Yet even that athletic feat seems somehow small when Johnny Sansone plays a harmonica. After moving to New Orleans seven years ago, the 39-year old Sansone has arguably blossomed into the finest harp player in Louisiana, with a deep-in-the-pocket style rooted in the traditions of blues legends Sonny Boy Williamson, Big Walter Horton, and Little Walter. Holding those Chicago blues inspirations close, Sansone has also integrated swamp pop, zydeco and Gulf Coast rhythm and blues into his repertoire. In early 1995, he released his third album, Crescent City Moon, an ambitious and passionately crafted record packed with superb original songwriting and guest spots from old friends Sonny Landreth, and Joe Cabral and Rod Hodges of the Iguanas. On the strength of that record, and countless one-nighters working his harmonica magic in cramped clubs and on international festival stages, Sansone is now in final negotiations with one of America's finest roots-music labels for an extended contract.

But the champagne corks haven't popped yet, and over the course of two extended recent interviews, it's plain to see why Johnny Sansone is cautiously downplaying his pending record deal. Not long ago, Sansone's career had downshifted from high gear to a disconcerting stutter. His 1989 move to New Orleans followed an extended stint as the frontman for virtuoso guitarist Ronnie Earl, with whom he also backed such seminal figures as Jimmy Rogers and Robert Jr. Lockwood -- the blues equivalent of playing in the promised land. But after his tenure with Earl, Sansone was struggling. He had no band. He had little resources. To add insult to injury, his second solo record, Mr. Good Thing, was released in 1990 without him hearing the final mix. Overblown horns, slick arrangements and back-up singers were added, painting Sansone as a misguided troubadour.

When Mr. Good Thing vanished from sight, Sansone could have called it quits for good; he'd already seen many of his downtrodden peers give up music for day jobs over the years. However as he sits in his banana-tree-shaded backyard in Bayou St. John and begins to recount his experiences, he never once mentions abandoning the stage. Between slow puffs on a cigar and sips on a Belgian ale brought back from one of his overseas performances, Sansone recounts the path that led him, at the low ebb of his career, to salvation from two unlikely sources: a chalkboard and a riverboat moan.

Johnny Sansone was born in Orange, New Jersey. His father was a schoolteacher, and played saxophone. "I was about eight years old when I started taking saxophone lessons and understanding music," he says. "I also know that an alto saxophone was almost as big as I was, and I had to carry it to school every day, and I thought, hmmm, I don't know about this." What persuaded the younger Sansone to follow his father's example is a version of a scene straight out of Audrey Hepburn's classic film Sabrina. "He ran the swim club, and they used to have these parties, and they'd bring in bands. The guy up the street was a sax player, and they had a band called the Wakinians. I never got to go with him to any clubs or anything, but these pool parties, they'd have all the tiki lights and scotch bottles on all the tables, and all these people going nuts over a Louis Jordan or Louis Prima tune. I'd climb up a tree and watch this and be amazed that at how my father would just walk out there, and he could dance and he could play, and it was pretty cool."

Sansone stuck with the saxophone, but was also drawn to the harmonica and guitar. "I had Jimmy Reed eight-track tapes," he remembers, "and I wanted to play guitar like I heard on these old records." It was Sansone's introduction to the blues, along with records like "One O' Clock Jump" he found in his father's 78 r.p.m. collection. In one of the early examples of his mechanical inclinations, the young Sansone also discovered a way he could "sit in" on a Muddy Waters song. His father ran a jukebox-rental program on the side, and a jukebox that was beaten up and broken beyond repair found a home in the Sansone basement. "At that time I didn't have an amp, but I was listening to Little Walter and all these guys with really cool tone, and I didn't know anything about amps. So I took this jukebox and cut the wires off from where the needle comes from, and I got this little microphone from a tape deck, and I wired 'em in. I used to put the records on, and I'd punch A-2, put a quarter in the jukebox, and I used to have the coolest tone I think I ever had in my life," he laughs.

Sansone's father never got to see his son play professionally; he died of cancer when Johnny was a teenager. Before he passed away, he gave his son one musical experience Johnny will always remember. "We went to see a show called "Two Generations of Brubeck" -- my father played sax with Dave Brubeck -- and it was probably the most important thing he could have done for me," Sansone remembers. "I knew there was some connection here with this Brubeck guy. I knew he came by the house and stuff, but I didn't know anything more than that."

