Charette is a “black sash” practitioner of White Crane kung fu, a style that, according to one martial arts academy website, “combines defense and attack, soft and hard power, uses firm, yet evasive footwork” and leads to “cultivation of sensitivity and clarity of mind and body.” Those are all qualities presented on You Don’t Know Jack (Cellar Music), an homage to Charette’s favorite Hammond organist, Jack McDuff (1926–2001).

The album, which features tenor saxophonist Cory Weeds, guitarist Dave Sikula and drummer John Lee, includes two McDuff tunes (“Jolly Black Giant” and “6:30 In The Morning”) and originals by Charette and Weeds that, largely based in the blues, emulate but also expand on McDuff’s soul-jazz palette.

McDuff was one of the chief acolytes of the legendary Jimmy Smith, the pioneer of greasy, bluesy organ jazz. To a budding young musician, a recent arrival in Manhattan in the mid-1990s, McDuff was an imposing figure and a hero; in their one meeting at the Blue Note, Charette didn’t say much; he was too starstruck.

“I learned how to play in Harlem on Jack McDuff’s organ,” Charette said from his East Village apartment. “It was at the Showman’s Club,” one of several Harlem venues then specializing in organ jazz.

Charette had come to New York intending to “become a hotshot pianist,” but at 21, hungry for work, he was asked to go on the road with blues acts playing the “Chitlin’ Circuit” in the South and Midwest. “They needed a Hammond organ, and the new keyboard of the day was a Hammond XB-2,” the first digital organ made by the company. “So, I got one of those and a small Leslie, and I would push it all around the East Village.”

Charette became a fan of McDuff’s compositions for his organ trio, especially on his more unsung albums from the 1970s. “He doesn’t play too many notes, which I really like. Also, while most organists would play with three drawbars out, he would pull the fourth one out, too — a little bit of a brighter sound.”

Another big influence on Charette was the late Dr. Lonnie Smith, with whom Charette became close friends. “He was a jokester,” Charette recalled. “I knew him from playing in the Hammond organ booth at the NAMM Show. We were both Hammond artists. He would sit down next to you … and not look at you. And he had this MIDI cane that he used to make music. And he would put it on your foot and not look at you. Then he would slowly turn around and say something like, ‘You owe me money!’ or ‘I hate you!’ But he was really a very nice man.”

Charette would sit behind Smith and observe him at gigs. “I learned a lot from watching him,” he said, “including how to use a kind of fast, ‘snaky’ vibrato; he would play exotic scales with it that I really liked.”

As a composer, Charette has been eclectic and exploratory, as evidenced by the variety of music on his more than 20 albums, many of them on Posi-Tone and SteepleChase. He has composed music for large ensembles including Prague’s Jazz Dock Orchestra and Budapest’s Modern Art Orchestra. At this point in his career, however, he has made a conscious choice to simplify, to get back to basics.

“There was a time when I was writing very dense music,” he said. “I would write in the modes of Olivier Messiaen. I would write in different time signatures. I would also combine electronics with organ, which I don’t really do anymore. I write less complicated music now.”

The new album is the most traditional he’s done in years, he said. “I didn’t want to think as much. I didn’t want the music to be hard. If you’re traveling around, and you’re bringing your music to different places, and it’s really [complicated], it’s not easy to play. And my more cerebral music maybe felt a little less authentic to me than the music I play now.”

His collaborator Weeds is a bit of a Vancouver institution, having founded and run the Cellar Jazz Club for 13 years until it closed in 2014. He also founded the Cellar Live jazz label in 2001, now Cellar Music Group. Weeds has booked Frankie’s Jazz Club in downtown Vancouver since 2016.

“The record came together very organically, pardon the pun,” Weeds said. He had brought Charette out west in 2023 to play a few nights at Frankie’s. At first the idea was to celebrate Cellar’s recent release of an archival McDuff record, Ain’t No Sunshine–Live In Seattle. They ultimately decided to record two McDuff tunes from that album and fill out the rest with Charette originals and one by Weeds, all performed in a straightahead soul-jazz style that would pay homage to McDuff.

The day after the Frankie’s engagement ended, “we went in casually to a studio here in Vancouver that’s got a really good organ, and we laid down what we thought was really good. Then, to be honest, I kind of forgot about it. But when Brian got the rough mixes, he was really excited. And the guitar player, Dave Sikula, who engineered it, is like, ‘Man, this sounds great!’”

The response to the record has been strong, Weeds says. “We sent it out to radio, and I got a lot of personal messages back, which is rare. We’ve also gotten a strong response from our Bandcamp page and from musicians who have heard it.”

They are responding, Weeds thinks, to the recording’s honesty. “People like authenticity,” he said. “When you hear something authentic like that it smacks you in the head. To sum Brian up, he’s a very real person. When you ask him, ‘How are you?’ you’d better be prepared for the answer.”

Some of the tunes are greasy, funk-laden romps, like the title tune and McDuff’s “Jolly Black Giant,” with high-energy, joyful soloing. Charette’s “Microcosmic Orbit,” a brisk but contemplative tune in 6/8, is named after “a Taoist breathing meditation in which you can heal all of your ills and become enlightened,” he said. “It’s basically Qigong,” the Chinese practice which, like kung-fu, has been used for centuries to cultivate and balance qi, the life-force of traditional Chinese medicine.

“You know, kung fu means, literally, hard work over a long period of time,” he explained. “It’s been a lot of work, that’s for sure. You might say, for me, music is kung fu.” DB