Jeff Joyner
2021-06-17
I imagine Jeff had to be quite puzzled, when I approached him. It was the middle of the night at Pótkulcs, a Budapest Open Mic event had just ended a couple of minutes before, and the room was almost empty. He was drinking his last sips of beer, and packing up his things to leave. And there I was, a stranger, who claimed to know him from before, and was asking for an interview. I mean I even told him that I listened to some of his music and somehow followed his appearances in the past years since his jamm sessions at Hunnia. And he had no clue who I was. I also swore that I am not a creep, and I can actually take no for an answer. But if he is down to it, we could meet up and do an interview, that might not get published ever, and even if it does, would not get him any mainstream exposure or anything. Such a nice guy - he agreed, and even more, told me that he is free the very next day! So we met the following day, and here is the result below.
Viktor: Tell me first, where you are coming from and how you started connecting to music!
Jeff: Sure, yeah. So I’m from Ohio in the US, grew up in a small town called Bellbrook, Ohio, which is a suburb of Dayton, Ohio. Our city is famous of the Wright brothers, the guys who invented the first motor operated airplane. I started playing guitar when I was probably thirteen. I was mostly going to lots of blues jams and stuff like that in Dayton. Then I went to college in Ohio State University. I attended biochemistry, but the whole time I was there, music was kind of a hobby. We had a band going in college called The Reggae Boys. We were playing lots of reggae like Bob Marley and some of our own stuff as well. And then I did a phd in chemistry and during that five years or so the music really took a rest, you could say. So I wasn’t playing that much. But I was still of course writing songs, as mostly just like an outlet, but not as a profession. I was in the laboratory like eighty hours a week, so that was a lot of time. But music was always kind of a passion of mine. As soon as I graduated from that, I was like OK, I’m gonna get back to doing what I like. I was doing some work like forty hours a week at a start-up company, but for the other forty hours a week I was just recording and getting familiar with the tools of mixing. I wanted to get much better. Back then I was still quite amateur in mixing and recording techniques. I didn’t have much of a set-up either, just a few guitars, bass and amps, stuff like that. I was mostly into the live performing aspect of it and just jamming with friends. Then I was actually dating a Hungarian woman in Ohio. She was there for her post doc research in the laboratory. During that time I was playing a lot of music, we were living together for a couple of years. Then her visa expired in the US when her job did, so she had to leave the country. So the decision at the time was like either we break-up or I just go on some crazy adventure and say bye to my job and all that stuff. Which is exactly what I did, and came here. It was like six or almost seven years ago. When I got here, the idea was to have like a gap year, and go back to the US. But then I came here, and I really liked the music scene, you know. Because there were these little concerts all over the place, and parties happening everywhere.
V: Tell me about your introduction to the Hungarian music scene. What were your first experiences? What places, what kind of scenes you met?
J: The very first thing that happened was I got on this Budapest Musicians and Gigs Facebook group, that turned out was made by this other guy from Ohio. Tito Slack is his name. It was the place where you could post events and concerts and stuff. I was posting out there: does anybody want to start a band, cause I’ll be here for a year and I just want to record some stuff and make an album. That was my plan for the year, to make an album. So I started playing with this kind of crazy Mexican guy, Israel Janeiro. We were hanging out together, jamming and talking about all these recording techniques. We were learning a bunch of stuff together. And so my other friend Bihari Gábor had posted something about an open mic that was coming out soon. So I went to this open mic at Hunnia Bisztro. And I was like oh OK, there is a scene here. It felt like home, so I became much more interested in the city. Also a friend of mine introduced me to this other band. I don’t know if they had a name at the time but they were playing in the dormitory at BME. They had a rehearsal room downstairs, and I started playing with those guys. We started doing a couple of concerts together, just like a month or two after I have arrived to Budapest. So all these different things were happening. Then instead of like once a month, Gábor started doing this open mic scene basically every week. Then it became several times through the week as he has started getting different venues. Then it turned into this regular thing. We go out to the open mic nights and hang out with people. Then with this other band, which we started calling The 45 Guns, we decided to start hosting those jams at Hunnia Bisztro. At first it was once every month, or every two weeks. Something like that. That went on for years actually that we were hosting those jams. We eventually switched to this other place Edison Bar & Ink on Jókai utca. They are not open anymore, but they were a craft beer bar and tattoo parlor. They had a nice room downstairs with a stage and a nice sound system. And for two years there we were hosting jam sessions every other week. That was cool, as these started to feel like much more professionally organized jam sessions. Whereas at Hunnia it was like let’s see how drunk we can get tonight. Had some problems with the drum kit too. But at Edison they had a proper acoustic kit and bass amp. That was cool. The Edison jams only stopped because I got a contract at a cruise ship at the Canary Islands, so I had to leave. I went there for three months, around a year and a half ago now. I left at December 2019.
