TT Mahony and Jeffrey Butzer are like Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey hangin’ with the seven dwarfs in an ice cream parlor. I heard this said backstage at a Jeffrey Butzer show a few months back. That excited me very much and I can’t wait for this thing. We caught up with The Butz recently to talk to him about his Charlie Brown Christmas. Whitney and Mariah doing Charlie Brown, nice. This is gonna be a good night.
Dry Ink: What is the idea behind the show?
Jeffrey Butzer: I had the idea years ago… I love the holidays and I wanted to do a holiday show but I never just wanted to do just ”a midwives christmas” with just a hodge podge of songs. I wanted to do an entire album, and its common knowledge that Vince Guaraldi’s a “Charlie Brown Christmas” is simply the best holiday album. And what better place to have a slightly melancholic Charlie Brown style show than the Earl?
DI: How did you hook up with TT Mahony?
JB: My brother-in-law Jeremy Smith is the drummer in TT Mahony and the Standard 8, so I’ve known him for years. When I was putting together the band for the “Beautiful Losers” show in 2006 I wanted to find a good piano player (I was mostly playing guitar and some accordion) we’ve played in various projects together over the years. People who know us both have joked that since we are both…eh, strong minded that it must be like Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey working together…But we actually some how work really well together.
DI: What is his role?
JB: TT is the star of the show, the high priestess of soul. He has the best ear of anyone I’ve ever played with. He learned the album by ear. I don’t think he ever looked at the sheet music for this.
DI: Do you plan to make this a tradition?
JB: Yes we do. Last year was the first show, and it exceeded our expectations so we plan to keep it up.
DI: What songs will you be doing?
JB: We are doing the entire album plus a few surprises.
DI: How long is the show?
JB: The Charlie Brown stuff is about 40-45 minutes but with the extra songs our set will be a little over an hour. I may open the night with a few solo songs, but I’m not sure yet. We have El Capitan doing a set of surf Christmas songs to open the show which I am very exited about.
DI: How close to the original are the songs?
JB: Typically we like to rearrange music and put our stamp on it but for this we are sticking to the script mostly. There are a few odd turns… a toy piano will most likely find its way in there somewhere.
DI: Thank you for your time sir. We will be there for sure and look forward to it very much. You folks can go to The EARL website and check out the bio for this show and find out more about this special occasion.
i was there last year… it was awsome, tt knows his way around a keyboard
jingle butz, love it. it will be awesome.