Marco Benevento

An inventive keyboardist and singer based in New York, Marco Benevento crafts an expansive, psychedelic sound that draws from wide-ranging sources. Having earned a degree from Berklee College of Music, he blends modern creative jazz, indie rock, jam band energy, and post-rock/experimental approaches. Active in the city’s experimental scene after joining the Jazz Farmers between 1999 and 2001, he also performed in the Benevento Russo Duo and, from 2006 onward, fronted his own ensemble, releasing the stylistically varied albums Me Not Me in 2009, TigerFace in 2012, and Let It Slide in 2019. In addition to live work, he established Fred Short, a recording studio in Upstate New York that served as the site for his 2022 self-titled album.

Born in 1977 and raised in Livingston, New Jersey, Benevento took up piano and first met future drummer Joe Russo while both were serving detention in junior high. After graduation, Russo headed to Boulder, Colorado, and immersed himself in the local hippie jam band community, whereas Benevento, more oriented toward jazz, relocated to Boston and completed his studies at Berklee in 1999 under pianist and instructor Joanne Brackeen.

Post-graduation, he launched the Boston-area improvisational group the Jazz Farmers, which persisted after his move to New York City in 2001. Reconnecting with Russo at a Medeski, Martin & Wood performance, he agreed to a series of duo appearances at the Knitting Factory; the collaboration quickly became the full-time Benevento/Russo Duo. Together they issued four albums—Benevento/Russo Duo, Darts, Best Reason to Buy the Sun, and Play Pause Stop—and, capitalizing on Russo’s jam band connections, spent much of 2006 as half of Trey Anastasio’s touring band.

Benevento began a live residency at New York’s Tonic in 2007, yielding the three-CD collection Live at Tonic, released that August and spanning small-combo jazz to post-rock/experimental textures. He then signed with Hyena Records and delivered Invisible Baby in 2008, featuring bassist Reed Mathis alongside drummers Andrew Barr and Matt Chamberlain. The same lineup recorded Me Not Me for Royal Potato Family the following year. In 2010 he cut Between the Needles & Nightfall at Brooklyn’s Trout Studio with engineer Bryce Goggin, again working with Mathis and Barr, and supported the release with club and festival dates across the United States and Canada. TigerFace, issued in September 2012 and produced by Tom Biller and Goggin, incorporated an even broader cast of musicians.

After a period of intensive touring and a short hiatus, Benevento reconvened his trio—bassist Dave Dreiwitz and drummer Andy Borger—with producer Richard Swift. For the first time he chose to sing, drawing inspiration from LCD Soundsystem, David Bowie, and My Bloody Valentine to shape a set of unconventional pop songs whose lyrics were co-written with Ween’s Aaron Freeman; the resulting album Swift appeared in September 2014. Two years later he released his fifth studio effort and second vocal project, The Story of Fred Short, again backed by Dreiwitz and Borger and now augmented by layered psychedelic, dance-oriented guitar textures.

Early in 2017 he issued Woodstock Sessions, recorded before a live studio audience at Applehead in Woodstock, New York. He next teamed with Leon Michels of El Michels Affair for the vintage psych-pop-and-soul-inspired Let It Slide in 2019. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic he remained active at his Woodstock-based Fred Short Studios, where he tracked the 2022 album Benevento, a project that explicitly referenced and honored the area’s psychedelic cultural legacy.