V: How do you even connect to such a thing? How did you get the contract?
J: There is a guy who is actually in our band, The Serial Chillers now. He was working in the same band on the cruise ship for two contracts, so he did like a six month contract and a three month contract I believe. It was at a German company, TUI Cruises, and Mein Schiff was the name of the boat. It is one of these gigantic cruise ships where they have like fifteen stories. He was doing that job for a couple of contracts and then at one point he just decided he didn’t want to do a third one because it was just enough. So he asked me if I wanted to replace him in the band. After the contract ended, we decided to have him join our band here. I’ve been in a couple of bands with Guillermo, this guy before, but he wasn’t in The Serial Chillers until just like several months ago actually. So I did that contract for three months, and before that I was sure that at Edison we will continue the jams as soon as I get back. But then when I came back it was March 7th of 2020, or so. I came back for three days and then I had to go the US for two weeks. And it was like the day we flew to the US, that’s exactly when all international travel was halted because of Covid. So there was that pause for a few months there. Then Edison closed up for that. They couldn’t reopen.
V: Could you return in the summer?
J: I was able to return after like two month waiting. I had to have police permission to enter Hungary, and I had to do quarantine. Then basically everything was reopening at the end of May.
V: Are you doing anything with your previous pretty long education?
J: Here at Budapest I teach chemistry as a professor at the Duna International College. It is all in English. On normal years I’m teaching like 20-25 hours per week, chemistry classes. The summers are all free too, so I also travel to Austria, where I teach English in some schools there, for like one week at a time.
V: The most difficult struggle I can see in this scene, is to find the right balance between your job and your hobby.
J: Well luckily my job now is pretty relaxed. So I have a lot of free time to do music actually. I don’t have the highest income but you know, it is enough to get by and I’m not running out of money.
V: Let’s talk about your several projects. You have more and more collaborations on your Youtube, each a bit different. You also have this kind of a Pink Floyd style psychedelic album uploaded from 2015, a full concept album. It is a very well mixed, exciting album. Again very different in style. And with The Serial Chillers, you are playing in so many styles. How do you decide what kind of music you want to play with the band, or in which style you’d write next?
J: Basically I just make whatever I feel like making at the time. Which is changing all the time. So sometimes I’m in the mood to make an electronic sounding track, and then other times I’m more in the mood to make some acoustic tracks. This happened more lately, because of all the time sitting around home I would say. Other times I’m more in the mood to make a live sounding full band thing with drums and all that. I don’t really like the idea on trying to fix it all into one category and not leaving that category, because this is what we’ve already defined as something. Pigeonholing, I guess they call it. When I made that concept album, I had a pretty set idea that this is how I want all this songs to sound like. I had the gap year the first year in Hungary, and I had a lot of time to plan that and think of the concept, and to write the songs.
V: So that is the result of the gap year you mentioned?!
