Home » Jazz Musicians » Jared Johnson
Jared Johnson
Jared Johnson is active as a professional freelance drummer/composer performing and recording extensively with regionally and nationally known artists. Jared has been a featured performer at Duet Jazz and the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame. He appears regularly with the Mike Cameron Collective, Swunky Face Big Band, and The Tulsa Playboys. With his own group, Next of Kin, Jared performs his original work, "The Grapes of Wrath Project". Jared is a composer/arranger, clinician and adjudicator for various jazz camps, workshops and competitions. An elementary music specialist, Jared leads the World Music Drumming program at New Tech at Cherokee Elementary School in Muskogee, Oklahoma.
Tags
As a longtime professional writer, music
lover,
and great admirer of John
Steinbeck’s work, I felt very privileged to
have
been the person Jared Johnson
selected to narrate his Grapes of Wrath
Project: Modern Jazz Reflections.
Anyone familiar with the music scene in our
part of the country knows Jared for
his skillful and versatile work as a drummer;
I’m also lucky to know him as a
fellow Steinbeck fan.
But even with that knowledge, I was hardly
prepared for what he and his similarly
gifted group, Next of Kin, came up with for
the debut performance of The Grapes
of Wrath Project. Of course, I was familiar
with Steinbeck’s book and the classic
scenes that continue to speak forcefully to
us
and our sense of compassion and
fair play. And I was familiar with Jared’s
facility as both composer and musician.But I
was hardly prepared for the synergy of the
two. In fact, it took me several
run-throughs to be able to get through my
part without choking up.
With The Grapes of Wrath Project: Modern
Jazz Reflections, Jared Johnson
adds another level to the deeply human
message that still rings out from
Steinbeck’s words. Sometimes as soft as a
young mother’s touch, other times
raging like Dust Bowl windstorms, and
occasionally reaching complexities of
emotion that lie beyond all words, the music
Jared gives The Grapes of Wrath
Project never tries to overpower the classic
text that inspired it. It does, however,
amplify — both respectfully and powerfully
—
some of the greatest and most
deeply American passages ever written.
John Wooley
Author and Host, Swing On This, KWGS