What is it like to find yourself playing with the heroes who work shaped your musical DNA? How do you approach a song when you are arranging, playing, and mixing every part? What makes Richmond the ideal place to create even when your success means you could prosper anywhere? Where do you draw the line between the need for commercial viability and individual expression?
All of these subjects are on the agenda for Saturday night, Feb. 24, when local musician Devonne Harris, aka D.J. Harrison, is featured as the local hero at the Richmond Performing Arts Alliance (RPAA) Legends on Grace series at the Dominion Energy Center.
It is arguably a long-overdue honor for the astoundingly versatile, Grammy-nominated musician and producer. It seems that he has played either drums or keyboards with every major musician in the area. There are many players who double on a second instrument, usually one closely related like trumpet/flugelhorn or saxophone/clarinet, but who else is virtuosic on them all?
He is an indispensable member of Butcher Brown, whose genre-defying sound, widely rooted in the past half-century of popular music, has an increasingly global reach. As D.J. Harrison, self-described as a “mad scientist” whose laboratory is his home-based Jellowstone Studio, he has released a dozen albums and counting in which he plays every instrument and records and mixes every track.
Usually, Harris lets his playing do the talking. The Legends event is a rare opportunity for people in the city he loves to get to know him in more intimate context. The planned conversation will range from his formative curiosity about his radio disc jockey father’s record collection, through his years at Virginia Commonwealth University, to being in Butcher Brown and being in a rain-soaked Los Angeles for music’s glitziest night, to his insights on analog artistic integrity in an era of digital mimicry. (Personal aside: I know all of this because I will be onstage as the other side of the conversation for the event, and I spent deeply enjoyable hours talking about the program with him recently).
Accompanying the talk will be live performances and curated recordings that illuminate Harris’s highly personal approach to his musical artistry and sonic craft. Will we resolve all of the questions listed above in a freewheeling, unscripted interchange? If not, it is because something even more interesting will have come up.
Legends on Grace: D.J. Harrison takes place on Saturday, Feb. 24 at 8 p.m. at the Dominion Energy Center’s Bob and Sally Mooney Hall. Tickets start at $42 and are available here. Doors open at 7 p.m.
