Smooth Groove with Richmond Music Legend Plunky Branch

Richmond music legend James “Plunky” Branch joins The Hook with Johni & Jess for a wide-ranging conversation about more than five decades of music, creativity and cultural impact.

From his early years in Richmond and time at Columbia University to the evolution of Juju and Oneness of Juju, Plunky shares how jazz, African rhythms, funk, soul and R&B shaped his unmistakable sound. He also opens up about his connection to the early development of go-go music, his path as an independent artist and label owner, and the experiences that have taken his music around the world.

Along the way, we talk about creativity, family, race, community, technology and why Plunky continues to seek out new sounds and new ideas after all these years.

It’s a thoughtful, surprising and often funny conversation with an artist whose influence reaches far beyond Richmond—and whose connection to his hometown remains as strong as ever.

Mentions:

• Lonnie Liston Smith 
• Melvin Ras Mel Glover
• Mighty Joshua 
• WHUR 96.3 / The Daily Drum 
• Experience Unlimited (E.U.) / Sugar Bear 
• 725 Arts 

Connect with Plunky:

🌐 Website: www.plunkyone.com
📘 Facebook: www.facebook.com/PlunkyandOneness
𝕏 X (Twitter): https://x.com/plunkyone
▶️ YouTube: www.youtube.com/user/plunkyb
🍎 Apple Music: music.apple.com/us/artist/plunky-oneness/6315845
🟢 Spotify: open.spotify.com/artist/0zeMpqW3Y0hyDOV6iQ6U9p?si=YYw70XuoQD6l8vKsp-MBgg&nd=1&dlsi=f660f15c79fa454b

Transcript

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SPEAKER_02 0:00

Welcome to the hook, where music and art come together. With the people that created it. I'm Johnny. I'm Jess. You're on the hook.

SPEAKER_03 0:16

Today we're joined by a true Richmond music legend whose career spans more than five decades. James Plunky Branch is the founder of Plunky and Oneness, one of the most influential Afrocentric jazz, funk, and world music groups to emerge from Virginia.

SPEAKER_02 0:37

Born and raised in Richmond, Plunky studied at Columbia University before founding Juju in San Francisco in 1971, a group that evolved into the legendary oneness of Juju. Along the way, he's blended jazz, funk, African rhythms, soul, house music, and go-go into a sound all his own.

SPEAKER_03 1:00

He's released more than 25 albums on his independent label, Name Brand Records, earned multiple National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, taught at VCU and Virginia Union University, and continues to perform, record, write, and inspire audiences all around the world. Plunky, you're on the hook.

SPEAKER_02 1:25

You were just telling us about a documentary that you recently took part in. Can you share more about that?

SPEAKER_06 1:32

This is a documentary on a renowned cosmic jazz pianist from Richmond, Virginia. His name is Lonnie Liston-Smith. And I suspect that his biggest claim to fame was that he played with uh Pharaoh Sanders, who played with John Coltrane. And I like to think of Lonnie Liston Smith as one of the most important improvisational free jazz players, piano players, along with McCoy Tyner and Alice Coltrane and maybe Sun Ra. So I was very privileged to be asked to speak a little bit about my information about him. And he and I interfaced 30, 40 years ago. He's from Richmond, Virginia, and resides here now. He's a bit older than me, not a lot older than me. We're contemporaries, and some people refer to us as legends, and I always say when somebody's a legend, it just means they're old. But Lonnie, I was privileged to uh talk about him. He and I are friends, but not that close. We performed with Pharaoh Sanders together, and then Lonnie went on to have some renown. He released an album in 1975 called Expansions, and it has a great song on it with that features his brother, that song, Expansions. It impacted me, and I released an album in 1975 called African Rhythms, and that's probably my most important release. So he and I, both from Richmond, both avant-garde jazz players who cross over into sort of a commercial smooth jazz funk combination with cosmic jazz, and both had impactful albums that came out in 1975.

SPEAKER_03 3:18

Well, we gotta be watching for that. You have traveled the world, played major festivals, recorded dozens of records, and influenced generations of musicians, but it all started right here in Richmond. What was it like growing up? And when did you realize music wasn't just something you loved and it was gonna be your life's work?

