By any measure, Aubrey Johnson is among the most versatile, creative, and persistently original vocalists on the contemporary jazz scene. But such are the vagaries of the music business that her debut West Coast tour came about thanks to a chance encounter at the storied New York jazz club Birdland.
Johnson’s original plans to tour in support of her 2020 debut album Unraveled came to naught when the March 20 release date slammed into COVID. She’d appeared on dozens of albums as a collaborator, but her dazzling debut, produced by Pat Metheny Group bassist Steve Rodby, announced the arrival of an artist fully in command of her craft as a vocalist, composer, and bandleader. The lockdown not only dashed her hopes for the album’s reception but also sapped her creative mojo as a songwriter, energy that she didn’t regain until a fellowship at MacDowell provided a very different kind of sabbatical.
“Some people became really creative during lockdown and used the time wisely,” Johnson said on a recent phone call. “I stopped writing anything for three years. I sort of got a complex about it. But I did a lot of home recording and arranging and collaborative projects.”
It wasn’t until some two years later, after she’d performed at Birdland late in the summer of 2022, that the seeds were planted for her first West Coast run. Stopping by the club the following night to pick up a microphone she’d left behind, Johnson happened to run into Palo Alto drummer Jon Krosnick, who was there with his band Charged Particles to perform the music of the late tenor sax titan Michael Brecker, joined by special guest trumpeter Randy Brecker (the saxophonist’s older brother).
“I went downstairs looking for the mic, poked my head in the greenroom, and we started chatting,” Johnson said. “Jon was super supportive and encouraging. We stayed in touch, and he kept looking for ways I could finally make it out to the Bay Area.”
Krosnick, a leading academic who studies public opinion and is director of the Political Psychology Research Group at Stanford University, has carved out an impressive side career with Charged Particles. He also curates the summer jazz program at Portola Vineyards, which ended up commissioning Johnson this year to create a new set of songs.
The sold-out Aug. 11 Portola Valley show ended up anchoring her West Coast tour, which includes performances on Aug. 14 at the Palo Alto Art Center presented by Earthwise and on Aug. 16 at the California Jazz Conservatory (where Johnson is also giving a workshop on small-group arranging on Aug. 18).
A Jazz Road grant from South Arts made it possible for her to hit the road with her chamber jazz ensemble featuring violinist Tomoko Omura, bass clarinetist and alto saxophonist Alex LoRe, pianist Chris McCarthy, bassist Matt Aronoff, and drummer Jay Sawyer.
In many circles, Johnson is known as a strikingly effective interpreter of standards from the American and Brazilian songbooks. Reviewing her second album, 2022’s duo project Play Favorites with pianist Randy Ingram, for JazzTimes, I praised a “ballad-centric program sifted from a wide array of sources, starting with a beguiling take on Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell’s ‘My Future,’” and noted that Johnson’s voice was “particularly striking on Joni Mitchell’s ‘Conversation,’ navigating the upper register leaps with liquid grace.”
Writing for her ensemble, Johnson creates lush, shifting textural settings for that voice, favoring extended melodic lines whether she’s delivering a lyric or a wordless passage. “I like writing music that takes you on an emotional or dramatic journey, long-form pieces with an unusual number of sections or phrases,” she said.
“I keep myself open to whatever I’m hearing and resist the temptation to do melody-solo-melody, though, of course, I do that sometimes, too,” she continued. “The violin brings a different kind of presence than the trumpet. Tomoko can play arco or pizzicato, so I can almost write for two different instruments. And Alex’s bass clarinet has such a beautiful, warm, round sound. I can have him doubling bass lines and low piano lines.”
Equally adept at delivering wordless melodic lines like a horn player and interpreting lyrics with emotional acuity, Johnson has a gift for fitting into many different ensembles, which has long been her calling card. Trumpeter Dave Douglas recruited her to sing his new settings for lyrics by David Hajdu, a project she’s recording in the coming weeks. She’s been particularly sought after by fellow vocalists, contributing to projects by Bobby McFerrin, her similarly intrepid colleagues Sara Serpa and Sofia Rei, rising star Michael Mayo, and Manhattan Transfer veteran Janis Siegel.
Siegel’s album The Colors of My Life is one of six that’s come out in recent months to make canny use of Johnson’s singular skill set. She also contributed to guitarist Randy Napoleon’s The Door Is Open, trumpeter Jun Iida’s Evergreen, composer and arranger Anthony Branker’s Songs My Mom Liked, and vocalist Allegra Levy’s Out of the Question.
Johnson is also featured on Jamie Baum’s 2024 album What Times Are These, a pandemic-gestated project inspired by the flutist and composer’s passion for Bill Moyers’s “A Poet a Day” postings. Johnson is one of four vocalists on Baum’s album, “but she’s such a talent that when I can only afford one vocalist for a gig, she was doing a lot of them,” said Baum, who plays two shows in the Joe Henderson Lab on Jan. 24, 2025, as part of SFJAZZ’s Experimental Composers series.
Johnson won’t be on the SFJAZZ gigs because the budget doesn’t cover Baum’s full ensemble and the flutist decided to present her instrumental quartet. Even if she wanted to find a vocal sub, there are precious few capable of navigating the intricate chromatic harmonies on What Times Are These.
“Some vocalists I checked out said, ‘I don’t think I can do this,’ and a bunch of people recommended Aubrey,” Baum said. “She’s got such amazing facility singing difficult material, with great pitch and a large range. That’s part of her gift.”
Given Johnson’s superlative reputation, it’s sadly telling that it took the chance meeting with Krosnick for her to be able to bring her working band to the West Coast. But the story of their acquaintance is more complicated than the Birdland encounter. While that was their first time meeting face-to-face, they’d been in touch before via mutual friend Paul McCandless, the Mendocino reed maestro known for his work on English horn, oboe, soprano sax, and bass clarinet.
A founding member of the world-jazz group Oregon, McCandless was a close associate of Johnson’s uncle and mentor, the late keyboardist and composer Lyle Mays, best known as a key collaborator in the hugely popular and influential Pat Metheny Group.
Krosnick had been in touch with Johnson when McCandless found a recording of a 1992 concert at the Emeryville jazz club Kimball’s East featuring McCandless, Mays, bassist Steve Rodby, and drummer Mark Walker “from the tour they did promoting Paul’s album Premonition on Windham Hill [Records], and it’s absolutely breathtaking,” Krosnick said.
It seems likely the music is going to be released, though fans of Mays have already benefitted from Johnson’s management of her uncle’s estate. In 2021, she oversaw the LP and CD release of “Eberhard,” a 13-minute tribute to German bassist Eberhard Weber, which features Johnson, guitarist Bill Frisell, and wind player Bob Sheppard and which Mays recorded over five sessions in the months before he died.
Mays wrote the piece for his niece’s voice, “and before Lyle passed away, he put everything he had into completing this final recording and tasked me to release it,” Johnson said. Marking Mays’s return to the studio after an eight-year hiatus, “Eberhard” won the 2022 Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Composition. Are there other Mays treasures waiting in the wings?
“Sadly, there’s no other music,” Johnson said. “He was very particular about what he released. His best friend Steve Rodby said it best: ‘He did what he wanted to do.’”
Johnson has no shortage of her own music to work on, and with her overdue Bay Area debut, she’s ready to reach new audiences.
