Larry Watson's Never Ending 'Journey'
R&B musician educates by day, entertains by night

By Ken Capobianco
CNC Arts Writer

A journey. To go to places familiar and unexplored. To travel over time and space. Boston's Larry Watson is on his own musical journey and he wants to take his listeners with him -- deeper into grooves of R&B and deeper into the search for ourselves through unity, understanding and humility.

His new record, "The Journey," which was made over a three-year period, is a delightful dose of old-school soul and R&B and contemporary consciousness raising.

'"This is a record about healing, it's a record about affirmation and looking back at problems we all face and recognizing that we all have to go forward," says the voluble Watson. . . "I think it covers a great deal of my life as well as others' lives."

Watson is a fine singer/song-writer and he has also been a dean at Cornell University, as well as an administrative dean at Harvard University. For years he tried to balance the academic cap and the musical head, spending an entire day working to make the educational system better while trying to raise the roof in clubs and halls in the evening. We're talking 24-7.

Time off'?. Yeah, sure. He teaches vocal training and there's no doubt that you can call him "teach," because he schools many of today's urban music listeners in what good old silky, beautifully crafted soul can sound like. He's got a supple voice, as each one of the 12 cuts on "The Journey" demonstrate, and he can kick it up and glide the beefy beats when he wants to. Most of the time, he evokes the masters: Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, Smokey Robinson.

Watson with legendary jazz pianist, the late Dorothy Donegan.

"The thing that makes this music special is that it was simple, but it was a story as it had a beginning, a middle and an end and it was the best of the black musical tradition," Watson says. "What kept me going when I was growing up in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn was Motown. [The] Temptations, Marvin Gaye, Diana Ross made all the difference in my life. What I see now, though, is that that particular aesthetic, so pure and so profound, is being lost."

Of course, no one can deny the impact hip-hop has made on modern culture. It is the driving force on the top 40 charts and it has also produced some of the best wordsmiths in any musical genre. But a great deal of it deals with drive by shootings, gun-toting, grass-toking, and dissing and degrading women, as well as some other simple-minded ethos.

Watson says he's not trying to bring a counter-message to the negativity as much as he's trying to show that there is beauty, there is grace and there can be unity found in the land of the good groove.

"I see a lot of bands these days trying to bring back some of the things that made R&B great like Tony, Toni, Tone. But understand, I'm not trying to be simply nostalgic for an era that has gone by. No, no no." he says emphatically. "It's the division that troubles me. I'm not going to blame the hip-hop community for some of the negative nature of the music. I'm going to blame my generation."

When Watson gets a head of steam, there's no stopping him, but he chugs ahead with such lucidity and compassion that there's no need to derail him.

Backstage with R&B sensation, Oleta Adams

"What happened was when people fought and knocked down the walls that stopped us from performing and making our own decisions, well, we didn't give this generation who are trying to create now some kind of sense of responsibility and direction, " he explains. "Too many people are simply out to make a dollar any way they can. The hip-hop community may be negative, but we do live in a negative time and it is a reflection of what we see every day. The thing is that we -- that means I as well as all people white, black, Asian, whatever -- need to be responsible; we have to put something out that counterbalances all the negatives."

The lithe singer knows that '"The Journey," which was recorded at Newbury Sound in Boston with various musicians, is a small step for his career, as he has yet to find major-label distribution. That dilemma mostly prevents radio stations from picking up on the many velvet grooves and giving them an airing. Still, he feels that he is gaining something that all the loot that major labels throw at less worthy acts can't provide.

"What I feel is that the journey is essentially the process of fulfillment and understanding, " he says. " Something we all must find for ourselves, but through music, it can be shared. The journey will go on because I will end up passing the baton to a young person who will follow in the hard road I've taken and create art.

"We pass on music and in the music is the tradition, the soul and humanity."