Canadian Originals is a series by Will Chernoff featuring exclusive long-form interviews with Cellar Music artists from Canada. In this edition of this series, Will talks to multi-instrumentalist John Lee. John grew up in Nanaimo, BC after immigrating to Canada with his family from South Korea and attended the Berklee College of Music in Boston with the luminaries of his younger-Millennial jazz generation. His latest album for Cellar, featuring his piano playing, is Second Wind (release date: July 5, 2024) with Peter Washington and Kenny Washington. Here, however, he talks at length about his upbringing and the road to his debut on our label, The Artist (2022) on which he plays bass.
Will is a bassist and a writer at the Vancouver jazz website Rhythm Changes. He spoke to John by videocall on August 29, 2024. This is the first part of that conversation, with the second part to be released later.
WILL CHERNOFF: Thank you, John, for joining me. Where do I find you right now, and where have you been lately? Talk about that.
JOHN LEE: I'm guessing you mean like, where am I at this current moment?
WC: Yeah.
JL: I'm in Victoria, BC, man, where I've been living for the last seven years. Can't find me anywhere right now! I feel like I almost took the entire summer off. I did some local stuff. I taught at a jazz camp and things like that, that I do here annually. But other than that, I've been chilling hard, but it looks like fall and stuff is going to pop off with some interesting things to do.
WC: Yeah, I know you as a Vancouver Island resident. I want to talk about Wellington and Nanaimo maybe a bit later, but first I want to know, when did you actually arrive in Canada? If you take it way back, what's that timing like?
JL: Oh, okay! Well, I arrived here in 1998. I was five years old at the time. My family basically immigrated us here, for I'm sure a variety of reasons that I still really don't know to this day. My brother and I were getting to this age where we were going to both have to start doing the Korean schooling system, and they didn't want us to take part in that, because it's very competitive and gets really weird. They wanted us to come over here and be a little bit more chill.
So yeah, I was five years old then. Been here ever since. I grew up in Nanaimo, though, And just to give you an idea of what the times were like at that time, I'm pretty sure we were the fifth official, registered immigrants to ever move to Nanaimo. When I grew up in Nanaimo, I was like a lot of people's first Asian, man. Really, in the schooling system, just growing up in elementary school, I was like the only Asian kid. Me and my brother were the only Asian kids throughout the entirety of our elementary school days. And then when we started going through high school is when we started to see more Asian people here. I'm sure it was different in Vancouver, but in Nanaimo, it was at that time still very... it was different times, man [laughs].
WC: That's unreal. Can I tell you something about my experience on the Vancouver side?
JL: Yeah, sure.
WC: I’m a couple of years younger than you, but I went to a very small elementary school in Richmond and I was one of the few people who wasn't from Hong Kong at the time.
JL: All right. So you had a whole different experience then, the opposite experience. That's actually really funny.
WC: It's funny how that works out. What were you into, and what was your brother into, at the time?
JL: We did everything that any kid would do around that time. We participated in some local sports, and we had a big passion for video games growing up too, and we did all that stuff. But the one sort of common thing that was around for all of us was definitely music in the house. Music was our regular pastime activity probably more than anything else. Had an early start.
WC: What were you playing? Were you playing piano?
JL: Yeah, so as soon as we moved here, my mom put me in piano lessons and my brother was already playing violin at the time, so they found him a violin teacher. I started playing classical piano, sort of pseudo-classical piano – the Suzuki method, and I went through that for a really long time. I did Royal Conservatory stuff just for the last few years of high school. But by that time, I was doing so bad in piano and my classical studies. I had already found jazz, and I just wasn't in the right mindset to achieve that kind of perfection. I finished with my grade 9 RCM [Royal Conservatory of Music] exam with a 60, man, they honestly shouldn't have even passed me [laughs]. But after that, I knew that my classical piano playing days were over. But I took it right to the end of grade 12. I was in it all my life, just didn't do as good by the end of it.
WC: Yeah. Wellington, it strikes me as such a place where you ended up going to high school and furthering your love of jazz, right? That program is so strong.
