. Duffy says, “Lennie Tristano made a distinction between jazz as a style and as an art form. If we improvise and get ‘jazzy,’ it’s as a style, not as an art form. This is pop music, and that means anything can happen.”
Would you tell us more about some of the other musicians who are involved?
With pleasure. Dennis Diken is best known as the drummer for the world-renowned Smithereens, but that may be about to change. Diken's new record, Late Music, credited to Dennis Diken and the Bell Sound, proves that he is not only a master of the American trap kit, he is also a pop visionary who composes, sings, harmonizes, arranges and produces fully-realized pop orchestrations to a frightening degree.
Bassist Paul Page is one of the most sought-after bass players on the East Coast. He is heard on Ian Hunter's latest album, "Man Overboard," and he will resume touring with the Hunter band in the spring. Page and Duffy are longtime associates, having played together in the band Martin's Folly.
Lance Doss, on guitars and lap steel, has recorded and performed with John Cale, among many others. Doss is also a compelling solo performer, as well as a prolific producer and studio operator. Doss' other activities are a mystery.
The basic group of Duffy, Diken, Page and Doss sometimes performs as the Jim Duffy Combo at the Lakeside Lounge on Avenue B in Manhattan, among other venues.
Now it's starting to sound "rock" to me.
It's true, they all came up through the rock basements, separately and together, playing in that exciting style while it was in its heyday. In Duffy's case, he played many hundreds of gigs with rock bands and saw a fair amount of this great country.
As the glory of rock dissipates into the ether, this leads us to the impasse that any incorrigible musician must face sooner or later: After 55 years of rock, what next?
In Duffy's case, he did not have much formal training, and he did not grow up with a "jazz" background, and that was most likely for the better. No one would ever accuse him of being overly sophisticated. He switched from bass guitar to the electric piano in order to make his musical grunts and groans more intelligible.
Still, he had gaping holes in his musical wherewithal. What was next? He scrambled to fill in the gaps. He found himself in a race against time, to save his own life, to find out what was next. He must justify himself.
He was not cut out for the "me-and-my-problems" school of singer-songwriting. Nor was he about to don an unearned cowboy hat and "go country," especially since he was born in Long Branch, N.J. Nor was he ready to go retrograde and turn himself into a laugh-at-me parody of a lounge act, unless it was unintentional.
This impasse explains a lot. Behind that skittish, jumpy exterior is a man who is a bundle of nerves.
In early 2001, a lightbulb appeared above his head, marked "instrumental pop music." Three-minute pop tunes, each one a tightly composed soundscape, in which anything can happen. So simple, yet so seldom done. He telephoned Dennis Diken, and things began looking up.
It sounds as though Duffy hasn't been playing piano very long. Is he any good?
Rather than answer that, let me tell you about some of the other people involved. Sound engineer Greg Duffin, who is no relation, is a close collaborator. Duffin, who works the mixing desk on Regina Spektor's world tours, is an aficionado of analog recording. Duffin's heart dilates in the presence of a glowing tube-powered compressor. Duffin recorded and mixed "Mood Lit" to tape, as he did "Side One."
Both albums were both recorded and mixed in the basement studio of Cowboy Technical Services in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which is operated by Eric "Roscoe" Ambel and Tim Hatfield.
You haven't answered my question.
Other participants include Kevin Kendrick on vibraphone. Kendrick has been turning heads and offending delicate sensibilities in the almost-too-creative group A Big Yes and a Small No. Kendrick is 110 pounds of sheer terror in a fabulous velvet jacket.
Brass virtuoso Mac Gollehon is like a comet -- he comes and goes as he pleases. Duffy is still not sure how Gollehon devises and executes those arrangements on valve trombone, flugelhorn and trumpet, and yet Gollehon does it -- the evidence is on the tape. Then he vanishes, as mysteriously as he came.
Baritone saxophonist Claire Daly makes a special appearance on "Mood Lit." Her solo on "Balladeer" is a bright moment. You should hear her for yourself -- she often performs with New York pianist/composer Joel Forrester, who is an entire subject unto himself.
You look as though you're about to tell me more.
Only that "Mood Lit" was mastered by Scott Hull, who has won several of those prizes that look like little gramophones.
Duffy looks kind of old and creepy.
I’m sorry, I’m not hearing a question.
How old is he?
Jim Duffy was born in Long Branch, N.J. during the second term of the Eisenhower administration. Cars still had big fins, and television sets took a long time to warm up, but the recent launch of Sputnik was already changing all of that. Duffy remembers very little of this period.
