Features

Meet the Benevento Russo Duo (Relix Revisited)

With Joe Russo touring with Furthur and Marco Benevento gigging in a variety of contexts as well, we offer this piece, which originally appeared in the December/January 2007 issue of Relix

In an outpost-like corner of Lawrence, KS, Marco Benevento and Joe Russo are preparing for a mid-June performance at the Wakarusa Music Festival. It’s been a busy week for the longtime friends, collectively known as The Benevento-Russo Duo, mostly spent outlining their amphitheater tour with jamband demigods Trey Anastasio, Mike Gordon and Phil Lesh. But tonight The Duo is alone in the hippie-rock wilderness, without its full arsenal of instruments or even its longtime tour manager. Along with my co-host, Benjy Eisen, I’m trying to get Russo to play an acoustic version of his song “Memphis” for Relix’s Cold Turkey podcast.

At first Russo is hesitant, but 15 minutes after bribing him with a bottle of Maker’s Mark whiskey, the drummer is seated behind an acoustic guitar, stumbling through the track off the band’s album Play Pause Stop. Soon Benevento joins in, scatting on humorous covers of songs by The Scorpions, Mr. Big and, yes, Phish (shameless plug: check out the new Relix website for the video podcast of them doing “Divided Sky” from this session). From their frat-boy banter to their dorky grins, Joe and Marco could be any 29-year-olds relaxing late night at a festival, but after the recording stops, the conversation’s tone begins to shift. Young fans emerge from the ether, sheepishly saying, “It’s an honor to meet you” and “I’m psyched to see you on tour with Phil!” Russo shrugs, somewhat unaccustomed to the attention. “People kept mistaking me for Trey,” the shaggy, bespectacled redhead jokes. “So I decided to cut my hair—otherwise it’d be a long summer.” It’s a unique time to be hanging with Russo and Benevento, watching as the two performers age from working-class musicians into tomorrow’s rock stars.

The Duo’s origins date back 15 years, when Russo and Benevento were students at New Jersey’s Franklin Lakes Middle School. Suburban preteens, Russo, a drummer, and Benevento, a keyboardist, first bonded in detention. For a while, the guys toyed around with starting a band, but ended up going to different high schools where their lives veered in different directions.

After graduation, Benevento enrolled at Boston’s prestigious Berklee School of Music, studying jazz piano and film score composition. He also began gigging at local jazz bars and befriended fellow freethinking students like The Slip’s Brad Barr, Marc Friedman and Andrew Barr. It was an incredibly fertile time for the Boston music community, with jazz inspired improvisational bands such as Soulive, The Miracle Orchestra and Addison Groove Project bouncing around the Northeast’s college ‘n’ club circuit. Benevento put together his own combo, The Jazz Farmers, which toured with moderate success until 2003.

After his mom passed away, Russo picked up his G.E.D. and followed some friends to Boulder, CO, where he fell in with Fat Mama, a seminal jazz-funk combo known for its early use of electronics. Fat Mama earned a small but loyal national following, selling out Boulder’s 700-person capacity Fox Theatre along the way. In 2000, the group received the inaugural New Groove Award at The Jammys and, that summer, Fat Mama was featured in an issue of Entertainment Weekly with Phish on its cover. But praise doesn’t always add up to financial success and Fat Mama eventually called it quits. “I was sick of touring and [at the time] I was engaged,” Russo says. “I kind of gave up on the whole band thing. I was broke and started working at a label. I figured playing in a band was something I’d look back on as part of my early 20s.”

Around the millennium, Russo migrated east and became a man-about town in Manhattan, often holding court at the downtown club The Wetlands. His resume from the period is all over the map, ranging from jazz-funk jams to trance-fusion rave-ups with the Disco Biscuits’ Marc Brownstein.At one point, Wetlands talent buyer Jake Szufnarowski even knighted the drummer, dubbing him “Sir Joe Russo.”

“It really was a great scene at Wetlands,” Russo says. “I owe Jake so much. He’d offer me all these gigs and, when I needed money, he’d let me do lights on a Tuesday. We’d all hang out down there and get sloppy.”

In 2001, Benevento moved to New York and began playing pick-up gigs with a variety of jazz-centric musicians. That May he went to see a packed Medeski, Martin and Wood performance at acid-jazz womb Tonic. Instead of waiting in line outside, the keyboardist ran across the street to use the bathroom at The Lansky Lounge, where Russo was performing with members of his Boston crew. “We both kind of looked at each other and were like, ‘What are you doing here?’” Benevento relates. “We swapped numbers and started calling each other for shows.”