JL: That's right. I went there because it was actually my dad who suggested that I go there, because he saw that I was getting interested in jazz. I was going to a school that's closed down here. I used to go to a school called Woodlands. I did that until grade 10, and then my dad was like, if you really want to try this jazz thing, I heard that the program at Wellington is quite good. And it was actually like a pretty big step for me. I was leaving all my friends. The high school that I [had been] going to, my elementary school fed into that school, so I had all my friends from elementary school. But I just decided to take the lead, do something for my musical future, I guess – although at that time I wasn't thinking that seriously about it – and decided to move there. That's where I met Carmella [Luvisotto, the Wellington music teacher]. You know her, of course. Yeah. That’s where everything started for me.
WC: So when did you start feeling more serious about it?
JL: Probably around that time, I would sa end of grade 11 and grade 12. Carmella never taught me too much about music to be honest, as the technical parts go, but she was a real guide, if you will. Her talent is an encouragement of making you believe in yourself and that you can do this. She really gave me that. She'll take you on these tours, give you opportunities to maybe win a little prize in the local jazz festival for kids, and all this kind of stuff. But all of that stuff adds into your identity artistically, saying, oh, maybe I am a little ahead of the game than these other people, in that I was able to win these things, participate in certain things and all that. For a lot of the Wellington people that are still pursuing it to this day, I think she really set us up more like that than any sort of musical foundation.
I would like to give a quick shout-out, actually, to a teacher here named Steve Jones. Carmella started inviting him because he was getting more disconnected with the VIU [Vancouver Island University, in Nanaimo] program. He was one of the big guys over there, so she started to bring him in the first year that I went to Wellington. He’s still there, I think, participating to a certain degree, and she would let him take over more of the technical stuff. We had theory class with him, and he was more of the musical guidance than I think she was. They played sort of different roles in that sense.
WC: Nice. One of the things that I know happens in the Wellington program is that American jazz musicians, or musicians of an international calibre, will come and work with you. Did that happen with you when you were there, and with who?
JL: Yes. When I was going there, though, it was a little bit early in Carmella's career, as far as access to some of these artists. I guess you could say that these days, she has more access now, because Wellington has changed a lot since I graduated there, which was 2010.
Some of the people that she had early connections with, who came and worked with us, were actually Berklee [College of Music, in Boston] alumni, which, I ended up going to Berklee. That was Christian Fabian of the Lionel Hampton Big Band. Ingrid Jensen. Jason Marsalis came when I was there. Terrell Stafford, I'm pretty sure, came as well. Christine Jensen. So her early connections were like that, and I feel like now she's a little bit more opened up.
But I got to say, it's so funny how that works out. I've known Emmet Cohen since 2012, before he was Emmet Cohen. Emmet would be doing some of his earlier tours, and I remember telling her at that time, hey, these guys want to come to your school just fill up their time while they're out touring, with Russell [Hall] and Kyle [Poole, who together are the best-known house rhythm section with Cohen on Emmet’s Place]. It's funny, I've always had a bit of an ear when I heard some of these artists that are huge now at their early stage, especially people who are close to my age. It's just some people that you just knew were going to be superstars in the jazz world already. Some of those guys were definitely some of the people that I thought, were going to, and they did end up becoming some of those people.
WC: That's awesome. I dig that. And it makes me think of another one that maybe you wouldn't feel is exactly the same, but this is something that I saw earlier this year, because I worked on Jazz at the Bolt with Cory [Weeds] and Tim [Reinert] – last year, as I am for this coming year. You reconnected at this year's Jazz at the Bolt with JK Kim the drummer.
JL: That's right. Oh, okay, you heard about that! Yeah, it's so funny how things work out, man. JK, we were very similar, we got along together. First of all, we arrived at Berklee together. He was fresh from Korea and I'm coming fresh from Nanaimo. We're the same age, we're both born in ‘93. We both skipped a grade. His birthday's in July and my birthday's in June, so we had both just turned 17 when we moved to Berklee together and we did school together. So he was like my brother, man. We played all five, six years that I was there on and off, we were super close. He's also somebody that I never doubted would have a very successful jazz career, especially in a certain subgenre, you could call it maybe, of jazz. You'd be surprised, some of the faces of the Instagram jazz world [laughs], how many of those people were definitely part of my growth. I'd like to believe that I was part of their growth as well in some ways. But once we all get older, we all go on our separate journeys in life.
