A Story of The Brother Jonathan Soon after moving to Southern California my at-the-time housemate, Pumpkin Bear fell in love with the dog next door, a corgi-mix named Tao Nakanishi. Well, it seems Tao’s service-human turned out to be the great bass player and all-around music guy, Hide Nakanishi (first name pronounced HEE-day)I started bringing my guitar over to his pad, pulling out some of my older material and he dug it. It was great to be playing music again and soon I was writing songs too, something from which I had taken a few years off. My day job had me traveling around California so at night I would write songs and sen them off to Hide whichever beach or bar I was writing songs on and he would offer up sound advice on arrangements etc and we’d mash them out when I returned. At about this time I moved to Silverado, CA and started playing with Zach Ostgaard, he of the mandolin, guitar and such a beautiful voice and whose Bluegrass roots run deep in that neck of the woods. He introduced us to banjo-playing drummer extraordinaire Ryan Fawley and we were up and running with a rhythm section. Michael Hamilton with whom I had worked making records with The Billy Talbot Band, invited us in to rehearse at his space. He listened, lit up, and helped us get into ready-to-record shape pretty quickly and we invited him to join the band soon thereafter as guitarist/producer. It was at about this time that we formalized Hide’s role as Musical Director and Keeper of Arrangements due to the size of his brain and beautiful charts he writes. Now it was time to put this thing on wax. At this juncture we had songs, and a sound and a direction but no band-name. I brought along one of my very favorite books, a thesaurus of slang from the 1950s chalk full of the most amazing words and phrases. While thumbing through the book Ryan, ran across an entry for Brother Jonathan, the 17th century newspaper caricature that Uncle Sam was later based on. Brother Jonathan checked all the right boxes for us: The guy is from New England, he dresses in absurd striped pants and a funny hat and the name sounds vaguely like a certain 70s funk band—perfect! -Tommy CarnsThe Brother Jonathan is…
Tommy Carns
Tommy Carns was reared by folksingers on Cape Cod and weaned on a steady diet of folk songs of all sorts from blues to spirituals from the southern U.S. and work songs, ballads from Ireland and Britain, and sea songs from New England. He formed The Hitchhikers in 1978 at age 12 with student of pop, songwriting singer and guitarist, Aaron Spade.
At age 17 the band made a record produced by Chandler Travis, and a couple years later The Hitchhikers moved to Oakland, CA. With a sound likened to the Everly Brothers meets The Jam, The Hitchhikers played up and down California, recorded and toured till Aaron Spade was recruited into hometown band, The Incredible casuals back in Cape Cod.
So, in 1989 Carns moved to Amsterdam to hone his songwriting skills and have a go at busking. Sequestered in an attic room, he filled notebooks by day and played in cafes, restaurants and busked for the next year and a half with Algerian double bass player, Lyes Geyes performing around Northern Europe including Berlin during the months before and after the fall of the Berlin wall.
Carns eventually made it back to the Bay Area and over the next years toured and recorded with bands— The Violets, and The Mums, and Chicken on a Raft. He joined The Billy Talbot Band in 1997 and it’s offshoot, boatclub. (always with a lower-case “b”).
Residing in Southern California co-founded The Brother Jonathan with Hide Nakanishi, Michael Hamilton, Ryan Fawley and Zach Ostgaard in 2017. Their debut album called, Silver Sound, is out now in digital realms everywhere.
Michael Hamilton
With brevity at 11: An Orange County, CA native, and again for the current moment, Michael Hamilton spent the good portion of his younger adult days as a NYC resident, working at the Bottom Line Cabaret there and eventually spring boarding from, to several years on the rock and roll road. He primarily worked during those years for his now lifelong friends, the Smithereens, in a variety of support roles, sometimes with hands on the knobs and phone and sometimes on the strings or keys. From there he went on to “settle in” to a quieter lifestyle supporting a young family with work more conducive to doing so, with less time away from home required. However, during those quieter years, he did and in some instances, continues to work with friends and colleagues including baseball’s Jack McDowell’s musical project “Stickfigure”, and the Billy Talbot Band, playing and or producing tracks, as well as with English artist Ian McNabb, with whom he and Billy, plus Ralph Molina, also of Billy’s band Crazy Horse, backed up on his record “Head Like A Rock”, which earned Ian a Mercury Prize Award nomination in GB.