SPEAKER_06 3:39

Growing up in Richmond was interesting. Virginia is a very conservative place, and at the same time, it has a kind of quaintness, and Richmond has a very rich history. When I grew up in Richmond, it was completely and totally segregated. The schools, the social life, the interactions on the streets or in businesses was all very much a segregated uh situation. In fact, I often say I only knew two or three white people by name growing up here. I loved chemistry when I was growing up. I discovered my father's chemistry book when I was nine years old, his college chemistry book, and I started reading it, loved the subject, but I think what I liked most about it was that it made me seem smart because I could do formulas and not many people my age did. And so I thought I was growing up to be a chemist. I often tell the story that I grew up on the south side of Richmond, not all that far from the DuPont plant. And DuPont had a sign out front that said, better things for better living through chemistry. And so I grew up thinking, I'll grow up to be a chemist, probably work at DuPont, invent some adhesive or something, some plastic that will make the world a better place, and that'll be my my lot in life. Evidently I showed some capabilities with music. We all took song flutes, were plastic recorders in the fourth grade, and the music teacher recommended that I join the band in the fifth grade. My mother invested in a clarinet and always loved music. She also invested in me taking piano lessons at that age, and I always thought of music as a past, sort of a pastime, a secondary kind of a hobby, but always loved music. When I graduated from high school, Maggie L. Walker High School, one of the white people that I knew was the Russian teacher, whose name was Mr. Tears, Gaspodine Tears, and yes, Yagavaru Paruski. I went to Columbia University in New York. New York is a very different place from Richmond, Virginia. Yeah. It's literally 20 times larger. It is very integrated. And I had some growing to do in my freshman year. Not to belabor the point, but when I went to Columbia, there were 800 young men in the freshman class, of which there were only 16 blacks. There were only 16 blacks total in the upper classes. So I was one of 32 blacks in a school of 3,200. I had to learn how to see white people. I would have classmates to say, Jim, they call me Jim. They say, Jim, we saw you on Broadway and you didn't speak. And it was quite frankly because I had trained my eyes. I don't I would look down the street or come into the grill. I'd only see the black people. Because growing up, I hadn't been allowed to look at white people in the face. Wow. And so I had trained myself not to even get into that kind of trouble. But also at Columbia University, the politics was very different from Richmond. As I described earlier, Richmond is a very conservative place. New York is quite the opposite. It's a very liberal place. And I ran into left-wing politics for the first time in a very direct way. And this was during the time of the Vietnam War. And so there was the anti-war movement. And my fellow students convinced me that I didn't want to be a chemist. They said, well, you know, if you a chemist, you're gonna basically you'll be making napalm and the you'll be a part of the military-industrial complex. And I eventually was convinced that that probably is right. And so music moved from my number two thing to my number one thing. I started a band at Columbia called the Soul Syndicate. It was a soul band. Quite frankly, it was a band that was to be like the bands I grew up with in Richmond. If I flip back, in Richmond, when I was growing up in school and through high school, if you wanted to hear music, it was live music or jutebox. Back then there were no DJs. You just, if you went out to a club and you wanted to hear music, it was always live music. And when the live music finished, you would might put a coin in the jute box and play it on a jute box, but it had to be live music. And so I grew up around bands, young RB bands and traveling bands, the Motown groups and James Brown type bands would come through Richmond, and I would go to those concerts. When I went to New York and Columbia, I started a band like I knew in Richmond, which was fairly unique in New York, and we became quite popular not only on Columbia's campus, but in the city. We played at a club called the Cheetah Club, one of the first large discos in New York. Infamous. Yeah, yeah, the Cheetah was it was a very important place. And we, every time we played there, we set the record for attendance. Maybe not because we were so great, but whenever we played there, the the guys from Columb the people from Columbia would come and some of the other Ivory schools would even travel from Connecticut or whatever, because we were playing at the Cheetah and it was a big deal. During that time, I learned that music and the arts could be important to making people's lives better as well as the sciences. I had not even thought of that before. When I was growing up, there was this movement to accelerate studies for the math and sciences, because this was in the Sputnik area. In the 1950s, the Russians put up the first satellite. So there was this mad rush to educate the young people in America so that we could have more science, more more prevalence, more proficiencies in the sciences, because we were in a space race and we needed scientists. And so we were pushed to take college courses in the maths and sciences, and that's how I had college-level chemistry and physics and calculus and and advanced maths at Maggie Walker, and that's how I got to Columbia. But now I saw that we could affect the world positively through the arts, through the humanities, and specifically through music. So in 1968, in April, Martin Luther King was assassinated. There were riots in several other major cities, particularly in New York and in Washington, DC. Later that month, in April of 68, there was a major takeover of the campus of Columbia University. It was one of the first, might not have been the first, but it was one of the first three where this happened, where the students boycotted, took over buildings, took deans, hostages, all these outrageous activities to campaign against the war and against segregation in general. During that time, I left school. I was an activist. I went to school, went there in 1965. By 1968, I was a campus activist, fairly active on campus in in politics. And I I quit school. I thought the revolution was upon us. On quitting school, I lost my student deferment and was drafted in January of 69. I chose to resist the draft and not go. I was living in New York, but my draft office was here in Richmond, so I had to come back to Richmond to not go into the Army. During that time, my father was an IRS agent, my mother was a teacher in the Richmond Public Schools for 30 years. They were middle-class black people. They had a very nice home in the Bird Park area of Richmond. And when I resisted, FBI agents and other people came to their house to say, Well, you know, you're going to lose your house, you're going to lose your jobs, your son is a draft resistor. And so that part of the story was that my parents convinced me to go into the Army. There are lots of humorous stories about that, but I'll skip those just to say that I decided to go. I went back down to the draft office, stepped across the line, said yes to, and immediately regretted it. But I said, I'll go into the Army so I can learn how to shoot. Because I had no experience with hunting or guns. And keep in mind, I believed that the revolution would was a matter of weeks, no more than months away. Because I had experienced riots. I had been on riots on campus. When we took over the buildings on campus, even that became a segregated experience. We took over the buildings altogether, but then the SDS, the the white students w wanted a more violent kind of protest, and the black students were accustomed to a non-violent protest. So the blacks were in one building, the whites took over other buildings. That was put down when the New York police came in with horses and batons and all that. So I'm in a situation where I'm thinking that the revolution is upon us. There are anti-war protests all over the country. And went into the Army. I said, I'm going to be in to learn how to shoot, because I need to know how to shoot, because the revolution is coming. I was in the Army for six weeks and I left. And when I left, I came back first to New York, but then I moved to California. Why? California, San Francisco Bay Area, specifically because that was a left-wing place, and judges and other officials tended to be sympathetic to the anti-war movement. And so if you got arrested there, you might be released. So I went to San Francisco and I joined a band. I joined several bands, but most importantly, I met a man named Ndiko Taba. Ndiko Taba was a Zulu from South Africa, and I ended up joining his band. And that was a pivotal part of my musical development because with Ndiko, I learned South African music and about African music in general. And I learned some principles. I learned that African music is very energetic. African music is polyrhythmic, lots of different rhythms. African music tends to be improvisational. And perhaps most importantly, African music is judged not by its content. It's judged by its impact on the village. It's judged by the impact that the music has on the people. And so those principles became my guiding star. I played with Indico for two years, and I learned that this music that I was learning with him, I saw how directly related it was to jazz music and RB music, the music that I had grown up on. And so that became a formative part of my music career. That two-year period between 1969 and 71, playing with Indico, again, we played anti-war movement demonstrations. He was trying to publicize the fact that in South Africa, where there was something called apartheid, this intense segregation, he wanted people to know that there was a war going on in the southern part of Africa. Because in the U.S., every day on the news there might be information about the Vietnam War and pictures of what was going on there, but also of the protests that were going on, of people trying to advocate that we extricate ourselves from this war in Southeast Asia. But Indico wanted people to know that there was also a war going on in South Africa, in Mozambique, and those places. When I left Indico's band, I formed a band called Juju. That was in around 1971-72. And I was the leader of the band and I was continuing what I had learned from playing with Indico. And that became our signature kind of sound. I released an album called Juju, A Message from Mozambique, to publicize the fact that Mozambique was at war. And we in seven that was in 1973, 1974, released another album called Juju, Chapter 2, Nia. Nia is a Swahili word that means purpose. So those are my two albums that I did with Juju. Based in San Francisco, came back to New York to play a New York musicians festival in 73, and was promptly arrested by the FBI. As I returned to the last my last known address in Brooklyn, I'd been gone three years, a month, and five days when I was arrested. Missed my festival gig, but got out a month later, free and clear. Another set of stories, but the war by that time had won down, and they were no longer interested in in there were so many people who had gone AWOL or who had resisted the draft. The US made a decision that it wouldn't be worth it, since it was literally thousands, it wasn't going to be worth the time, effort, and money to to prosecute these people to have them serve a month or six six months in jail. So they just basically wiped the slate clean on all of us. So I went back to New York, lived in New York for a couple of years to 74, came back to Richmond. And when I came back to Richmond, I had been a part of the avant garde jazz scene in New York, interfacing with people like Ornette Coleman and Pharaoh Sanders and this label called Strata East Records, which was a a collective of musicians and producers to create this record label called Strata East Records, and stayed in New York, basically being a starving artist for a couple of years, and I moved back to Richmond. And the band who had been with me in San Francisco had followed me to New York, followed me to Richmond, and we were now based in Richmond. And in Richmond, I found that there was not a large market for avant-garde African music.

SPEAKER_03 20:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 20:06

As you might imagine. And so I learned, remember, my big lesson from Indico was it's not so important what you play, it's much more important how you play it. And even more important than that is what's the impact that it's having on your community. And so with those lessons in mind, I determined that it was important that we learn from Richmond. As much as we were trying to bring information and experience to Richmond, we should also, it was a two-way street. And so Richmond had as much influence on us as we had hoped to have on Richmond. And so, again, abbreviating this, I know it sounds long-winded, but abbreviating this, we changed the nature of the music a bit and changed the name of the group from Juju to Oneness of Juju. It became Oneness of Juju because while we were doing this roots African music and avant-garde music, when we got to Richmond, we found it necessary to add RB elements. We didn't have a drummer. We had African percussionists, but we didn't have a drummer. We added a funky drummer. We added a guitar player whose name was Ross Mel. His name at the time was Melvin Glover.

SPEAKER_03 21:21

He plays with uh Mighty Joshua, so exactly right.

