Joe Jammer might have moved again into the public view with "Headway" that he cut 40 years ago, but that doesn’t mean the guitarist was away from the scene, or stage for that matter. Yet now he has not one but two projects on the go, both rooted in Joe’s past and taking him into the future. As Jammer’s gearing up for Quebec performances and is booked for live appearances up to April 2016, we talked about these forthcoming records.
First project is called THE BEATNIX and has a whole concept attached to it.
Says Joe: “Beatniks in coffee houses in New York, like on the fringes of early rock ‘n’ roll kids… I want that kind of an image. It’s just two people: me and and the singer. Imagine him, sitting on the floor, cross-legged, with a pair of bongos – no drum kit; and I’m playing bass and guitar, trying to keep the guitar acoustic enough that we can recreate it on-stage as a duo. The seven songs that I have with THE BEATNIX are from the album called "Nobody's Business" that was released some years ago, but the singer is Marc Scherer from Chicago who’s now a partner of Jim Peterik from SURVIVOR; they also did a project with me for the memorial of the slaughter of those children in the schoolhouse [Sandy Hook] in Newtown, Connecticut, and President Obama gave us permission to use his audio clip [in the song]. Marc’s been working with me for 25-30 years, so we do things every once in a while, and now THE BEATNIX are using the NOBODY’S BUSINESS songs but making them modern, with different arrangements, same melodies and mostly the same lyrics. And I want this girl that’s on the video, the slide show for ‘Visions Of Eros’ [Sucre d’Orge] to dance seven different routines for each of the seven songs, and then we will sell that a DVD/CD under the musical genre of ‘burlesque rock’! I’m inventing this new genre of audio-visual.”
The second endeavor sees Jammer in the company of SHA NA NA singer Johnny Contardo, the vocalist on “Headway”; and DME’s happy to have been instrumental in bringing the veterans back together.
Joe explains: “We’re going to do an original album of new material, and we already have two songs finished, ‘How Long’ and ‘Invite Me Home’, so we’re doing this right now to follow up on the release, forty years later, of the ‘Headway’ album. I have sixteen songs that I recorded in Chicago not long ago, and I have labels that want me to release it now, but now that I’m back in touch with Johnny Contardo I want him to do all the vocals ’cause he has a much better voice than me, and that improves the commercial potential of the product.”
No release dates as of yet, but 2016 is going to be a great year for Joe.