Interview with Josh Dion

On learning from Dad, going to music school, and being part of a lineage.

I love to read interviews. I learn so much by reading a version of speech, a rendering of what people say. A well-written interview invites us to return, over time, to the subject’s words and consider them anew.

Mr. Art Taylor was absolutely correct when he collected musicians’ speech in book form. Taylor’s Notes And Tones, his collections of interviews with Miles Davis, Art Blakey, Elvin Jones, Tony Williams, Ron Carter, Nina Simone, and many more, is one of the essential books on American music.

In our time, trumpeter Jeremy Pelt has done the same with his books, greatly increasing our understanding of the current moment in jazz, while Ethan Iverson, my frequent collaborator, has published many long conversations with a range of important musicians and thinkers, including composers and critics.

But we need more. I want to read lengthy, in-depth interviews with our leading drummers, especially the players who give so much to so many different music scenes here in NYC. There are scores of drummers like this. The first one that came to mind is Josh Dion.

I hope this interview is the first of many.

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Josh Dion has recently been on the road with John Scofield’s Yankee Go Home, a quartet which featured Jon Cowherd on keyboards and Vicente Archer on bass, with a repertoire featuring Scofield’s originals plus classic Neil Young, Grateful Dead, and Bob Dylan tunes.

Other recent touring includes a stint subbing in guitarist Jim Wieder’s The Weight Band (playing the music of Levon Helm and The Band), a last-minute show with Joan Osborne, and many shows with his own group, Paris Monster¹, a duo with bassist and synth programmer Geoff Kraly. In NYC, Dion was heard regularly with guitarists Jim Campilongo and Wayne Krantz, and going back further, with saxophonist Bill Evans.

Besides being a great sideperson in any project, Dion is a singing drummer, perhaps more common now than ever before, but still rare. In Paris Monster, he goes one further and accompanies his vocals (he’s the sole vocalist) on drums and keyboard simultaneously, playing the keyboard with his right hand and the drums with his left.

I’ve been friends with Josh since we were freshmen at William Paterson University many years ago. Watching him play has been a major part of my development, and he’s helped shape my core values as much as anyone. I especially admire Josh’s openness— his knowledge, respect, and love for all music gives him enormous depth and flexibility (You can get a good sense of this depth in Part 2 of this interview, coming soon.)

This is a condensed and edited version of some Zoom calls we had in the summer of 2023. I initially imagined a brief conversation about family: like me, Josh’s father is a drummer, but we had a lot more to cover. Here Josh tells us how he got started, his experience with music school, and what playing with older musicians means to him.

Dion’s story, like yours and mine, is both totally unique and completely typical. Indeed, no matter how similar, no two musical life stories are identical.

Josh is wonderful to speak with: open, loquacious, candid, ready to laugh, and absolutely devoted to his craft. I hope his zeal and love for the music comes across here as clearly as it does in person.

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Music At Home.

VS: Gerald Cleaver’s father’s a drummer, my father’s a drummer, and so is yours. What does having a drummer as your father mean to you?

JD: I can’t remember ever making a choice about the drums. It was always there. It was the thing my Dad and I did together, other than sports. It was the way we communicated, and it’s what I was.

VS: What are your memories of your father as a drummer, as a musician?

JD: He was in a band that did parties. He had a day gig at a high school— the high school I would go to, actually, in Mansfield, CT, he worked in the audio-visual department, and then would play gigs— weddings, parties. I have a recording of them, I was just listening to it.

They sounded great— they did everything, Top 40, Sinatra, everything. They would let me play congas, and he has a video of that, I would wear wristbands, the whole thing. I remember playing congas on “Jump For My Love” by the Pointer Sisters, I remember the feeling of being surprised as I played along and knew it.

I loved that music and I loved— big band. My Dad had five or six of those 20 Greatest Hits records of the bands— Basie, Ellington, Goodman, and I loved it. My parents lived separately— my parents broke up when I was five, I would listen to the records at his place when I was there on his weekends.

He wouldn’t always have his drums set up, I remember he had a stack of records and a practice pad, and I played the roll on the pad, traditional grip, the whole thing. I remember figuring out the bounce— it was like a lightning moment.

My Dad would watch a lot of old movies, and he had that movie The Gene Krupa Story (1959) with Sal Mineo, and I became obsessed with that movie, I learned everything. I probably know Sal Mineo better than Gene Krupa [laughs], and Shelly Manne played Dave Tough in that movie.

My Dad loved it too, saw it three times in the theater. I guess you could say that movie played “a big roll" in our lives.