WC: That's such a funny way to put it. I like that. But it makes total sense to me, because if you just think about the function of your ages and where you're at in your career, it's like you're in that prime position right now, where you're both young and slightly older. You've learned some things, and yet in the grand scheme of things you're still super-young.
JL: No, that is true. We all met when we were teenagers, and now we're all in our thirties and doing our own thing, and it's crazy. [JK Kim is] somebody that I consider to be a super-close friend of mine. We went through it all, man. We went through everything that schoolmates, especially – I'm just talking about jazz, the jazz world, because that's what I know – everything that we should have done at that time. We hung hard, we played hard, we did all sorts of things together. I think that was a huge part of all the community. To take it even further, even though we are all split up somewhere in the professional world in this field, we all have a common connection in where the roots of our sound came from.
Someone like JK, I am influenced by him as I am influenced by so many people that meant a lot to me in a peer sense at that time. You could argue that even in a smaller community like Cap [Capilano University’s jazz program] that in some way, because language and dialect is so regional [...] It stems from the elders, people who are teaching at the program. But the sound that the community finds together, it's... you go to this jam session, you see the guys that you see at school, and then you hear them. It makes it so that even though the world is very much connected online and stuff, regionally, what you experience and see in person affects the Vancouver sound, the Boston sound, the New York sound. All of that stuff is definitely a real thing. When I listen to Vancouver musicians, it's not something you can really describe or put your finger on, but you can hear that we all have influences that are local and together, and I really liked that. I think that's actually an important thing. I have to imagine that this was even more so before we were all connected with this [holds up phone].
WC: Yeah. I want to hear a little bit more about when you landed at Berklee. You're already giving me an idea of the vibe that you found yourself in once you got there, and you've talked about some of these people who became your contemporaries. But what else do you recall right now about that period of time that you could share?
JL: To back up just a little bit, you have to understand that the reason that I was able to attend Berklee was a very fortunate and lucky situation. I don't know if they have it anymore – they must – but there's a man by the name of Gary Slaight in Toronto who sponsors a full ride to one Canadian, every single year, at Berklee. That scholarship had only started two years before I applied, and I was the third recipient of that award, so that was the reason that I was able to go to Berklee. They check your financial things as well, with your parents, and if you feel like you couldn't afford to come here without it. They suss all this out: merit, level of playing, and artistry and all that. They choose one Canadian every year. I was fortunate enough to win that somehow, like it was like literally a lottery. That's the reason that I was able to go to Berklee.
I don't really consider that my ability to go there had anything to do with the level of my ability to play jazz, necessarily. I was already a multi-instrumentalist at that time, and I sent in everything that I've ever done, like my pop-punk band in high school. I'm playing bass on this, I'm playing guitar on this, here's some of my singer-songwriter stuff, here's my jazz drumming stuff. All these things, and they chose me because of that. I would say that the reason they chose me for the scholarship is still the same thing today that I take advantage of in my artistry: everyone has to be quite diverse in the music world to make a living, and I feel like my diversity actually lets me stay in the world that I want to stay in, which is performing within a straight-ahead jazz vein. I'm able to diversify it by playing these different instruments. What is getting me through now is the same reason as why they chose me for that scholarship.
My [level of] experience in the BC jazz community, especially not being involved in Vancouver in any way, it was really low, man. I had a lot of great jazz in my ears, because I'd been listening to it since I was really young, but like my experience of playing jazz, still at that point when I went to Berklee... I'd never heard of people like Joshua Redman, Brad Mehldau, Christian McBride. I didn't even know these people! I'm just like, isn't jazz like “St. Thomas”, like Max Roach and all this stuff? I'm going in green.
When I landed in Berklee in the first week, a couple of my friends said, hey, there's this thing called the global jazz institute that Danilo Perez runs. It's Wayne Shorter’s crew, and it's all about original music and what was creative at that time. There's a concert tonight, we should go! It's a jazz concert. I'm like, Oh, cool, I'm going to go there and hear “Sonnymoon for Two” and “Red Clay”, or just things that I was sort of familiar with. I went there, and they started playing, and it was the most modern, craziest music I've ever heard. I remember going home that day feeling a little confused. I was like, wait a second: I thought jazz was like this, but they're playing something that actually now looking back at it, it's like new stuff, man, that no one had heard before.