SPEAKER_06 21:23

And uh he played with the Wailers for 15 years. But he first was in my band. Wow. Oneness of Juju. So we added a drummer and we added a guitarist, which changed the nature of the sound from this rootsy sound to a more RB sound. And then, even more importantly than that, we added a vocalist, a female vocalist, Jackie Holliman Lewis, whose name was Lady Ekite. And those things changed the quality of the sound of so we were became not juju, but oneness of juju, with the thought that all of this music that we might choose to play is all one. It's all music. We can break it down. For marketing purposes or to target purposes, but it's all one music, and that's why we have the name Oneness of Juju.

SPEAKER_03 23:37

My sisters both went to Maggie Walker, but also I'm from San Francisco. My godmother has always been into African drums, and she's married now to Eric Smith. I don't know if you're familiar with him, but he's a big-time drummer out of California in the San Francisco area. So uh there's some overlap there, which is kind of interesting. So I came into Richmond on the opposite of you, having grown up in that environment. DC is where I went to high school. DC, DC, not Nova. And then coming here. So it I literally have had the reverse life of you where I didn't understand these differences because where I grew up, nobody thought like that. And then coming here, it was just like, whoa. Why am I seeing clusters of people out together that are all the same and nobody's mixing? Now it's a little, it's better now.

SPEAKER_06 24:24

Yeah, it's different.

SPEAKER_03 24:26

But even 20 years ago it was weird for me.

SPEAKER_06 24:29

Well imagine 50 years ago. I can't see. I can't.

SPEAKER_03 24:32

Anyway, that is all just fascinating. Let's get into some go-go talk. I was in DC in the eighties when everything started on the upside-down trash cans in Georgetown.

SPEAKER_01 24:44

Sure.

SPEAKER_03 24:45

Before it even became what it is now. And so I've seen you associated, but then I couldn't really find a lot. Tell us about that.

SPEAKER_06 24:52

Let me say something provocative. I was one of the originators of go-go. And there are others who will verify that. Other go-go players from that era. Here's how. I had a group called Oneness of Juju. We've already talked about how that became. And we were now doing funkier music. And I put out an album in 1975 called African Rhythms.

SPEAKER_04 25:26

These are African rhythms. Passed down to us from the ancient spirit. Feel the spirit. A unifying force. Yeah, just together. Come on, move with the spirit. Stand up. Clap your hand. Move with the visit. Get down. Get up.

SPEAKER_00 29:42

Make it cut a hull. We'll make you come. Make it home. Make you come.

SPEAKER_01 30:02

Make it come up.

SPEAKER_06 32:25

African rhythms, I would define as my most important record culturally, not necessarily the biggest seller, but African rhythms combine these African rhythms with RB dance music. And we put the record out, and it was popular in Washington, D.C. So popular, in fact, that that song and songs from that album would be the theme music for WHUR's news program in the afternoon. That program was called the Daily Drum, and they would use African rhythms as the theme song. So here these African rhythms being played on the radio in DC every day. I always again remember my history of Indico Juju. I've always had tremendous percussionists. And in Washington, DC, I had a group called the Elu Drummers. Then I had two Latin percussionists, Alfredo Mohica and Rafael Solano. And then I had most importantly a percussionist whose name was Asante. Asante was the percussionist with Hugh Masekela. He went on to do two world tours featured with Fleetwood Mac, and he was also a percussionist, the one with horns. If you ever saw the Graceland tour, where Paul Simon is touring the world with the South African musicians. Asante is from Ghana, but he was a featured person on that tour. But before he did all that, he was with Hume Masekela. And when Hume Masekila left to go back to Africa, Asante stayed and he played with Wanus of Juju. When African Rhythms came out, and we were popular in Washington, D.C. because our record was being played every day on the radio, we signed up with this uh booking agency called Charisma Productions. And Charisma Productions was the booking agent for Hume Massachila, Lonnie Liston Smith, Roy Ayers, Norman Connors, Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers, and some other local groups. One group called Brute, another group called Father's Children, another one called The Young Senators. All of us were a part of a booking agency. And Oneness of Juju would be the opening act for many of those acts. When we would if if Roy Ayers was in Washington, we would be his opening act. And because I was playing kind of weird original music as opposed to RB music like most of those other groups, what I found was as an opening act, if I played the songs and stopped, I kind of would lose the audience. But if I ever got the audience going, we would just play nonstop. So as far as my memory, I kind of invented that feature of go-go music. One, it's African and Latin percussion, and it's non-stop, and it's call and response. All of those things were central to what Oneness of Juju was doing. So some of the go-go musicians like Sugar Bear for EU, he says in one of my document in a documentary about Black Fire Records, he says, I learned from everything, but when I saw Juju, Oneness of Juju playing and all that percussion, he said, I gotta have that in my music. And so the other groups on Charisma started doing that feature. I didn't stop because I didn't want to lose the audience. It would just be harder to get them to get back stand back up. And so it was a practical measure. It was also an African principle, because in African music, the music almost doesn't stop. It's always bad, but usually based on this high energy, expending high energy for a long period of time. Now, traditionally, there's a history, there's a tradition for that. There's a kind of a spirituality with that. The Africans believe that the expending of this energy and this doing something on and on to the point of monotony, and then going past that point, what I would compare it to is like a runner's high. That you might start out, you get tired, but if you keep going, you get to a point where you have another boost of energy. Well, in African spiritual terms, that boost of energy is when the spirits would come and ride you. Where you lose consciousness of yourself, you're just you're going into a zone or I have goosebumps.

SPEAKER_01 36:59

I do too.

SPEAKER_06 37:00

You go to a place where you're not so aware of your ego, you're you're letting the spirit speak through you. So in order to get to that point, it almost always involves, doesn't always, but almost always involves some kind of longevity to the to the rhythm, to the music, to the expenditure of energy. In other words, usually you don't just snap your fingers and say, Okay, now this I got the spirit. It usually takes some effort. And so that's where this concept of the African drums that never stop and this boost of energy. Also, this isn't related, but in traditional history in the United States and in the South, where enslaved people lived, one of the things that w happened with the white slave masters was that they took away the drums. They didn't they weren't allowed to be a few. Well, that's how they would describe it, but the Africans would say it's giving us the power of the spirits of our ancestors and the power to resist. And also these drums can be used to communicate and we can we can coordinate, we can conspire. So for all those reasons, the African drums were taken up taken away. So fast forward to way in the future where where you now have African drums and you have the spirit of Africa in this little place called Washington, DC, where at one point it's 80% black people, it's an international black population, not just Richmonders colloquial, but African or black people from everywhere, from Haiti, from Guatemala, from Nicaragua, from Cuba, from Jamaica, from Jamaica. All of this coming together is kind of a cauldron, kind of a melting pot, if you will, of a cooking pot of all this rhythm and all this culture, and out of that, go-go grows. Because go-go is roots music, but it's kinda uneducated. It's not that you go to a school to learn go-go. As you say, it's very raw. It's beating on trash can tops. It's not formal drums necessarily, but the spirit of it is this is a spirit of community. A go-go concert, a go-go show is very much percussion non-stop, but it's also call and response. That's almost the primary thing of it. That somebody on stage says something and the audience says back. Yeah. Or you say, Let me hear you from Southeast, and the Southeast people cheer. And it's a it's a communal experience. And that you don't go to go-go to just go and watch a performer. You go to be a part of the performance. That's that's my relationship to go-go. You ask me what I think that's.

SPEAKER_03 39:48

What's crazy is that that is what I grew up in. So it does make me a little different as a Caucasian. So I'm at like events and I I don't get the music if it's not got that rhythm. And when I would go to a go-go show, I mean, I would have the biggest water bottle I could, the least amount of clothes possible, a little backpack on my shoulders, and it was like just get ready for three hours to profusely just sweat and dance and be a part of it. And I d nothing really has ever been able to compare to that for me, because just growing up in that, it's everything. I love and we don't get that many here. I mean, a little bit.