My father had me all dressed up in a suit and tie right in the front row. We're listening to the music, and it's me and him: he took me there, he wanted me to get this. The fact that we were sitting in the best seats you could get and watching this white-haired guy go nuts on a piano, I was really moved by this. And then the lights come up, and a whole symphony orchestra was sitting behind Brubeck. I though it was just four guys, and they were really rocking out on some crazy stuff, and then it was a whole symphony. There's all these people in tuxedos playing every kind of instrument you can imagine. And then on the ground floor right in front of us, this guy came out with a violin, this kid with really long hair, and then a guy with a trombone, and these were some of his sons. Then one of his sons came out and started playing harp; harp like I'd never heard. then they had a big light on Dave, then the light was shining on his son's band, and the symphony's up above. I'm like thirteen years old and I'm looking at this, and my father and I made a huge connection here. These guys started playing some wild blues, and I'm hearing Dave Brubeck playin' some blues piano."

After the show's over, my father's trying to get a hold of Dave, through the crowds of people, and I'm saying, 'Dad, this guy doesn't know you, leave him alone, you know?' From out of nowhere -- and this is where I realized the respect that comes from generations, these guys probably hadn't seen each other in I don't know how many years -- all these people were trying to get autographs and get near him, and when he saw my father, he said, 'Al, you old son of a bitch!', and he pushed people out of the way, grabbed him and started huggin' him. Then they pulled us all backstage, and I got to talk to all of his sons, and the harmonica player about all the people I loved. He started tellin' me, get this record, and he started writing down all these things for me. It was right from the top; these people were so important. And that was a really big connection that I can never forget."

Besides carrying on his father's passion for music, Sansone also kept up another gift his dad taught him: swimming. Upon graduation from high school, Johnny's athletic prowess in the pool earned him a scholarship at Colorado State University in Ft. Collins. He lived up to the expectations, setting an NCAA national record in 1976. At the same time, he was getting an invaluable music education in the progressive and open Colorado music community.

"A lot of my musical maturity came while I was there," says Sansone. "A lot of great bands were coming through there. This is the mid-seventies, and there were a lot of bands coming from Minneapolis and Texas and Chicago. The (Fabulous) Thunderbirds were coming through, Lamont Cranston's band, the Nighthawks...all these bands really made me realize, these guys are doing what I want to do. It's what I was doing in high school, and it wasn't clicking. But now here's these guys playing in these bars to packed houses and they're kicking everybody's ass."

Sansone was finding his may musically, playing in a jug-band format and scouring the dorms for like-minded players in the dorms. "At the time, I played guitar, and harp on the rack, and I was really into Juke Boy Bonner, Jimmy Reed, the solo guys. And Sonny Boy (Williamson) I though was so cool. To me it was like he was Bob Dylan wrapped up in mud and guts. It was so down-in-the-gutter, but he was so poetic at what he did."

As he began putting bands together in Ft. Collins and playing the club circuit, Sansone -- an imposing physical presence at 6' 3" -- relied on more than his harp chops to win over fans. He laughs about what the results would be if he pulled these stunts presently, but his antics did earn him his stage name. "I was in the most unbelievable shape you can imagine, and I would get on top of the piano and do a back flip off the piano while still playing harp. People would wait all night just to see this guy who could jump off the stage; I used to jump over the bass player's head, I was just a ball of energy. So people started callin' me Jumpin' Johnny."

Musicians drifted in and out of the band in typical fashion, but through separate twists of fate, Sansone hooked up with a set of players who would also go on to make their mark in the New Orleans music scene. A young horn player named Joe Cabral and guitarist Rod Hodges drifted down separately to Colorado from Montana, and ultimately joined Sansone and drummer Willie Panker as Jumpin' Johnny's Blues Party. Various configurations of the group played together for a couple of years; Hodges and Cabral and Panker eventually went on to form The Iguanas. (Panker played with the Iguanas on their debut album, and now regularly drums for Sunpie Barnes and Brint Anderson, among others.)

Sansone's various Colorado bands soon became the standard choice to open for the national blues acts coming through town, giving him the opportunity to play alongside performers such as Son Seals, Koko Taylor, James Cotton and Jr. Wells. "At that time, I was also getting introduced to a lot of Louisiana sounds, because there were people coming up like Sonny (Landreth) and Beausoleil, and I was starting to get hip that there was a sound down here that I didn't know too much about," says Sansone.

