On the eve of his thirtieth birthday, Benny Benack III, a Pittsburgh-born, New York Metropolis-based trumpet participant, jazz singer, pianist and charismatic bon vivant performed a late November present at The Craftsman, a plucky bar in Morningside Heights. Chilly rain fell staccato towards the patio’s plexiglass roof whereas patrons, largely masked, huddled round stanchions and warmth lamps. From behind a makeshift stage, Benack cracked jokes about his age, his rising inebriation, and known as on acquainted musicians from the gang to hitch the jam session.
Beneath a close-by awning, Aaron Johnson, an achieved saxophonist and Benack’s periodic bandmate, chuckled at his pal’s antics.
“Don’t let his laughs and smiles deceive you,” he mentioned. “He’s a really severe musician. The music he performs and the notes that come out of his instrument are completely cannon. It’s like listening to a document from the ’50s.”
Of the numerous jazz musicians who name New York Metropolis residence, Benack is likely one of the few who made probably the most of a disastrous 2020. Final yr, the jazz scene’s infrastructure — an ecosystem of golf equipment and venues that artists depend on to earn a residing, set up their identify, and construct neighborhood contacts — essentially collapsed. Feeling as if the home had crumbled round them, many musicians spent the primary few months of quarantine feeling disoriented and unproductive. However Benack started working. He recorded songs in his West Harlem house, cultivated his social media presence, appeared on podcasts and sought venues, as quickly because it was permitted, to carry out open air.
“All people was in the identical boat,” he mentioned in a telephone interview. “And as soon as I noticed that, it was a matter of refocusing and saying, All proper, effectively, if everyone’s doing the identical factor, sitting at residence, what can I do to remain within the race?”
On the Sunday main into New York Metropolis’s lockdown, Benack performed a present at The Craftsman. The subsequent morning, on the primary day of quarantine, a track he had carried out — “Put On a Pleased Face” from the Sixties musical Bye Bye Birdie — returned to him. He reimagined the lyrics (“Don’t unfold corona all over / And put a masks in your pleased face”), arrange a digital camera reverse his keyboard, pulled on a striped shirt and gray blazer with a pocket handkerchief, and recorded a cover, “Put a Masks on Your Face.” He jammed by way of the track, enjoying, at one level, each trumpet and keyboard concurrently. He uploaded the video to YouTube, the place it continued gathering hits till it was picked up by a neighborhood information community. It’s since gone viral, accumulating hundreds of views.
“It was the primary day of quarantine and I used to be nonetheless, , form of constructive,” he mentioned. “I might have a tough time doing one thing like that now with over 250,000 deaths in the USA.”
The expertise taught him a lesson: it was attainable to remain related, as a jazz musician, in the course of the pandemic. It will simply require creativity.
Benack is a dapper dresser, preferring sport coats and blazers, of medium construct, and has a younger face masked by a well-maintained beard. He’s the son of Benny Benack II, a famend saxophonist, and the grandson of Benny Benack, a legendary trumpet participant, who as soon as confirmed Fred Rogers learn how to play the instrument on an episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
That Benack III performs the trumpet, like his grandfather, isn’t any coincidence. In a jazz band, the trumpet and the saxophone are thought of complementary devices. They’ll share the stage with out stepping on the opposite’s toes. Gaming this dynamic, the Benacks orchestrated a generational tradeoff.
“My grandfather didn’t need his son to play the identical instrument so they might play gigs collectively,” Benack mentioned. “In order that’s why my dad performs the sax, and wished me to play the trumpet so I may stand subsequent to him on stage.”
The trumpet, whether or not by likelihood or by a lifetime on his lips, can also be a dead-on match for Benack’s character. Within the mythology of jazz it represents “the pure chief in a gaggle of people,” defined Juilliard-trained bassist Russell Corridor, one other of Benack’s common bandmates. It’s typically a band’s loudest instrument, and gamers who gravitate to it have a tendency in direction of extroversion. Louis Armstrong performed the trumpet, as did Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie — figures whose devices turned inseparable from their identities.
