MIKE MERRITT

Michael Monroe "Mike" Merritt (born July 28, 1955) is an American bassist best known for playing with The Max Weinberg 7 on the late night television show Late Night with Conan O'Brien.

Merritt was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father is jazz bassist Jymie Merritt, who has performed and recorded with many jazz and blues musicians, most notably Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. Mike began lessons on upright with Eligio Rossi then studies with percussionist/composer Warren McLendon. Although his father was primarily an upright bass player, he also owned a 1964 Fender Jazz Bass which Mike felt was the instrument he was meant to play. During this time Mike absorbed a number of influences ranging from jazz to rhythm and blues to blues to rock.

After playing in a jazz group called Forerunner/Nuclei, Mike moved to New York in 1980 at the suggestion of the members of the Jazz Messengers. It was here that he began playing with blues legend Johnny Copeland and continued through 1989. While on the road with Copeland, he backed up Chuck Berry pianist Johnnie Johnson which led to Mike working with him off and on for the next several years.

It was also around this time that Mike started gigging around the New York scene where he regularly played with future members of The Max Weinberg 7. In 1993, guitarist Jimmy Vivino called Mike about a group being put together by Max Weinberg to audition for the house band on what would become Late Night with Conan O'Brien. The band has been there for the entire run of the show.

Mike plays with a strong, swinging groove whether he's playing the Late Night theme song (in which his walking bassline is prominently featured in the intro), a blues shuffle or even the barrelling 8th notes of a Ramones song.

Mike plays a variety of basses including Rickenbacker, Lakland, Fender, Hofner, the Zeta Crossover bass and a 1935 Kurt Moenning 3/4’ Acoustic Bass.

Mike lives in suburban New Jersey.

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My father, Jymie Merritt, is the first bass player I’d ever known, and the reason why I do what I am doing today. He had established himself in the 50’s and 60’s on recordings and gigs with Tadd Dameron, Earl Bostic, Bullmoose Jackson, B.B. King, Art Blakey, Sonny Rollins, Chet Baker, Benny Golson, Dizzy Gillespie and many others. My mother, Dorothy, always had the house filled with great jazz sounds from artists like Ray Charles, Horace Silver, Dakota Staton, Gloria Lynne, Jimmy Smith, Charles Mingus, Wes Montgomery and some of whom, like John Coltrane and Bobby Timmons, because my father worked with them, would stop by our house every now and then. 

I discovered bass playing in my mid-teens when I would come up to New York and tag along with Jymie to his gigs. I always knew my dad as an upright player but when I saw that he had an electric bass, something clicked. That bass, a 1964 Fender Jazz Bass, was given to me and is the centerpiece of my bass collection and I still use it on gigs and sessions. Jymie was also one of the first jazz players to use the electric upright bass. The one he used is the Ampeg Baby Bass, which he plays on the Lee Morgan album "Live At The Lighthouse" and nowdays I'm playing one of those, too. Mine is called the Zeta Crossover Bass. Anyway, around this time I got to see my father in action on gigs and I met Lee Morgan, Max Roach, Freddie Hubbard, Clifford Jordan, Odean Pope and many other cats on the jazz scene with whom he worked.

I was practically out of high school when I got serious about playing music so I studied privately for a while, taking string bass lessons with Eligio Rossi and theory at Settlement Music School. The music I was listening to and buying records of at the time were Chicago, Allman Brothers, Led Zeppelin, Cream, Creedence, Sly, the Stones, Black Sabbath, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Winter, Mountain, Humble Pie, ELP and Yes.

Just about all of these bands were rooted in the blues in one way or the other, which was one reason why I liked them, but I had not yet discovered the "real" blues of Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon.

Later, after high school I was mostly listening to jazz-everything from bebop to fusion. The bulk of my learning experiences came from studies with percussionist/composer Warren McLendon. He was conservatory trained but known around Philly as being of the avant-garde and his musical approach reflected influences from Coltrane’s final creative period, with only a nod at mainstream jazz tradition. In fact, he and my father developed a distinct musical language that existed on its own terms and one had to learn it in order to play their original compositions.

We performed in a collective known as Forerunner/Nuclei, doing occasional concerts in the Philadelphia area, even coming to New York to play at Carnegie Recital Hall. This experience culminated in a recording titled 'Spirit of the Ghost Dance', released on our own label and marked my first time in the recording studio.