I really emphasized that when I would come back. I would say to my friends here, man, I feel like when I'm out there in the room, in the classroom or in the concert that no one is filming and putting it on Instagram or whatever, I feel like I'm hearing stuff that no one has heard yet before. Truly, these artists are... I don't know if you'd know some of these names, but man, the drum crew at Berklee when I first got there – Justin Faulkner, Mark Whitfield Jr., Jonathan Pinson, Corey Fonville, Adam Arruda, all these people who are now doing wonderful things within the jazz world – I was hearing them express themselves in a way where you would hear stuff there that you just would not be able to get anywhere else. They hadn't made their records yet. They hadn't been on all these projects where people are checking it out. It was the rawest creative thing that you could ever see happen. It was happening right there, as a Canadian boy in America watching the new age of American music happen right in front of your face.
I got to hear a lot here and see a lot of stuff that looking back at it now, man, that was music that you could only get right then and there from these future stars within the music. It's like hearing JK play at 17 years old and the way that he was dealing with the drums. Dude, I think this is something special that someone's going to hear it one day and be like, this is the new thing. It's not the new thing yet, but you're doing it right now in front of my face. There's a huge sort of learning experience that sort of happened there.
Benny Benack, it's the same thing. When we first discovered Benny Benack, we were like, no one is doing this now. I feel like in some ways, cause he's such a big influence, everyone is doing that now. But when we first heard Benny Benack, it was like like an original thing, man. It was like a mixture of Roy Hargrove and Nicholas Payton and all this stuff, but it was done in this kind of new way. Once again, he still didn't have his first records out. You were like, this is swinging, and I don't think anyone else in the world has heard this yet. And sure enough, they hadn't. I'm glad all this stuff has come out now, but to be in Boston at that time, the best part about it was basically being there for a movement in the music that would surface ten years later. The way they handle improvisation, the way they handle all aspects of their musicianship, you got to hear it firsthand as it was brewing up.
It was a different time, man, because now I feel like whatever's brewing up, we're all up-to-date with it. But at that time, like early 2010s, we didn't have [...] we had YouTube, but even then it wasn't the thing, like we couldn't just see how people sounded. You had to be somewhere to experience that. So that's the thing that I think about a lot when I first landed there. Getting that experience was huge for me.
WC: That's amazing, man. That's giving me chills [laughs]. That's so cool. So now we’ve got to fast forward a little bit in time, because I want to talk a little bit about each album. Certainly Second Wind, the recent album on Cellar; but also there's The Artist, your first album on Cellar. You even play two different instruments on those albums, in a testament to the multi-instrumentalist prowess that you already alluded to, right? There's this time between when you're at Berklee and when you record The Artist, and that's a decent number of years. If we isolate that amount of time, this is you coming back to BC and maybe participating in Vancouver a little bit more, and maybe this is the first time I would have heard you play. What can you say about that time?
JL: Yeah, sure. Once I graduated school, which was in 2016, I came back here. I should mention that I didn't do any other instrument, officially studying-wise at Berklee. I was a drum major the entire time that I was there. When I came back here, man, I really wanted to be a drummer. That's still in a lot of ways my real like passion within the music, because it was the first thing that gave me access to being able to converse, if you will, at a high level with other musicians.
While I was at school, I picked up a lot of instruments. I didn't play upright bass at all before I went to Berklee. I didn't play any jazz piano or anything like that before I went to Berklee. But because I had some past experience on these instruments, it was all about applying the overall musical knowledge to the situation.
So I moved back here – I know how to play a little bass. I know how to do a little bit of this and that – and because I knew how to play a little bit of bass, everyone just started calling me on bass. To be a hundred percent honest, I fell into playing bass. I think many people might be surprised to hear that. I still don't really consider myself to be a bass player necessarily. Never took a lesson in my life, I don't know how to arco a single note in my life [laughs]. My left hand technique’s all wrong, my right hand technique’s all wrong, everything's all wrong. But there's a certain point in music where none of that really matters; it's really about what you're able to communicate through it. People, to a certain degree, liked what I was doing, communicating through that.