J: Yes, basically. It is called “Dr Joyner’s Ego Death”, it is up on Youtube. So there was that, and then the next thing I did after the release of the album was to start getting The Serial Chillers going. We did that with Tito actually, the other guy from Ohio I mentioned, and this guy James, who is from the UK. He was our cajon player and drummer. We started to gradually adding more and more people to the band. We were playing live all the time in these open mics and jams, so I was really feeling the vibe of live sounding music. We had this chill funky bluesy sort of vibe, which I in fact have always liked since going to these blues jams twice a week back in Ohio. I was joining other peoples’ bands too as guitarist but they kept failing for whatever reasons. Let’s just say I decided that in order to have a band that lasts many years, I have to basically lead them because otherwise I am just at the whim of other peoples’ motivation or lack of it. So I decided to start writing our own songs and have this band together where we can do this sort of chill bluesy live funky kind of stuff. That is how The Serial Chillers started. We started off with just a few songs, and some covers to fill the rest, and little by little over the years we have started writing more and more songs. Now we have like 30 original songs I think. So now we have to decide which ones to leave out at concerts, which is cool. So the band was my main focus I would say for like a couple of years. Trying to get this band hop off the ground and get bigger and bigger shows and keep publishing these albums. There are two albums already published and a third one is basically already out as singles, but we are gonna consolidate it into an album soon. As the years went by, people kind of came and went, but the band just kept going. For example our first cajon player had to move back to the UK, and then we found two new drummers actually. And a keyboardist, and then another guitarist, and eventually a saxophone player, and then we kind of switched the drummers. One of them wanted to move to the Netherlands, the other one broke his shoulder before a big show. We found another drummer, who turned out to be so professional and amazing for us that we had to tell the previous one, sorry dude, but this sounds a lot better. We kind of needed that at the time. Then a couple of people lost interest and left at some point. Our old keyboardist and the other guitarist. Now the line up is pretty much the best sounding we had, where everybody is interested. We all feel the vibe. We were having a problem even with this other amazing drummer who was working with us. He was requiring more money for shows than we were able to practically earn. These financial factors were stressing our ability to operate in Budapest. But we found a new drummer who actually wants to practice every week with us instead of only before a big show comes up, so now we are actually creating as a band. With the other guitarist in the band, he and I had this duo going four years ago mosty playing in restaurant gigs to make money, and also just to have fun doing music, small gigs. And then Lancelot our saxophone and synthesyzer player from France, he joined us a couple of years ago and he and I are also doing these duo performances on the side as well which we’ve been doing for a couple of years. Then there is Mike and Guillermo – Mike is our new drummer who just joined us a few months ago, and Guillermo is our new bassist, who was the guy from the cruise ship I told you about. He is super professional, he was playing in the kind of famous band in Budapest, called the Pálinka Republic. Mostly expats know them, probably because they had guys from South-America, Australia. Guillermo even played in Boney M for a while. For a year when they were doing some touring like maybe five or ten years ago? It is just a funny fact.
V: So it seems like many of your connections and the scenes where you are present in Budapest are somewhat connected to expats. I saw it yesterday at the Budapest Open Mic at Pótkulcs as well that probably two third of the performers and the audience as well either seemed like international students or expats.
J: It feels like half-half to me. But yeah, you are right. There are lots of expats. There are a few different scenes depending on which Open Mic you go to. I would say probably the ones going to the Udvarrom Open Mic or at the open jams that I host, are more Hungarian people. But at the ones we have at the Hoff House, there are more expats there, I would say. Because there is this party hostel culture, party booking companies for tourists, and a lot of people working in this group are expats. But there are many sorts of groups that are all coming together.
V: Do you see any minor differences between expats playing music and jamming together, going to open mics and Hungarian musicians? Do you see any characteristics that are different?
J: I am not sure. I’d say maybe expats are a bit more flamboyants and more outgoing. But there is not much difrerence in my opinion. Maybe Hungarian musicians on average tend to be a bit more reserved. More going for the technical and professionality side of music, whereas the expats are a bit more showey, like I said, flamboyant. There are some examples, but it is not always like this.
V: That is actually reassuring. Because what I saw, is that the expats are very confident. It seemed to me they know their value, their level. I can see that they are confident with showing that. But probably it is just the spirit of the open mic. And also what I noticed is that if you live here, and let’s say you want to succeed in music, you tend to pressure yourself to make it right. And for some expats, who probably live here for a shorter period of time, they don’t want to have something permanent, so they are just free to give. Free to share their talent and their joy in music.
J: There is probably some truth to that. I think the expats may have this mentality, that they come here, and there is a bunch of people they don’t know so they kind of start from scratch. Just do something crazy, different. Whereas for the Hungarian people, you are home with the same people you always have known so maybe that makes you a bit more reserved in general with a lot of things.
V: I used to just travel and stay at hostels and you know, enjoy the scene. And I was much more open to making a fool of myself because there is no risk really. If you come back healthy, then it is all good.
J: I think that is what all the British people are thinking when they come here as tourists. They come here to have a big party, to be crazy. Don’t really care what they look like here, because they are going back in a few days anyway. But a lot of the expats are coming here for a long term. So I don’t think they have the same feeling about it.
