David Janeway was born in Rochester New York in 1955 to a family of avid musicians, performers and music purveyors. After a few years in the New York, the Janeway family upped sticks and moved to Detroit in 1960, a boomtown that saw waves of economic migration in the pre-war and post-war years. Everyone in his family played the piano, bridging his grandparents’ generation to his siblings and all those in between. Keys ran deep in the family blood, his father a big George Shearing fan started giving David informal tuition at the age of four. After noticing an early aptitude, his mother started him out on music tuition when he was five, after which Janeway would take formal classical lessons until he was 14. In keeping with the spirit of teenage rebellion, David eventually wore his path with classical music and moved to rock and R&B playing in his teens, experimenting initially with the organ before moving onto Fender Rhodes and electric keys.
David remembers growing up in Detroit during the height of Motown. Many of the musicians in Berry Gordy’s roster were serious jazz musicians who could just about session over anything. At this point in time, David had quite a few older musician friends that he was in bands with and his curiosity led him towards going to jazz clubs. Prior to these experiences, his father had taken him to see Oscar Peterson at Bakers Piano Lounge when he was much younger, an experience which made a formative impression on David, as was seeing Marcus Belgrave and Harold McKinney play under the Voices & Rhythms of the Creative Profile banner at Bert’s Jazz Club. When he heard Oscar Peterson’s piano in a live setting, it had such an impact on him that he made the decision to play and learn jazz, aged 16. “It was all I wanted to do after that moment.” Thankfully in the sixties and seventies, Detroit was full of jazz workshops which he attended, learning directly from the top contemporary jazz artists of the day and some of Detroit’s finest musicians (Wendell Harrison, Phil Ranelin, Charles Moore). “There was great music happening everywhere” Janeway says of this time.
Large social unrest loomed large in Detroit in the summer of 67, a year that would alter the social consciousness of America. The Detroit riots erupted in high summer, a deeply traumatic period for David and his family. His father had his business in a section of Detroit that was looted and set alight. White flight to the suburbs of Detroit followed, redrawing the city along more heavily segregated lines. “My family is Jewish, and when we moved to Detroit the Jews and the blacks lived in highly integrated areas of Detroit. After the riots, white flight happened. The suburbs just sprawled outside of the kernel of Detroit and the city’s population shrunk, then the auto industry started to tank in the seventies and eighties which made things worse.” Things would get much tougher for Detroit, the scars of the riots and the deep racial chasms palpable and marked to this day. The initial scare and frenzy of the riots wasn’t enough to curb Janeway’s enthusiasm for black music, and his unshakeable musical fixation grew and grew.
He performed with Dizzie Gillespie when he was 19 in a big band setting, led by Marvin Doc Holliday (baritone sax) from the original Thad Jones Mel Lewis band. David had some fortunate experiences that would sharpen his talents very early on; he certainly didn’t seem to have any trouble in finding gigs with canonical players, securing regular work as a pianist at this point with The Supremes, Wendell Harrison, Mixed Bag (Larry Nozero & Eddie Russ) and Charles Moore. At 23, he decided that he would chase his dream in 1978 and he moved to New York, a rite of passage for serious American jazz musicians. “I knew that I had enough experience in Detroit to be able to stand on my own two feet.” While in Detroit, he met Art Farmer while he worked as part of the house rhythm section at a club called Dummy Jordan, which got him a gig as part of Farmer’s section as sub keys for Fred Hersch, who was his main pianist at the time. Initially working in NYC as Hersch’s sub for the Art Farmer band, other opportunities opened up for him. He soon got into the Latin jazz scene in 1978, when the New York salsa scene was at its peak. “Those days were fantastic. You could rent an apartment for 200 dollars a month, the middle classes could easily survive in Manhattan. The scene was incredible and happening, there were tonnes of jazz clubs within a small radius that were open all the time. You could go down to the village and head to the Village Vanguard, Sweet Basil, the Brecker brothers owned Seventh Avenue South, Bradleys, The Tin Palace, Lush Life, there were around half a dozen to a dozen good clubs in lower Manhattan. You could go in for five dollars and stay there all night. Often you might be able to sit in on the last set. The places were full of musicians.”