In late 79’ Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers came to play at the Bijou Cafe in Philadelphia. After meeting the guys in the band, pianist James Williams, Bobby Watson on alto, Dave Schnitter on tenor, Valery Ponomarev on trumpet and Dennis Irwin on bass, I was asked to sit in. Art introduced me and we played 'Along Came Betty', which my dad had recorded with him some years before. Afterward, the guys said you should come to New York because that’s where the gigs are.

So in early 1980 I moved up to the Big Apple. Ironically enough, one of the calls I got was not from the jazz world but from the world of the blues. I remembered what my dad told me once, that you can’t really play jazz without learning the blues. This began my long association with Johnny Clyde Copeland.

I started out with Johnny in mid-1981 when his first album for Rounder, "Copeland Special" came out. We used to play at the Top Club in Harlem and at the original Tramps’ Blues Room downtown as well as road gigs in the northeast and New England. In early 82’ I recorded with him for the first time on the album titled "I Make My Home Where I Hang My Hat", which got a four-star review in Rolling Stone magazine and led to Johnny becoming a fixture on the international blues circuit.

In 1984 we did an extensive European tour after which we went to Abidjan, Ivory Coast to record the album "Bringing It All Back Home".

I believe it was the first time a black American blues artist wrote original songs reflecting a bluesman’s view of Africa and recorded it there on the continent itself.

This was also my first time in the studio with drummer James Wormworth, and we've played on many projects since then. Other musicians who played in Johnny’s bands during this period included drummers Julian Vaughn, Damon Duewhite, Dwayne "Cook" Broadnax, "Skoota" Warner, horn players Joe Rigby, John Pratt, Ben Bierman, Todd McKinney and Bert McGowan, guitarists John Liebman, Peter Ward, Jonathan Kalb and Kenny Pino, and keyboardist Mike Kindred.

We were also the first blues band to tour what was then known as East Germany and did many festivals and TV appearances on the continent, including the North Sea Jazz Festival, Paris Jazz Festival, Barcelona Jazz Festival to name a few. In the US we were on the road constantly and some of the highlights were touring with Stevie Ray Vaughn, sharing the bill on many club and concert appearances with artists like Robert Cray, Albert King, Albert Collins, Joe Louis Walker, Lonnie Brooks and John Lee Hooker. We also played the Long Beach Blues Fest, the New Orleans’ Jazz and Heritage Festival, the Ann Arbor Blues Festival and the San Francisco Blues Festival on which Johnny was the headline artist in 1988. By this time I was also acting as road manager and band coordinator on top of being the bass player. Whew!

In early 89’ we went to Agrigento, Sicily to play an international music festival, and representing the blues from America alongside Johnny Copeland was Chicago bluesman Jimmy Dawkins and that great piano master from St. Louis, Johnnie Johnson.

Johnny Clyde Copeland passed away in July of 1997. He was a great bluesman who gave me my start as a working musician, and I'll always be grateful for the many things I learned from him, about the blues and about life.

On the trip to Sicily in early ’89, part of the deal was that Copeland’s band would back up two other acts, so we did a set with Jimmy Dawkins and then another set with Johnnie Johnson. I didn’t know much about Johnnie then, only that his appearance in the film 'Hail Hail Rock n’ Roll' showed everyone the real source of the music behind Chuck Berry’s songs.

From that point on I had a working relationship with Johnnie. He was great to play with (and I always kept an eye on his left hand) but very shy onstage and didn’t want to sing. We closed that first set in Sicily with "Johnny Be Goode" with the audience singing along and afterward, Johnny Copeland told Johnson that he should "start singin’ to those people out there, they’ll help you out-they know the words".

So Johnnie began to sing more and more tunes, scoring a hit with "Tanqueray" from the Johnnie Be Bad CD in 1991. We toured the US, Canada, Europe, Japan and Morocco in 90’, 91’ and 92’ with various line-ups, and Johnnie had his own band in St. Louis that he played the mid-west with.

By this time I had left Copeland’s band in mid-89’ and began to work locally on what was then a very active NYC blues scene, playing with people like Popa Chubby and Joan Osborne, and putting bands together for Johnnie when he came to New York. The combination that really clicked with Johnnie right away was with future LATE NIGHT bandmate Jimmy Vivino on guitar and vocals, who used to come down to the old Lone Star Cafe and watch me and Johnny Copeland play, and James Wormworth, my old bandmate from the Johnny Copeland days, on drums. We went on the road with Johnnie, playing at The Mint in L.A. where, unknown to us at the time, Conan O'Brien was in the audience, and we had a memorable gig at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 92'.We also had a chance to record an album together with him, the 1995 MusicMasters release titled "Johnnie Be Back".