My first experiences getting into the scene of playing bass behind people [came from] playing with a drummer in Victoria here named Kelby MacNayr. He started to include me in these projects where we would bring some people from New York and we would play with them. But to be honest, I was really green at that time, playing bass. But I got to play with George Colligan, Larry Fuller who was the last piano player for Ray Brown, Misha Piatigorsky. All these people, some saxophone players too [...] After all that happened, I met Cory shortly after.
If I reflect on my bass-playing career, he also was a huge part in jumpstarting that too. [...] The first gig I did that was an official Cory gig, it was a quintet gig I think in 2017 or ‘18 with Josh Bruneau [...] all those years, like the last seven years being involved with Frankie's and the Vancouver jazz scene and stuff, I think people would look back at some of those concerts and say, yeah, you already had it. But the truth is every single night that I play, I feel like I'm just figuring it out and doing it right there. It may sound sometimes maybe like a complete thing, but every gig is still a new learning experience for me: how to play a high D in tune or whatever, you know what I mean [laughs]. Every single night, it's a sort of a experimentation in that sense.
All of this stuff is still relatively new when I think about it, but because Cory started hiring me as a bass player first, I think that's where it leads into him discussing my first record. He said, what instrument do you want to play? And I said, I don't really know. He said, let's think about a few different things. It was really him who chose what instrument I would play on my first recording.
He was like, hey, what if we did this? What if we brought Eric Reed out, and Carl Allen, and we did a trio recording? I was like, yeah, sure [laughs]. I don't have very much initiative in my life, man. I need people to push me and make me do things that I would have never done on my own. That's how that first record came about, was my relationship with Cory was fairly new at the time, I would say, in the long run. We've gotten really close over the last five years, I would say. But he was the one that jumpstarted all of that.
When he first said, hey, we should do a recording for you on Cellar... I’ve got to say, man, I never even thought about that at all before he suggested that. You know what, I think that's a good thing, because I think sometimes young musicians want to rush this process. To be honest, I could have waited forever, but he was the one that said that there's no time to wait, man, I'm a do-it-now kind of person. Which, I'm completely not, so our relationship in that sense is hilarious too. He was a really important part of getting my start into the idea of recording.
I still hate recording to this day, by the way. I've done all of his records, I've been on every single Weeds record for the last however many years. Still, whenever we go into the studio, man, I leave the session going like, ah, we didn't get anything good. Especially his most recent quartet record, Just Coolin’, man. I left that session just... dude, he's not gonna release any of that. That's ridiculous! There's just no way. We didn't get anything good. It was live off the floor. We didn't get to punch in or do any sort of edits or anything like that. I remember feeling super-discouraged after that session. He was like, no, I'm putting it out. I'm like, you sure? And he did, and it actually ended up being one of his most, if not his most successful quartet recording, as far as streaming [...] I'm proud of all those recordings, but the process, I'm not always a huge fan of.
I like it when the music disappears into the air. I don't like it being bottled up into this thing where it's like, hey, let's go back and listen to that again. Maybe we shouldn't! I never listen to my old recordings, man. I had to listen to Second Wind so many times for the post-production process, and then after that I was like, dude, I’m never listening to this ever again [laughs]. It was just like, I can't bear to hear myself speak that many times in a row, the same thing over and over again. I always have a bit of a mindset of like, let the past be the past and move on to the next thing.
As much as we need to talk about Second Wind, because it's newer in the sense of it just came out two months ago, I'm ready to talk about the next thing, man [laughs].
WC: You know what I dig is you described it in a very unassuming way, where you said, oh, maybe I don't have that much initiative. And yet, when I hear the story of the record, it almost sounds like that ended up being a secret power for you. The fact that you felt that way, even though you described it in a way that could almost sound negative, or at the very least sounds humble, it actually is maybe one of the secrets to the success. Because it puts you in the right position with partners like Cory, right?
JL: I think so. I think that sort of a yin-and-yang relationship, the process sometimes might be difficult. Me and Cory, sometimes we butt heads here and there, but in the long run I think that having opposite types of energy is a formula for something really creative and good to happen.
to be continued