A music fan for as long as he remembers being conscious, he recalls borrowing his older sister’s drum sticks – she was in “band” at school – and mimicking and playing along to a lot of Hal Blaine from classic pop records of the day and past, on carefully arranged pillows on his bed at the age of 4, with the thought that maybe he could actually be a part of making this music he so loved, too. Ultimately the guitar grabbed him hardest and became his primary instrument du jour, in addition to capturing, reinforcing, and playing with sound.
Michael met Tommy through work with the BTB, and after Tommy’s relocation from the Bay Area to the OC, and a shared Rammstein show experience; Tommy’s invite. They made it through 6 songs…… True. Fast forward to today and Michael is a happy playing member of the collective, The Brother Jonathan.
Hide Nakanishi
While growing up in Japan, Hide's older brother rented a red bass that took the path of many home-bound instruments, sitting in a closet for years. One day Hide happened to hear a song from RC SUCCESSION (Legendary R&B band in Japan) and at that very moment music struck his soul like lighting. “Band?..., Band.., Band!”. He immediately opened that closet and grabbed that old, dusty hard case that held the rented red bass, and from then on his life would never be the same. Hide was 14 years old when he reached for his first bass. Shortly Hide started his first Rock band that, a few years later, grew to one of the most popular band in his hometown.
Hide then began auditioning at clubs and performing several times a week around the Tokyo area. He eventually started a new project of all original R&B music with band, VOBD with vocalist Sumihito Nagahisa and drummer Yasuhiro Minami. They performed ma through 90's and were nominated as one of Tokyo's best new bands in a nationwide contest.
Hide also began playing a large variety of shows with many different well-established local groups. These experiences took his musical journey through Rock, R&B, Folk, Jazz, Funk and Country bands. This wide range of experiences began to have great influence in the development of Hide's unique bass sound and style.
When Hide moved to Southern California in 2010, he soon settled in as the bassist for MADABOUT BLUES BAND, one of Orange County's premier blues groups. It also led Hide started all original Jazz/Funk project WEST FOUND TRIO with the phenomenal composer/keyboardist John Shutza who joined the blues group a year later. They performed many gigs and had rehearsals in Hide’s house sometimes.
One day a guy with a dog caught Hide in front of the house and said, “Sounds great Man!”. He was living across the street. The guy was Tommy Carns...and the rest is history, the history of The Brother Jonathan.
Ryan Fawley
Raised by two musicians, Ryan’s fate was inevitable. After getting his first drum set at age 15, he went on to complete the drum program at Los Angeles Music Academy (now LACM). He has played a variety of styles with local groups including rock, blues, jazz, and R&B. He was a founding member of the Orange County reggae group All Night Pressure. Ryan also plays and performs on guitar and banjo.
Zach Ostgaard
Zachariah Ostgaard (24) was born I'm orange, California and raised in silverado, California. He started playing mandolin (self taught, and encouraged by his father) at the age of 10. Since then he has played in numerous bluegrass, country and western bands based in and around southern California. Now an ecstatic member of The Brother Jonathan Band. He continues to live, work and play in and around Silverado, California.
A Story of the Album Silver Sound by the Brother Jonathan
The material is a mix of older songs of Tommy’s from his days in Oakland CA and some of his new stuff, informed by the culture of Silverado, CA and by the people he’s been meeting at the beaches and bars frequented from Santa Barbara to San Diego and east to the Coachella Valley, always with a notebook, a guitar, and a tenor banjo in tow.
It was about this time the band started experimenting with using A=432 as our standard of tuning. The reasons for this are varied but in short, we liked it. (Standard pitch is a bit higher at A=440).
