Bryant Watson
Bryant Watson has always had a strong desire to share his music with the world. When he was 10 years old, his father, Anthony Watson Sr. (an accomplished musician and educator), scolded him for trying to secretly teach drum lessons to a fellow elementary schooler. Even before he knew much, he knew he wanted to be in communication with his art. Eventually, Watson earned a music education degree from Cleveland State University, spent many years teaching—with his father’s approval—and co-founded the studio program for the Roots of Music. This July, he is finally about to release his first solo EP, Tried & True, which he fully arranged and played many of the instruments on. Watson can also be heard drumming on dozens of records and seen frequently performing with Caribbean funk pop band Daria & The Hip Drops, private party big band Nola Dukes, his older brother’s band Michael Watson and The Alchemy (of which he is the music director), and most recently, with Marina Albero, an experimental jazz piano player from Barcelona.
You and both of your brothers are professional musicians, but you’re not from New Orleans, where that’s somewhat common. You’re actually from Ohio?
We’re from Canton, Ohio. My oldest brother [Tony Watson Jr.] plays sax with [R&B group] Pieces of a Dream and my middle brother [Michael Watson] plays trombone and sings and has his own group called Michael Watson and The Alchemy that I play with. Our father was a music educator for 38 years and he’s a drummer, so that’s where we got it from. He still lives in Ohio and is performing a lot. He released an album a year or two ago called Renewed. He’s a big influence over us but he also gave us the opportunity to choose to do whatever we wanted to do, as long as we put our full selves into it. I always loved sports but I knew, from a very early age, that I wanted to play music. I used to dress up like I was going to play a show and then I would go downstairs and play my drums and then come upstairs and act like I came home from a show.
What was your first drum set?
I had a little Walmart Mickey Mouse drum set when I was three. I broke it in the first month ‘cause I dunked on a basketball hoop and fell on it. But my first drum set, after that, was an old [1967] Rogers [4 piece Powertone drum] kit that I loved so much. It was zebra colored. It’s a great jazz kit from the ‘60s. Then I got a Yamaha Stage Custom that was maroon colored. After that, I won a drum set, called a Taye [GoKit], that was also zebra colored, and then I moved to New Orleans and I bought my Yamaha [TMP0F4] Tour Custom. It’s an all maple kit that I really love playing on. It’s a chocolate, satin-colored drum set and it sounds great. I first started playing, for real, when I was 10 years old, and then I started playing gigs at 12 or 13. And I remember that I wanted to feel like an adult, so I would order cranberry juice ‘cause they would put it in a nice glass for me and it looked like wine. I still go back to that sometimes, for the old times.
Your dad is still a professional drummer and was a teacher for nearly four decades, so do you feel like you’re the one directly carrying on his legacy?
A big reason why I got into drumming is because there was always a drum set around. My dad had this orange, sparkly, see-through TAMA [Superstar] kit in the basement and I would love going down to play that thing when I was a kid, especially after I broke my Mickey Mouse drum kit. I couldn’t reach the pedals but, you know, I still enjoyed it.
I’ve been teaching for a long time. I started teaching in an after-school program, private lessons, when I was 15 years old. I was teaching drum lessons to kids that were probably just two or three years younger than me. Actually, my first teaching experience was before that, when I very first started playing drums. I remember this, because I started teaching a kid when I was in fifth grade, and I had him coming over, but I didn’t tell my parents. And then when my dad found out, he made me stop doing it. I was like, “Why?!” And he was like, “‘Cause you don’t know enough.” And I was like, “But I really want to teach and I want to help him.” And he was like, “I’ll do it.” He wasn’t wrong, I just really wanted to, so eventually I went to school and got a degree in music education so I could teach. I was given so many opportunities, being a teacher’s son, and also being a musician’s son. I got to be around music professionals my whole life—people who taught me the business of music—and I got to be in studios young because my dad had his own group called BloodLine.
You really are directly carrying on that bloodline, but you actually have a song called “Your Legacy” that isn’t about your dad—it’s about your mom.
I wrote “Your Legacy” right after my mom passed, almost nine years ago. Peggy Watson. It talks about her love of dancing, her smiling, and her being supportive of everything we do, which is what she was. Her legacy is us and all of her grandchildren. I now have nine nieces and nephews. After she passed away it was like, “How do I find that peace and love within myself?” It was a struggle for a little while ‘cause I felt like I was growing cold. And for a person who loves to love people, that was a little scary. But then through being able to talk to a professional and having a village around me, I found it again. She was inspiring. She worked very hard. All three of us played sports and all of us did music, so the amount of times that she was running us to everything, you just couldn’t show the amount of appreciation that was needed to be shown for that. And my dad was busy because he was teaching and playing. She was also a really good dancer. She would make us dance with her in the living room and that’s how we all learned. The song has both my brothers on it, my middle brother [Michael] did background vocals and my older brother [Tony] did the sax solo. Not everybody gets to grow up with two great parents but we did, so I’m lucky in that way.
The most important thing for me, arranging that song, was who was gonna be the singer, and Sari Jordan was the perfect fit because I started it with just me on the piano and vocals in the studio. I had a picture of my mom there and candles and it was perfect. They didn’t try to do too much with it, but they put a lot of emotion into it. All of my favorite singers growing up, especially Sarah Vaughan and Donny Hathaway, that’s what it’s been about. We were nearly at the end of production on that song when my brother Michael offered to add backing vocals and that took it where it needed to go. And John Maestas did all the guitars on it. He’s so thoughtful as a guitar player and he’s so killin’.
“Your Legacy” is the third single released for the album. Tell me about the other two.
