Features

Meet the Benevento Russo Duo (Relix Revisited)

Beginning with a show at the Moroccan restaurant Tagine, Benevento and Russo started gigging around New York City in a number of different configurations. The session players first performed as a duo at The Wetlands in 2001 at a Madonna birthday tribute organized by Szufnarowski. “It was one of the many nights when I was too lazy to put together a band,” Russo jokes, drinking lactose-free ice coffee near his Park Slope, Brooklyn apartment. Russo speaks in a loud whisper—quietly cool. “After Wetlands closed, Jake started booking the Knit [Knitting Factory], so he gave me three different nights to put together. One was this avant-garde thing, another was a rock band with Scott Metzger [RANA], and then I asked Marco for this funk, jazzy duo thing. At first it was just a month and then it became two, three… slowly those other projects faded away.”

The Duo played in the Knitting Factory’s Tap Bar every week for a year, slowly pulling in fans from different corners of the city. “It was a free show so people would show up, sometimes after other shows,” Benevento explains while preparing brunch (“eggs a la Benevento”) in the basement of the Brooklyn apartment he shares with his fiancé. “The NYC Freaks [an influential Yahoo group of music fans] came and [Soulive’s Eric] Krasno stopped by. It was about endurance, a journey filled with lots of improvisation, lots of notes and lots of harmonic challenges.”

He flips through a binder filled with burned CDs, tracing The Duo’s evolution from a stripped-down organ-and drums combo to the complex mutt of jazz, rock, jam and indie sounds it’s become today. “I have every Duo show dating back to our second gig,” he says with a hint of taper pride. “Before that we had a very selective taping policy.”

Benevento’s apartment is a cozy, self-designed artist’s lair. His basement also serves as The Duo’s veritable Bat Cave, its rehearsal laboratory and subterranean getaway.

Around the corner from his stove, an organ and drum kit sit facing each other, the band’s classic stage setup. In contrast to Russo’s Fonzie, Benevento exudes Richie

Cunningham’s boyish enthusiasm. He sits back, grins, and flips the front of his shaggy bowl cut when he’s excited about free jazz, quirky keyboards and, especially, the evolution of his band. “That summer [2002] I got us a gig at High Sierra, so we booked a tour around that. As soon as we got in the car, Joe was like, ‘Okay, where is your CD book?’ He flipped through the entire thing without stopping ‘cause it was all Coltrane and Bill Evans. Joe loved jazz too, but was definitely a rocker. Besides a Beatles CD, the only other thing I had was OK Computer, so we popped that in.” Slowly those sounds crept into the group’s set.

“We didn’t know shit about each other,” says Russo. “It was like a first date and we didn’t have MySpace to say things like, ‘Are you really 99 years old?’ or ‘Are you really a swinger?’ But we had this unspoken connection because we were classmates.”

The Duo returned from its first tour energized and soon graduated from The Tap Bar to more prestigious music dives. In 2003, the group released a live CD, Darts. Gigs became more frequent and focused, often piggybacking on the pair’s other projects. When Russo toured with it live, so now we ‘fuck her gently.’” Russo and Benevento spent 2005 touring both by themselves and with Gordon, picking up a New Groove of the Year Jammy along the way (Russo is the only artist to hold two trophies in the category). They performed at Bonnaroo, became “big in Japan” and began packing larger clubs like the Bowery Ballroom.

The group also caught the ear of an eager Trey Anastasio, who eventually brought The Duo and Gordon into the studio to record a handful of tracks for his recent album, Bar 17. “I was working in Brooklyn and Mike [Gordon] kept telling me how great it was playing with them,” Anastasio says. “So I asked them to record just one song but there was so much chemistry, we ended up recording almost a whole album of songs, four of which are on Bar 17. It was fairly complicated, but because of Joe and Marco, it turned out so well. We even ended up writing one song together, ‘Dragonfly.’ After meeting Joe that night, we started hanging out and he came over and recorded on some other tracks.”

Anastasio also formed a new band, featuring The Duo, Gordon and himself. Without an official name, the quartet hit the road in June with Phil Lesh and Friends, playing mostly material from Anastasio’s solo career (though The Duo brought “Play Pause Stop,” “Becky” and “Something for Rockets” to the repertoire). “Going from playing a Moroccan restaurant to an amphitheater in five years is crazy,” says Russo. “But there was never any pressure because The Duo wasn’t supposed to be a real band. It allowed it to develop naturally.”

Russo and Benevento agree that rolling with Anastasio’s camp helped make their operation more professional. As a teenager, Benevento used to push bootleg T-shirts on Phish tour. When he tried to sell his new line of designer Tees in the lot, he got busted. “I kept saying, ‘Wait, I’m playing here tonight!’ but they didn’t believe me.”

“I’d go on PT [PhantasyTour.com message boards] and there’d be all these threads about how I hated playing with Trey because some kid saw me drunk backstage,” Russo continues. “I was like ‘What are you talking about?’ So we got hammered and made up fake screen names and started posting shit, but [Marc] Brownstein busted me!”

A few weeks into their run with Gordon and Anastasio, The Duo released its second proper studio album, Play Pause Stop. Unlike Best Reason, Play Pause Stop was largely written in an L.A. recording space and features no “special guests.” “[Best Reason] was half jazz and half rock,” Russo says. “We were sort of transitioning at that time, while this is more of a rock album. It adds weight when you ask skilled players to play simple music.”

The Duo supported the album at almost every music festival under the sun (from Camp Bisco to Fuji Rock, Lollapalooza to Austin City Limits) and Russo celebrated by drinking enough Maker’s Mark to dehydrate a small country (he is currently on the wagon). “We actually talked about changing our name before Play Pause Stop came out,” Russo says. “But I guess I’m confined to being in bands with shitty names for all eternity.”

Determined not to be pigeonholed as a Phish side dish, The Duo spent the remainder of 2006 touring with art freaks Apollo Sunshine and sharing the stage with indie-pop icons like The Shins. In many ways, Russo and Benevento are the linchpin holding together a new, post jam scene, featuring urban live bands like The Slip, Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey (JFJO), Sam Champion, Apollo Sunshine, RANA and Tom Hamilton’s American Babies.

“Usually you have to go through some bullshit and shit-talking before you can be friends. But, for Marco and I, it was like, I’ve known you before, asshole— we’re going to be best friends,” JFJO’s Brian Haas says. “From the very beginning, we totally had each other’s backs.”