We decided to make the record at Jim Perkins’ Roshambo Sound in Irvine as the room sounded right and Jim being a such an audio whiz and wicked cutup, it seemed right.
For the principle production Tommy’s dear friend, Jhon Renoir who agreed to truck down from a northern place in a clown-car full of some of the finest mics and preamps ever made. In proper Jhon Renoir fashion, we set up to record so as to capture as much vibe as possible. Like his famous relatives, Jhon employs a sense of the natural when it comes to making art.
For him the live energy of a band is the cream of what’s being captured and so, anything that gets in the way of that is to be avoided such as strict isolation and over-dependence on headphones relying instead on informed microphone placement and expert baffling.
And, he had Tommy sing “keeper” lead-vocals during these sessions so the performances we hear on the record are those recorded during the basic band-tracking, something more and more rare these days. The result is that the guy singing is, for example, adjusting his phrasing in real-time, in reaction to something the drummer played nanoseconds earlier and so on like a conversion, one the listener can hear subconciously.
We did our overdubs all over— at friends Geoff Pearlman’s, at Eric Ambel’s, and at Michael’s studio in Orange, CA where a list of great instrumentalists came in to put flourishes and brushstrokes to the thing.
To finish, Michael brought the tracks to Ed Stasium, the producer and engineer of so much great music by The Ramones, Talking Heads, etc., whom Michael knew from working with the band, The Smithereens. At Ed’s studio, Eight Palms Ranchero down San Diego County way, we did additional overdubbing then Ed set about to mix the record.
Michael packed up the mixes into an invisible envelope of some kind and delivered them through magical conveyance to Brian Lucey at Magic Garden Mastering to supply a final dose of potion and poof, the record was complete.
For the cover-art we chose Caterpillar Dream by pal Jeff Stratford. Tommy and Jeff were friends from Oakland and Nevada City scenes and his art seemed perfect for what the band was about.
Jeff Chase, another member of the Billy Talbot Band and designer of all Billy’s album covers, puts the Senor Stratford’s cover art into context with skillfull and soulful graphic sensibilities, providing layout, the logo, and lots of help with this site and with video.
We recently met Matt Borden from The Omen Room who stepped in to help in several like directing and produce a series of videos with Director of Photography, Nate Louman. Matt’s selfless diligence and hard work helped us meet our April 10th release date.
Jack Sherman appeared as if from the ether, offering his skills and powers at a crucial hour by editing 13 videos. (Jack and Tommy grew up together in Cape Cod and were great pals starting in the 4th grade)
So now the record Silver Sound by the Brother Jonathan will be released digitally on most platforms on April 10th, 2020 along with videos and lots of fun stuff on this website which will be updated with new stuff. We hope you enjoy it!
Did you know that this record is tuned to a non-standard, standard pitch?
A flood over over 23,000,000,000 emails have …
…trickled in since the release of our album Silver Sound asking some version of the same basic question: “Golly Fellas: I couldn’t play along to your record till I re-tuned my pipe-organ? What gives?!”
Well, here’s what gives Fictitious- Pipe-Organ-Guy/Person: A few months before making this album, The Brother Jonathan began to use, as our standard pitch, A=432 which, as many of you may know, is not insignificantly lower than the standard, A=440. A friend had told me about the basic concept and his spin on it which is all very cosmic yet logical (cosmiclogical) which spurred me to do own poking around about it and then tuned up a song or three that way at home and really liked it. I brought the idea to the band and they all really liked it too, God Bless ‘em!
Why buck the standard? Why subervert the dominant parakeet? Why do we doe it? Because once we done did it everything became a little more magical. Things felt more grounded on the bottom and more sparkly on top. My voice suddenly was singing better. And we even started getting along better: Sometimes people would pop by rehearsal only to catch us standing around grinning like high chimps watching a parade.
...anyway, we decided to commit to an A=432 lifestyle (and all the pitfalls that come with it) and we’ve never looked back.
There are a multitude of theories out there on this subject and so I recommend checking into it. Here’s an interesting article in Vice: