ROUSES_JulyAug2019_Magazine

New Orleans funk, rock, blues and jazz musician John ”Papa” Gros photo by Zack Smith

Sheep . “Having June in my life opened a door I am so blessed to have walked through,” he now says. This doorway has led to multiple tours in Japan. At first, Gros says, he felt like he was on a different planet, a place where even finding a tube of toothpaste became a mysterious expedition. “Being a big American guy, there was nowhere to hide my ignorance,” he says. He’s grown to love Japanese culture and food, and to find cultural similarities in the most casual moments. “One thing that reminds me of my Louisiana upbringing is June and his friends sitting around the dinner table after a great meal telling stories, laughing and carrying on for hours,” Gros says. “And it won’t be long before we talk about the next meal!” When a massive earthquake and tsunami hit Japan in 2011, Gros dug deep into the lessons he learned from his friendship with Yamagishi — as well as into his own Louisiana roots — to find the right way to help. A “Jammin’ for Japan” fundraiser brought together local musicians ranging from Kermit Ruffins to Jeremy Davenport to Bonerama, and by the end of a Sunday afternoon of music, $50,000 had been raised. “That money went directly to fishermen to rebuild and replace their boats so they get back to their livelihoods,” Gros says. Last year, yet another new project for Gros and Yamagishi took Yamagishi’s musical journey full circle. During Yamagishi’s early years playing in Japan, he performed with drummer Johnny Yoshinaga and vocalist Mari Kaneko. That couple’s son, KenKen, became an enormously popular alt-metal musician in Japan, and he’s now collaborating with Yamagishi, Gros and drummer Nikki Glaspie in a New Orleans-style funk band called Funk on Da Table. After playing a series of dates in Japan (including Mardi Gras in Tokyo) the band brought it all back home to New Orleans. “With his long, dark hair, tattoos and top hat, KenKen’s image recalls early Alice Cooper crossed with Slash,” music critic Keith

Spera wrote in the New Orleans Advocate . For his part, Yamagishi offers a typical response when asked about playing music with the next generation: “Age or generations never occur to me as anything special. Musicians are musicians.” The band released a live album of its show at Tipitina’s, which also included a recording of an extended song performed in Tokyo. This long, multilayered jam opens with Yamagishi’s ethereal, solo-guitar evocation of the Mardi Gras Indian anthem “Indian Red.” As his fingers work the strings, he calls forth a unique musical journey that is still reaching to find new turns, new improvisations. The title of the song? “June’s Spirit.” The Japanese Satchmo Trumpeter Yoshio Toyama and his wife, Keiko, a banjo player, were so inspired after seeing Louis Armstrong perform in Kyoto, Japan and going backstage after the show, that they moved to New Orleans to study jazz. They would stay for several years before settling back home in Japan. Toyama was a great musician in his own right. But it was his perfect impersonation of Armstrong’s gravelly singing voice and distinctive playing style that earned him the nickname "the Japanese Satchmo." ​

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