They say practice is how you get to Carnegie Hall. I learned this summer that the best way to get to Fort Adams State Park, the site of the Newport Jazz Festival, is by ferry.
For $20, you get transportation from downtown Newport to Fort Adams and back, a stunning view of the Northeast’s longest suspension bridge and, if the captain is feeling chatty, background on the gleaming yachts and sleek sailboats you’re chugging past as you cross Newport Harbor. It’s a uniquely seductive escape route.
It’s speedy, too; less than 15 minutes after you set off from Perrotti Park, you’re in line getting backpacks and folding chairs checked by security and charting a path to your first stage of the day. For my wife and me, there to celebrate my 40th birthday and cross off a bucket list item in the process, that was the Quad Stage, where the Richmond-based jazz fusion band Butcher Brown would be performing early on the festival’s first day. I had no idea, as I willed the security line to move faster, that Butcher Brown was facing its own time crunch.
They were waylaid in Massachusetts and had to navigate rental car snags en route to debuting at Newport. “We got there right down to the wire, with all the traffic and everything,” remembers keyboardist Devonne Harris, also known as DJ Harrison. “Once we got in, we just assumed the position and did what we [were] supposed to do.”
“It cleared up,” says guitarist Morgan Burrs, his voice thick with relief. “I thought it was going to be late as sh-t, and I would have felt stupid-guilty.”
That guilt, thankfully avoided, was rooted in reverence for past luminaries who have performed at Fort Adams. While known for recorded output ranging from Afrobeat to hybridized big band hip-hop, Butcher Brown is seriously steeped in the straight-ahead jazz tradition. Four of its five members studied jazz at Virginia Commonwealth University, and the fifth, drummer Corey Fonville, studied at the Brubeck Institute. The Newport Jazz Festival, which dates back to 1954 and maintains an old fashioned feel via hand-painted signage and an early evening stop time — reminiscent of Wrigley Field’s resistance to hosting night games under artificial lights — holds a special place in that tradition.
Following respected footsteps
The members of Butcher Brown each have dogeared moments from Newport’s past. For Corey Fonville, it’s Anita O’Day’s 1958 version of “Sweet Georgia Brown,” which was filmed for the documentary, “Jazz on a Summer’s Day.” For Devonne Harris, it’s Duke Ellington’s comeback set from 1956, during which saxophonist Paul Gonsalves stretched the crowd’s perception of how long a solo could be. “He had something to say,” Harris notes.
The fact that they’re part of that history is still sinking in.
“They gave each artist these blue banners,” Harris says, “and I literally just framed that joint … Every time I go upstairs and look at it, I’m just like, ‘We really did that…’ It’s surreal to be a part of that lineage.”
Getting to this point took more than a 15-minute ferry ride, and not just because of traffic or car rental difficulties. Near the end the group’s new album, “Solar Music,” you’ll find a track called “Touring Pains.” It’s among the shortest of the album’s 17 cuts, but it speaks volumes about the road Butcher Brown has traveled as a collective. The track pulls back the curtain as saxophonist, trumpeter and emcee Marcus Tenney, also known as Tennishu, notes the absurdity of driving to New York City for one-night stands, something the band did in the mid-2010s to gain a foothold in the crucial jazz proving ground. It often meant leaving home in the morning and pulling back into Richmond at 6 a.m. the next day. “We were psychos for that,” Corey Fonville says in disbelief.
The conversation in “Touring Pains” was captured during a 2018 visit to the back of the black-carpeted, neon-lit tour bus of funk band Lettuce. Keyboardist Nigel Hall would often extend an invite to hop aboard when his path crossed Butcher Brown’s, affording an opportunity to trade war stories. “[There were] all musicians of all those different levels in that room, and we all understood exactly what the f—k I was talking about. Everybody has to jump through those hoops,” Marcus Tenney says. “They would play some vinyl records for us, they would talk about some of the interactions they were having in the industry [then] they would hear what we’d been on… They always looked out like that.”
At the Newport Jazz Festival, kindred-spirited musicians were everywhere. They caught Quad Stage performances by fast-paced virtuosos DOMi & JD Beck and by rapper and producer Anderson .Paak, whose DJ set turned the inside of Fort Adams, actually shaped more like a pentagon than a quadrangle, into a five-sided dance party. They checked in with festival artistic director, bassist Christian McBride, and Corey Fonville got to meet British keyboard player and rapper Alpha Mist. “It was a great hang,” Fonville says.
Devonne Harris caught up with Neal Evans, who plays keys for jazz-funk trio Soulive. Evans has been an especially bright spot in Harris’ constellation of influences since the latter’s high school days. “I wanted my clavinet to sound like him,” Harris remembers. The two went on to work together on sessions for Jack White’s 2018 album “Boarding House Reach.” “The fact that he was like, ‘Ah, Butcher. What’s good?’ [and] the fact that people recognize us… was a good thing to me,” Harris says.
