A Thing Called Joe

2017 release. Producing A Thing Called Joe was an exercise in abandon for Flouzat. On the day before the recording, the drummer spent a leisurely afternoon picking tunes and comparing different versions, making a home cooked dinner and engaging in casual conversation with his bandmates. The next day Flouzat, pianist Sullivan Fortner and bassist Desmond White met at The Bunker Studios and took turns calling tunes from a list, making arrangement suggestions on the spur of the moment and rarely recording more than two takes. When the day was done, eighteen tunes were recorded. Then came the work of distilling the material and discovering the right sequence for listeners, so they could do what listeners used to do with old LPs: listen to them over and over again. A budding songwriter, Flouzat has always drawn a lot of his inspiration from the wit and understated sophistication of composers and lyricists like Harold Arlen, Yip Harburg, Oscar Hammerstein and the Gershwin Brothers. His interest in the American Songbook led him to learn the lyrics of lesser known standards and to call them out at jam sessions, delving into their many interpretations and incorporating them into his drum routine.