V: Can we talk a bit more about these Budapest Open Mics?
J: Sure! So I first noticed them about six years ago, and at that time it was only once a month, when it first started. Then Gábor was the one that was really speeding up the progress. Tito has also started hosting a couple of them. Once Gábor already had like three going, he saw the opportunity and he started one at Jelen Bisztró, and also one at somewhere else. Anyway, there were a couple of them, but neither of those are going now. Now Gábor is the main guy and then myself and Kenny Berg – he is from Scotland – he and I are hosting the one every Thursday night at Hoff House. But I would call Gábor the grandfather of the open mic scene.
V: I think I remember him from the jams at Hunnia. He was there sometimes and he sang mostly Beatles songs, right?
J: And Neil Young a lot actually. He has a Neil Young cover band of which I am the bassist. But it hasn’t been active for like a year now. It was going really good right until I left for the cruise ship and then the Covid stuff happened. We had gigs at Trip hajó and Ellátóház and maybe at A38 at one point, I cannot remember. Then all that was cancelled because of Covid.
V: How would you introduce or characterize the performers of these Open Mics? Who are they?
J: It is a mix of people. Mostly hobbyist musicians, just getting comfortable performing in front of people. They kind of use it as a spring board to become more confident to playing live. I would say probably seventy-five percent of the performers are just like this. They are people who love music and love playing music and are just getting into this idea of playing live. And then the twenty-five percent of the people there are much more experienced. They either are pursuing music actively as a career or as song writers. And have something relatively big going on, like some sort of music career. You kind of notice sometimes at open mics, there will be a lot of people playing, and then all of a sudden there are a couple of artists who would walk in there, and then everybody runs in the room to see the performer. It is one of the more famous people, or something. You know, when you go to an open mic with Zubi, or someone like that walks in the room, and it is like oh shit!
V: There are also some exceptionally talented or I would say gifted voices there. The girl who sang a song from the 4 Non Blonds I think, and amazingly well too. Or a duo – a girl and a guy – who vocalized together. I could see that they want to do something, I wonder if their purpose is to play in a band and have some kind of a mainstream end goal, or they want to do just the duo.
J: I’m not sure actually. I know for a fact that they’ll be playing at the Tokaji Utcazene Fesztivál where we’ll also gonna be playing at in September. So they are doing something. They are at the level of applying to festivals, and that is saying something. But I don’t know if they have a band or they are just a duo, I am not really sure. Because sometimes you have duos showing up at the open mics but they actually have a full band who were not all there. That happens a lot. But yeah, there are a lot of these great talents that come to open mics who aren’t necessarily successful artists, or even have any kind of online presence. They come because they just like playing at open mics, it is quite common to see that. And it makes a lot of sense. A reason why they don’t have much online presence is because they aren’t into producing or mixing. They don’t know where to start, or they just aren’t interested doing that. I have seen a lot of that in open mics. People with great voices, but they don’t write any of their own songs, or they just don’t produce them. But it is a great community I would say. The open mics are a great source of collaborations because you can go on an open mic, show us what skills you have, and you see others playing and the skills they have. It is like rapid exposure, mass exposure to a lot of different artists.
V: Like fast blind dates.
J: Something like that. I’ve also heard Gábor say it is like a swingers’ club for musicians.
V: So what else do you get out of this, when you go and become some kind of a regular at an open mic?
J: Free beer. That is a perfect reason. I mean sometimes I go even if I don’t feel like playing, because it is fun to just hang out with the regulars there. A place to socialize. And if you are often playing there, you get to expose people to your music who wouldn’t have heard it otherwise. As an artist it is kind of a way to get your name out there. Although I generally find it doesn’t work that well for promoting a band, because usually at the open mics you are not there with a full band anyway. But it is still a way to meet people, and you could still announce your band in the performance. Sometimes you might show up with many members of a band, and that is the best when you do that.
V: And then you can have collaborations.
J: It is also a good way to just practice. For example during the whole lockdown from November through April, I basically only sang through a microphone two or three times, and I noticed when I came back for the first couple of open mics that I felt quite weak, singing in microphone. But when you are doing it regularly, like every week, it really helps you to keep up with the breathing and the muscles and you get used to how to act in front of people.
