Greg Piccolo
Greg Piccolo’s surname just happens to be perfect for a woodwinds player and he just happens to be from a town that boasts one of New England’s most historic music venues, but his skills are anything but a twist of fate; they stem from his lifelong commitment to his craft and passion for performing. After picking up the sax when he was in elementary school and joining his first band at age 13, he spent 24 years with Roomful of Blues and formed his own trio over three decades ago, establishing himself as one of the most artistically astute cats to ever hold a horn.
With his signature black beret, nuanced phrasing, unique vocal style, superb songwriting and ability to blend blues, jazz, R&B and rock into an acoustical stew all his own, Piccolo uses a spontaneous, free-form approach in his shows, never following a setlist and often switching to guitar during performances to give his take on blues, R&B and rock classics. Known for his charismatic stage presence and “less is more” musical ethos, he’s recorded five solo albums and is in the Knickerbocker Music Center’s Knick Hall of Fame along with Junior Wells, Leon Russell, Duke Robillard, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Mose Allison, Jon Batiste, Sugar Ray Norcia and others.
MUSICAL BEGINNINGS
Born on May 10, 1951, Piccolo grew up in Westerly, Rhode Island, a seacoast town where the famed Knickerbocker Café opened in 1933. His father was a World War II veteran who played harmonica and there was plenty of music in the family home, particularly blues and jazz. While he never considered picking up the harmonica himself, he was drawn to the saxophone from an early age. “I wasn’t really interested in the harmonica,” he told Nancy Burns-Fusaro of The Westerly Times in 2018. “My parents got me a clarinet but I knew I wanted the sax.” He started with alto while in elementary school but began playing tenor around age 16 and made it his instrument of choice at age 19.
Among Piccolo’s earliest musical memories are jumping up and down on his parents’ bed while he and his sister listened to the family “hi-fi,” which was in their parents’ bedroom, and he says two songs caught his attention the most: Dave “Baby” Cortez’s “The Happy Organ,” which hit #1 the Billboard Hot 100 in 1959, and Dion’s “The Wanderer,” which made it to #2 on the Hot 100 in 1961. The latter track inspired him to pick up the sax, he says. “I loved the sax solo in the song ‘The Wanderer’ by Dion,” he told David Mac of Blues Junction in 2022. “I found out that it was a tenor sax on that record and it sparked my interest in that instrument.”
In 1964, 13-year-old Piccolo joined his first band, The Rejects, a six-piece rock outfit that played regularly at the Westerly YMCA. He realized that the demand for sax players was waning, however, because The Beatles’ debut on The Ed Sullivan Show in February that year brought unprecedented attention to the guitar. “The Beatles came to America and all the music I loved on the radio from the ‘50s was all gone and so were the sax players,” he told Mac. “The guitar replaced the tenor saxophone as the lead instrument in rock ‘n’ roll almost overnight.” Despite that watershed shift, Piccolo stuck with the instrument since the sax provides a broader acoustical variety than the guitar, he says. “When you get 15 different tenors players playing the same instrument you get 15 different sounds,” he told Mac. “The guitar is like that to a great extent, but it is even more noticeable with the tenor. I like the different textures the tenor brings to the bandstand.“ As for saxophonists who had a significant influence on his own style, he’s cited Illinois Jacquet, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Louis Jordan, Gene Ammons, Red Prysock, Arnett Cobb, Clifford Smith, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, Joe Houston and Ben Webster.
THE VARIATIONS, GREG & THE GROUPE
In 1966, while playing at the YMCA with The Rejects, 15-year-old Piccolo had what he calls “a defining moment”: meeting guitarist-vocalist Duke Robillard, who was 18 at the time and co-founded Roomful of Blues the following year. “He’d just come to town and he asked me if I’d ever heard of Chuck Berry or Muddy Waters,” he told Mac, noting that the question surprised him at first because he’d never realized that Berry and Waters had had such a huge influences on the British Invasion bands he and all his fellow musicians were listening to at the time. When Robillard invited him to join his band The Variations (on vocals, not sax), Piccolo leapt at the opportunity, excited to be a part of the new folksy, bluesy sound Robillard was creating while covering songs by The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Animals and others. “It didn’t matter what [Duke] did, he was great,” he told Mac. “[He’s] never changed, he’s always been great.” During his time with the band, he occasionally practiced on tenor sax instead of alto, learning tunes by Traffic and other rock acts that featured the instrument on certain tracks.
After graduating from Stonington High School in 1969, Piccolo formed the cover band Greg & The Groupe with pianist Al Copley, guitarist-vocalist Buzz Goodwin, bassist Eddie Parnigoni and drummer Chuck Riggs. They played the popular songs of the day, but incorporated less-familiar material to distinguish themselves from the throngs of other rock groups playing at dances and other events. “We’d add music from people they hadn’t heard before, like The Kinks’ ‘Waterloo Sunset’ or something from Laura Nyro like ‘Poverty Train,’” Piccolo told Mac, noting that they played lots of tunes by The Animals since their music “made me feel like there was hope for the world.”
ROOMFUL OF BLUES
In 1970, Piccolo joined Roomful of Blues, which Robillard and Copley formed in 1967 with bassist Larry Peduzzi and drummer Fran Cristina and had a regular Sunday gig at the Knickerbocker. The revised lineup included Piccolo on tenor, Rich Lataille on alto and tenor and drummer John Rossi. “I just wanted to play with Duke and I didn’t care about anything else,” he told Mac about joining the acclaimed ensemble. “That’s when I really started in on tenor sax. We loved being on stage doing what we were doing and we played anywhere we could. We were so immersed from that point on that we’d work 300 nights a year.”
With a jump-blues sound inspired by Buddy Johnson, T-Bone Walker, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and others, RoB was unlike anything else around at the time, largely due to Robillard’s deep knowledge of the blues and ability to steer the band in new directions, Piccolo says. “There wasn’t anybody doing what we were doing,” he told Mac. “We weren’t responsible for the music but I think Roomful, and Duke in particular, was responsible for the revival in this type of music. He was kind of the guru [and] we all followed him musically. We would follow him anywhere.” Robillard left RoB in 1979 to be bandleader of rockabilly icon Robert Gordon’s group, replaced by Ronnie Earl, and Piccolo took over as RoB’s de facto bandleader, singing lead most of the time and writing the bulk of the tunes; he’s credited as the writer on seven of the 10 tracks on their 1984 album Dressed Up To Get Messed Up.
GREG PICCOLO & HEAVY JUICE, RECENT ACTIVITY
In 1990, while still with RoB, Piccolo recorded his first solo album, Heavy Juice, at Newbury Sound in Boston, backed by Robillard, Copley and RoB members Lataille, Rossi, Doug James, Porky Cohen, Bob Enos, Carl Querferth and Preston Hubbard. Released by New Orleans-based Black Top Records, the disc was a significant departure from his work with RoB – more acid-jazz, hard-bop and funk influenced than blues-based – but was very well-received and bolstered Piccolo’s reputation as an artist who refuses to be tied to one genre. “It doesn’t rock any harder than this,” wrote AllMusic’s Bob Porter about the LP.
In 1994, after nearly 25 years with RoB, Piccolo left the group to pursue his own “heavy juice” sound more deeply, which he’s done ever since with the trio Greg Piccolo & Heavy Juice, the lineup of which includes Berklee College of Music graduate and associate professor Shinichi Otsu on organ and bass and drummer Bobby Ruggiero, who spent 13 years in Van Morrison’s band. Since then, while appearing at various venues and festivals across North America and Europe, the trio’s cut four albums – Red Lights (Fantasy, 1995), Acid Blue (Fantasy, 1997), Homage (Emit Doog, 2000) and Who Did This? (SwankTone, 2018) – and Piccolo played on Jay Geils Plays Jazz (Stony Plain Records, 2004) along with J. Geils, Billy Novick and others. During the 18 years between his fourth and fifth solo LPs, he remained busy as a sideman with guitarist-vocalist Jimmie Vaughan’s Tilt-A-Whirl Band and worked as the Knickerbocker’s booking agent.
These days, Piccolo plays regularly at the Knickerbocker, the Ocean House resort in Westerly and The Steak Loft in Mystic Connecticut, and Heavy Juice has appeared at notable New England venues including Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel in Providence and Scullers Jazz Club in Boston. Asked what kinds of places he likes to play most, he said he’ll go wherever he’s welcome. “I’ll play wherever people want to hear my music. I don’t care if it’s a dive,” he told Blues Junction’s Mac in 2022. “I’m happy doing my stuff and letting people hear my sound. Even though I’m fortunate to have steady gigs and be able to do my thing with my trio close to home, I’m willing to travel. I just want to play.”
(by D.S. Monahan)
