Jef Lee Johnson

Philly's secret guitar hero is ready for his close-up. Are you?

by A.D. Amorosi

Mark Stehle

Despite several decades in the music business, Jef Lee Johnson's guitar skills have gotten notice only on a need-to-know basis. Everybody who's worked with him sings his praises.

And everybody else has never heard of him.

"I'm used to that, whether I want to be or not," says the 51-year-old Johnson from his home in Germantown. "I'm a cranky old guy now. My original thing was to be great, like Thelonious Monk, not to be famous. I wanted to be expansive musical infinity. Being famous is a whole other gene. Every time I tried to get famous, it died."

This prevailing obscurity is being threatened, however, as he's currently in Los Angeles recording with fusion master George Duke. "George has said he's going to make making me well-known his cause," laughs Johnson, on a break from packing his suitcase. While he's out there he'll visit with "cyber girlfriend" Chaka Khan, too. Also on the front burner are two new solo albums, Longing Belonging Ongoing (under the name "Rainbow Crow") and The Zimmerman Shadow (an odd, beautiful Dylan covers collection).

"Man, I can't believe you're letting my secret out," says Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson. The Roots drummer hosted Johnson on his band's Phrenology (2002) and played with him through studio sessions and tours backing D'Angelo and Erykah Badu. Thompson, a renowned musicologist, didn't even know the fellow Philadelphia native before the D'Angelo gig.

Johnson's had an innovative slate of solo albums, starting with 1995's Blue, that have equal footing in legato-loving jazz, out blues and frenetic space funk. Usually, he plays all of the instruments and does all of the production. Each album is ripe with his gorgeously appointed melodies, deeply pointed lyrics and, more often than not, sketches and photographs that he's taken for that project.

"To be so damned great, not only in a supporting role but as an artist in every way," marvels Thompson. "In a fair world, I should be carrying Jef's bags."

Once he worked with the guitarist, Thompson "got" that Johnson had the discipline and chops of a jazz cat like David Murray with the free-visionary potential of Hendrix. "I didn't think anyone would ever find this out: Jef Lee Johnson is the G.O.A.T."

The Germantown-born Johnson grew up in the church his grandfather Roland C. Lamb Sr. built, Providence Baptist on East Haines Street. He did his first (uncredited) sessions on records by gospel legends like the Rev. James Cleveland at age 18. Playing without your name above the title made it so that the music was the only thing. The musician becomes anonymous and at one with the music.

That sounds just like Jef Lee Johnson.

To Philly drummer Adam Guth, Johnson is holy. He is funk. "When I say 'funk,' I'm talking about the larger metaphysical sense of the word," says Guth, who's played in the Jef Lee Johnson Trio as well as their new progressive electronic outfit, Resistance Message. "While others play clichés — George Benson lines, Van Halen licks — Jef plays cosmic singularities, exploding worlds and post-apocalyptic terra-forming. At the center of it all is a sensitive being and positive spirit intent on being a force for good."

Germantownian Aaron Levinson also speaks of Johnson in reverent terms. Besides playing with him in the local noise-jazz act Gutbucket, Levinson produced Rediscovering Lonnie Johnson and cast his friend in the role of the blues/jazz legend. From the first moment I met him, it was like finding a missing limb of my body," says Levinson of their 1987 introduction. "Like Coltrane, Jef is inside the music. He plays from a place that is beyond notes, beyond technique."

Swampy bluegrass, blissful avant-garde jazz, deep strange blues, dusky funk — Jef Lee Johnson does it all, especially on solo albums where he's freer than on his session work. "I'm not trying to be out," states Johnson. "The out guys never bother to come in. I can go further out than anybody, but I want to go in. I want to put all this music together and for it to be accessible." He wants people to hear News from the Jungle (his 2007 import) and get Duke Ellington. He wants people to catch the Monk and Sly Stone references on Longing Belonging Ongoing. "The Britney, Raymond Scott and the Jonny Quest theme, too," he says.

In the minds of those he's worked with, and from the upswing in his solo album output (four since 2007), Johnson seems to be eschewing the session/pop world for the intimacy of his own recordings and for oddly angular jazzy sounds. "Jef played the profile gigs to eat, but all along he's been making his own personal brilliant music," says Levinson. "He doesn't consider himself a 'jazz cat' but of course he is. He's also a country musician and Jonathan Winters in sheep's clothing."

Ahmir Thompson recalls D'Angelo's Voodoo tour in 2000. The drummer assembled what's been known as the best R&B band in history, The Soultronics, only to have D'Angelo cancel shows in a fit of narcissism. "If he didn't look ripped, he canceled," says Thompson. "Jef wasn't having any of that. He left the band because it had nothing to do with the music. Music is all to him."

Johnson laughs and says these things aren't the case. He states that he didn't leave D'Angelo's tour because he wanted to — he was asked to when the ailing musician he replaced got better.

By: Mark Stehle (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

And, in his mind, he's not a jazz guy but gets where the idea comes from.

"I developed chops playing with McCoy Tyner back in '79," says Johnson. "Tyner plays dense chordal stuff like George [Duke] and I'm stupid enough to try to play like them on guitar. That's what's known as notes that aren't on the neck. When I played Ronald Shannon Jackson, I was a blues guy who had absurd jazz chops."

Johnson says he'll continue to do as many sessions as he can if people would only hire him. Without a shred of egotism or hubris, he claims he might be too great and inventive a musician for his own good. Rumor has it he was all set to tour with Steely Dan until one of its principal players put the kibosh on it — for fear of being upstaged. Johnson won't confirm that, though. All he'll say is: "My mom always told me, sometimes it's bad to be too prepared.

"I've had that said to me, that I'm too good at what I do and that I show people up. I'm not looking to show off other musicians' shortcomings. Their shortcomings are not my problem. I may be a guy who has said no more often than I said yes, but I'm just trying to knock the gig out of the park every time."

He thinks it's great that Thompson remembers the D'Angelo thing differently than he does, and that Chaka and Duke are his champions. "But there's not much that they can do," he says. "I fit in less than I did when I was a kid. I'm not tall, pretty or blond, even if am skinny. And I don't follow industry rules. Ultimately I'm just trying to bend and tweak things the way I hear them in my head. I'm obligated to do this."