SPEAKER_06 40:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 40:26

So but in DC it was, you know, all day, every day.

SPEAKER_06 40:29

Yeah. But that's my relationship.

SPEAKER_03 40:31

Wow. That's a pretty that's a pretty big relationship. Okay, well, I'm dead because this is my you know, this is my and I did end up marrying a drummer. So funny, because the first time we were ever at a show, I don't remember who it was. It was a rooftop reggae show in Richmond, maybe two months in, we hadn't danced together. And I was like, man, I like this guy a lot, but what if he can't dance? What if he doesn't have rhythm? I should have known he's a drummer. Of course he has rhythm. But it was that reggae show where I was like, okay, okay, okay.

SPEAKER_05 41:09

I can get down with this.

SPEAKER_02 41:11

So you founded your own label. Am I gonna say this right? N-A-M-E or is it name? Both. Okay. N-A-M-E or Name Brand Records, and stayed independent long before independent artists had today's tools. So, what made you take that route?

SPEAKER_06 41:31

I mentioned already Strata East. Strata East was a jazz label in New York City, a collective of jazz musicians, some of them fairly renowned musicians, who had gone on to start their own label as a collective. A part of Strata East were these older jazz musicians, people like Clifford Jordan and Pharaoh Sanders, and maybe 30 musicians in this collective. Of those 30 musicians, they had there was a young lion. It's kind of hard to imagine me as a young lion, but at one point I was a young lion, and the young lions were Juju, Plunky and one is a Juju, Gil Scott Heron, and a man named Mtumey. Mtumey was famous, he wrote the song Juicy Fruit. It's an RB song, but back then we were all jazz musicians. And uh Gil Scott Heron put out a record called The Bottle. And when that record came out on Strata East, Straty East was not prepared to capitalize on the record because Strata East was a jazz label. When Gil Scott Heron's record came out and it was a bona fide hit record, the label was not prepared, and the label had to have discussions as a group. Did we even want to have a hit record? Did we even want to have an RB crossover record when the the collective had been put together to make this political statement to share what jazz music is black music and we can control our own destinies and be self-determinate and all that? Do we really want to crossover? Well, Gil Scott clearly did want to crossover because it represented the possibility of making a whole lot of money and a whole lot of positive impact. So Gil Scott ended up leaving Strata East as we all did, or as we all the young lions did. And when Gil Scott left Strata East, he was based in Washington, DC. I co-formed a label with a man whose name was Jimmy Gray, and we formed a label called Black Fire Records. Black Fire Records put out the album African Rhythms. It also was the label I released Experience Unlimited, EU's first album, and a bunch of other Washington, DC based jazz artists and RB artists, Black Fire Records. That was in 1975. And in 1980, I put out a record called Everywhere But Loose. And Every Way But Loose in some ways was the same thing. I'm the first time putting it together like this, but the same thing that happened to Gil Scott Heron and Strata East was with Everywhere But Loose and Black Fire. Because Black Fire had been very much a political arts kind of slant. Very avant-garde, even though with some RB and all that. Very political as the label. But my song, Everywhere But Loose, crossed over into the dance world. A gay DJ whose name was Larry Levan at a place called the Paradise Garage started playing my song Everywhere But Loose. That song would go on to be top 80 dance billboard here, but top 10 in London. Black Fire was not the label that could capitalize on that. And so we signed with Sutra Records as part of Buddha Records. Same kind of thing. We crossed over and graduated to another thing. After signing with Sutra, and after being with Straty East and Black Fire, I started my own record label, N-A-M-E Brand Records. That stands for New African Musical Enterprises Brand Records. Shortened to Name Brand Records, which is Quippier. So, Name Brand Records. So I had this extensive experience. Almost by luck, I met with Ndico, South African musician. We put out an album called Indico and the Natives on a small label. Then I graduated to Strata East, where I'm working with 30 or more of these. Very experienced jazz musicians from New York who had all had contracts before and knew the business. And then forming Black Fire Records, co-founding with my partner, and having distribute an album or records on our own. We released 17 albums on that label. Then working with Sutra Records, another smaller, independent, but larger, the largest one I'd been to with at that time. And then form my own company, Name Brand Records. All of that to say I had a lot of practical experience in the record business. And yes, I had all these theoretical reasons to try to hold on to my copyrights and to manipulate my own masters and to do licenses and agreements and collect royalties on my own. And so I had this experience and I used that experience and it served me well. Kind of postscript to that. That was 1975 through 80. In the 90s, there was a Japanese company that came to license the whole Black Fire catalog. Then in 2001, several European companies would take individual songs or individual records to reissue. And then a company called Strut Records of London re-released, licensed from me and re-released the whole Black Fire catalog in 2018. I sold the Black Fire. My partner Jimmy Gray died in 1999 and ended up selling that catalog to str to Strut Records. And I kept name brand going as my own independent. Now, you asked me about it, but that's that's sort of the overview of my relationship to independent labels and releasing the music and the mis the music business. I have taught that subject at at the university level and done many seminars on it. I don't know that I would be considered an expert, but I have such practical experience that cannot be denied. I may not have had a MBA in in business, but there are people who have MBAs that don't have the experience that I have had. Sometimes I feel like a kind of a black forest gump. I end up in I end up in these situations with sort of world important figures that have no idea why I how I got there or or any predilection that I would have gotten there. But, you know, I meet with, you know, a South African apartheid is going to become a major international thing. I do a record that the my record African Rhythms, New York Times article called it one of the top 15 inf most influential records in the black political revolutionary movement. That wasn't planned. That's just the way it happens. I got to record with Farris Sanders because I was a fan. When he played in San Francisco, I would go to every one of his shows. I'd be there from soundcheck to the end, and ended up over and over again being in his presence until he finally said, Wow, are you stalking me? or And then later saying, Well, come record, you know. But none of these things are planned. Or if you looked at my life when I was nine years old with a chemistry book in Richmond, you wouldn't have thought that I would end up in some of these places in some of these things. So sometimes you just go with your flow.

SPEAKER_02 49:20

I firmly believe that if you are on your path that you should be in in your life, that those things just fall. That's right. And it's supposed to be easy.

SPEAKER_03 49:30

An opposite. When you're not on your path, you're just constantly having to chop down everything that's getting in your way and fighting your way.

SPEAKER_02 49:36

And and it sounds like you started on your path early and followed it wholeheartedly, which is beautiful.

SPEAKER_06 49:43

Yeah. I think that that in some ways is luck or being blessed, or maybe just being on the right path. Maybe having maybe the luck of having the right parents or the right situation.

SPEAKER_03 49:55

Speaking of your parents.