The first song, “Golden Hour,” is about all the beautiful moments that happen during sunset. But it’s also—when I was a kid, our only rule was we had to be inside the house by the time the street lights turned on. So I was always outside, no matter what was happening and that last hour, golden hour, was when I was trying to get all my best playing out. And then I would rush home to try to get home on time, which I was never home on time and I always got in trouble for. It has Bob James on it, of Fourplay. He wrote the song on the old sitcom show Taxi. His playing on it was so tasteful and exactly what I wanted, which is what I feel like I keep saying about every single person on this album—it just came out exactly as I wanted. Also on that song is Ricardo Pascal on saxophone. I met him when I first moved here. He’s a really amazing guy. Sam Albright is on there—bass player—really, really great. He’s on the first three songs. I always love playing with him ‘cause he knows exactly what to play and he makes it feel so good. And then I did all the drums on a really nice Yamaha and the keys were recorded on a [Fender] Rhodes [Mark I 73-key stage piano], a [Sequential] Prophet-5, and a Steinway grand. Keenan McRae is also such an incredible engineer and co-produced the album with me at Artisound [Production]. The DAW that he uses is LUNA—it makes everything sound really good. Keenan and I have worked together for a long time. We worked on the studio program for Roots of Music, which we co-created along with Derrick Tabb in 2020.
The second song, “Diamonds and Pearls” is a Prince song I’ve loved since I was a kid. I’ve always been a romantic. Even when I was 6 years old, that song was always the way I felt. I gravitated towards the words and the production of it. I had to have my brother Tony on that one—he’s the perfect personality for it.
Even though you’re mainly a professional drummer, you mentioned that your songs all start out on the piano.
I write everything on my [Yamaha Concert Grand] piano or my Roland A-500 PRO [MIDI keyboard]. I love playing piano. In so many situations where there was a lot going on with me—my mom had cancer for 12 years, that’s why I stayed in Ohio for so long—there were a lot of hard moments, and the first place I went to was a piano and I would get a lot of hard things out that way. There were a lot of moments at my college where it would be 1 a.m. and I’d be writing in one of the practice rooms on a piano, and it was the best way for me to release but also a really good way for me to songwrite. I first fell in love with piano in church. I played so much piano in one particular church that they had no idea I played drums until, one day, the drummer was sick and I jumped on. In school I had to really learn how to play it and learn how to teach it, but both colleges that I went to had beautiful 9’ Steinways, so I really loved playing them.
You mentioned Keenan and Artisound, which reminds me that you and I have a really weird connection. A few years ago, when I was on vacation in Mexico, at a nearly deserted resort, the only other people there were a musician couple named Meghan Linsey and Tyler Cain, who randomly told me, over breakfast one day that they had just done a recording session with you and the Roots of Music kids at Artisound, where my band had just recorded our debut EP, and it also featured my two favorite Preservation Hall guys, where I had been working. It was the most bizarre “small world” interaction to happen in another country. I’d love to hear the full story of how that session came about.
Meghan (who’s from Louisiana originally) and Tyler came down from Nashville to talk to the Roots students and they all started writing a country song together. The students had never played country before but you would have thought they’d always done it, they were such pros. It just shows you how versatile our youth are here in New Orleans. Then they went back up to Nashville and I got a call from Meghan a few days later, on a Thursday, that was like, “Hey, I just got a call from the producers of Queer Eye. They want a New Orleans version of their theme song and I don’t want to use Nashville musicians. I want to use New Orleans musicians.” So I said, “Why don’t we get our students involved? We can get them to be engineers and play on it.” So she was like, “Yeah. So, we’re gonna come down this Saturday and record it all and we love the history of the city too.” So we got Branden [Lewis] and Ronell [Johnson] from Preservation Hall, Ricardo [Pascal] on clarinet, my brother [Michael] played trombone, and then Kaleb [Summers], one of our former students who has now moved to Barcelona—a great trombone player—also played on it with us. And Chaela [McGinnis], Tryisten [Washington], and Ayani [Medina] engineered with us.
So when we listen to the New Orleans’ season of Queer Eye, we’re hearing the work of several of your Roots of Music Studio Academy alums. That’s so cool. What else did they learn in the program?
We taught them LUNA, but the first day was super simple, just, “How do you wrap a cable?” And doing it over and over. There are so many tedious things in a studio that you have to get right every time. There are three little wires in a cable, so if you don’t wrap it the right way, they could easily break, and so then you have to learn to solder to fix them—so just don’t break them in the first place. These students are getting their education in an actual working studio too, so if they break a cable, that’s a problem when Keenan has an artist that comes in—like George Porter, Weedie Braimah, Headhunters—‘cause he doesn’t have the extra time to replace those cables when the artists are sitting there. Then, also, we would get them internships in the summer and we can’t send you somewhere if you don’t know what you’re doing. It makes the Roots of Music look bad and it also makes you look bad. I was sad to leave Roots, but when I did, I felt like I had accomplished a lot and I finally had time to do my album. The students had so many resources. They all got MacBook Pros from Roots, they all got UA Audio Interfaces, they all got MIDI keyboards, and we had up to 20 students at a time. Plus, they had access to all the gear that was in [Artisound] studio. There were four or five different drum sets, four pianos—including one that Dr. John played on—a lot of different cymbals, guitars, a lot of tools and toys to play with. And then the other side of that was, we didn’t just take musicians in the program, we took students who wanted to learn about music business, entertainment law… They had the world at their fingertips and they did a lot that was great with it.
“Golden Hour,” “Your Legacy,” and “Diamonds and Pearls” are all currently available for streaming, and the full EP Tried & True will be out on all platforms on July 16. For more info, check out @bryant_watsonmusic on Instagram.
Top photo by Sabrina Stone: Bryant Watson at the New Orleans Jazz Museum
Bottom photo courtesy Bryant Watson: “Diamonds and Pearls”