Via a quirk of history, Duffy was too young to remember the Kennedy assassination, but his first living memory came three months later, in February 1964, when at the age of 3 he witnessed the Beatles' first performance on the "Ed Sullivan Show." This was a life-altering experience from which Duffy has yet to recover.
Is it true that Jim Duffy is the brother of Karen "Duff" Duffy?
Yes.
Any formal instruction?
As a child, Duffy had four years of piano lessons with a Mrs. McCarthy in Rumson, N.J. He says, "Anything I have done in music falls back on those four years with Mrs. McCarthy."
In 1966, when Duffy was a cool 6 years old, he played a recital at the local high school auditorium, dressed to the baby-teeth in his new suit and a fresh crewcut. When he had finished playing "The Alphabet Song," he turned to the audience, bowed and retreated to the wings, at which point he realized that he had left his musical score on the piano. He went back on stage, retrieved the music, then turned and bowed again. The whole house broke up. This was Duffy's first taste of showbiz.
In the year 1975, he purchased an early-'60s short-scale Fender Musicmaster bass for $75. (The same model bass was recently displayed in the window of Matt Umanov's guitar shop on Bleecker Street with a price tag of $1,800.) He took bass-guitar lessons for a couple of years, off and on, studying from the Simandl book. More to the point, he started jamming in a basement with a bunch of young burnouts, playing the Who's arrangement of "Summertime Blues" over and over again. Every time they approached that big modulation at the end, they all looked at each other with great anticipation. This nameless band played one gig, at a church social in Hackensack, N.J., on the gymnasium stage while a basketball game was in progress.
Duffy quit this nameless group and joined an up-and-coming band called Fragile. The lead singer, Sam Tarrant, looked like a teenage Peter Frampton and played electric guitar through a talk-box. The band played hits from "Frampton Comes Alive," which had conquered the world the previous summer. The keyboard player was Joe DiNicola, the son of "Mr. Peppermint Twist" himself, Joey Dee. On drums was Nick Policastro, who played a clear lucite drumkit with lights all around it, and a gong. Fragile had a dry-ice smoke machine, strobe lights, flashpots (yes, pyrotechnics), the whole works. They performed at church "dances," at which no one danced.
As the name of the band may suggest, Fragile's specialty was doing epic-length opuses by the British band Yes. Bear in mind that the year was 1976, and these guys were not yet shaving daily. The teenage Duffy would step into the spotlight and play the excruciating bass solo to "Heart of the Sunrise."
Despite all this, Duffy managed to kiss a girl for the first time, at which point all that prog-rock stuff went -- poof -- out the window.
None too soon, I'd say.
When Duffy arrived at university in Boston in the late 1970s, he found that the Summer of Love had not yet faded away. The aura of Grateful Dead hung over the Boston College campus like a cloud of day-old patchouli. The hottest party band around, the the Elliot Mouser Floating Blues Band, featuring the remarkable Chris Jenner on guitar, was playing mostly Grateful Dead repertoire. This band was also attracting the best-looking women. If you wanted to play music, that was the only game in town. Duffy learned a bunch of Grateful Dead tunes without having much feeling for it, but it was a way in. He started jamming with a guy down the hall, and one night he got to sit in with some members of the Mouser band, and that's how he finally got to meet the keyboard player Brian "Herman" Hess, whose musicianship Duffy had admired.
Is this the same Jim Duffy who played played bass guitar in the 1980s Boston band Rods and Cones?
Yes. The Mouser band graduated and went their separate ways. Hess went on a trip to the Holy Land, and when he returned, he and Duffy hatched plans to start a band that would play original material. No more of that warmed-over hippie stuff. They recruited baritone singer Chris Kelley from the Mouser band, and they already had the drums-and-percussion team of Chris and Jimmy DiNardo. They already had a gig booked at the Inn-Square Men's Bar, and they needed a name. Their friend Pete Newman christened them Rods and Cones. They weren't exactly "going punk" or "going new wave," whatever that was, but something had to change.
The results were decidedly weird. What did the early Rods and Cones think they were doing? The beats were funky and chomping. Mike Napolitano on guitar was doing a sort of low-rent James Brown vibe, Hess was putting his Farfisa organ through a phase shifter. They had a two-brother percussion team, and Duffy was by this time playing a clunky Guild bass guitar through an Acoustic 301 cabinet that was as tall as he was. In front, Chris Kelley was at the mic, singing, "Excuse me, do you have change of a Kennedy half?"
They conjured up all these strange tunes in a basement on Duval Street in Brighton, Mass. Or maybe it was all a weird dream. Maybe it didn't really happen. Then again, the evidence exists in a box of dusty cassette tapes, so maybe it really did happen after all.