VS/JD: [laughter]

JD: During the summer my Dad would work at the school, and I’d go with him, and I’d be in the library, and I started looking at the Leonard Feather Encyclopedia of Jazz, seeing photos, learning the names from photo captions, the whole thing. I was 8, 9, 10 years old.

Around that time, I started to think “I am a drummer.” When I was in second grade I did a talent show— I couldn’t even turn my snares on or off, but I did the talent show. It was an amazing moment. My Dad would help with all that, he’d bring the drums and help me set them up. I would do drum solos— Ringo on “Carry That Weight”, I would do “Sing Sing Sing”, I would do “Moby Dick”, just solo, and the people loved it.

That feel— the rock feel, when I play it now— that’s him. Once I got into swinging, that was uncharted— he didn’t know about that stuff as much. I took it, and went to a new place. He was excited to see that, and he encouraged it.

VS: Can you talk about your father’s background? What was he coming from, musically?

JD: He studied with a guy named Rod Vincelette, a great Connecticut drummer, rudimental drummer, all hands and rudiments. My Dad excelled at that, and so did my uncle, also a drummer. To this day they have great hands! My Dad comes from that and his rudimental stuff is still together to this day.

From there he got into rock music, blues, he was in a band called Tommy Day and the High Tensions, and the recordings of that band really sound great, they sound like a classic Sixties band. Locally they had a big following.

Rod was the key— that was the guy who got him into the drums. That was in Willimantic, CT, the next town over from Mansfield. My Dad would practice for hours, got really into the rudiments, and that put him far ahead of all the local rock drummers, guys who heard the Beatles and were like, I’m a drummer. He took that stuff to a high level, and he also loved concert band and classical music.

When he played swing or jazz, it was more literal, more landing on the one and being kind of obvious. [Sings a heavy swinging beat and fills.] That’s how he would play.

To him that was Gene Krupa, but I was so lucky, I had all the books, I found out who Baby Dodds was, who Papa Jo was, and we had Buddy Rich videos. Somebody gave me a book called The Early Years of the Big Band, or something like that, that’s where I learned about James Reese Europe, and I had never gone back that far!

Then I got some records, I got some King Oliver and the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, and Hot Fives, and I even had a Fletcher Henderson record somewhere, and it was just mesmerizing to look at those old photos and hear those old haunting recordings.

VS: You were the first person I met who loved, not just liked, but really loved Fats Waller.

JD: Yeah, this was my own thing, not really my Dad’s thing. He was supportive though. I still have a Fats Waller tape that he got me, with, as I recently learned, Zutty Singleton on the drums. There’s a great drum solo on “Ain’t Misbehavin”, Zutty killed me on that.

This was something where, I could have been the only person that liked this, and I would have been ok with it. It wasn’t until I started to see movies of these guys, which were not accessible at that time. Then I understood— these guys were stars, no way was I the only one who liked this! [laughs]

My Dad was just supportive. He always came to the school concerts, was always there. Our peak moment, as father/son, was when this lady came to make a documentary about me for public access TV where I give an interview and play Gene Krupa style solos and stuff.

After that, things changed— I was a teenager, got into the church, and the drums took a back seat, my Dad was living elsewhere, and when he was not as near, I got into my own thing.

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Heading To Music School. Radio Host. Singing Drummer.

VS: So what put you on the path to study jazz, go to music school, and move to New York?

JD: So I went to Smith High School [Mansfield, CT], and I met another student who played bass, who had just moved from California. He was advanced, way far ahead, knew so much more, he had Miles, Coltrane, Charlie Parker. He got me into all that stuff. There was a place across the street from the school that had a jam session on Tuesdays.

Prior to this, I knew that U Conn [University of Connecticut in Storrs, CT] had a jazz department, because when I was twelve, they got me in a combo, cause I was fucking up at school a little bit, they tried to help me, they didn’t think I was being challenged enough, so they threw me in a basic jazz combo from the college. That’s where I first heard “Four”, and [bassist] Dave Santoro taught that combo with [pianist] Ellen Rowe.

And Vinnie, when I was 12, I was in a combo with them, and I played all my Gene Krupa shit on an 18” bass drum [laughter], and they were like, Who the hell is this kid? [much laughter]. I remember Dave Santoro walking in all cool with his Champion sweatshirt, I had no clue what the music was though. I heard Tony Williams at the time and I did not get it.

VS: Do you know what Tony you heard, specifically?

JD: Had to be the ’64 concert². Everyone knows— when you get into it, when you hear that second Miles Quintet, you know that’s the thing! With that band, it’s all together, it’s endless and a lifetime.

Anyway, age 17, senior in high school, hanging with my bass player friend, checking out Coltrane, exchanging tapes, and then I met the cats in CT who played bebop. Vinnie, do you remember Mark Small, tenor player?