Richmond music’s North Star
For many in Richmond’s music community, Harris and his bandmates are the guiding light. Dave Pierandri, drummer for Richmond-based country outfit Chris Leggett & the Copper Line, followed that star all the way to Newport. Butcher Brown’s musicianship keeps him coming back. “When I see them, I’m constantly impressed,” he says. “The arrangements, the musicality, the creativity … What they do, I’m jealous of — I’m in awe of.”
The city of Newport also holds special significance for Pierandri. It’s where he and his wife got engaged, and where his parents first met. When he learned Butcher Brown was playing the jazz festival at the same time his parents would be renting a house in the area, he and his wife jumped at the opportunity — first onto a Breeze Airways flight and eventually onto bikes to get across town and around traffic. (The other best way to get to the festival, it should be noted.)
As showtime approached, the Pierandris found a spot to stand behind a sea of white folding chairs. Taking stock of his first out-of-town Butcher Brown show, he was struck by the crowd’s focus, which increased as the group progressed through a handful of selections from “Solar Music” mixed in with earlier compositions. “By a third of the way through their set, the tent was locked in the sound,” he says. “It wasn’t a party set. People were [into] the music. They’re doing such creative things.”
“There’s something about what Butcher has captured that is a Richmond sound to me,” he describes. “I tell folks, ‘These are jazz cats from town who have created a very commercially viable sound …’ They’ve put a neo-hip-hop-soul-funk thing behind these jazz principles. If there’s anyone else trying to do it, they’re not doing it anywhere near as well as Butcher’s doing it.”
Expansive sound, expanding circle
The Concord Jazz label — home of legends like Kenny Burrell, Charlie Byrd and Chick Corea — bet on that viability by signing Butcher Brown in 2020 and releasing the “#KingButch” LP later that year. The album was a turning point for Marcus Tenney, whose free-flowing delivery as emcee moved forward in the mix. The group doubled down on that arrangement, flexing bassist Andrew Randazzo’s arranging skills in the process, with 2022’s innovative, genre-combining, “Butcher Brown Presents Triple Trey featuring Tennishu and R4ND4ZZO BIGB4ND.” Now, with “Solar Music,” Butcher Brown is pushing outward in every direction, evidence of an evolving relationship with Concord.
“I think there’s more trust at this point, because they know what we can do,” Corey Fonville says of Concord. “We have a really great relationship with [A&R representative and album co-producer] Chris Dunn. He understands musically where we’re coming from. With ‘Solar Music,’ we were able to just do our thing.”
“You’re not going to make us do one thing,” Fonville adds.
Butcher Brown has always been similarly outgoing when it comes to collaboration. When making “Solar Music,” the group leaned into existing Richmond relationships, from the lyrical contributions of rapper Michael Millions to recording sessions that took place with No BS! Brass Band drummer Lance Koehler at his Minimum Wage studio and with engineer and producer Adrian Olsen at Montrose Recording. The rest of the tracking was completed at Harris’ home studio, Jellowstone, which doubles as his group’s headquarters.
There are familiar out-of-town names as well. The album’s second track, “Espionage,” features the D’Angelo-affiliated guitar deity Charlie Hunter, who has been part of the band’s gravitational pull for some time. He joined Harris and Fonville in the backing trio for jazz singer Kurt Elling’s 2021 “Superblue” LP, whose instrumentation was recorded at Jellowstone, and which garnered a Best Jazz Vocal Album Grammy nomination. Hunter even sat in with Butcher Brown at the inaugural Daydream Fest at Main Line Brewing in 2022 when Morgan Burrs (now based in Los Angeles) was unable to appear. “Charlie’s obviously kind of an OG homie at this point, which is crazy to think,” Fonville confesses.
Still, “Solar Music” represents a notable expansion of Butcher Brown’s collaborative orbit. More than half of the tracks on “Solar Music” list a feature and several names are new to the discography, including saxophonist Braxton Cook, rapper Nappy Nina and kaleidoscopic hip-hop artist Pink Siifu, with whom the band performed live — without rehearsing beforehand — at the 2022 Pitchfork Music Festival. A key vocal assist came from singer Vanisha Gould, who turned the Marcus Tenney-penned lyrics in the chorus of “I Can Say to You” into a firm but uplifting mantra: “You’ll find your way tomorrow or today / There’s nothing else I can say to ease your mind.”
Corey Fonville is the one who sought her out. “We open up another lane for ourselves getting other people involved,” he says. “It’s like, ‘Cool. Let’s allow some other people in the sandbox. We’re gonna have fun. We don’t bite.’”
From October to December, Butcher Brown will travel thousands of miles inviting listeners into their world. The quintet will hit nearly a dozen European countries before returning to Richmond on Friday, Nov. 24 to kick off the tour’s second stateside leg at the Broadberry. If Newport Jazz Festival attendees are any indication, their arrival in those places will be eagerly anticipated.
