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HazelEye Media

The Pad releases genre-busting CD on Germany’s q-tone label

Editor, producer, journalist Gene Bryan Johnson, as his musical alter ego The Pad, releases music described as “Brian Eno meets 1970s Stevie Wonder, with a touch of Sonic Youth, a bit of Pharoah Sanders, a side of Bernie Maupin and a pinch of Joni Mitchell.”

In the early 80′s, Johnson co-produced, wrote and arranged projects with legendary Motown arranger Paul Riser, dance music pioneer Tom Moulton and others. But after signing his own major-label development deal, he grew frustrated with music business shenanigans and dropped out of the industry to raise a family, work in public radio and produce a series of movies for McGraw-Hill Higher Education.  (It was during this period that he co-produced Hamlet for Radio with Joseph Papp, artistic director of the New York Shakespeare Festival — a performance directed by academy award winning actor Kevin Kline, who also appeared in the title role alongside Tony Award winning actress Dana Ivey.)  

GBJ began to develop a reputation as a somewhat reclusive multi-instrumentalist singer-songwriter who “takes forever” to finish his own projects, yet throughout the 90s produced recordings by pianist/composer Matthew Shipp, jazz guitarist Charlie Byrd and trombonist Al Grey, made guest appearances on recordings by avant-garde composer David Garland, the Black Rock Coalition and others.  Occasionally he would schedule a gig at Brooklyn Academy of Music’s BAM Cafe or lower Manhattan’s Knitting Factory, and was known to periodically show up unannounced at anti-folk impresario Lach’s east village hootenanies, before embarking on one of his lengthy self-imposed hiatuses from live performance.   He never stopped writing and producing his own music, however, and eventually some of those private recordings ended up on the desk of Germany’s q-tone label.

“I immediately liked The Pad,” says q-tone head Andreas Lang, who plays cello on two cuts and also designed the innovative eco-friendly packaging. “Gene Bryan elevates songwriting to another level with work that is very personal and independent.” The Pad’s iconoclastic nature may be due to the fact that it was a pure labor of love for the craft. “These pieces were not meant to be released,” he says. “I was simply sharing my love of creative process with my daughter.  She was the one who wouldn’t let me throw out the reels of tape cluttering our Manhattan apartment.  And when she wrote Train and Hanging Upside Down while still in high school I knew she had the music in her soul just like I do.”  Which, ironically enough, proves one of his life theories: “Parents should listen to their children because kids are generally more in tune with what really matters.   My wife and I are better people, better parents, because of what our daughter taught us about life.  And she’s growing into a fine young adult because we were better parents.  I should write that thought down because it sounds like the germ of good tune.”

Available from www.q-tone.com on August 1, 2009

Available everywhere on October 1, 2009

The Pad (q-tone/HazelEye Media)

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