A Journey Into Deep, Deep Peace

Johnty Wilks

Clad in a white shalma kameez, Johnty Wilks could easily have been standing alone on a Mediterranean beach, absorbing the gorgeous warmth of the sun and the sound of the sea gently lapping the shore, while children played in the sand and grown-ups relaxed. No matter that this was not Ibiza, but rather a dreary rain-drenched Valentine’s Day Eve in Reading, that the sun-kissed beach was merely a picture projected on to a backcloth attached to the Studio wall of South Street Arts Centre; the image of a beautiful far-away place was already firmly planted in our minds and as Johnty took up his alto saxophone we were ready to follow him on a Journey Into Deep, Deep Peace.

His sound is cool, instantly captivating and reminiscent of Jan Garbarek and the late Paul Desmond. Eyes tightly closed, he improvises freely; richly melodic phrases flow endlessly from his imagination. Is this really a musician, whose instrument lay abandoned for twenty-seven years, while he pursued a successful career as a research scientist? “Dad that sounds horrible! Horrible! Stop playing it!” his then teenage son remarked as ONLY a teenage son could, when Johnty first resumed playing. After months of practise the sound returned. But there was a difference. The incisive quality of his playing that gave an edge to funk bands in the seventies and eighties had given way to a new mellowness and a slower pace, the perfect voice for playing ballads.

But … how do you make a career playing ballads? Miles Davis is said to have given up playing ballads because he loved playing them so much. Isn’t it self indulgent? Won’t an audience get bored? And what about other musicians? How would you earn their respect or hold them in check if they were in your band?

One night, his instrument at hand, Johnty was sitting with a fellow musician in Ronnie Scott’s, enjoying a late-night set by the trumpeter Jay Phelps. During an interval, and encouraged by his friend, Johnty asked if he could sit-in. “You can play?” Phelps asked. “Yeh, yeh, yeh,” Johnty reassured him.

“It was about twelve o’clock,” he recalls. “The place was packed. I got on stage with these fantastic guys and played The Nearness of You as a duet with Jay. When we came to the end there was complete silence. ‘Hell!’ I thought. ‘They don’t like it.’ Then the clapping started. It got louder and louder, until eventually people stood up. They were cheering. Jay greeted me with a huge smile. ‘That was beautiful,’ he said.
‘Wow!’ I thought. “Perhaps I can make something of this … a niche; playing mellow, relaxing music.’”

This was all a far cry from Johnty’s early days as a DJ and sax player in funk bands, which he combined with full-time study for a PhD at Imperial College, London. “It was a competitive environment,” he recounts. “Seven days a week, twelve hours a day.” Rather than turn to drugs or alcohol to ease his stress, he started to practice meditation. “I took to it straight away. I was a different person, to the point where friends sometimes didn’t recognise me. ‘You’re so different,’ they would say. ‘What’s happened to you?’”

Having tested his mettle at Ronnie’s and in the company of many local musicians, Johnty yearned to really stretch out with his ballad playing. “I met the wonderful tenor player, Scott Hamilton one night at the Pizza Express, Dean Street,” Johnty remembers. “He told me about a gig when he was booked just to play ballads. I was disappointed to learn that it didn’t really work. It was what I wanted to do. Could there be another way?”

Johnty taught himself music production using his laptop and began writing his own music. “I wanted to combine my love of jazz and ballads with something that would overlap into meditation music.” After six months of diligent study most evenings he found that he could lay-down richly-textured tracks; tapestries of electronic sound through which to weave his improvisations.

“It’s enabled me to produce music of real worth and great sound quality without having a band,” Johnty explains. “You can add, you can take away, and each time you listen you find pieces that you weren’t aware of the first time. It’s a process of continual exploration, making it possible to improvise freely without worrying about time or space. I watched an interview with Carlos Santana the other day. ‘You know,’ he said. ‘I listen to some music and start to play along with it. After say, forty or forty-five minutes, I find my own sound. I touch into something unique to me.’ As soon as he said that I realised; that’s exactly what I do. It’s an intuitive process.”

“I had a gig coming up and wondered whether instead of playing three, four or maybe five numbers, I should just play one track; Deep, Deep Peace. I couldn’t face the prospect of people walking away while I was playing so I closed my eyes and kept them tightly shut for an hour. I just played. After ten minutes I felt myself being completely absorbed by the music. I no longer felt as if I was playing. Thought had gone. I’ve asked fellow musicians; trained musicians, great sight-readers and fluent players, what they think about when they improvise. They’ll often come back with some technical answer, like ‘E? (E-flat)’ or ‘I’ll try some substitution here’. I was amazed. ‘What do you think about?’ they’ll ask’. ‘Nothing!’ I reply. When I opened my eyes the audience was still there. ‘I can do it,’ I thought. I got a standing ovation and a queue of people waiting to buy my CD.”

Johnty held his audience similarly spellbound at South Street Arts Centre, Reading on 13th February; a tour-de-force performance of free improvisation, supported by the gentle heart-beat of K. Darling’s U-bass and the evocative backing of his electronic orchestra. Deep, Deep Peace and Blissful Moments, with the inclusion of a track laid-down by the funk band Odysseys’ keyboard player,  Hamish Balfour, were certainly relaxing pieces, but don’t be fooled, this was music that demanded attention, sometimes played with heart-wrenching emotion, drawn from the depths of the soul. Angelic Noir explored darker territory, as the change in background scene suggested – with the logos of two prominent banking organizations shining brightly against the night-sky from the lofty heights of Canary Wharf. Could this be a musical comment on their nefarious activities?

A simple rhythmic pattern played on wood-sticks cast the scene for the second set as we set out on an evocation of a Zen monk crossing Africa on foot. Great playing. Some members of the audience took advantage of the meditation mats available and absorbed the music in their own way.

K. Darling brought a touch of romance to the eve of St Valentine’s Day with a delicate Brazilian love song The Girl from Brazil, all the more sensual for being sung in Portuguese. She then took up a berimbau (a single-stringed percussion instrument indigenous to Brazil, with a gourd as a sound-box), from which she extracted some interesting sounds and invited the audience to join in with ‘a little playfulness’; responding correctly, on time, and in Portuguese to her instructions. This led perfectly into the final tune of the evening, Ibiza Swell, a number so full of gaiety and good humour that it could have easily set everyone dancing.

Apart from Johnty Wilk’s natural gift as a musician and his engaging personality, honesty is his great attribute. He gives freely of himself and allows his audience to make of his music what they will. As I write he will be in Brazil with his partner K. Darling, followed by a season in Ibiza. We look forward to a return visit in the not too distant future. Meanwhile, why not sample his playing on   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHfuk_ZnB6g

Trevor Bannister

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