Calvin Johnson's Pres Hall Series

“One of his mantras that he would always say to me,” Calvin Johnson Jr. recalls of his uncle—the late, great jazzman Ralph Johnson—from Preservation Hall’s courtyard offices, “was, ‘The world is just waiting for that melody. Until you have it, shut up.’”

- Frank Etheridge

Johnson is laughing as he recounts stories from a childhood steeped in such lessons learned in the method only New Orleans musical family hierarchies can teach. He was first brought to Preservation Hall at age six by his father, Ralph’s younger brother and one of six children in a family where all the boys played music. Now in his thirties and a well-established saxophonist and composer best recognized for his work in Chapter:SOUL and his own Native Son project, he recalls that experience: “I sat down on the bench directly adjacent to the drum set and I watched [Albert] ‘June’ Gardner on drums.”