Classic funk reimagined – On Occapella, funkmeister Jon Cleary surveys the Allen Toussaint songbook

British-born, New Orleans-based pianist/vocalist/composer Jon Cleary is a study in contradictions. Recently retired from extended stints as a featured keyboard sideman for Taj Mahal and Bonnie Raitt—who’s called him “the ninth wonder of the world” and let him go after nearly a decade, reportedly with great reluctance—Cleary is ready to concentrate on his own music.

So what does Cleary, now approaching 50, choose as his first project out of the gate? An album composed entirely of songs by someone else: New Orleans pianist/vocalist/composer Allen Toussaint. This despite the fact that Cleary has been a relatively prolific and successful songwriter and has already released four studio projects and one live outing of mostly his own tunes, backed on the last three by his band The Absolute Monster Gentlemen.

But Occapella is a Cleary record in nearly every sense. He chose the tunes, worked up the arrangements, recorded the songs in his studio at home, played nearly all the instruments on just about every track (his first instrument was, in fact, the guitar), and continued working on the final selection and order right up to the moment of commercial release on his own label, FHQ (Funk Headquarters). Both Raitt and Dr. John show up on the opening track, “Let’s Get Low Down,” as if to establish Cleary’s top-notch credentials, and the Absolute Monster Gentlemen provide impeccably smooth backup vocals on several key tracks. But on the title cut—an a cappella, percussive tour de force—that’s Cleary all by himself overdubbing two, three, four, five, who knows how many vocal tracks.

The song selection reflects the essence of Cleary’s sensibility: borrowing from commercial material to make a decidedly one-of-a-kind, one-man-band record. “My inclination at first was to pick the most obscure tunes I could find,” Cleary has readily admitted, “because I [like to think of myself as] a bit of a funk detective. But then one of my managers said, ‘If you’re gonna do this, make sure there are some songs that people will recognize.’ So I picked a couple better-known tunes, but I tried to take them in a different direction, to take each song and do a flip on it.”

Cleary searched through the cluttered music shop of his imagination—a world animated by the 45-rpm single and slinky, low-down-and-dirty R&B freshly translated from the gospel sounds of last Sunday’s Baptist church service—and applied the essential language of soul and funk to both the ultra-obscure and the chart-toppers.

Little-known tunes like “When the Party’s Over” are redone to resemble forgotten jukebox hits from the early 1960s, while the super-familiar, like “What Do You Want the Girl to Do?”—also covered by Raitt, and most prominently in the 1970s by Boz Scaggs—acquires a toned-down treatment, opening with acoustic guitar and hanging for effect on Cleary’s emotive and homespun croon recorded in close, beard-stubble focus.

And in the final song lineup, he’s also conceded to the wisdom of the familiar, grouping together a nice set of well-known songs—“Everything I Do Gonna Be Funky,” “Southern Nights,” “Viva la Money,” and “Sorry, Wrong Number”—as a prelude to the quietly, personally masterful “What Do You Want the Girl to Do?”

It gives the whole a muscular effect. But in no way has Cleary conceded to even the slightest commercial instinct.

So, how do you make chart-topping music into a singular, idiosyncratic collection that’s all about the music and not in any way about the business? Ask the shining star behind the scenes.