In 1983, he decided to leave Colorado and investigate the mushrooming blues scene that the Fabulous Thunderbirds and Stevie Ray Vaughan were spearheading in Austin, Texas. Traveling with everything he owned in a van, the band gypsied around from one flophouse to the next, trying to get themselves some recognition. "Austin was a terrible place to live," Sansone laughs in retrospect. "There were so many great, great bands, and nobody would give us a chance, even though we knew everybody. So we did most of our work on the road, and it just fell apart because we couldn't make any money. We had a little house gig playing on the coast down near Galveston. This was a kind of cool time, because we kind of lived in Austin but didn't really live anywhere. So we would go down to this little town and play Friday and Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, and it was right on the Gulf. Sunday after the gig, I would either leave and go to New Orleans, or we we would drive and go down to Mexico. With Mexico and New Orleans, we were like, why do we need Austin? So we never really went back. There's nothing wrong with Austin -- I love the city -- but there were just so many brick walls, and we ran into every one of them."

Sansone subsequently found steady work back in the Midwest and the fertile Kansas City blues scene. In 1984, during a holiday visit to his mother in West Palm Beach, Florida, he sat in with a North Carolina group named the Alcaphonics for a New Year's Eve gig. "The next day, I drove the bass player up to Miami, and he was sayin', we really need you in the band," Sansone remembers. The next day Sansone's guitarist Hodges decided to move to Europe, so he took it as a sign, and packed up all his belongings and moved to North Carolina to join his new band. "That's where I got into the whole Southern soul thing," he says. "We were doing 5 Royales Tunes, Clarence Carter, stuff like that. I started out in Jersey doing Chicago blues, and now I was doing everything from James Brown to James Carr, and it was really cool to me."

The Alcaphonics ran out of juice two years later, but Sansone's dynamic performing skills and playing chops attracted an independent investor who offered to finance the debut record of Jumpin' Johnny and the Blues Party. Besides the core band he was playing with at the time, there was one guitarist and friend he knew he wanted on his record: Ronnie Earl. "I first met Ronnie in Ft. Collins at Sam's Old Time Ballroom," Sansone remembers. "Duke Robillard had just left the band [Roomful of Blues], and I didn't know who Ronnie was. But I had met Gregg Piccolo (Roomful saxophonist) before, and we were talking about some harmonica stuff, and he said, well, you really need to talk to the guitar player in the band, because he'll tell you about playin' with Big Walter and stuff. So he introduced us, and we hit it off immediately. When the band finished playing, Ronnie and I got on stage and started playin' together; he knew every single turnaround, and was just an encyclopedia of stuff. I took him over to my house after the show, and we were just puttin' on records and playin' all night."

Earl guested on Sansone's debut Where Y'At?, a strong showcase of shuffles, witty tunes from Sansone's songwriting pen, and bullseye covers of material like Little Walter's "Blue and Lonesome." More touring followed, and in 1989, after years of experiencing New Orleans for pleasure and family visits (his cousin was an oyster shucker living in the Ninth Ward), Sansone made his move to Louisiana. Immediately after his arrival, Ronnie Earl called him to fill the vocal and harmonica chair in his band The Broadcasters. "To me, that was like God opening the gate and saying, 'You're a saint, come on in," Sansone says. "That was the best thing that ever could have happened with me, because that's where I started playing on a serious basis with guys like Jimmy Rogers, Pinetop Perkins, Hubert Sumlin, and Snooky Pryor. One night I played in the harp chair behind Jimmy Rogers, Robert Jr. Lockwood, and Ronnie; that's a harp player's dream gig." The slot with Earl lasted six months, with the two parting the best of friends and Earl moving on to explore the all-instrumental format he's championed brilliantly.

That heady experience for Sansone was followed by headaches. His aforementioned second release Mr. Good Thing was a blindside dagger into his reputation. After Mr. Good Thing died a merciful death, Sansone's longstanding club-owner friends were itchy for new material. "They were saying, Johnny, we really like you, but it's been a while, you know?" With work becoming scarcer, Sansone was at a crucial crossroads; starting back at ground zero required a massive amount of determination. His way out lay hidden in his old Cadillac.

