“Growing up in the suburbs on New Jersey in the late ’80s and early ’90s, it was kind of standard that you would take boring piano lessons,” he says in a phone interview from his upstate New York home. Marco Benevento performs with Mike Dillon & Punkadelic at 8:30 p.m. on Tuesday, March 14, at the Beachland Ballroom. “Everybody sort of did it. I did that at a young age, but I kind of liked it. I just got better and better at it.”
While his parents weren’t musicians, they still encouraged him to pursue his musical ambitions.
“When I would play piano, my dad would try to sing along with me, and my uncle would play a little guitar, and we’d play things like ‘Hey Jude,’” says Benevento. “After getting the basics down, it wasn’t until around seventh or eighth grade at 12 or 13 that I was interested in getting a synthesizer, and I could put on headphones and make cool sounds. That’s when I was like, ‘This is fun.’ That’s what led me into other realms.”
Benevento really embraced those “other realms” when he moved to New York and dove into the downtown jazz scene that had exploded in the late ’90s and early 2000s when clubs such as the now-shuttered Knitting Factory presented eclectic music that pushed jazz’s boundaries.
“What a wonderful time period that was,” Benevento says when asked about what the scene was like at that time. “I was right out of college. I was 21. I just wanted to go to New York and be awesome and try to play with as many people as I could. At that time, acid jazz and experimental funk was going on. I would do all sorts of random gigs with a Rhodes [piano] and a few pedals, and a lot of the scene was improv. We would improvise and be in the background at some restaurant or bar. Sometimes, people would want to hear it, and sometimes we were just in the background. You meet tons of people doing that. [Drummer] Joe Russo and I go back to middle school, and when we reconnected in 2001, we had a residency at a Moroccan place every Thursday. It was organ, drums, sax and percussion. There was no talk about songs.”
By the late ’00s, however, Benevento was ready to move out of the city. He says he was constantly on the road and his Brooklyn apartment “just shrank” when he had kids.
“We looked around the Hudson Valley, and there’s a huge span along the Hudson River with some cool towns,” he says. “Woodstock was kind of an obvious choice. I had played festivals here, and there were a lot of musicians here. That was an obvious choice. We were back and forth about it for a while. As soon as I moved here, I was recording with Carl Newman from the New Pornographers and playing anti-fracking benefits with John Medeski and seeing Donald Fagen when I went to get pizza. There are so many cool musicians here. [The venue] Levon’s Barn is here, and I play there about once a month.”
Benevento’s latest album, Benevento, consists of songs he completed during the pandemic. He wrote some of them from scratch, and others were ones he just had the time to finish.
“I often can’t get to songs fast enough when I’m on the road,” he says. “Being on lockdown gave me time to tackle songs that I liked but hadn’t finished. I was able to address all the new songs because of the pandemic. I wrote and played all the instruments on the songs too.”
Benevento also enlisted San Diego-based poet Al Howard as a lyricist. He had met Howard some 20 years ago but hadn’t kept in touch. When he heard through a friend that Howard had been writing songs, and he’d be willing to lend the lyrics to musicians, Benevento was ecstatic.
“Lyric writing is not my strong point,” says Benevento. “I’m learning and getting better. When I’m at a standstill, I don’t know what to do. Seeing someone else’s output really helped. I could just fill in the blanks with his words or edit them for the songs.”
While Benevento plays all the instruments on the album himself, he did make an exception for “Marco and Mimo,” a percussion-heavy jazzy jam that features Mamadouba “Mimo” Camara.
“Mimo teaches African drums at our kids’ school,” says Benevento. “He’s married to one of the teachers at the school and is from Ghana. He is an older dude. He doesn’t speak much English. I think he speaks French. I honestly don’t know his whole story, but I know he’s a great drum teacher. Whenever we see our kids do their drum concerts, it’s awesome and cool. He’s the closest guy that I could have over during the pandemic. I put everything outside, and we had our masks on and were distant. He set up all his drums outside. It was cool to connect with him.”
Benevento, who’s played the Beachland’s smaller tavern in the past, says he’s excited to play the bigger ballroom.
“We play stuff from [2008’s] Invisible Baby to the newer album,” he says. “On the last couple of tours, we’ve been leaning more on the newer stuff to see how the songs can get people moving and dancing. We do some covers as well, which is fun. I am happy with how Benevento turned out. I am glad I put it out. I was kind of hesitant. It’s this experimental guy in the studio losing his mind during the pandemic record, but music is positivity and life and gives people so much joy. It’s like [the album is stating,] ‘Everything is going to be alright.’”
Coming soon: Cleveland Scene Daily newsletter. We’ll send you a handful of interesting Cleveland stories every morning. Subscribe now to not miss a thing.
Follow us: Google News | NewsBreak | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter
This article appears in Feb 8-21, 2023.