Why didn't that band go to some little eight-track studio for a day and document what they had? This is lost history. So much goes unrealized. It was the strange, early period of Rods and Cones. They could have made an oddball record to make Captain Beefheart blush. Instead, they spent months and months (and months) doing overdubs and mixes on one tune, "Round Room," which was released on a vinyl compilation, and which holds up pretty well.
Rods and Cones went through several distinct phases. Mike Napolitano left the band, and when Gary France came along, they became more "rock" and more acceptable, and that stuff was just as valid. But the early material, Duffy says, "gives me the willies."
Duffy: "Back in the 1980s, Boston was a great place to be a local band. In Kenmore Square, the Rat was spawning punk rockers, in Cambridge, the Inn-Square Men's Bar -- my favorite music venue of all time -- was featuring creative music every night. Further out on the fringes, thousands of college students were looking for a good time, and the drinking-age rules were not enforced the way they are today.
"In those days, Boston radio stations -- not only college stations but commercial stations as well -- would play records by local bands. You could be a big fish in a small pond, flopping around merrily.
"In the midst of all this, a local TV station blinked onto the air, on the other-worldly UHF dial. It was V-66, and it was a free version of the then-new MTV. You might have to move your antenna around to tune it in, but it was music on TV, and it was free.
"Rods and Cones, arrived at the right time. We had had something of a local hit with our tune 'Education in Love,' and Gary France arranged for some talented Emerson College film students, Kris Hockemeyer and Peter Martinez, to create a video for that track. For a long stretch of time in 1986, V-66 was broadcasting the video to 'Education in Love' every day of the week, and more and more people started coming out to the shows. By the spring of 1986, we were playing 20 to 25 shows a month.
"Great memories and high times. There are worse ways to misspend one's youth.
"Go check out 'Education in Love' here, freshly available.
"I'm the skinny guy on bass."
Rods and Cones performed and recorded from 1982 through 1988. "Round Room," from 1983, appeared on the vinyl compilation "Boston Rock and Roll, Volume 3." Then came the self-titled, five-song EP in 1985, recorded by Alec Murphy at Polymedia studio, featuring "Education in Love." Finally, in 1988, came the band's swan song, the full-length album "New Breed," on Invasion Records. Some live material was recorded live at CBGB in New York and was released on vinyl and cassette on the short-lived CBGB label.
None of this music was ever released on compact disc. And now that CDs are going the way of the 8-track cartridge, it's getting a bit late in the day. They skipped a format! Ah, but in this interconnected world, nothing gets lost forever. These tracks will soon be available, via MP3, at a screen near you.
Brian "Herman" Hess died in 2004, in Park City, Utah.
The surviving members of Rods and Cones reunited for one night in early 2010, playing their first Boston show in 22 years at House of Blues. You can find some of the results here.
After the Cones, what happened next?
The Cones split up in the spring of 1988. Duffy started attending business school at Northeastern University. It was a lost period of Duffy's life, a black hole in his personal history. Then, in 1990, he was living in the West Village in Manhattan. He was effectively retired from music, until one day he spotted a classified ad in the Village Voice: He had finally found an apartment!
What else happened?
Back in New York, Duffy ran into Don Gilbert (RIP), who introduced him to the guitar player Chris Gray. The three of them, Gilbert, Gray and Duffy, plus Chris DiNardo on drums, played a few gigs under the name Load. At their first live performance, they played a version of Public Enemy's "You're Gonna Get Yours," complete with deejay, and then...
Wait a minute, is this the same Jim Duffy who played in the band Martin’s Folly?
Yes, I was just getting to that. After some trial and error, Duffy and Chris Gray founded a band called Martin's Folly. The name of the band was meant to evoke an imaginary historical incident, perhaps from the Civil War. The idea was to make melodious music in which the vocals would be prominent. Gray and Duffy went looking for a keyboard player but couldn't find anyone suitable, so Duffy switched to keyboard, "temporarily."
Martin's Folly got lumped into the "roots rock" category, but the songwriting strayed outside the lines of typical country-and-western and blues. Under the veneer of melody was an undercurrent of ornery originality that was not recognized at the time. Maybe it's not too late.
Martin's Folly's rough-but-melodic aesthetic became associated with the artwork of Steve Keene, who created much of the CD artwork.
The "classic" lineup of Martin's Folly had Chris Gray as lead vocalist and guitarist, Jim Duffy on electric piano and organ, Pat Fitzgerald on drums and Paul Page on bass. From 1996 through 2002, Martin's Folly made three album-length CDs produced by Eric "Roscoe" Ambel. Highlights include a version of Mott the Hoople's "I Wish I Was Your Mother," featuring guest vocals from the great Ian Hunter.
