The rhythms, roots and influences that shaped this jazz virtuoso
Published: 26 Jun 2025
Time taken : ~10mins
Image Credit: Roberto Cifarelli
With a career spanning more than five decades, Johnny O’Neal has forged a legacy as one of jazz’s most soulful and masterful performers, known for his swinging style and boundless spontaneity. In this interview, the acclaimed pianist and vocalist reflects on the music, mentors and defining moments that have shaped his remarkable journey.
I’d have to say While The Blood Runs Warm that I learned from Aretha Franklin on her solo piano and voice album. Later on, as a teenager, I got to play for her father’s church for a short while, but I never got to meet her. In the 2000s, she was supposed to present me the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Detroit Jazz Fest, but she took ill shortly before, and my dear friend Mulgrew Miller ended up giving me the award.
As far as albums, I’d have to say the one I recorded with the Ray Daniel Vocalaires. Ray was one of my musical mentors and one of Detroit’s finest gospel players. I give him credit also for helping me prepare and win the James Cleveland Gospel Workshop of America competition for best gospel pianist of the Midwest in 1972.
On Green Dolphin Street. It was in 1975 at a jam session in St. Louis and I got booed off the stage. It cultivated my appreciation because I didn’t leave the venue after getting booed. I hung around till the end and to my surprise the band actually asked me to join them professionally because I guess the leader, drummer Kenny Gooch, heard some kind of potential in me. We played six nights a week plus a Saturday matinee at that club, Mr. Connor’s Jazz House. We got paid $100 a week, which back then you could do a lot with. I stayed with them for a whole year.
There’s such a long list, so many great tunes, it’s not easy to narrow it down to one or two. I give credit first and foremost to singers, who usually seem to stay truer to the melody than instrumentalists. My musical background was hereditary through my father, who was a great blues shouter and a crooner. I heard him sing Stardust and Once In A While, just to name a few. Both of those songs are on the only recordings he ever made, which was a 78 RPM record. It was under the name Johnny O’Neal and the Versatones. I know there are not many of those records made at that time, but I sure would be so elated if I could ever hear them again.
Nat King Cole At The Sands. His touch and feel as a pianist are just flawless, and of course his vocal stylings are so diplomatic and articulate. I’m not sure if there will ever be another artist like Nat King Cole.
Of course, there are many good ones, but he is the innovator. Ray Brown told me a story about a festival that was held as part of Jazz at the Philharmonic. He said they had a lot of the great jazz artists of the day performing from the early part of the day all the way till the evening and Nat King Cole was the closer. According to Ray, as soon as Nat finished his first song, it was what he called a “big eraser”. His time feel was so immaculate it seemed to erase all the music that came before it earlier in the day.
All of them are hits so I can’t really choose one. I go and revisit a lot of them. If I really had to choose one, maybe I would say Tiger Rag. Oscar Peterson said when he heard it, it gave him nightmares and he stopped playing the piano for two months. Apparently, he originally thought it was two pianists playing together, but his father told him no, that’s just one. What I loved about Art Tatum was that he made any song his own through his characteristic and unique interpretation.
Joan’s Gospel Blues is a track I’m proud of which I got to record with the great Ray Brown on my first album Coming Out. Actually, that whole album was recorded in 1977 but apparently, they kept it in the can until 1983. That was shortly after I had joined Art Blakely. The band stopped in Concord, California and the producer Carl Jefferson of Concord Records came to hear us play and he realised he had a recording that I had done, and he decided to release it then.
Another favourite track of mine is Guilty from In The Moment on Smoke Records. It features the late great trumpeter Roy Hargrove who left us too soon. It was one of the last recordings he made before he passed, but he still plays so beautifully on that track. He and I were very good friends.
First and foremost, I’d have to say Art Blakely. Playing in his Messengers band caused me to be more of an ensemble player. I felt like I was really in school at that time, like I had joined a university. The modern style of the songs we’d play was a new challenge to me, since prior to that I was playing mostly with swing and post-bop jazz musicians.
I got that gig with Blakey the first week I moved to New York. Around Christmas of 1979, I was living in Atlanta and I met and got to play with Clark Terry for the first time. He told me whenever I come to New York to give him a ring. So, a few months later I landed in New York, and I saw in the listings that he was playing at the Blue Note. I called him and asked who was playing piano with him. He said, “You are!” And then Art Blakey came to our gig on the last night of our run and asked backstage if I would join his band, and that we were going to Europe for three months. That was my first time going to Europe. The whole band was only two or three weeks old, and we went right into the studio and recorded Oh By the Way. The band was Donald Harrison, Terence Blanchard, Billy Pierce and Charles Fambrough.
Stevie Wonder, Earth, Wind & Fire, Anita Baker and many more. As you know, I’m from Motown, so I grew up hearing all that great music and it’s become incorporated into who I am today and how I play even when I play jazz. I admire them because they were the innovators of pop music. It’s because of them that we have everything that’s going on today, musically.
My greatest loves musically are in gospel and the blues. That’s where I’m most strongly rooted in and what I love the most. Those are the things that I grew up with from the earliest age.
Well since I’ve been in New York for the past 15 years, I have seen so many great young musicians come to the city as little green babies and how many of them have developed their own careers. A handful of them have come through my band as well. In terms of today’s scene, there are so many wonderful talented young musicians that I am quite in awe of. It is not easy to just choose one or two because they all work hard and have great potential.
Jazz master Johnny O’Neal takes the stage with his quartet on 3 & 4 Jul 2025 at Esplanade Recital Studio as part of Jazz in July 2025.