Gail Jhonson and a Decade of “Jazz in Pink!”

Gail Johnson is in a minority of women pianists/keyboardists who also carry the prestigious title of Music Director. Gail has traveled all over the world performing and leading some of the most well-known groups throughout her career, as well as recording her own albums with her latest release New Beginnings.

Gail Jhonson was on a smooth jazz cruise over 10 years ago. She saw flutist Althea Rene performing in one of the showrooms. She wanted to know her better and Rene told her that she used to work with Straight Ahead, an all female band out of Detroit. Gail had known about the band when her family was in New York and their next-door neighbor’s fiancé was managing them—small world! Althea Rene was the only woman instrumentalist on that smooth jazz cruise. Gail and Althea met the next day for lunch and decided on the spot to create a platform for women musicians and Gail Jhonson came up with the name Jazz in Pink!

Interview by Kaylene Peoples |Responses by Gail Jhonson

Kaylene: You’re a Berklee College of Music graduate and studied composition. I understand you also play many instruments.

Gail: My degree is in composition. And I think because of my training in composition, it has helped me to be a music director. Part of our curriculum was to learn all these instruments. We had to learn brass, percussion, strings, and of course I already played piano. We had to play scales in four keys. So between trumpet, trombone, violin, clarinet, and flute—to give us an understanding about each instrument—I don’t ask the instrument to do things that it is physically awkward. I just love writing for orchestra. Most of my compositions now are for small jazz bands, theater, and for Jazz in Pink. That’s where the classical marries the groove of the rhythm section.

Kaylene: Gail, why did you decide to call it Jazz in Pink, specifically “pink”—A girl thing?

Gail: Yes, the girl thing because we love jazz and wear pink. At first people were skeptical [of the name] but we needed to brand.

Kaylene: That was smart.

Gail: People were discouraging me, saying don’t do it—mostly people in the industry and other women. So we went on a cruise that February, equipped with a manager and about 10 women on stage at the Market Creek. It was fantastic. I hadn’t intended on a whole female band. I was just thinking of a few female artists that were already recording artists that needed to come together—a packaged deal like the days of the oldies reviews like Diana Ross and Jackson 5. So that’s what I was thinking, get an individual artist and get a band to back us up. But then people started calling me about this band I was putting together, asking to play. So we ended up with percussion, vocalists, guitar, bass, drum, everything. The only thing I was disappointed about was our drummer. She was working with Prince at that time and was [bound by contract] to not join any other group. At the last minute we had to get a guy to play drums. But that was all right, he was still great!

Kaylene: Just put a pink hat on him, you know . . . to represent. Besides it’s nice to have a bit of male energy anyway. (They both laugh.)

Gail: Yes, the female energy was different. They all really wanted to dig in, play their instruments and really say something meaningful. So that’s how we got started back in 2008. Now it’s 2018 and it’s been 10 years. We’ve had about 50 women who’ve come and gone in Jazz in Pink. Like any band, we have our ups and downs. We’ve endured and a lot of people are recognizing the band, too. Many have seen me [and know me from] performing with Jazz In Pink.

Kaylene: So you’ve branded the band.

Gail: This thing is branded. They got on me because I used to wear a pink Afro wig. I went on a Dave Koz cruise with a big pink Afro wig. I was sharp. I had my makeup on, my outfit on and I walked around that cruise. We went to the bar and hosted for 2 hours pink martinis, selling CDs. Say what you want, but it’s advertising.

Kaylene: No, it’s perfect because you needed to establish Jazz in Pink, but an all female band can pose some challenges I bet, especially on tour.

Gail: We’ve had all these women musicians and have traveled around the world, including Africa. A lot of the girls didn’t want to stay in the accommodations. For people there, they were 5-star hotels, but for us . . . 1-1/2. But it was where all the dignitaries stayed. It was at the top of the hill with a guard gate at the bottom and top of the property. So we couldn’t be prancing around in our little pink outfits running around Cameroon, but we had to stay there where we had protection. We’ve traveled and performed at so many places over the years.

Kaylene: What has it been like being a woman musician in this male-dominated music industry? You’ve played a lot of cruise ships. I understand that getting the chance to perform on cruise ships isn’t easy at all. What has been your experience?

Gail: We’ve had some hardships as being women in music. I remember one cruise they signed me up. “Oh yeah Gail, you want to come and play?” I said, “Sure.” They offered me this tiny piano room [the size of a closet]. Then asked me if it was okay with me. I had to get on that cruise to get a bit more notoriety, so I accepted the offer. They signed me up for two years. They said, “We’ll put you in this room for now and next year we’ll put you in another one.” Well, they didn’t sign me up on the next cruise. Instead they put another Black female piano player . . . “so we can’t have but one Black female piano player on this cruise?” It was a little disheartening. Like I said, I think women are just underrepresented in jazz. It’s harder for us to go on individually, but if we go on as a force, we make ourselves a revue—a package. Then they could say they’re getting this or that artist. But the downfall was they would say, “Well, we already had her before. We’re going to use somebody else.”

As the leader of the group, I had to stand up to these people and tell them “We’ve been selling it as a package, so if we could mix it up and diversify . . .” Some people didn’t feel that way. They felt that other people shouldn’t define who we are. But I wanted to give all women a platform to be a part of jazz in Pink if they wanted to be. Not to exclude anybody, but if an artist is already working independently outside of Jazz In Pink, then they’re already promoting their thing and have already been on this event. The promoters have the right to say, “We want to give our audiences something different, and if Jazz in Pink is open to accommodating us, we’ll hire you.” So that’s how we started morphing into what it is today.