SPEAKER_06 49:57

My mother was always supportive. When I graduated from the song flute to the clarinet, it was my mother who invested in it. My mother invested in piano lessons for me. My mother was the one who would say, Pursue your path. This is what you're supposed to do. My grandfather, her father, thought when I was four years old, he would always say, That boy's going to be a preacher, because he can talk. My mother was a teacher. One of her principals came to one of my shows, I think at Dogwoodell, and he said, You better watch out. Plunk is going to be a political leader because the people will do whatever he says from the stage. My father was quite the opposite. My father would have rather that I have a job. My father would was very much a disciplinarian and he was disciplined with himself. My father might have worn the same suit. He might have had two suits for 10 years while he provided for us. My father was a penny pincher. He would save. My father did not believe in paying interest to anybody, so he would save his money religiously until he could buy the furniture. He would save his money till he had the down payment to move to what would have been a white neighborhood at the time. My house in Southside Richmond, we were poor. I didn't know that. I wouldn't have described it as poor. The house was on bricks, outdoor bathroom, no indoor plumbing for the first nine years of my life. When I discovered that chemistry book, we didn't have indoor plumbing or anything. But my father scrimped and saved and worked at RRS, and we moved into Bird Park Court. I don't know if you've seen Bird Park Court. It's a little courtyard that was built by a man who went to England and wanted to create, recreate what he saw there. And it's a little fountain and it's a driveway, a circle, and all these houses, very almost extremely middle class. So we went from abject poverty to this bird park, look overlooking the lake kind of house, just by the bootstraps, if you will. My parents were dismayed with my experience with the FBI and being a wall from the Army. My father had been in the armed services. My mother was a teacher. They were very conservative. They were dismayed for different reasons. My father primarily was afraid of the potential shame and me ending up in prison. My mother more that my dreams would be deferred and that I might be hurt in some way. They were much more supportive later when all that was over. My father, probably to the end, would rather have had a regular job.

SPEAKER_03 52:39

Do you have siblings?

SPEAKER_06 52:41

Yes, I have two brothers, and one of my brothers has played with me for since I moved back to Richmond. Still in my band. Muzy is a is an artist, master's degree from VCU and fine arts. He's a cultural art person. He's retired from VCU, worked at the hospital. He was the person that bought the art for all the hospitals and booked all the entertainment. If you went to MCV and saw bands in the lobbies, that was my brother Muzi's doing. My other brother, Kari, has been a part of our management. He runs an organization called 725 Arts down in South Hill, Virginia now. So my two brothers are related to my business and related to what I've done.

SPEAKER_03 53:23

Isn't that interesting that the more traditional parents had three that ended up being creatives?

SPEAKER_06 53:30

Yeah. But it's the two of them. My father working and providing. It's often very difficult to be creative if you're starving. Sometimes we talk about starving artists, but if you don't have your basics, it's awfully hard to be successful. You can be creative, but it's tough to be successful. And that's what my father provided. My mother provided the inspiration to say, yeah, go for this. Do do you. My brother is a painter, and he says he grew up thinking that he would sell his art because my mother would give him 25 cents to pay him for his little drawings. So he just grew up thinking, oh, my art has some value and I'll sell it. And my mother brought me piano lessons before I knew I wanted to play piano. My second or third day I was playing March of the Toys, and my teacher thought it was so amazing that I was reading the music and I really wasn't. I was had a great ear and I heard, and if I could hear it, then I could sort of play it. But my mother sort of saw that. Now, my father played piano. My father played piano and played it well enough that at parties he would be the person to play Happy Birthday or take requests. He never had a lesson, but he had a piano in the house. Back then, in people's houses in the South, there was often a piano. Because back then, when when that piano moved into the house, it was way before I was born, maybe even before my father was born, in this dilapidated house with no plumbing, there was a piano. There were no radios or record players when that piano moved in. If you wanted to hear music, it had to be live. And this piano was a piano roll, what they call a player piano. You could put a roll in with these holes in it, and you pump it with your feet, and the roll would spin and it would pluck the strings inside the piano. Well, those piano rolls, this is skipping around in history, but those piano rolls was the first way recorded music was sold. So back say 1890, you might buy a piano. You bought a piano because it was classy, it was thought of as something to aspire to. All the kings and queens had pianos in their houses. And it's the only way you could have live music. There's no radio to turn on, you don't have a record player, so you bought a piano. And if nobody could play the piano, you'd buy a player piano. You could be a hit record by selling piano roles. And pianos were sold by furniture stores. And so when records started being made, actual records, Thomas Edison in the late 1800s, record players, but by the 1920s, people were buying records. And you know, the people who became some of the record producers were furniture stores. They produced records. Here in Richmond, there were piano players and jazz musicians who made records. And the people who funded the records were the furniture stores. Why? Because they were selling these pieces of furniture called record players. And in order to get people the they needed the software to make people say, Oh, I do want a record. So I do want this thing called a record player because I like this music.

SPEAKER_03 56:58

Never have I heard that. Never. Never denied that.

SPEAKER_02 57:00

This is this is amazing. So you have been performing for over fifty years. But what keeps you inspired enough to keep creating new music instead of simply living off your legacy?

SPEAKER_06 57:13

That's a simple question, but maybe not so easy. And it's not easy for a a reason you can't know about. But I would give you the typical answer, and that is I'm inspired by the impact that I think I might be able to have. That's one reason. And maybe I have 20 reasons. So I'll just tick some of them off, and they're not necessarily in order. So I keep creating because I think I might be able to have some positive impact. That's all the way back from in Dico, wanting to be able to impact my community. I also, another big reason is because I keep encountering young people who inspire me, who who show me that there are new things to do. And they tell me that I can have impact with them. They bring me their tracks or their musical ideas and allow me to work with them, allow me to put my parts on them. Because music is largely collaborative. There are some people who compose every part, and Mozart might write a concerto when he's four years old. But most musicians and most music is done collaboratively, particularly jazz and soul and African music. That's almost a prerequisite. We want it to be a give and take. And so I'm still giving and taking. It's not me sitting down composing by myself. I'm working with other people. And so a large part of my inspiration to keep on going is the people that I get to work with. That's important. There is also new technology. New technology keeps on going. And the new technology often inspires me. Music and technology sort of go together. You don't need technology to make music. And I have this new set of thinking as would write another book about certain theories and my view of history and how things develop, at least from my view. You don't have to have technology to make music. I know music was um uh among our first ways of communicating. Humans. Two screams together making a song that said this is the time to do something, humming, first discovering that you could blow on a piece of reed and make a flute sound. All of those things tell us music is a form of communication. We also know that there is no society that we've discovered that doesn't have music as a part of it. It's just that basic. It's just that basic. The idea that sound, we make sounds, we beat on our chest, we we hum through our teeth, we whistle, those sounds are basic to human development. But also basic to music is technology, meaning we graduate from just using our voices and our bodies to a piece of reed, and we have to sculpt that reed, or we've horn off of a buffalo and found we can blow into it, or we dry some skin. All of these are levels of technology. And so we keep on developing technology. We talked about earlier the the fact of a piano roll. We're getting really technical. I'm skipping over the development of all the instruments. Every instrument is a kind of result of some technology. Whether it's wood or like I play a saxophone, it's metal, you have to forge the metal, you have to put keys on it, you have to put springs. A spring is a kind of a simple instrument, literally in physics. You're combining all these things to make an instrument technology. When Edison invented the the ability to record sound and play it back, that was the beginning of a music industry that went from printed sheet music to being able to hear the music and selling a form of music that could be heard, fast forward electricity with instruments, the electric guitar in the 30s, then fast forward all the way up to synthesizers and meanwhile recording the science of recording, all these technologies, they can be debilitating, they can be discouraging to some musicians all the way through. Every one of those technical developments probably had musicians who resisted it. Oh, how are you gonna put metal keys on this flute? Everybody knows a flute should just be a piece of bamboo with holes in it. Why are you putting all this technology on? That's like cheating. How are you gonna use electric instruments? That's cheating. We should use our breath. How are you gonna make a sound out of something called a synthesizer? How are you gonna wait, how are you gonna take a piece of my music off a record and sample it and make another record, another kind of record? All of these technological advancements are not always universally accepted as progress. But for me, every one of those is something that could be explored or I would like to explore. Doesn't mean that I will be successful in them, doesn't mean that I'll like them after I explore them. But I like the the new frontiers. If I were confined to just being symphonic music or just doing a cover band music or not doing new music, I probably would have gotten bored and turned to something else. I like the new frontier of it. I like I like the new genres, I like the new technology. And though that newness inspires me to keep on creating.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:45

I feel like because you are so open on your path to anything falling in your path, that is what has created you as a musician, as a a person, a human, and all your experiences.