"I looked at my career and what I was doing, and being caught up in the circle of playing around and not really getting anywhere, trying to book gigs on the road. So I came home one day, and I got out a blackboard that I had in the trunk of my car that I had bought at a yard sale or something. And I wrote down on the board in chalk so that I could see it every day from my bed: THE GOAL: I want to be a working musician. So what do I have to do? I looked at all the different things: I've got to be able to keep a good band together, I've got to be able to travel and survive, and it all led back to, I've got to have a good record. So then I crossed everything out and wrote GOOD RECORD," he laughs. "I just charted everything and looked at it every day. Then I said, I've got to make my own record. I took a really big gamble, because that's usually not the way it's done, and a lot of people advised me against it. If nobody else was going to get behind me, so be it. I was going to do everything the way I wanted to do it, and nobody was going to tell me, 'That doesn't work, or put a shuffle here, or this or that'. If it dies, then that's my fault. But I was tired of other people telling me, this is what you got to do, and having it die. But I die with it when it dies, and they don't."

The process took over two years, with Sansone carefully choosing a diverse mix of material he'd been working on in some cases for a decade. His old friends Joe Cabral, Rod Hodges, and Sonny Landreth all came on board for the ride, adding their unique touches as well. The centerpiece and haunting title track of the record came from a late-night revelation Sansone had while sitting in his backyard playing the accordion. "I was out here looking at the banana trees, and it was cold, and I could hear the riverboat blowing from here," says Sansone. "I just started feeling kind of lonesome, and came up with the chord structure right there."

"Crescent City Moon" is one of the most powerful slow-blues of recent memory, evoking Louisiana and the South but cutting across all geographical borders to touch on universal themes. The images of the song -- a man "sold down the river," standing on the muddy bank, asking why his only friend is the lunar guide above him -- seem a direct inference to Sansone's tribulations. But the person behind the lyrics has never been bitter about any of his misfortunes. Sansone is an inspiringly positive man, loyal to his bandmates, friends and contacts over the years. Perhaps the best example of his selflessness is told to me by his wife Kelly, who Sansone met during JazzFest. She was visiting from Canada, and met Johnny one night at the Maple Leaf. Exhausted from a day at the Fairgrounds and fading fast early in the night, she off-handedly mentioned how much she'd love just to get a couple of hours of rest. Sansone told her she could sleep in his car outside if she liked, and she took him up on the offer. While the band inside played until dawn, Sansone stood watch outside his car, making sure his new friend was undisturbed. They were married two years later.

The joy of finding his soulmate coincided with the release of Crescent City Moon, which has opened new doors and re-established Sansone on a local, national and international level. For blues lovers, his forthcoming record deal means the possibility of a long-overdue harmonica showcase from Sansone. His bag of harp tricks has hidden surprises that have won him praise from esteemed peers such as Fingers Taylor and Texas ace Mark Hummel; it's a wide-open approach that can catch even the most jaded listener off-guard. "I've always tried to play completely different every night," notes Sansone." But I've heard stories about Clifton Chenier, doing a song five nights in a row in five different keys. That's kind of fascinating, and I try to take that approach. I don't like to do anything the same. If every once in a while a phrase comes in, I might have no idea where it came from, but if I like it I try and keep it. That's how you develop a style. Charlie Musselwhite, who can play a thousand positions, and can play in any one key on any harmonica, stuff like that is mindblowing how far you can go with the instrument. I really appreciate that."

Whatever lies around the corner, there's little chance of it affecting his devotion to the music and his fans. He asserts it's all about being "a regular guy playing for regular people," and has never forgotten the kindness and accessibility of his mentors. It's fitting that for a man in it for the long haul, Sansone uses an automotive analogy to sum up his journey. "It all comes back to, it doesn't matter what you do. You might be underneath a car changing a muffler, and you've got rust fallin' down in your eyes. And you're under there cutting a pipe off a car saying, why am I doing this; there's got to be something better. And then you have to say to yourself, nobody's gonna put this pipe on this car like I am. I'm going to do a good job. It's not the pain of what you're doin', it's what you're doing that it's important. It's not the money, and it's not the rust in your eyes. I'm going to give you the best muffler you ever had."

Copyright 1996, OffBeat, Inc.