Kaylene: Tell me about the music of Jazz in Pink.

Gail: Jazz in Pink has a wide array of music because all the women that come have different experiences. It’s contemporary jazz, music with a beat, generally not too fast, not too slow, but grooving music that you can sit at your desk and enjoy if you’re a corporate person. We take solos. The live shows of course are much more edgy. We can play up-tempo and some really touching ballads. When our harpist first came to us, she was doing wedding music, songs like “On the Wings of Love.” Now she’s doing Curtis Mayfield. And she got dancers! (Laughs.)

I’d love to see that. Now I’d really like to get inside your brain! What put this fire inside of you that you are so forward moving? It’s very impressive. Tell me about your childhood and background, or whatever led you to be the go-getter that you are.

Gail: I guess am just the queen of tenacity. I was out playing one day. I guess I was in 4^th grade, and I was just waiting for my girlfriend to get home. I kept waiting and waiting, I saw her down the street, ran down there and asked her where she’d been. “I was at piano lessons,” she said. “Piano lessons. Where?” She replied, “At school.” I ran all the way back to the house, “Mom, mom, I’ve got to take piano lessons!” She got the money for my lessons. I think they were about $5.00. She bought the books and everything. I just had to play that piano. But I remember when I was little that we’d go on our family vacations, there would always be a piano at my grand parents house. It seemed like you weren’t supposed to touch the piano. For some reason, that was the message I got. I’d always go there [and sneak] playing it. (Laughs)

Kaylene: You have to play it or else it goes out of tune! A lot of people just use it for furniture.

Gail: Right. I think it just looked expensive and you’d better not break it, and just don’t touch it. But I always found my way to slide my fingers across it. My grandmother had an old M8 organ. You had to turn it on and it would rev up. I turned that thing on every time I got there. I played the heck out of that thing, and it was my sister’s organ and she never touched it. And then my mom reminded me later that when I was about two, she had bought me one of those toddler grand pianos. And then I remembered that piano. So it was always in me. In fact, when I got to high school I started playing flute because they already had a piano player. My uncle bought me a Yamaha organ keyboard because my cousin played guitar. He had a band. I was going to be doing some music. I had my keyboard to play, I had my flute to play by the time I was 14, we were jamming in clubs all around Philadelphia. I always wanted to do more. I said, “Hey, let’s do some recording. Let’s do some professional stuff.” But they were happy to just be gigging.

Gail: I went off to college, “I need to learn more.” Everything was just by ear. Of course I had learned to read classical stuff, like CARMEN . . . opera stuff. I love that style the most I think out of the classical [genre].That was all good, but I wanted to play some different stuff, and when I saw Stevie Wonder at the Uptown Theater with that little portable organ, that little Farfisa, that was a wrap! “This is what I’m going to be doing.” I knew then at 10 what I was going to be playing for the rest of my life. I never thought of myself as a leader though. I never thought that I would be creating stuff. But I’ve always been involved in pushing things forward.

Kaylene: You’re also a Music Director for a lot of bands.

Gail: Yes, I am a music director for a lot of different groups. I don’t know how that got started because I wasn’t the leader or the music director of the band we had started as teenagers. Even in college, I wasn’t the music director. I think I was still in my learning phase. But after a while I started writing charts for a lot of singers. They needed a piano player to rehearse with them, do their keys, and learn a list of songs. I started getting into music directing that way. Writing arrangements, rehearsing the band, and by the time I moved to California from Philadelphia, I just started working with different people. I’ve been music directing with Norman Brown for over 20 years now. Through his series SUMMER STORM, I got to play with Brenda Russell, Patti Austin, Peabo Bryson, Jeff Lorber, Marion Meadows, Paul Taylor, Brian Culbertson, Dave Koz, etc.

Kaylene: As a woman, what challenges do you face being a Music Director, especially working with male musicians? I’ve heard horror stories. In my own experiences as a woman artist leading my own band, many times it’s difficult to be taken seriously.

Gail: It’s hard for men to take direction from a woman, “Don’t play that chord, or invert it. Layout or turn down?” (She laughs.) Guys just don’t want to hear that. They don’t want to hear you telling them to turn down. They want to just blast as loud as they can as big as their ego will let them! In fact, I just did a show with Wendy Barnes, a fabulous vocalist. She said she went to go fling her hand in the air and the band was just looking at her. She wanted them to do an accent. So she said, “What, I have to go through Gail? So Gail throws her hand up and boom!” She was like, “Ooh, so I have to go through Gail. “Well I’m used to doing my own band, throwing my hand up, and the band follows me.” I Told her, “Don’t worry, once they get used to you . . . but my job is to make sure they’re in line and I’m following you wherever you go, my eyes are on you.”

The experience of being a music director with guys has been challenging, but it’s improved, much better now. I think once they know you’re serious about what you’re doing and that you can play, and that you do know the music. There are a lot of people that don’t read music and don’t write it, don’t compose it, don’t publish it . . . and when you come along and you do, automatically you get kudos.

Ten Years Celebrating Jazz in Pink

It was 10 years ago that Gail Johnson started the all-female band Jazz in Pink. Gail is celebrating that monumental anniversary Saturday October 20th from 3pm to 8pm at 11210 Otsego St. North Hollywood, CA, called Jazz in Pink “WOMEN MAKING MUSIC . . . A CHOICE! Learn more about Gail Johnson and her all-female group Jazz in Pink AND THIS INCREDIBLE EVENT by visiting her website jazzinpink.com I’m also looking forward to being a part of the panel discussion that day. I’ll be in VERY good company with Melissa Manchester, Eloise Laws, and other women who’ve made carving a niche their choice in life!