Jon Regen’s new single, “A Hundred Days” is out Friday, September 27. The track seamlessly blends pop, jazz, R&B and gospel, with the singer and pianist sounding confident, hopeful and soulful. All the more remarkable is that he was just beginning his journey as a songwriter with a distinct voice and vision.
It’s a new release but, as Regen tells it, an old song.
“It just hit Jazz FM’s A List playlist in the U.K., 20 years after we recorded it,” he says, speaking on an early autumn afternoon from his home in New York City. “Talk about a round trip!”
The track predicts a four-song EP, Lost and Found that will arrive November 15, featuring Bob Mann (guitar/production, James Taylor, Billy Joel), Zev Katz (bass, Roxy Music, Elvis Costello) and Keith Carlock (drums, Sting, Steely Dan). But as the aptly-titled EP telegraphs, the music almost remained lost for good.
“These songs came from recording sessions I did two decades ago,” Regen explains. “I literally thought they had disappeared, until I found them a few months back on an ancient hard drive. It was like they were there all along, waiting to be discovered.”
In the early 2000s, Regen found himself at something of a crossroads: He’d released acclaimed jazz recordings, toured with bassist Kyle Eastwood, and landed a gig with the legendary vocalist Little Jimmy Scott, who was experiencing something of a renaissance at the time. But the gig was winding down and the young pianist realized that the music he was playing came largely from a different era. What kind of music, he wondered, would he play if he led his own band?
A chance meeting with British singer-songwriter James Carrington outside a New York venue led to a string of pop gigs, the first Regen had done in a decade. “I was simplifying my chords and simplifying the message I was communicating,” Regen notes. He soon penned a series of songs that appeared on an EP titled Almost Home. The collection wound up taking the budding singer-songwriter far from home. He began landing road gigs and, in London, came to the attention of Culture Club’s original manager Tony Gordon, who was keen on finding Regen a record deal.
One thing led to another, and soon, studio time was booked back in New York City with producer Bob Mann and an ace rhythm section. Over the course of a few weeks, they cut three originals and Regen’s reimagined version of Journey’s “Don't Stop Believin,’” prior to the song re-entering pop culture in The Sopranos and Glee. “I had loved that song since I was 12 years old,” Regen recalls, “buying Journey’s Escape on cassette at my local camera shop. I always wondered what it would sound like as a piano feature. When I tried it live with my band, people freaked-out!”
The collection seemed like a good representation of Regen’s strengths but, as he recalls, it became part of a familiar story: Artist records songs, shops music to labels, labels reject the music, and enthusiasm begins to fade until the project’s all but forgotten.
Well, almost forgotten. People did hear and write about Regen’s rendition of “Don't Stop Believin’,” and “A Hundred Days” has remained a staple of his live shows across the decades. “We still close my live show with that song,” he says. “It’s a link to how this all began.”
That song and the EP itself also reflect the way that he used to make records. With his two most recent LPs, Satisfied Mind and Higher Ground having been completed remotely, the EP is evidence of musicians working together in a room. “It’s great hearing these songs again, which are me in a studio with a kick-ass band, just feeding off them. And it still sounds like me. I was just getting it together as a singer and songwriter, but it’s still a good snapshot of what I do. Writing, singing and playing from the heart.”
The EP arrives at a time when Regen is taking a look back on his career. There will be some past jazz recordings forthcoming soon as well but, he says, the look back is also in service of the future.
“We get so used to planning the next project that oftentimes we forget the past,” Regen says. “Looking back helps me take a moment and say, ‘Okay, where do I want to go from here?’”