Johnnie Johnson passed away in April of 2005. Long live one of the founding fathers of rock n' roll. 

In between our gigs with Johnnie Johnson, Jimmy and I, along with James Wormworth began playing our own gigs around NYC, sometimes as part of the New York Rock and Soul Review. That band included Donald Fagen, Phoebe Snow, Al Kooper, Elliott Randall, Catherine Russell, Jerry Vivino and others; in early 92’ the club DOWNTIME opened and the three of us played there from the beginning, eventually playing there every Thursday night for the next five years.

The band, by this time known as Jimmy Vivino and The Black Italians, expanded to include Jimmy’s brother Jerry Vivino on tenor sax, percussionists Fred Walcott and Mike Jacobsen, Felix Cabrera on harp, and either Danny Louis, Kevin Bents or Scott Healy on keyboards. Lots of guest musicians would come by and sit in, including Dion, Johnny Rivers, Al Kooper, Catherine Russell, Sarah Dash, and Max Weinberg.

The Vivino Brothers’ first CD, titled "Chitlins Parmigiana" was released in 1992 on the DMP label and stands as kind of a document of this period. We also became a backup band for visiting blues artists like Hubert Sumlin, Son Seals, Sugar Blue, and Lowell Fulson.

In late 1992 Jimmy Vivino called me about a gig in a band with Max Weinberg called "Killer Joe". We did a couple of rehearsals and played at a private function in Manhattan. The band included future Late Nighters Jerry Vivino and Mark "Loveman" Pender on trumpet, and the sound of this band was a rockin’, jump blues style, kind of a template to what was going to follow. This kind of groove reminded me of my early days in Copeland’s band, when he had a three piece horn section and we did Texas jump blues, like T-Bone Walker did.

In the summer of 93’ Jimmy contacted me again and said Max was putting together a new band to audition for the new Late Night show at NBC. By the middle of August the band had been chosen and thus became The Max Weinberg Seven. Since September of 1993 we’ve been on the air and providing the musical connective tissue that hold the various segments of the show together, like playing the opening theme, Conan’s walk across to the desk, the guest entrance music and lots of comedy sketch music.

I’ve also had a chance to share some great musical moments while performing with guests such as: B.B.King, Bonnie Raitt & Little Milton, Jackson Browne, Branford Marsalis, Curtis Salgado & Steve Miller, Brandy, Robert Palmer, Pete Townshend, Bruce Springsteen, Toni Toni Tone, Barry Manilow, Tony Bennett, Duane Eddy, James Brown, Toots Thielemans, Michael Brecker, Tony Williams, Ray Davies, David Johansen, Jonathan Richman, Joshua Redman, Louie Bellson, Solomon Burke, Ruth Brown, and many, many others.

I also get to play with my other great bandmates, trombonist Richie "LaBamba" Rosenberg (The Year 2000 Guy), and pianist Scott Healy. I even get to jam with Conan sometimes during a break in rehersal when he’s bashing away on Max’s drums or strumming along on his Stratocaster guitar.

In 1999 Max returned to the road and toured once again with Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. He named Jimmy Vivino bandleader and James Wormworth took over the drum chair. One of the highlights during James’s time with the band was going to L.A. for a week’s worth of shows .

In the fall of 2000 an album produced by our bandleader titled, "The Max Weinberg 7" was released. This CD features full-length versions of tunes we often play on the show, with a guest performance by Dr. John.

In 2005 I have finally released my first album as a leader, along with my sister Mharlyn on vocals. Titled "Alone Together", self-produced on my own imprint (Emerrittus Records) we interpreted tunes from the standard jazz repertoire as well as newer songs by Mark Knopfler and Sting. Although jazz is the main influence on this record, it is not my only influence and future projects will reflect other sounds and attitudes. 

I guess I always just wanted to be one of the cats, man. Be it Jazz cat, Blues cat, Rock cat, whatever. I started out wanting to play certain kinds of music that I thought I wanted to play and wound up in a whole different direction, which was probably for the better. There’s a common thread that flows through all these disparate musical situations I’ve been involved in, and I don’t know how to describe it except that it feels a little bit furry!

Source: www.levonhelm.com/ band_bios/Mike_Merritt.htm