VS: I saw him yesterday.

JD: Amazing! Ok so Mark was up there, Jason Williams [saxophonist] was leading that jam session, [drummer] Jim Oblon was there, [drummer] Tony Leone I used to go see play on Tuesdays at a dive bar where they had jazz and a jam session, that was in New Haven, called Rudy’s. I didn’t know about cities, so it was a big deal to go to New Haven. I didn’t know about cities until I moved to one.

VS: Yeah, me too, I’m the same way.

JD: We’re similar like that. Anyway, Tony Leone was playing the SHIT out of Art Taylor, Philly Joe Jones, that kind of thing. I was 17 and I started to get into it.

I remember the first time I played, basically, a transcription of some Philly Joe from Everybody Digs Bill Evans, like “Night And Day” and “Minority”, I played some of that stuff at a Dave Santoro gig, he had hired me to play a gig and I remember he was like, [does a lower voice] I can tell you been checking that shit out man! And I was like, [laughing] Oh, so if I keep doing this, and playing this way, people will call me for these gigs! And then I took a lesson with Oblon that was like, three days long, where he taught me basically everything I know about that stuff, in those three days, wrote down tons of things and just gave it me.

And then at Husky Blues, in CT, I saw [guitarist] Terence McManus playing “One Finger Snap”— wow, I have a complete memory of this occasion— and someone in the audience was like, He’s going to William Paterson! And I said to myself, What the fuck is that? And someone else said, You should go down and check it out. And that’s what happened, and you were in the class, you, me and Jamieo Brown, I remember sitting in that room with you and talking about Roy Haynes.

VS: A special time.

JD: By the time I met you, I was an addict for that music, would play anywhere, just to play— we’d play at Borders for, like, CDs for pay.

VS: I would do that now.

JD: Yeah me too, totally.

VS/JD: [much laughter]

JD: I just learned everything from those Connecticut guys— learning about form, learning tunes, going to jam sessions, I totally ditched my big bass drum-Gene Krupa style, even though I’m sure I still played that way, and I got into the language. And it’s so funny how it’s a cult, like anything else [laughter] and I got into it and my mind got twisted a bit.

VS: I think that’s part of it, I think that’s natural and good to go down the wrong street for a while, and then realize, This isn’t it.

JD: Yeah, well, so much of it is mental.

VS: You were also hosting a radio show at college, I learned a lot listening to that show. Can you talk about that, how you got into it, what you learned from it?

JD: I took a year off between high school and college, just playing gigs. And somebody said, You can do a free [unpaid] radio show at the college. And I thought, No shit? And I had gotten into collecting funk CDs when I worked at a record store. So I went over to the college and I met this guy Marko Fontaine who’s still a friend of mine up in Connecticut. And he was decked out in kind of more punk style of dress, and he was like 15 years older than me, like an older brother status. And I was this nerdy kid who was gonna host a jazz show, and I was at first like, who the fuck is this guy?

Turns out, as I got to know Marko, he knows about ALL music, this guy, and has a sick record collection, and really knew, just had great taste in music, had a sixth sense. And we started doing a show together.

At first I think I did my show after him, and then he started to stay for my show, and then that became our show, called ‘The Funk Machine’. Marko would come and hang, and friends would come, and I played, now that I look back, all stuff that was popular, really in the genre. These days especially you could really go down some rabbit holes and find some things that I didn’t have. That was way harder then, ‘97, ‘98, at age 17, 18. I had all of the really popular stuff, Curtis Mayfield, P-Funk, Earth Wind and Fire.

I mean, in our house we had Stevie Wonder, we had Motown, but we didn’t have Black music that went into the George Clinton realm even. I mean, we didn’t have the funk. I discovered that myself, through friends and through some moments in my life.

One day I was hanging with some friends and one friend, a Black friend, he said to someone, man, put on that Parliament. And I looked at the cover and was like, dismissive, what the fuck is this? And they put on “Tear The Roof Off”, and I remember being like, Alright. Challenge accepted! So I went out and bought a Parliament record, and I started to buy compilations, and then you see the fusion-funk stuff, with George Duke, it’s so relative to what we love, and you start to hear those connections.

So I did a jazz radio show and I did a funk radio show, and all it did was help me learn, learn about the history, learn about the music, and help me think about how to create segments of music that have a flow, to think about one song going into another. Like for instance, “Stomp” by the Brothers Johnson goes really well into “On The Floor” by Michael Jackson, it’s the same bass player [Louis Johnson], it’s a similar tempo, and it might even have the same modulation. I mean, deejays man, I would love to get into it.