Benack, nonetheless, attributes his confidence and charisma to his mom, a voice instructor at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. She typically taught non-public classes at their residence, and as a toddler, Benack would rise on weekends to the sound of her college students singing — and her giving suggestions.
“’Make certain the you’re making eye contact together with your viewers,’” he recalled her saying. “’Get your fingers out of your pockets and actually inform the story of the track if you carry out it.’”
However his formal introduction to jazz — and the world of freelancing — got here from his father.
Benack began singing at age 5, and enjoying trumpet at age 9. His father, throughout these years, would typically name him on stage to carry out a track or two. By age 11, Benack began displaying promise as a trumpet participant, and his father started hiring him as a bandmember. A few of their performances, notably one at Greenbrier, a resort and on line casino in West Virginia, launched him to the rituals behind the music: driving in a van to the gig, staying up late with the band, enjoying playing cards into the early hours. It was a way of life as a lot as a caree
Richard Agudelo, an expert music photographer and the proprietor of Terremoto Espresso in Chelsea, befriended Benack simply earlier than the shutdown. Throughout quarantine they exchanged texts and DMs, and when the town issued permits for out of doors eating, he urged Benack carry out on the store. Agudelo laid a patch of astroturf outdoors of the door, and on the third weekend of June, Benack performed the primary of what would turn into an unofficial weekly residency. It attracted dozens of visitors and different musicians who had been out of labor.
“Benny is just like the mayor of the jazz neighborhood in New York,” Agudelo joked over the telephone. “As quickly as he declared the present on social media, everyone got here out.”
Now, with the arrival of winter and coronavirus charges rising, Benack mentioned he plans to proceed streaming performances, recording in his house, and making an attempt to recreate the sense of neighborhood that was misplaced this previous yr — whereas nonetheless enjoying open air, so long as security and climate allow.
“The one solution to lose the sport is to stop,” he mentioned. “That’s true about New York Metropolis it doesn’t matter what you do, however particularly for musicians.”r, and Benack took to it shortly.
“I didn’t have to spend so much of time determining who I used to be or who I wished to be, or what music I wished to play, or what sort of artists I wished to be like,” he mentioned.
These formative experiences produced a robust sense of self, which helped him navigate the bustle of New York Metropolis’s jazz scene when he arrived, at age 18, to review at The Manhattan Faculty of Music. After commencement, he performed occasional gigs at weddings and birthday events, however has been in a position to make lease with out non-public occasions for a number of years.
When the pandemic shut down the town, his sense of objective stored him grounded whereas others felt scrambled. Nonetheless, it was a troublesome time for Benack, whose profession had simply hit an upswing.
“I don’t actually wish to dwell on what my plans have been for 2020,” he mentioned.
In January, he launched his second album, A Lot of Livin’ To Do, which garnered glowing reward in jazz publications like DownBeat and JAZZIZ Magazine, and climbed to quantity eleven within the Jazz radio charts. A number of of his songs amassed a whole bunch of hundreds of performs on Spotify, and he had excursions lined up throughout the US, Europe and Asia. However in February, when the virus began to unfold inside China, a three-week residency in Shanghai was canceled. In March, his European and US exhibits have been pushed again, and by April they have been all known as off.
Looking back, the success of “Put A Masks on Your Face” appears well timed. Energized, Benack turned his bed room right into a recording studio. He purchased a microphone, video enhancing software program, and applications to combine and grasp his music. He organized distant recording periods with different musicians — “virtually just like the Brady Bunch, with everyone’s face in slightly sq..” Then, over the summer season, when Black Lives Matter protests erupted throughout the nation, he started to carry out throughout protest marches with Russell Corridor and different native musicians.
“The music created an environment of social gathering and pleasure,” mentioned Corridor. “It was a supply of safety for individuals, as a result of if you’re marching with out music, then to the police and regulation enforcement, they see it as extra of a risk.”
For a lot of native musicians, the protest marches have been the primary time they’d performed with a dwell band for the reason that begin of the pandemic. It was an emotional reunion, Benack recalled, and he started to seek for extra alternatives to play with pals.