SPEAKER_06 1:04:01

Absolutely, that's right. I would agree with you that my open my openness to newness, my openness to new things, my openness again. I won't even try to psychologically or even historically try to say why that is, but I agree with you that it is, that I I enjoy the newness. I enjoy improvising, I enjoy making something out of nothing. That's just understatement, but I enjoy that I really enjoy that part. I enjoy being able to shock and awe people with something they may not have anticipated or maybe never even experienced before.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:36

Okay, well, what about astrologically? What is your birthday?

SPEAKER_06 1:04:40

A cancer. I was born my birthday is coming up next Monday in Richmond this Sunday. We're this this July 19th. It's called Plunky Day. Plunky Day started because DC has Chuck Brown Day.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:55

Yes.

SPEAKER_06 1:04:57

And and some people thought that I am important to um to Richmond. So the mayor, Stoney, at one point gave me the key to the city. That came about in part because during COVID, I started, here again, I'm making this bold claim. I started doing front porch concerts, of which are very important now here in Richmond and even in Washington, D.C. But uh for 71 days I played on my porch at 7 o'clock. I would do a little five-minute, 10-minute, 15-minute little concert for my block, for my neighbors. Well, it was for me. I imagined, well, if Miles Davis lived on a block and he couldn't play, if John Coltrane lived on a block and and the clubs were closed because of COVID, what would they do? And and I said, Well, I can be the Miles Davis of my block. And and it and it gathered, and my neighbors just loved it. I had no idea that it would it got to be a thing. And then every day, I have older people in my block. One of my fans was a 15-month, two-year-old little white kid, whose parents would bring him every day down to my front. He would come with a different instrument. He would have these little toy ukuleles or horns or whatever, and he would play with me. And eventually it went from me playing solo to me adding my brother, and eventually my whole band. And on my birthday of that year, we played a big concert. COVID was winding down, so the neighborhood came out and it was a big crowd, and the mayor came and gave me the key to sit in. It was on my birthday.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:34

Now it's Plunky Day. We shared that on our Facebook deal. Yeah, that that was coming up. Wow. I just gotta ask what type of romantic partner can keep up with you.

SPEAKER_06 1:06:45

You keep asking these questions that are so relevant to today. Yesterday, I was supposed to come do a podcast with two young ladies yesterday. And I didn't tell them why I had to postpone it. But it was my anniversary. 51 years.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:03

Wow. Happy anniversary.

SPEAKER_06 1:07:05

Thank you. And I could have probably squeezed it in at five, but I didn't want my wife to think yet again she was taking some sort of backseat delay. But yeah, I don't deserve a whole lot because for probably more of the 51 years, at least half of them, not only did I forget, but she would forget. Would forget when our anniversary was. So now I try to make it a thing because so for many years it would be the week later and say, Oh, you know, we missed our anniversary last week. You know. She has been someone who has been m obviously more than supportive. She's given me two wonderful kids, and but she's she's not a musician. She was a teacher like my mother. She taught for 30 years in Richmond Public Schools.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:54

What subject does she teach? Or did she?

SPEAKER_06 1:07:57

English, reading. She was Spanish, but when she moved, she came here from Philadelphia and she was a Spanish teacher, but they needed English teachers. And in fact, let me tell you this that as I go around town, it's not impossible, but very rare that I go and somebody doesn't recognize me. And we always joke about that. But she has as many fans as I because she taught so many kids for 30 years. So it's always a competition. Is it one of my fans or one of her ex-students?

SPEAKER_03 1:08:31

So somebody's coming up.

SPEAKER_05 1:08:33

Exactly.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:35

All right. Well, I don't know if you've listened to any of our episodes, but one thing we do is called a speed round, and it is to very quickly help our listeners get to know you a little bit. So we're gonna move into that, and I know you've got a commitment, but one thing I do feel like I want to touch on before we go into the speed round is kind of where you started. Where you started was kind of the way you saw the world in Richmond as a child, and then how you kind of saw it in New York when things were a little bit liberal, but still kind of segregated. And I'm curious as you've gone through your journey all around the world and through music, how your views on that connectivity and race has evolved and changed and your comfort level in different environments and kind of just where you are today with that?

SPEAKER_06 1:09:27

I've changed not at all and a lot because I think even as a child, and I think I I'm gonna just go out on a limb, I think most people, most kids are open. Most people, race is not important at all. And even growing up, it was not a thing to me. I'm just describing the situation. But I was told not to look at white people in the face. I was told I had to defer to white people on the sidewalks. But it wasn't a thing for me. I never held, I didn't have prejudice. I said that in the past tense because it's also possible as I have gone through growing up and living and advancing, there are racial issues. There are racial issues that survive our humanism, that go past what we know to be the right thing and what we feel in our hearts. But as a practical matter, if a white cop stops me in Hanover or or in Rico, I can't afford to just be myself. I have to put on my persona that gets me through the experience. If I'm gonna get on a plane, I have to put on the right persona so that I get my seat and not get kicked off the plane. So in some ways, I have let the world pollute my my spirit in that way. But going around the world, going to Africa, going to Europe, maybe it's just me, or maybe it's the luck of what I do for a living, that's very very much not a thing. I work with white producers and I'll say some of my best friends in the industry are white. It's it's it's not important. The color, the race is not important until it is. The people who really love music, at least in my experience, really love people.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 1:11:24

And I don't think that they even think the race of the people. They love people. It could be a black reggae artist or or a white punk artist. It's if it's music that appeals to you, it it it's it's so alien to think that something that makes you feel as good as music could be or even ever should be a negative. But that's probably my child childhood naivety. But that's really how I feel about it.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:51

You just laid it out so beautifully, so beautifully from an artist's position. Like Stanley Jordan is very big on that. He just feels like music and musicians and the artists are gonna be the ones that bring this world back together again.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:05

All right, we're gonna lighten it up a little bit. We have been deep, deep, deep with Plunky today. So we're gonna go we're gonna go light and jump into our speed round. This is the first thing that pops into your head. First question, actually, this isn't that light, but you've played all around the world, and so I'm curious if there is one thing that audiences everywhere actually have in common.

SPEAKER_06 1:12:27

Their response to rhythm and melody, this thing called music, that is common everywhere that people can relate to music. So that's mundane, but that's that's it for me.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:41

You get one dinner guest from any era of history, who's at the table?

SPEAKER_06 1:12:47

I'll have Fay Lakuti from Nigeria. And the the why is because he was such an oddball. He created what we call Afrobeat music. He was political, fighting against the Nigerian military junta there and against corruption and got persecuted for it. His mother was even killed for it. Went he went to prison, but he was marijuana smoker who had more than twenty wives and created a compound in Lagos, Nigeria, which he declared another whole country. He was he like I said, and his music is coming to fruition now. So I think I'd go to dinner with with him. I met him once. He he's been the subject of a off-Broadway and then a Broadway play called Fela goes through his it's a musical that goes through his story.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:43

Are all the wives in the play?

