Which brings up a very important part of it for me, which is: Music has always had a social context. JL: Yeah! And really, for me, the era of jazz I like, you could say the same thing. It’s really all the same, the energy.ĪC: Harlan Howard once defined country music as “three chords and the truth.” You could say the same thing for punk rock. What I really loved was the aesthetic of it, and I think that the energy, what it means to me, is exactly the same as it meant to be Ernest Tubb in the day, or Jimmy Smith, whom I had the pleasure of playing with before he died. Punk escaped my peripheral acknowledgement of what was going on. I was into reading music and doing that kinda stuff. When that was really popular, I was into, as we just discussed, jazz, blues, country. I was never really exposed to the music when I was in high school. She had a punk rock band in the Eighties in Montreal. She’s a brilliant song interpreter and just a crazy artist.ĪC: What about punk rock – any interest there? She’s a Canadian icon, and at the time, she’d moved to Los Angeles and would come back and do television performances and such. As a Canadian, I think we had more respect of real American music than maybe a lot of Americans. That’s very American.” So, we were kinda schooled in that. And we tried to emulate American music, so we often had discussions with my uncle about, “Well, see, the bass and drums really laid back on that. We listened to records, my family, and we played in bands. And for me, listening to American music was the real deal. JL: Well, when I was a kid, my father and my uncle were big influences and I played in their bands. The lineage of American music to me is fascinating and I’m a huge student of it.ĪC: Yet, you’re so steeped in American music. They have a real reverence and respect for it even though they were clearly a blues and rock & roll-kinda thing. Boogie-woogie is very similar to what Count Basie was doing, where Duke Ellington came from, Professor Longhair. Having worked with musicians like Pinetop Perkins and people of that legacy or that lineage, I know them to have had a huge reverence for jazz music. I’m a huge fan of all that, all the Chess Records stuff.ĪC: That’s the original rock & roll, right there. The only difference would be the trajectory of Chicago blues, which sorta paralleled the blues in New Orleans and the development of it in New York. And they certainly invented rock & roll, country music, soul music, R&B. So, pre-war, that generation of Fifties musicians would’ve only really known how to play jazz music, or aspire to be jazz musicians. Prior to the war, that’s all there was, really. Everything kinda came out of jazz and big band playing at the time. JL: Hal Blaine, exactly! They really were jazz drummers. So, if you reached a certain level of proficiency, like Hank Garland or Earl Palmer. Jake Langley: Most of those Sixties guys aspired to be jazz drummers. Only a small fraction of our conversation made it into the paper, so here’s the bulk of our interview.Īustin Chronicle: Rock & roll drummers from the Sixties had clearly listened to jazz drummers of the Forties and Fifties, whereas today’s drummers only listen to rock drummers. He may look like an elegant version Zakk Wylde, but he shreds from the head and heart, not just the crotch.

Jazz heads upstairs at the Continental Club for Church on Monday, Tex-Mex two-steppers at raucous Los Texmaniacs gigs, and even Dupree fan Mike Judge can attest to Langley’s guitar prowess.Īs detailed in this week’s Music feature, the local guitarist made a name for himself in NYC with jazz great Joey DeFrancesco’s organ trio, but almost any night of the week, you can find Langley applying guitar both thoughtful and incendiary on bandstands across town. Jake Langley of Toronto may be a relative newcomer to Austin, having moved here in 2010, but he’s impressed huge swaths of the local music scene.

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