At the time, some of the more underground and popular trends within the jazz scene were fusion and Latin, pushing a more progressive Nuyorican and urban sound. “The Latin scene happened to be at its peak back then. By that, I mean the salsa scene. New York Puerto Rican music. There were lots of Latin clubs at the time which I really enjoyed going to. I wanted to know how to get more into this scene, so I spoke with a few friends who were directly in this musical culture. Bill O’Connell, who played with Mongo Santamaria, found a good band for me salsa wise, Angel Canales and Sabor. There were four horn players in the group, and I got to write and arrange the music.” Between 1979 and 1981, he played with Angel Canales’ band and was an active participant in New York’s latin scene, rubbing shoulders with Oscar de Leon, Ray Barretto and Tito Puente. “Sabor were a top salsa band at the time, and we played in all the major Latin clubs as well as at Madison Square Garden as part of the annual Salsa Festival.” Village Gate’s Salsa meets Jazz, which took place on a Monday night, was one of the hottest spots in town to hear this crossover Latin-jazz, where you could see the likes of Machito playing alongside Sonny Fortune, a true and uninhibited verging of Jazz and Latin styles of music. “Sonny Fortune would play, but people in there were dancing there too. This music is dance music, going back to the roots of both jazz and Latin music really if you go back far enough is dance music. It was used in rituals to bring people together in the community. These traditions that we talk about, coming from the Afro Caribbean cultures, dance is a big part of their culture.” A lot of the music that he played and listened to in the Salsa scene was performed in dance clubs to audiences of hundreds of dancers. “Any pianist who wants to get into this music needs to understand they aren’t playing for themselves or their fellow musicians. You don’t need to show off or take the most interesting solo, it’s about playing for the dancers so that it is in clave, so that it grooves and that it inspires the dancers and vice versa. It creates this community spirit, a conversation. That’s what it’s all about. That’s what a lot of younger musicians can’t grasp. Dancing to salsa music is a highly evolved form. Same goes for tango and other south American cultures. It’s a highly evolved art form and it takes lots of study and dedication to dance to that movement.”
Through his work in Lower Manhattan, he played and became well acquainted with Lionel Hampton’s former drummer Jimmy Madison. His apartment was also a recording studio on the Upper West Side, where he recorded all the sessions that took place. David met a lot of musicians through these sessions, such as Bob Berg and Tom Harrell. “There was the adjacent loft scene where people would play all night, but Jimmy had a set up in his apartment which allowed us to record there.” Entry point was inspired by what he was doing in the Latin and jazz scenes, output rooted in the contemporary fusion of the two scenes. “Steve Berrios had been with Mongo for several years and was a perfect rhythm section for that track. Then there’s Berg…” Bob Berg plays tenor sax, maintaining an unrelenting and fiery tone which gives entry point a fortified kick. “The first time that I had played with Bob Berg was at that recording. We had a very brief rehearsal but aside from that Bob just turned up and did it. It’s in a complex key, there are lots of different sections for improvisation. I have never played with a musician to this day that had the facility, fire and intensity of Bob Berg. The ability to get around the horn, play over complex changes, play all different styles. He was the eighth wonder of the world. He had this laser focus and always in that zone. It’s hard to even put words to it. It was incredibly inspiring to play with him.” Tragically, Berg would die in a freak car accident in 1987, six years after the recording of the A side of Entry Point, a lesser-known showcase for Berg which shows his raw intensity and superior dexterity as a player. The track is a 9-minute-long suite, filled to the brim with powerful electric keys and gravelly tenor playing from the incomparable Berg. The track flits between swinging sections, complex changes (in a reminiscent manner to Giant Steps) and straighter, harder and rhythmically visceral Latin sections, providing montuno patterns that lock in with the laser sharp rhythm section to deeply percussive and effortlessly rhythmical effects. A wonderful track, and a seriously rare and under wraps nugget of jazz dance.
Remembrance, the second track on side A of this album, was done at a separate studio, featuring a new rhythm section Jon Burr and Keith Copeland. “The A side of Entry Point is really a conglomerate of New York sessions, whereas the B is comprised of Detroit sessions which I did a few years later”, featuring George Davidson on drums, Jerry LeDuff on congas and miscellaneous percussion, Phil Lasley on alto sax and Vincent York on tenor. In 1982, he came to the realisation that his scientific mind and his passion for medicine was too important to ignore. His undergraduate degree was in science (biology) and after being in NYC for 4 years he decided to go down the medical path. “Danny Zeitlin and Eddie Henderson were influences on me, even when I was in my teens to realise that you could do both things, that it is possible in life to pursue both dreams, especially medicine and music. I was evolving out of the Latin scene at the time, and I was feeling like a part of me wasn’t fulfilled. Music just wasn’t all that I wanted to do, and I knew that my calling was to pursue medicine. So I applied for med school and as luck would have it there was a school that I got into back in my home state, Michigan State University.” David went to med school between 82 and 86, eventually becoming a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine. Later in life, David would become an integrative psychiatrist, specializing in collaborative care. Even during his studies, he was working non-stop in Michigan with a trio backing up Betty Joplin with Marion Hayden on bass and Randy Gillespie on trap. He also would return to work with a homegrown midwestern talent from Donald Walden and Phil Lasley, crossing paths with the Strata core and also serving a stint playing with Roy Brooks.