SPEAKER_06 1:13:45

Yeah, but not as individuals. The play is about the experience of his mother being killed. His mother was killed when she was thrown out of the second floor window of their compound when the soldiers came to raid him, and her spirit is in the in the in the I've said the film. Maybe there should somebody should do a film of that. But it was a off-Broadway play and then a Broadway play. I went to both.

SPEAKER_03 1:14:09

All right.

SPEAKER_06 1:14:13

I'm gonna say Mama J's Jamaica House you know, a whole string of them. My wife and I go to sort of all of the soul food restaurants, Family Secrets and and Southern Kitchen, and Mama J's, and and I shouldn't have started because I leave some out and and Jamaica House is Jamaica restaurant and and M M F Jamaica restaurant. And but we also go to Terrence and we go to last night for our anniversary, we went to Bookbinders because she's from Philadelphia and Bookbinders, she went went there for her high school senior prom at the Philadelphia version of it. And she's a seafood lover and they have great, great seafood.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:01

So what is the most ridiculous thing you've ever bought?

SPEAKER_06 1:15:05

I bought a $200 soprano saxophone from Timu.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:11

Wait, and it ended up being the size of her baby finger.

SPEAKER_06 1:15:15

It was a soprano saxophone, it was this big. Oh my goodness. But it worked. And I have played it on stage, and I still use it as a part of my array. My tenor saxophone was given to me by the New York musicians. I went to play at the New York musician festival in the 70s, and my horns were stolen from the trunk of my car. And the musicians put up to get me a saxophone. They got me this tenor saxophone, which is a Selmer Mark 6. You guys aren't saxophone players, so you don't know that name. It's like the creme de la creme, it's the Cadillac of saxophones. And mine is old as that, but it's worth probably $7,500. And my musician friends and and I talk about these days, it seems that the music companies believe that any musician who's going to be played professionally, their instrument should cost $3,500 as the bass. No matter what instrument, it doesn't matter if it's a guitar or a bass or a keyboard or a saxophone or a trumpet, it should cost $3,500. So for me to play $200 and expect to get a playable instrument with something as complicated as a saxophone was a ridiculous purchase, but it worked. That's a killer. That's all that's a killer.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:37

All right. Speaking of instruments, if you could instantly ma master any instrument that you can't currently play, what would it be?

SPEAKER_06 1:16:45

Probably piano. I don't play piano, haven't taken any lessons since I was nine years old. And I wish I could play keyboards. So keyboards is the versatile instrument that it can get you into others that can you can play synthesizers, and if you can play keyboards these days, you can use it to trigger through some technology called MIDI, musical instrument digital interface, where you use the keyboard to trigger other sounds, so it can s you can use the keyboard to sound like anything, any instrument, from the voice to strings to so keyboard is a very useful thing to know how to do.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:24

Okay, what's something people assume about jazz musicians that's completely wrong?

SPEAKER_06 1:17:29

Most of what they assume about jazz musicians is completely right. They think sometimes they think jazz musicians are nerds and snobs about that music. And most jazz musicians are down to earth and very human and very not stuck up. Sometimes we have to maintain that posture on stage to keep the persona going.

SPEAKER_02 1:17:55

I have heard that about jazz musicians that they're snobby.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:58

That was before we started this, and we have learned we saw Stanley Clark. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Blown away. Blown away. Blown away. And then the way he brought in the drummer and it's not the jazz I grew up thinking was all that existed.

SPEAKER_02 1:18:15

I would say, and please correct me if I'm wrong, that jazz artists have so much going on because you really play whatever you're into at that moment, whatever your mind is playing, the sound you're hearing in your head, that it's not snobby, it's that you are bringing out what is inside you.

SPEAKER_06 1:18:32

I would say you're exactly spot on. The perception is that they're very introspective and but they're not. They are so focused. Jazz is is a a very mental exercise. It can be emotional and spiritual, all these things, but for me, primarily, it's mental. You're you're it's a thinking man's music. It's close to classical in that way. It's not something that you just feel and play. It's driving toward a feeling. But a a a professional, uh proficient jazz musician is thinking about the chords and thinking about the notes and thinking about the length of the notes and the changes, what we call playing the changes and the transitions. It's very much you have to be focused. It's not something you just flippantly do. Even though we try to make it seem like that as well. Um and even the concept when you talk about improvising, there are jazz musicians that resist that term. They say it's not just improvising because it implies that we're just playing anything that pops into our head. Well, it's sort of that, but it's with a whole bunch of rigid systems to make that work. And that would the rigid, the rigidity of the systems make it what it is. And jazz is is black classical music. It is as as intellectual as classical music, it's as structured as classical music.

SPEAKER_02 1:21:07

It's almost like you see numbers in the music.

SPEAKER_06 1:21:10

Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely amazing. Absolutely, absolutely.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:14

And uh both Plunky and Stanley have the same, you know, his chemistry, Stanley's math, you know, it it definitely there's a theme there. Where, you know, some like our drummers, you know, they just kind of leave him.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:33

I'm married one. Hey, I'm married one.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:35

I'm married one.

unknown 1:21:36

I'm married one and leave him.

SPEAKER_03 1:21:38

All right. What talent do you have that has absolutely nothing to do with music?

SPEAKER_06 1:21:44

Not many. I don't know. I I think that I have the talent of insight. I know that's not the kind of answer that you're particularly going for, but I think I have this ability to to look at external situations and distill I have the ability for macro vision. Maybe to my detriment. My talent is to see in the the individual thing, to be able to see how that is relates to the whole. To see an individual person, I see an individual person, and I see that whole genre of people, that whole race of people, that whole nationality, that the ability to extrapolate, that's what I say is my talent.

SPEAKER_02 1:22:29

That's an incredible gift. Okay, back to food. Okay.

SPEAKER_06 1:22:32

Late night snack. Hmm. Gee whiz. Y'all ask me these things, I don't even know. I would say chocolate chip cookies and ice cream.

SPEAKER_03 1:22:43

You said you had a book out, so that book, if it became a movie, who would you like to play plunky?

SPEAKER_06 1:22:49

I don't know that many actors by name, but especially the younger ones, and I'd want somebody younger. Um, but then let me just be extreme. Let me say Denzel Washington.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:01

I was like, Well, I like to be mad when I was yes.

SPEAKER_05 1:23:04

You got a little Denzel. Yeah, and I think that, I think that and spy him too. And he played a musician in Mo Better Blues and all that.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:12

So I would like to speak that you hold yourselves. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:23:18

Totally groove. Good one. I'm glad we agree. Good. Smooth groove with plunder. Great, I like it. Very much.

SPEAKER_06 1:23:28

Good.

SPEAKER_02 1:23:29

Most underrated city for live music.

SPEAKER_06 1:23:31

I'm gonna say Richmond, Virginia, because nobody outside of the industry would think of Richmond as having a vibrant live scene. And oftentimes when we talk about live music, we often, and I'm not saying you, I'm not sure that you meant this, but we often think of the live music scene in terms of how many national acts come to or through that city, and that makes for a vibrant live scene. But Richmond may not have the most of that, but Richmond has a very diverse music scene. First, it has a lot of jazz because of VCU's program and University of Richmond and Virginia Union and Virginia State. So it has a kind of a large college-age population. In terms of demographics, those are the music buyers and uh even more importantly to the live scene. That's the age group that most goes out to see music, no matter which kind. Having a large base of college-age students gives you the at least the possibility for a vibrant live scene because people will go out to see music. And Richmond has larger than its share. And VCU, because of its arts focus. VCU is one of the top arts schools in the country. And in one poll I saw, it was either number one or number two. So again, I'm not just blowing smoke. VCU is strong in the arts, and having arts people are people who want to go out and be a part of the arts, not just music, but music being the most important art. So I would say Richmond.