Keep going.
Martin's Folly performed up and down the East Coast, with forays into Nashville and Chicago and points in between. Duffy was singing less and less, and pretty soon he no longer had a vocal microphone. He started composing asymmetrical tunes that did not have verse-chorus-verse forms. Late one night in 2001, he had an idea to record an album's worth of instrumental compositions, using the best musicians he knew in New York. He phoned drummer Dennis Diken, and that -- alley oop -- takes us back to the present day.
OK, so what does he think he's doing?
Duffy: "Having grown up in the era of 1960s hit radio, I have a deep appreciation for the tightly arranged three-minute record. A great three-minute record glows like a gem. There's no wasted motion. It's like a dream that you can return to again and again.
"Over time, and having listened to many other styles of music, I found that many hard-bop jazz records of the 1950s and early 1960s, the early LP era, had such great vibe and hi-fi sound to them -- the whole band is performing live in the studio, and there's such great feeling and playing. The only trouble is, those records have so much soloing and take so long to get to the point.
"The idea may not be original with me, but I wondered, what if you tried to get that great vibe and feel and musicianship of those great hard-bop records, but had the concise, tight structure of a three-minute pop tune?
"When I had the opportunity to make my first record of instrumental pop tunes, 'Side One,' the sound engineer, Greg Duffin, understood all of this immediately. Greg had earned a degree in broadcast engineering, then worked for Lou Whitney in Springfield, Missouri, in an all-analog setting. Greg knows a warm tube tone when he hears one.
"What's a bit odd about all of this is that the recording group of myself, Dennis, Paul and Lance is sort of a rock band. We can't help it -- we came up through the rock basements. As much as we may try to stretch away from a rock background toward other forms of music, the rock will always be there. So there's a bit of tension that I believe benefits the records -- a rock band stretching toward other forms.
"Since there's no vocal in the center, we're free to move away from verse-chorus-verse song forms. This opens up all kinds of possibilities and allows for bits of improvisation. If it gets 'jazzy' at times, it's as a style, not as an art form. The composition comes first. This is pop music, and that means that anything can happen.
"With the second album, 'Mood Lit,' the production is more stripped-down, more immediate, fewer overdubs, and the band may be swinging it a bit harder. We just grooved and rocked and tried to swing it as hard as we could. Some of that feeling made it onto the tape, I believe.
"To make swinging, grooving and moody instrumental music in the form of three-minute tunes -- it seems like such an obvious thing, but not many people are doing it."
It sounds as though anyone could make this kind of music.
Yes, but they don't.
Has he done any more formal studying?
One evening in 1991, Duffy was in Buenos Aires, Argentina, at the home of his friend Martin Iannaccone, an accomplished cellist, bassist, percussionist and all-around musician. They had been hanging around for a couple of hours, then Iannaccone pulled two bass guitars off the wall. They plugged in and started to improvise, and they were getting into it. At one point Iannaccone, while playing, sort of winced and crouched as if to say, "Don't play so hard." Duffy eased up on the bass and let the notes ring out more, and it all started to sound groovy again. Duffy says this music lesson has stuck with him.
In early 2001, Duffy had not taken a formal music lesson in almost 25 years. Then, at age 40, while under the spell of the music of Burt Bacharach, he decided he would learn to play the trumpet. He bought a decent student horn and took a dozen or so lessons from a Polish trumpeter in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. But trying to develop an embrochure at that stage in life would have been a full-time job, and Duffy already had one.
In the late 2000s, Duffy studied with the Brooklyn pianist and composer Lee Feldman.
Who else has Duffy played with?
Thanks largely to producer Eric "Roscoe" Ambel, Duffy got to play on records by the Bottle Rockets, Go to Blazes, Greg Trooper, Florence Dore and other artists. This led to other opportunities, such as an eventful gig with the rock-and-roll pioneer Freddy "Boom Boom" Cannon. He also got to play on a live album by rockabilly legend Wanda Jackson. Duffy has also performed or recorded with Speedball Baby, Reid Paley, Tandy, Will Rigby, the Fleshtones, Bone-Box, Sour Jazz, the Damnwells and many others. A nearly complete discography of Duffy's appearances on recordings can be found here.
Any final words from Jim Duffy?
Duffy: "If I could explain it, I wouldn't have had to make the records."
Well then.
He adds that he thanks you who are reading this and appreciates your interest. He hopes you'll have a listen.