V: That is true. I tell you an unexpected experience of mine. There were these two long pauses now, and both times when I went back to start rehearsing once again, of course I felt like my throat was sore after two songs. But I also felt more in tune, more than before. I could remember that I was out of tune last time, at certain parts of songs that were just difficult. And then when I started again, it was so much easier to fix those parts. Probably I lost some muscle memory, and could develop those jumps from scratch, and it was right from the beginning.
J: It is funny you said that, because actually I kind of noticed the same thing. I hardly had any problems of being in pitch since the lockdown, but I don’t know why. But what I did notice is that when I listen to my recordings, my voice sounded so out of breath. I think it was more the lack of technique and too long without practicing. But yeah, I think you are right. I did notice this thing about the pitch. It somehow became easier to hear. Maybe if you just listen to bunch of other music, and don’t hear your own voice for a while, you just start to hear the difference more. Kind of in the same way like working with a mix for too long. Listening a lot to a certain music, then you start to become comfortable, even though there are some problems, and you just stop noticing them.
V: What is the future for your band, for your projects?
J: Well, I have two projects now. I started marketing my own solo project more agressively. During the lockdown it was just easier for me to start producing music on my own. But we started practicing every week for several months now with the new guys. We have kind of strong plans for the band, and also for my own stuff. For example we just had a photoshoot the other day with the new guys, just had our first concert last Saturday and we’ll be playing a concert very soon at Balaton. We have the one in Tokaj, we also want to go to the Veszprém Utcazene Fesztivál. Just the other day we sent the application. And we’ll be playing at a private festival too. The owner of Ellátóház has this private festival every year by Badacsony, and we’ll be playing down there at his ranch in the middle of a forest basically. So we are doing a bunch of stuff like that and our goals are just to keep on growing and next up trying to kind of get into places like Szimpla and Instant. And as well as talking to bands to open for them. And I’m applying to big festivals every year, without much success I would say. Like a lot of them just don’t even respond, or they do respond like thank you guys, but we are not interested. That’s always an uphill battle, but we still keep trying, because you never know when there is gonna be a positive answer. Even if you get into Bánkitó or Kolorádó one time, that would be pretty awesome. We are trying to get more gigs around Budapest and even Balaton. It is always tricky to get enough pay to support the whole band, but the goal is to just keep going and I think we’ll probably always stay around Budapest for the most part. Or at least in Hungary, I’d say. I think we would quite enjoy travelling to other cities, but you know, transportation of the gear gets difficult then. But that is a goal. I think all of the members of the band, we all plan on being here for the forseeable future like the next couple of years at least. So we’ll just take it as it comes. We’re working with an artist, who is making artwork for us, for the band. So we have kind of a consistent theme. This sort of psychedelic imagery going on, which I think fits our image. I think our band is an indie-soul psychedelic funk band. With a little bit of a tribal side? It is hard to explain why this is the case, but you can definitely feel something like that. I think we are trying to book five or six shows a year with the full band and of course if we get more, we’ll take it, but it is kind of hard to have shows more than that if you are just staying in Budapest. Because you know, people aren’t always wanna come to a show if it is in every two weeks or so. Maybe every month is OK. We were actually just asked by the Hoff House, if we would be a resident band playing there everymonth. That is something we were considering. But for this summer we are already quite busy, so it might be something we start doing in the fall. Which might be nice for our development as well because it will force us to keep adding new materials, working on things with a little more pressure in a good way.
V: How about your solo project?
J: For my solo project I find the best is to always keep that going in parallel to the band. And that is just a whole different outlet with different limitations compared to managing a whole band. So I intend to keep them both going separately and to use them to cross-promote each other. That way I don’t feel limited, where everything I produce has to have one sound with the band. If I decide to make some weird trance song, I could do it and just put it on my own project instead of on the band.
V: How do you find your collab partners? Like if someone wants to do a collab with you, how is it comfortable for you to work together? What are you looking for in these contacts?
