photo: Shervin Lainez

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The Late Show bandleader remembers his lifelong friend James Casey as he releases his own introspective sophomore album, Reflections.

His Full, Authentic Self

I met James Casey my first day at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. I left home when I was 18, not really having a musical community in my wonderful town of Albemarle, N.C. James and I found a real friendship, largely because we both grew up in the church. He was actually a year ahead of me, but we met in the 150 dorms, he showed me around and I said, “We’re gonna be best friends for the rest of our lives.” We would discover a whole world of things over the next 20 years of playing music together, but from the first jam session, there was a spiritual connection unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. He is this incredible human that brings his full, authentic self and that light that everyone who has played with him describes similarly—whether he was with Animus Rexx, our band Six Figures, Trey Anastasio or Billy & The Kids.

We would play together at Wally’s, and I had a spot where I was teaching at on Boylston Street—I had a couple of drum kits set up and we’d go down any hour of the day or night. He was also a notorious night owl, so we’d eat a lot of bad Thai together, a lot of pineapple fried rice. Corey Bernhard was at Harvard while we were at Berklee and would also frequent Wally’s. James and I were sitting in there and playing with Sam Kininger, and Corey brought this group of friends and musicians together that became Six Figures—there were six of us and we just decided to see what happens. From the first time we played together, there was a cool chemistry. We started playing Wally’s on Wednesdays and, from there, we kept getting opportunities to travel and perform. We recorded a short record and a full album that has yet to be mixed or released. We were young, hungry kids who had these shared experiences with gospel and improvisational, groove-based R&B/funk music. It felt vibrant, alive, invigorating and unique.

The Honest Path

When James died [in August, after battling colon cancer], his wishes were to have a party in lieu of a funeral, which is what we put together for Brooklyn Bowl. I asked Raydar Ellis, who was around Berklee the same time as us, to be the DJ— having this family element and keeping that party energy going was important. It was also important that we played some of this unreleased Six Figures music during the show. The struggle was to create a party that reflects the range, breadth and reach of his light. How do you bring together all of these people from the jamband, jazz and R&B worlds who, without James, probably would never have come together?

The irony that James and I both ended up playing in this [jamband] world was not lost on us. We talked a lot about how, identity-wise—especially when you’re in your early 20s and finding your place in the world as a human, and then subsequently as a musician— you think you’re gonna to end up on one path. But that path and the most honest path are often completely different. When we were coming up, James always had the latest music that was out, often before it even came out. He was listening to a lot of experimental R&B and early Robert Glasper. But both of us, personally, loved a wide range of music and a lot of those worlds that we were influenced by require a certain degree of isolation. If you want to be in the straight-ahead jazz scene, you really have to almost do nothing else—it’s a lifestyle. Doing that never checked all of our boxes. And, in terms of the taste element, our path led us to find our identities and spread that into these other worlds. When he started playing with all these jambands, James had a lot of conversations with Oteil Burbridge about this and asked him: “What happens when you bring these other elements that you’re into to this soup?” Energetically and musically speaking, it just makes for a different combination of flavors that go together really well.

The Tools to be Reflective

I first started working on Reflections during the pandemic times. Like the rest of the world, I had a lot of time to be introspective. And I learned a lot about myself through personal experiences—family and global things that were happening. I was really grateful to have a great therapist that gave me the tools to do a little more digging in my songwriting, which has always been a cathartic thing for me. So the songs had to reflect that. I kept writing until a month before I went into the studio during the summer of last year. Then, I whittled that group of 17 or 18 songs down to the eight on the record. This group of songs felt like it was the storyline—the most current and honest document of where I’ve been in my life. It’s a reflective place, from relationships to parenthood, loss and everything.

I’ve gotten a lot of feedback about the album title and people are taking a lot of different meanings from it. I’ve learned a lot from that feedback because where I was coming from was very much a first romantic relationship, post personal therapy. My first album was also honest to that time in my life but, depthwise, I didn’t yet have the tools to be reflective at these levels. This album starts with me speaking about the experience of falling in love but on a more self-aware level than I had been before. It’s a love song but it’s also a dark comedy. It’s like, “It hit me like a flood. I wasn’t even ready.” It’s also about realizing that part of the attraction is seeing that familiar brand of self-love—that the ego is attracting.

Mick Would Love It

Musically, I said to myself, “What is the least amount of instruments that are needed to convey this emotion or this story?” That was the goal. From song to song, across the record, I wanted to let go of ego attachments as much as possible. These are love songs, so I wanted to deliver them as honestly as possible and strip them down as much as possible. And if that meant that the only instrument was one guitar, then that’s what that meant. Also, because of the level of vulnerability and what this group of songs represents for me personally, I needed to play whatever instrument I needed myself, from my heart. That won’t always be the case but, for this album, that felt like an important piece of the puzzle and the organizing principle.

In terms of a storyline, I decided to include [The Rolling Stones’] “Miss You” as a break from the heaviness. On songs like “Human,” there’s the existential crisis of putting on faces for family and friends and even love songs like “Reflections” are a little dark. I had done “Miss You” during my weekly cover series during the pandemic, and I had been working with Lisa Fischer, who sang with the Stones for 20 years. And she was like, “I think you really tapped into something there; it’s a fresh perspective on the song. Mick would love it.” That weekly series had been a way for me to connect to the world around me and to exorcise the demons of my inner musical producer and inquisitive, curious brain during the pandemic. So I wanted to represent a little bit of that somewhere on this record and that was how I got to “Miss You.”

Following a Hunch

In the spring of 2015, Jon Batiste called to ask me to be a part of a recording session that he was working on for a theme song for a television show. I didn’t know him personally or otherwise—this was also before I was active on social media—and that was all the information that he could legally give me. Long story short, I decided to follow a hunch; it felt like good energy. So I changed my plans and stayed in town an extra day, and we ended up working on a recorded version of what would be the theme song for The Late Show.

During that process, he got to know me as a multi-instrumentalist/producer and asked me if I would be willing to join his band Stay Human. They were already together but he wanted it augmented for the show. So I came in as the utility guy in the very beginning and then, in March of 2022, he had to miss a show for the first time and he asked me to hold down the fort. I did it to the best of my abilities and that was the beginning of the end of his tenure. He received more Grammy nominations than anyone that year and it has been amazing to see him apply his genius to these myriad things. He took some time off from the show to deal with some of the heavy things happening in his life and his humanity. And, once he decided he was gonna move on from the show, Stephen asked me if I wanted to do it permanently. And, henceforth, here we are now.

I’ve learned so much because Stay Human have a real brotherhood—they have been cultivating that synergy in every environment, from subways to concert halls. I had always taken music very seriously and playing with them has disarmed that in a way. It was set up in a way where you couldn’t really be too prepared, which makes me lean on so many other powerful, organic elements— playing together, listening, moving together, instincts. This was something that was always innately there when you strip away the things that you can plan for. It really opened me up to a whole other way of existing and making music that I’ve continued to learn from. And I’ve also tried to carry a bit of that into the way that I lead the band now.