Skip Heller on Dizzy, Joy, and Never Taking a Music Lesson

This week Jonesy sits down with the great Skip Heller: composer, guitarist, bandleader, arranger, and one of the most restlessly curious musicians you will ever meet. Skip grew up in Philadelphia a few blocks from Dizzy Gillespie's old house, never took a real music lesson, and built a life in music that runs from bebop to rockabilly to exotica.

They get into his new Dizzy Gillespie project with his band Voodoo 5, why joy is the fuel in the music he loves, growing up on the Smothers Brothers and John Hartford, learning harmony from chord diagrams in a music store, the day Stevie Wonder's "I Wish" turned a Philadelphia block into a dance scene, and a wild year on the road with Yma Sumac that ended at the Montreal Jazz Festival with the copyists still passing music up to the bandstand.

Skip on the heart of it all: "Art doesn't have to be serious and heavy. Art can have a joyous component to it."

Listen to Skip's band Voodoo 5.