SPEAKER_03 1:25:11

We've actually heard that from a few people. It's it's um it's almost like a secret. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:16

Because Charlottesville has their big music.

SPEAKER_06 1:25:20

Same thing because of University of Virginia.

SPEAKER_03 1:25:22

Look, Snoop Dogg played here. So you know.

SPEAKER_06 1:25:25

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:25:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 1:25:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:25:28

One word that your friends would use to describe you.

SPEAKER_06 1:25:32

My fans would say legend or legendary, and that's just what they say. My friends, adventurous. I don't travel all that much, but I might go anywhere. I really enjoy traveling. If I motivate myself to do it, I'm really a homebody more and more and more.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:49

That's the cancer. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 1:25:50

Exactly. Totally. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 1:25:52

Well, what about one word that you would describe yourself as?

SPEAKER_03 1:25:55

Homebody might be it.

SPEAKER_06 1:25:56

Yeah, it might be. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That that's a good one.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:00

Right. Yeah. Homebody. Yeah, that could be it.

SPEAKER_06 1:26:04

My wife would tell him he didn't want to go nowhere. He would just stay right here.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:08

All right. We do something after the speed round that gives you the opportunity to ask us a question if you have one, since we've spent an hour and a half drilling you. If you have a question for us, this is your time to ask it.

SPEAKER_06 1:26:25

What motivates you and what do you want to have as the impact of your podcast series?

SPEAKER_02 1:26:33

I want young people, up-and-coming artists, and just normal, we'll call them civilians, to really hear the the heart and and the the minds of artists and what they go through to get where they are, that when they flip the radio on and they hear that song, so much of their heart and soul and mind goes into that song. That's my favorite part about this is getting to know you as a human being that has made you do this thing that again brings people together that makes you feel like music makes you feel and I'm getting chills. And sometimes it can motivate you. I want people to see you and not take you for granted and and get to know the individual, is my thing about this podcast.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:26

Mine might be a little more selfish. I have learned over the years that what you surround yourself with is how you evolve. We are with such incredible, magical creatives that it's almost like filling us up and evolving us with that spirit of creativity. And it's making us more creative because we're just taking from the people that have the antenna to the universe of creativity. And it's just been so fulfilling. It's it's like I've never really felt my soul grow as rapidly as I have being around people like you. Well, I've cried, I've teared up, I've chills.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:07

I mean, I've had a lot of chills today. We have gotten emotional in some way with every artist we talk to.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:14

Plunky, it was an honor to have you on the show. I didn't even know how much of an honor it was going to be. I knew, but I didn't know, but the go-go thing has really just killed me.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:24

And we also want to discuss what you have coming up.

SPEAKER_06 1:28:28

I have a couple of things coming up. I am going through a very fruitful period of my career, particularly locally. I'm doing Plunky Day in a couple of days, uh, a day dedicated to my birthday and my career and having uh several local musicians come perform a song for or with me. And then coming up, I have a very important gig to me. I'm playing the Richmond Jazz and Music Festival on August 8th. We're headlining the Saturday night of that jazz festival, doing a special performance of Plunky and Oneness, and we're doing a tribute to D'Angelo, another Richmond musician. Then I have an ongoing, kind of regular gig at this club in Richmond called Revelae. I love that place. It's intimate. It's I often say it's like you stumbled into somebody's grandmother's attic.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:19

Yeah. That's true.

SPEAKER_06 1:29:20

It's so eclectic, but and they kind of have all kinds of music. It's intimate. I say that word again. I know I'm repeating myself, but it's intimate and it's filled with people who can't. Came to hear the music. You can dance, you can do whatever you want to do, but it's clearly a music lover's place. And uh we play there coming up on August, August the 29th. And then I have another m major gig, I think it's October 3rd. We're we're headlining the Second Street Festival, the Sunday. That's the first weekend in October, and we're the headliner for the Sunday, the closeout artists for that. One of my documentaries, the Black Fire documentary. It's the short film about the label that I talked about earlier, the Black Fire record label. We finished that film maybe two, two and a half years ago, but it's still being screened, and one of our screenings is going to be October something, October 10th or 12th in Amsterdam.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:17

Wow.

SPEAKER_06 1:30:18

And so that's a big thing. It's a small gathering, it's 85 people, but it's a screening in Amsterdam. So those are the kind of things that either keep me awake or keep me going. But some of my best gigs of all are happen here in Richmond. I say that not to to to flatter Richmond, but it's my home and I love the place. I've had some amazing musical experiences. I love talking about the fact that I went to Cuba in 2001 twice, sneaked in, did a film, a documentary there called Under the Radar, a survey of Afro-Cuban music, went with my son. I love playing in London and Paris. Went to Brazil to play at the carnival one year. I I've done all these things, but to be honest, some of my best experiences have been here in Richmond. The last time I played at Revele, it was just a couple of few weeks ago. I nearly cried on stage twice. I was so moved by the the music. I don't know. Somebody might look at it and say it's an ordinary club gig, it's 105 people sitting here. And but I was moved to tears right here in Richmond. It's five minutes from my house. No road, no having to get on a tour bus on or get on the road. I could be home in 15 minutes, you know. I had a great experience 2019 or 2017. I played at the International Folk Festival in Richmond. And I had a big band. I had 15 musicians on stage. It was like a reconstruction of Oneness of Juju. And we headlined the festival of the last act of the last day. And under the dance tent, and it was completely packed, and all of the people were screaming and cheering. And if I said a word, if I said hire, and they said hire. Moving experiences. So that is to say you don't have to go to Paris to be moved. You can be moved in your garage. You could be moved on your front porch. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:32:23

Had I heard about it, I would have driven the city. People did all the way to the street.

SPEAKER_06 1:32:25

People could become seeing you. And then people started streaming it. We had at the at the end we had 4,000 people watching the live stream. Wow. And I I did it never thinking that it would have that. It was for me to rehearse. I did that because I saw on the news, the evening news, there was a woman in this small town in Italy. The town was known for making violins. I don't remember the name of the town, but she was on the t on the rooftop of her building playing solo violin to almost nobody, but just out into the ether because COVID. And I said, Wow, I can do that. You know, we can all do what we we can all be inspired to do what we can around ourselves. You don't have to even be a musician to do that. Because my performances every day was dedicated, I would say it out loud, we're dedicating this to the quote unquote essential workers. It was for the nurses and for the people, the garbage people who still had to go and still had to pick up garbage and still keep the cops, the essential workers. And so that's what it was dedicated to. And so sometimes when we do stuff for other people, we do we move ourselves.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:33

And once again, music heals.

SPEAKER_03 1:33:42

You can submit to be on the show by visiting our website and filling out the Be on the Hook form. Just head to johnnyandjess.com. That's J-O-H-N-I-A-N-D-J-E-S-S dot com. That's where you'll find everything you need to get started. Make sure to follow us on social media at Johnny and Jess on TikTok and you can find the hook with Johnny and Jess on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.

SPEAKER_02 1:34:12

You can listen to all our episodes on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, iHeart, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and the colour.