Jazz firefly learns a new language
Justin Firefly Clarke’s first language was jazz, now it’s world music.
For those who are wondering about his name: At jazz school ‘Justin’ was written on the whiteboard next to the song he was about to sing, Firefly – a friend thought for a long time he was called Justin Firefly – and it stuck. He found that Berlin’s music community was also quick to identify him with the moniker.
Clarke remembers falling in love with music at the age of three. His older brother made a shrine to John Lennon when he got shot and the very young Clarke was a quiet observer.
Softly-spoken Clarke started the piano as a five year old and was given a guitar, now his main instrument, at 13.
“I locked myself in a room with that guitar for three or four years. My parents thought I was going crazy. I probably was,” he smiles.
At the age of 14 he was clear that music would be his career.
“Music is endless and I was aware of that. It was like standing on the edge of an immense ocean and deciding to build a boat.”
He went to jazz school after his sixth form year and after three and a half years spent studying and gigging to save money, Clarke decided to move to Berlin.
“I squatted, the classic artist with no money. For seven years I played as much music as I could, jamming and busking and meeting people and joining their bands,” he explains.
Clarke became very interested in world music and played at a lot of world music festivals with musicians from different countries, such as Eastern Europe, Russia and India.
He discovered that while jazz was his primary musical language and the basis for learning others, he was more interested in other forms of music, particularly the world music he was discovering.
When Clarke returned to New Zealand in 2006 he found he was a different musician, his jazz hat slipping to one side.
“It was hard to share the music I was doing in Europe. It’s in a different box,” he says.
However, he’s just received funding from AsiaNZ to bring some world musicians to New Zealand at the end of December. They include an Australian percussionist who was brought up in Nigeria and studied in South India, and a Japanese sitar player.
There’s also a new album of Clarke’s songs called To Serve the Waves that is yet to be released.
Before then, you can see the Firefly in action at the St James, where he’ll be playing with Fly My Pretties as one of the original crew. The first set will be new songs and the second old classics, with a screen showing specially commissioned visual creations as accompaniment.
For the foreseeable future, Justin Firefly’s staying put in Wellington, where he’s half way through a Masters in Composition at Victoria, and he’s quick to say he values the far more cohesive creative community.
“Things are simpler here.”
Fly My Pretties, St James Theatre, November 19.
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