“Working with (Brooks) was an experience that I never had with any other musicians. Much like Mingus, he had a concept of a workshop of evolving music, he was doing a lot of experimental things, influenced by Roscoe Mitchell, the jazz avantgarde, Art Ensemble of Chicago, Percussion Choir, Max Roach, he was involved in so many different projects and was concertedly pushing his music out of the mainstream tradition. I only did a few gigs with him, but they were highly influential and had a huge impact on me as a musician. He suffered from mental illness, one of the stories at the time which was true was that he came to a gig at Bakers Keyboard Lounge and he was naked – he had some struggles.”
Referring to the atmosphere of the music that he recorded in Detroit, David concedes that there is a certain je ne sais quoi about Detroit’s music that manifests differently to jazz recorded in other parts of the world. “The Afro American music tradition in Detroit is deeply rooted in gospel, blues, R and B and jazz. The Motown sound was created by top musicians steeped in this tradition. It’s characterized by deep sense of groove, swing and gospel.” Compared to New York, the musicianship is seemingly different, although both cities have produced a laundry list of jazz greats. “It used to be a center for jazz and R&B along with NYC in the 40s/50s and it has produced many of the top jazz musicians. Elvin Jones, Hank and Thad Jones, Barry Harris, Ron Carter, Joe Henderson grew up not far from Detroit, Curtis Fuller, Yusef Lateef, Geri Allen, Bob Hurst, Tommy Flanagan and many more.” There is a feeling however that the conditions that breed succesful musicians in New York can be akin to a pressure cooker in many ways, breeding a slightly different mentality to musicians in other large cities, which could be as much a factor of environment as well as a facet of human geography. “As great as musicians can be in other parts of the world—Detroit has a rich tradition within the jazz history—New York has an intensity to it, which brings out more of an edge in its musicians. It’s all to do with the pace of life, the competition. New York ended up being the jazz capital of the world in those days, so all the greatest musicians in jazz wanted to come to New York to prove themselves. It produces great musicians from challenging and competitive circumstances. There are plenty of musicians in all parts of the world that might not want to come to New York though and I understand that. Latin music and the opportunities that it provided to me were unique to New York at that time. There certainly wouldn’t have been those chances in Detroit.” Detroit’s role as one of the world’s leading jazz cities, overlooked intially by myself, is something that David reinforces firmly in our conversations and doesn’t allow me to forget.
David was concertedly shocked when I told him that Entry Point had appeal as a jazz dance record in the UK, visibly shocked when I told him that I had DJed that particular track in venues across London (with varying degrees of success) but had seen generations of people—who weren’t necessarily the intended audience of the music—dancing to the record and recontextualising it on contemporary dancefloors. Moreover, David was even more taken back by the prices that original copies of his record had fetched on the UK jazz collector scene, where copies are known to have been marketed at punters for around 90-100 pounds.
David spoke further about the responsibility of jazz as dance music, tying UK jazz dance culture in with the American jazz tradition, established under common principles. “Jazz had the same thing in the swing era, Glenn Miller, Count Basie, this was dance music for American audiences. Then growing up in Detroit with the Motown scene, it made you want to dance. You can’t sit still. The rhythms were so deep, this gets back to the afro roots of this music. The rhythms performed by street bands, it’s all about that. We don’t want to loose that. The musicians during the bebop era got bored of their roles in these big bands. They branched out and formed this new music bebop in the forties where they could really stretch out. Then Parker, Monk and Gillespie changed everything. Changed the whole listening experience to a concert listening atmosphere.” When David grew up, jazz as a musical format was roundly a seated experience. “From my parents’ generation to mine, no one really danced to jazz anymore. That was all left behind. It was really in the Latin scene in New York where I saw people dancing to jazz.”
David expresses to me what he feels his role as a musician is and how a lifelong study of jazz and a wholehearted depth of appreciation for Latin music has informed his musical philosophy. “When you realise your role as the pianist is in the rhythm section, the job is to link up with the rest of the rhythm to create a more solid foundation. That also leads to the whole area of comping and how to be a good comper. In the jazz tradition, it’s an equivalent to the montuno that helps to propel the groove, but it also helps to make the soloist sound as good as that soloist is supposed to sound. It’s all about listening and compassion, support, and love, really. To make the music really something greater than yourself, you have to put your ego aside. You play as a part of a larger role and your job is to support and make it happen. To support the group. It sounds basic but a lot of younger musicians bypass that there is a listener there and they need to listen and project that. Musicians that improvise are always influenced by so many outside forces. There really are no barriers. Everything is possible inspiration.”
David Janeway – Entry Point
David Janeway – Remembrance
David Janeway – Only So Far
David Janeway – A Blues
David Janeway – MT’s Mood
David Janeway – After Listening
David Janeway – Jasi