VS: You mean get the gear and have gigs?

JD: Yeah! Because to me what a DJ can really do is use their knowledge to create those moments, where you’re putting things together, you know?

VS: But we should talk about you as a vocalist too, cause you had that whole DJ patter down, and you’re a singer, you’re a drummer— it all runs together.

JD: So I had a girlfriend when I was fifteen, and she got me to join the church choir. I made friends with Justin Wade, a singer at church, and I looked up to him because he had way more of a developed thing. We had great singers in church, and I remember wanting to know, How does this happen? how do you sing? I had nothing, I remember thinking there was no physical connection for me to this, watching them sing the way they did in church, all the gospel stuff.

Time went on and I started at William Paterson, having sung in the choir and even sang some sort of solo. But then I didn’t sing as much. When I met you Vin I wasn’t thinking about singing at all.

And then I started leading this jam session, at the Shepherd and Knucklehead in Haledon, NJ, and I started to sing there, and at Sarah Street Grill, in Stroudsburg, PA, and I started to realize from friends and the reaction I was getting, that I was, in fact, a singing drummer.

I don’t know if I was developing my voice as a jazz drummer, but when I started to sing, I started to feel that sense of completion. I never got that drum sound where you say, well, that’s Josh. It’s more like, Here’s a person, he sings and plays drums, THAT’s Josh. Then I started to write music, and that’s when the real identity formed.

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Apprenticing. Becoming a Bandleader and Songwriter. Part Of A Lineage.

VS: Ok, so now, you’re out of school, it’s about 2001, 2002. I remember you joined a club date band when we were at school, which I was very impressed by.

JD: Oh man, I got my ass KICKED in that club date band! I thought I knew— anything. And I did not know how to hold together a 10-piece band! And it wasn’t because I couldn’t do it, technically, it’s because I was— feeble-minded [laughter]. I just didn’t know how to MAKE IT happen for them. Inside I felt like, God, I know I can do this. Why am I failing at this?

And I think, socially, I had a lot of growth to do. I had the chops. I had the groove. But I needed growth in terms of being a person. Being a drummer, you have to be able to look someone in the eye and show them where it is. You can’t be asking where it is. That’s something I really learned then, and, man, it always peeps its head back up.

So the club date band was good for me because I was making a living as a musician, my rent was $280 a month. I mean, I was rich [laughter]. And I was doing local gigs, I started on Bleecker Street, playing at Terra Blues, I’m doing, really, any gig, I’m driving back to Connecticut, but there was a lot of work.

Then Brian Killeen, a great bass player, my friend from William Paterson, was in a band called Ulu³, sort of a Herbie Hancock Headhunters kind of band, and he got me in that band. That was my first road gig, my first time traveling, seeing the country, in the van, load out, load in, sleeping on floors, playing cool music every night, fusion-funk with odd time signatures, we made a record called Nerve, and it was really fun.

I listen back to some of the old recordings and I think there was something really good about that time in my life, I was kind of like Keith Carlock meets a guy with dad groove. And that ended because I got a gig with Chuck Loeb, who heard about me playing club dates! Goes to show, don’t knock anything.

VS: If you don’t want to do something, don’t do it. But don’t knock it, don’t put it down.

JD: Exactly. Well, this sax player, great old-school sax player named Gary Keller told Chuck about me, he said to Chuck, Check out this kid. He shows up early and he sings. Then I met Chuck, and he gave me the gig.

That was my first time playing in an older, established cat’s band. We did a two week tour in Spain, and I was seeing the jazz scene, seeing how that worked, this was huge for me. We played it all, small clubs, theaters, festivals. “Home James”, a Loeb track I recorded with Will Lee, I’m very proud of that.

Chuck was super cool. He was in the smooth jazz scene and his records were like that, but he was a burning player, could play these, like, almost bebop lines over smooth grooves, and he had all these ties to fusion and the NY studio guys, he’d played with everybody: Charlie Drayton, Steve Jordan, Steve Ferrone, Steve Gadd.

By then I had started writing songs, and I met Phil Brennan, who was the manager of Spyro Gyra. He took an interest in me, and he got us free studio time at Bear Track Studios, in Suffern, NY, very close to where I live now. This was Jay Beckenstein’s old studio. I had started writing songs because Scott Chasolen, who was in Ulu, was into songs and lyrics, and I started keeping a journal, and by about 2003 or so, I had written an album’s worth of songs, and that was me really coming into my own. That’s when I started Josh Dion Band, singing my own songs.

VS: I heard you guys so many times, learned so much. Can you talk about that band?

