Hot Tuna

Hot Tuna -- a Living Legend in American Music

The name Hot Tuna invokes as many different moods and reactions as there are Hot Tuna fans -- millions of them. To some, Hot Tuna is a reminder of some wild and happy times. To others, that name will forever be linked to their own discovery of the power and depth of American blues and roots music. To newer fans, Hot Tuna is a tight, masterful group that is on the cutting edge of great music. All of those things are correct, and more. For almost four decades, Hot Tuna has played, toured, and recorded some of the best and most memorable acoustic and electric music ever. And Hot Tuna is still going strong.

The two kids from 1950s Washington D.C. knew that they wanted to make music. Jorma Kaukonen, son of a State Department official, and Jack Casady, whose father was a dentist, discovered guitar when they were teenagers (Jack, four years younger, barely so). They played, and they took in the vast panorama of music available in the nation’s capital, but found a special love of the blues, country, and jazz played in small clubs. Jorma went off to college, while Jack sat in with professional bands and combos before he was even old enough to drive, first playing lead guitar, then electric bass. In the mid-1960s Jorma was invited to play in a rock’n’roll band that was forming in San Francisco; he knew just the guy to play bass and summoned his old friend from back east. The striking and signature guitar and bass riffs in the now-legendary songs by the Jefferson Airplane were the result.

The half-decade foray into rock music was for Jack and Jorma a detour, not a destination. They continued to play their acoustic blues on the side, sometimes performing a mini-concert amid a Jefferson Airplane performance, sometimes finding a gig afterwards in some local club. They were, as Jack says, “Scouting, always scouting, for places where we could play.” The duo did not go unnoticed and soon there was a record contract and, not long afterwards, a tour. Thus began a career that would result in more than two-dozen albums, thousands of concerts around the world, and continued popularity.

Hot Tuna has gone through changes, certainly. A variety of other instruments, from harmonica to fiddle to keyboards, have been part of the band over the years. The constant, the very definition of Hot Tuna, has always been Jorma and Jack. The two are not joined at the hip, though; through the years both Jorma and Jack have undertaken projects with other musicians and solo projects of their own. But Hot Tuna has never broken up, never ceased to exist, nor have the two boyhood pals ever wavered in one of the most enduring friendships in music.

Almost from the beginning of the new millennium, Hot Tuna’s acoustic and electric concerts have featured the brilliant mandolin virtuoso Barry Mitterhoff. In the last few years, the band has included sharp young percussionist Erik Diaz in its electric sets. What has not changed is Hot Tuna’s commitment to the music and to increasing their own proficiency. Fans remark how the Hot Tuna of today sounds astonishingly like the Hot Tuna of 30 years ago -- and even better!

The Musicians

Jorma Kaukonen

In a career that has already spanned nearly a half century, Jorma Kaukonen has been the leading practitioner and teacher of fingerstyle guitar, one of the most highly respected interpreters of American roots music, blues, and Americana, and at the forefront of popular rock-and-roll.

Jorma graduated from high school and headed off for Antioch College in Ohio. There he met Ian Buchanan, from New York City, who introduced him to the elaborate fingerstyle fretwork of the Rev. Gary Davis. Jorma was hooked. A work-study program in New York introduced the increasingly skilled Kaukonen to that city’s burgeoning folk-blues-bluegrass scene and many of its players. He would leave college and undertake overseas travels before returning to classes, this time in California.

There he earned money by teaching guitar. A friend who taught banjo mentioned to Jorma he and another friend were thinking of starting a band -- was Jorma interested?

Though he was less interested in rock than in the roots music that was his passion, Jorma decided to join. It would turn out he would even have something to do with the naming of the band. An acquaintance liked to tease his blues-playing friends by giving them nicknames which parodied those of blues legends. Jorma, he had decided, was “Blind Thomas Jefferson Airplane.” When the new band needed a name, Jorma mentioned this, and thus the Jefferson Airplane was christened. He sent word back to Washington, where his teenage musical partner Jack Casady had taken up electric bass. Did Jack want to come to San Francisco and be in a band? The Kaukonen-Casady duo created much of the Jefferson Airplane’s signature sound, and Jorma’s lead and fingerstyle guitar playing characterizes some of the band’s most memorable tracks. The two would often play clubs following Airplane performances. A record deal was made and Hot Tuna was born. Jorma left the Jefferson Airplane after the band’s most productive five years. Hot Tuna had become a full-time job.

Jorma has also had a succession of more than a dozen solo albums, beginning with 1974’s “Quah” and continuing through “Blue Country Heart” in 2002 and, now, the much-anticipated “Stars In My Crown.” Along with his wife, Vanessa, Jorma operates and teaches at Jorma Kaukonen’s Fur Peace Ranch Guitar Camp, located on a large tract of fields, woods, hills, and streams in the Appalachian foothills of Southeastern Ohio. Since it opened in 1998, thousands of musicians whose skills range from basic to highly accomplished gather for weekends of master instruction offered by Jorma and other instructors who are leaders in their musical fields.

Jack Casady

Few musicians have the opportunity and skill to create an entire style of playing, but Jack Casady has done exactly that with the electric bass. With roots as a lead guitar player, Jack broadened the range and scope of the instrument, taking it out of the rhythm category and bringing to it a world of complex and complementary melodies.

