Friday 22 June 2007
Idle Monday nights led to a full-time gig for John “Papa” Gros.
In 2000, the keyboardist worked steadily as a member of George Porter Jr.’s band, co-leader of the rock band MuleBone and as a solo act on Bourbon Street. To fill his open Monday nights he launched an informal New Orleans funk project, Papa Grows Funk, at a weekly residency at the Old Point Bar, later moved to the Maple Leaf.
Papa Grows Funk is now Gros’ main gig, with three CDs — 2001’s “Doin’ It”, 2003’s “Shakin’ “, and the new release “Live at the Leaf” — and 200 shows annually on a touring circuit that extends from coast to coast and to Europe and Japan. PGF songs have turned up during broadcasts of Major League Baseball’s World Series and the National Basketball Association finals.
“It’s taken on a life of its own,” Gros said. “We’ve found that there’s a market for what we do, and it seems to keep getting bigger and bigger.”
Gros is joined by guitarist June Yamagishi, saxophonist Jason Mingledorff, alternating bassists Marc Pero, and drummer Jeffrey “Jellybean” Alexander, who replaced Russell Batiste in 2005. A typical set may include Mardi Gras funk, “Sea Cruise” or other rhythm and blues classics, original material and jams.
And they never work from a set list. “All the tapers who record us always want to know what songs we play,” Gros said. “I tell them to send me a copy (of the tape) and I’ll e-mail the list, because I have no idea.”
“We’ve spent six years working on our musical communication onstage, so it’s at a high level,” Gros said. “We don’t practice a lot, we don’t talk about it. But when we’re playing, everybody’s completely into what’s happening at the moment. We’ve turned five great individual musicians into one great band.”
In Japan, they’ve sold 3,000 plus copies of their CDs. In early 2004, several hundred enthusiastic Japanese fans grooved to PGF at Club Quattro in Tokyo and also at the Fuji Rock Festival in summer of 2005. “It was like the Beatles,” Gros said. “In the first song, when we went into June’s solo, whoever was sitting down was screaming and jumping up and down. It was wild.”
New York, San Francisco and Colorado have long embraced Papa Grows Funk. But plenty of markets remained untapped, as recent forays into Texas, the Northwest, Chicago and south Florida made clear.