Jazz pianist Johnny King brings his trio to Gloria Krause Recital Hall Performance Art Space this Saturday, October 3, to perform a benefit concert for Damascus Citizens for Sustainability (DCS). They will perform a set from 4:30-5:30 p.m. and 6:30-7:30 p.m. in the second-floor event space inside the Delaware Valley Arts Alliance Center at 37 Main Street.

As a 40-year veteran of the jazz scene, King has performed with some of the world’s greatest musicians. Based in NYC, King owns a house in Milanville, PA and is a flyfisherman and lawyer. How does he balance these pursuits? The Democrat sat down with King on the banks of the Delaware to find out.

D: Let’s talk about the performance on Saturday- who’s playing and why a benefit for DCS?

JK: Damascus Citizens for Sustainability is a great organization, and somebody had the idea to do a benefit. I wanted to make it special and get my favorite musicians. The bass player is Ed Howard, a friend since the 80s. The drummer is another guy I’ve known a long time—Adam Cruz, an amazing drummer.

D: How did you start playing music?

JK: I went to see The Sting, and it had ragtime in the background. As a nine-year-old I went home and started figuring it out. I took piano lessons but within three months I’m saying, ‘I don’t want to do it that way, I want to reinvent it,’ which is, I guess, the instinct of a jazz musician. My parents’ friend was a jazz trumpet player who took my mom and I to jazz clubs where I met legendary musicians like Earl Hines. By age 15, I was playing professionally.

D: What connects fishing and music?

JK: What links them together is exploration. Those are the only two pursuits in my life that when I do them, it’s all I think about. When the music is good, it doesn’t matter whether you’re playing at a festival in front of 10,000 people or there are two people in the room, it’s just you and the musicians, and you’re just responding.

D: How has the explosion of AI affected your workflow?

JK: It hasn’t affected my workflow at all. Artificial intelligence (AI) models study recordings and disassemble them to establish statistical correlations, so it’s entirely derivative. Jazz is spontaneously composed. AI is circumscribed by the materials it’s trained on. It doesn’t have the human capacity to create something original.

In the case of the AI music generator Suno, they rip, copy, and process recordings to train their models to spit out similar things. They say it’s ‘fair use,’ which is a defense in copyright law that says it’s ok to build on what prior authors did. But when you’re just copying to create things that will substitute it, that’s copyright infringement.

There’s a streaming platform that estimates that 50% of uploaded music is AI-generated. When the music publishers sued Anthropic for copying song lyrics, they said ‘We can’t pay.’ Anthropic’s worth trillions of dollars! The entire worldwide music publishing industry is around $10 billion. It’s a joke.

I’m a copyright lawyer who represents the music industry and a musician, so I have a personal axe to grind. If you’re going to exploit my music to train AI, you should pay for it. And they say, ‘But this is the same as you listening to music to learn how to play it.’  And I say, ‘No, it isn’t!’ I paid for my subscriptions, I paid for my CD’s, you’re just copying tens of millions of recordings indiscriminately. Also, I listen to it, I’m not encoding it in my brain, the scale is so different. But it’s an arms race, so they go as fast as they can.

D: Are you the only bebop attorney?

JK: No, the drummer Pete La Roca went to law school and practiced law as Peter Sims. He was on as many Blue Note Records as anybody.