J: It is always a little bit different actually. So a lot of times it’ll be like I start writing a song and I’ll try singing it, but I don’t like the way my voice sounds, or it is just not the right type of song for me to sing. Lot of times I try to work with female vocalists, because a lot of them can just completely blow up the vocals like crazy. In ways that I wouldn’t be able to do. I used to be in a band before, where we had a song called Midnight Drive. We had this female singer and we had like ten original songs together. Then the band kind of stopped for a long time, but we never actually fully produced the songs. We just made some demos basically. So I got back in touch with her. I said – hey, that one song is really awesome, why don’t we do a real production of this, trying to make a Spotify hit or something? So that is why we met again, to at least work on that one song, and now it is actually doing pretty well. I think we’ll start working on more of those songs, turning them into real songs. There was this other one, the last collab that I made actually. I had the whole structure, like the beat and most of the instruments recorded, and I was even singing the choruses which are still in it. But I didn’t have any verses written at all, so I was talking to my friend Sayomi. She is the collaborating artist on that, who I’ve been hanging out with most of this winter in the isolation. She is a great singer, and I was like hey, why don’t you try to see what you can do with this song, and write some verses? And sure she came back with some really nice verses. We were recording this stuff at my house. The final song is called Slow Jam. There was another typical situation, when I had recorded the whole song, but I didn’t like how my voice sounded. So when my friend Denae Rae from the US, she was asking if I would collaborate with her on some things, I was like sure. And why don’t we start off with this song, if you are interested? And sure enough it sounded really good with her voice, and we published that one as Forest Inside Your Mind. So a lot of the collaborations were working out like this. Recently I started working with a British guy, Gabriel. He is cousins with this other guy Anatu who is a producer for Zubi. Anatu and Zubi are always putting out songs together, and Gabriel is sort of in their triangle also. So I just started working with him on a song the other day, we just decided to meet in my studio, and started recordings. Beats, guitar, bass and some drums and it started sounding like an R’n’B song. We don’t have any lyrics yet, but you know, sometimes it just starts like this. I guess the key is that you always have to be clear at the beginning, how you would release this in the end. If you start collaborating with somebody I found this easier nowadays to just keep the two separate artist names, and just list them both under the song instead of always trying to start a new band every time you are collaborating. Because if I felt the pressure to do that, to make a band every time, than it would always probably fall apart before getting it going. But if you just agree to make a single, it is a nice and easy way to get something done that doesn’t have the pressure to be an album or like a whole band. I like this kind of new thing. I feel like you take a look at Spotify and you see it all the time now, where there are just two artists on the track, and I think that is usually because of these types of collaborations. So now I just prefer to focus on individual songs because anyway that is the attention span these days that people have to listen to music anyway.
V: So that is a stupid technical question, but is it easier to just publish one song or two on Spotify, or does the mechanism work better if it is a full album? How do you see that?
J: I am not really an expert on this, but I find that the marketing aspect to get your music out there works better as singles. Because you know, imagine you publish a whole album. You gonna make a Facebook post, an Instagram post, maybe send some emails out to your fans, that „Hey, here is a new album”. And later it is like „OK, now what do I write about?” Hey we’ve released an album two days ago! Hey, we’ve released an album three days ago! Check it out! If you do want to release an album, get it all recorded, mastered, finished and everything, like several months before you actually plan to release it! Then release one single at a time every two or three weeks. Then at the end, bam! Put out the whole album with a few songs that you haven’t released yet. And this way you slowly got it up, over several months instead of just putting that all out there once and realizing you don’t have anything more to say about it. You can also use that time to get interviews or set-up some radio plays, all kinds of stuff like this. You know, try to be in Youtube channels and Spotify playlists. By the way, that is another reason why it is good to do one song at a time. Because on Spotify you can pitch your singles to editors who make the playlists. You can pitch your songs to them, and they decide whether or not they like it, and also which playlist it can go into. But you cannot do that with a full album, and you can only do one song at a time. The other tricky part about that is you have to pitch it generally like three weeks before release. So it is good to have a song release scheduled for every three weeks. So yeah, that is kind of the modern way of doing things, I would say. And it makes a lot of sense. Ninety percent of the people who you approached online, maybe listen to the one song, but they are not gonna sit and listen to your whole album. It is just the fact, it is the way it is. The way you get people’s attention to music is different than twenty or thirty years ago when there were record stores you could walk in to buy CDs or whatever. Now they make playlists with a bunch of different songs, and if you happened to be in a playlist, then people may want to listen to different songs as well.