The son of a Washington D.C.-area dentist, Jack fell in love with music at an early age and took full advantage of the wide cultural experience the city had to offer, from classical and jazz concerts to the strong southern musical influence to the small blues and jazz clubs not normally populated by children.

“One night I’d be down at the Howard Theater seeing Ray Charles,” he remembers, “and the next night I would be at the Shamrock Tavern in Georgetown, hearing Mac Weisman, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, and other bluegrass people. And the next night it would be jazz -- people like Eric Dolphy and Roland Kirk.” He took up guitar and became friends with an older boy, a guitar novice named Jorma Kaukonen. Together they explored the area’s music scene.

When Jorma went to college, young Jack continued his methodical study of guitar, often sitting in with local club bands. One night he was asked to play the bass, and thus began a love affair with the instrument that has endured for close to a half century.

Jack has played bass with numerous groups and legendary performers, from Jimi Hendrix to Government Mule and beyond. His signature bass sound was front and center in his critically acclaimed solo CD, “Dream Factor.”

The inventor of the Jack Casady style of bass playing devotes much of his time to passing on what he has learned and invented, by teaching several times each year at Jorma’s Fur Peace Ranch.

Barry Mitterhoff

One of the nation’s leading mandolinists, Barry Mitterhoff has explored all the instrument’s various styles, and it has carried him to Broadway, the silver screen, thousands of live performances and the recording studio for dozens of projects, even the White House.

A native of New Jersey, Barry was interested in the guitar until two events happened almost simultaneously: an aunt, who had appeared in a mandolin orchestra presented him her instrument, and he heard the recordings of Bill Monroe.

With the support of an artistically inclined, music-loving family, Barry pursued his music, joining Bottle Hill, his first professional band, midway through college. He toured and learned his way around the recording studio with Bottle Hill, and developed skills not just in bluegrass but in Celtic and jazz styles as well.

He studied with jazz virtuosi Jethro Burns which led him to a college jazz studies program after Bottle Hill broke up. Though aimed at guitarists, Barry and his electric five-string mandolin were welcomed, and he ended up studying in Rutgers University’s highly regarded jazz program.

He was asked to join Peter Rowan, Lamar Grier, and Tex Logan for some tour dates and festivals. The mandolinist the three had been most famously associated with previously was Bill Monroe himself. Following that association, he joined with old friends Danny Weiss, legendary banjo stylist Tony Trischka and Dede Wyland to form a

bluegrass band. Soon they were joined by Larry Cohen and became Skyline, a bluegrass band with a New York attitude. That attitude included broadening the range of “bluegrass” to include a multitude of other influences, extending even to jazz, classical, and the ethnic influences still very much alive in the city.

Skyline toured and recorded for most of a decade. After its members sought other artistic outlets, Barry, Danny Weiss, and Larry Cohen continued to tour from time to time under the name Silk City.

He has also extensively explored the mandolin in ethnic and European traditional music of many kinds. He played for the movie “You’ve Got Mail” and taught mandolin to Parker Posey for the film “A Mighty Wind.”

He is a regular member of Margot Leverett and the Klezmer Mountain Boys, and for the last five years has toured with Hot Tuna and with Jorma Kaukonen, and was part of the Blue Country Heart band that toured in support of Jorma’s 2002 album of that title. He appears on Jorma’s current album, “Stars In My Crown.”

In addition to mandolin, he plays several varieties of electric mandolin and octave mandolin, four-string banjo, and is one of the leaders in the revival of the tenor guitar. Though regularly touring, making festival appearances, and teaching at workshops, Barry still calls New Jersey home.

Erik Diaz

One of the tightest and most proficient young drummers in America today, Erik Diaz has joined Hot Tuna in its electric sets since 2004. He met the band at Merlefest in 2000 and left such an impression that when Hot Tuna decided to return to playing electric music they knew the drummer they wanted.

For Erik, percussion is a matter of heritage.
“My dad, Ernesto Diaz, was a drummer,” he explains. “It was always sort of a casual thing -- if they were around I’d play ‘em, if not no big deal. It wasn’t as if I had a goal in mind; I was just doing it because I enjoyed it. But by the time I was 11, he was doing a lot of VFW clubs and so forth, and when they asked me if I wanted a gig, I said, ‘sure.’ He dropped me off at the door with a set of drums and said, ‘Have a good show.’

Those performances tended to be country music, which I’d never listened to too much or learned how to play, particularly. Then I got up at 7:30 the next morning and headed to seventh grade.”

Touring with Hot Tuna, he says, is a delight, and audiences accustomed to the warm, unspoken interaction between Jack and Jorma find it between Jack and Erik, too.

“Obviously, their chemistry is impeccable, which makes things a lot easier. And Jack I find very easy to follow into a pocket with; it seems like we can generally cue off of one another pretty well.”

In addition to Hot Tuna, Erik has played with numerous bands, and critics have likened his style to that of Keith Moon, the legendary drummer for The Who. Originally from Los Angeles, Erik is known around the Kent, Ohio, area for his years with the Kent State University African Music Ensemble. He is also the drummer and vocalist for the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame educational program “Blues in the Schools,” bringing the history of rock music to public schools all over Ohio.