JD: Josh Dion Band was me being with a group of friends and peers, who developed a thing together, and was my first attempt at making a record of original music, my first time being in a real studio, singing the whole time, writing finished songs, working with a mixing engineer, I had no clue about that!

It quickly turned into a unit that was its own thing, went from six members to five members, and [guitarist] Dan Hindman and I were writing most of the stuff together, co-writing. And everyone else had a specific role in the band. It was the first time I think I heard anybody mention, This is what my role is.

I mean we were young, the music was somewhere between……I guess I just embraced my ‘rock roots’, and everyone was into blues…… I think that the way I play now with guitar players is all stuff I learned from that band. Playing with that band was where I learned how to reach the climax, peak energy, that mountaintop, and realizing what my potential was as a front man.

We had a lot of songs that had too many sections. That was my early experience as a songwriter, it’s kind of how I am in general: there’s so much stuff. Editing is something I’ve learned over time as I got older. I’m still working on that.

VS: What was the trajectory of the band? I have some memory, but I’d like to hear your summary of the life of the band.

JD: The band built a local fan base, started to get some interest from business people along the way, and sold out some venues, including the Bowery Ballroom, a big night for us. We had some peak moments because of the local following in New York, and traveled to Spain, and also played around the Northeast, and we were a thing, we had really found something.

But we were young, and because of the inner workings of bands, and not really knowing how to run a band……well, everybody grew. Everybody grew up in the band. People completely found their own, all of us did, and a decision was made to go on hiatus, actually [laughs], but we never went back to it.

And then I thought, I’ve got to write music by myself now, and I went to Steve Wall, the great producer/engineer who I had met through [singer/songwriter] Jeff Taylor, straight into the studio with him, and made all this new music, and I tried to put together a band where I was a total bandleader, and I booked some gigs, and people were still kind of digging it and coming out, but I never put that record out.

That phase didn’t last long, I didn’t like it! [laughs] I realized, I don’t know, it’s funny, sometimes when I’m the only one doing it, I can only get it to third base. I mean, I love writing, as [singer/songwriter] Ben Scheuer once said, I love putting words on paper. But I was looking for collaborators.

And that was when I connected with Geoff [Kraly, bassist/sound design/lyricist in Paris Monster]. I started to realize that Geoff and I were definitely in similar places, artistically, and we had strengths in different areas. So that’s how that started.

VS: You were still working with Chuck Loeb and [saxophonist] Bill Evans throughout all this though, weren’t you?

JD: Well, yeah, I was still playing with Chuck, he was my gateway, the way I met the original cats that were there, people like Bob James, Randy Brecker. Later I met Jason Miles, and I played on a Spyro Gyra record.

It’s an amazing thing being a freelancer, especially in jazz and improvisational music. You learn to join a band, every band you’re in is your band. You don’t even wave to somebody, and you get on stage, you don’t even look at each other, and suddenly, stuff starts to happen.

Anyway, I met Bill Evans sometime after doing that Spyro record, and all the guys we look up to had gone through the ranks with Bill: Adam Rogers, Henry Hey, Keith Carlock, Tim Lefebrve, everybody had played with him. I even sang in Bill’s band cause that was what I did, you know? That was my thing! [laughs] It was an odd collaboration, Bill and I, me doing that thing that I had developed, singing and playing roots-rock drums, but also being open and improvising and playing the gig. But Bill was great, it was a great gig.

I got to experience Europe in a deeper way, seeing how the scene worked, you get into that routine, you get to know clubs and cities, and the fans who are so receptive, and you learn how to tour, having rough tour days, and how it feels to get on a stage at a festival with no soundcheck, all those different things.

And you’re part of something, you’re part of a lineage of people who’ve played with Miles Davis or whoever, and you’re in that guy’s band now and he talks about that. It’s part of growing, having a career. Those were cool moments, I was writing, keeping a journal, Paris Monster was just beginning, and I would go on tour with Bill and that would facilitate the music we were working on.

And I got to meet so many people, that couple-of-generations-above-us guys in New York, people who played Mikkell’s or the Bottom Line, and hearing them talk about New York, that’s something that fascinates me still.

I love all that, just like you Vin, all that memorabilia, all those old recordings, trying to conjure up some idea of what it must have been like. And that’s why I love playing with that generation.

VS: Seems to me Paris Monster is keeping that going. You guys are updating a classic sound, you’re a duo that’s unlike other duos, et cetera.

JD: I hope so! I guess so. I mean, that’s the idea, a lot of what we do is totally coming from those classic records, we’re just doing our take on it.

1. Properly styled paris_monster.

2. Miles Davis: My Funny Valentine and Four And More, recorded in February 1964, both released by Columbia.

3. Properly styled ulu