Accidental street team
My first interaction with a Butcher Brown fan at Newport took place before my wife and I had even cleared security. While waiting for our bags to be searched, the man in front of us in line, who had been chatting with his companion about the typical investment period for a venture capital firm, turned to comment on my three-quarter-sleeved Butcher Brown shirt — bought from Devonne Harris at a VMFA Jazz Café gig — and ask when the band’s set would be. I double-checked the quickly approaching start time and mentioned, proudly, that I was also from Richmond, which made him laugh. “You came all the way to Newport to see a local band?”
The Butcher Brown hat I wore on the second and third days of the festival was even more of a conversation starter. I snagged the brown snapback mimicking the signature “Jackie Brown” font when the band played Friday Cheers in 2021 — my wife’s and my first big concert after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. On Saturday evening’s trip across the harbor, we sat across from a trio of ferry riders in their mid- to late-20s, all smartly dressed, mustachioed, and toting vintage-looking cameras. “Nice hat,” one of them said. We talked about the band, and they shared, with no small degree of envy, that they’d hoped to catch the previous day’s Butcher Brown set but missed out because of traffic.
That envy extended to a similarly aged group we crossed paths with on Sunday on the Beer Pier, one of two cordoned-off areas at the festival where alcohol can be sold and consumed. While surprising at first, that separation did wonders to keep the music front-and-center, and to designate a space for socializing and trading concert stories. These Butcher Brown fans had been hooked after seeing the band in Boston, though they also missed Friday’s set, not having tickets to the first of the festival’s three days.
The longest hat-initiated chat happened during the wait for the Sunday evening ferry, just after an octogenarian Herbie Hancock set the main stage ablaze with signature vocoder singing and a festival-closing version of “Chameleon” during which he leaped into the air with a giant white keytar slung around his shoulders. The trio standing behind us in line — a decade or so older than my wife and I — consisted of a married man and woman and the woman’s brother. The married man may have been a newer Butcher Brown fan, but the trio’s Newport Jazz bona fides vastly exceeded mine; they’d been to the festival 10 years in a row, not counting 2020, and they listed their own dogeared jazz moments while we shuffled closer to the dock. Miles Davis’ last set at Fort Adams was one, as was the time the PA system went out during a Dave Brubeck performance and the pianist simply — and calmly — motioned for his band to bring the volume up a bit, not missing a beat.
I suspect I’ll be telling people about Butcher Brown’s Newport debut many years from now. I’ll describe Morgan Burrs’ soaring guitar solo during “Around For A While,” the first song the band played, and the deeply funky synth bass solo Andrew Randazzo dropped at the beginning of “No Way Around It,” smiling as the crowd cheered him on. I’ll talk about scanning the grassy interior of Fort Adams while a mass of strangers focused — many for the first time — on a group that brings pride and honor on the place where I live, and the fact that I walked around for the two days after acting as a conduit for the enthusiasm several of those strangers were eager to express.
The meaning of “Solar Music”
Butcher Brown personifies Richmond music as much as any band could, but its music belongs to the world. The idea of “Solar Music” goes beyond bright-sounding vibes, or a song title like “This Side of Sunshine.” Making music that’s so varied and welcoming that it shines on everyone is a modus operandi. “It’s really easy to make music with people that understand and respect multiple genres,” Corey Fonville says. “We listen to everything. We always want to be challenged.”
Devonne Harris points to the title of the group’s first release, from 2014, “All Purpose Music,” and to the stylistic sprawl the ones that have followed: “We’ve got R&B records. We’ve got rap records. We’ve got rock records. We’ve got straight-ahead jazz records. We have a little something for everybody. Anybody who hasn’t listened to straight-ahead jazz will hear us and all the sudden have an open ear to it.”
Marcus Tenney has seen the change happen in real time. He remembers a stop during a previous European tour where the group encountered a club audience he describes as “closed up,” with legs crossed and arms folded. He felt the distance between their culture and his, and the stoic surface of the stone roads and thousand-year-old buildings they passed on the way to the gig. Then it all started to move. “As we started playing through the set,” he recalls, “we see people’s jackets coming off, people start chair-dancing and [then] dancing all over the place.”
“If they open up that fast,” he remembers thinking, “the rest of Europe is going to open up that fast [and] the rest of the world is going to open up, even if it takes longer for some people.”
“That’s what makes music a powerful thing,” Harris says. “It transcends all individual barriers. We can go onstage, whether it’s down the street at the Camel or the Broadberry, or we can go across the ocean to Indonesia.”
In that sense, “Solar Music” is a mode of transportation in and of itself — perfect for reaching whatever destination Butcher Brown sets its sights on next.
To hear and purchase “Solar Music,” visit butcherbrown.com. Butcher Brown will perform at the Broadberry on Friday, Nov. 24. Doors open at 7 p.m. Tickets are $20 and can be purchased at thebroadberry.com.
