Trumpeter Keith Johnson made his way in music by building his reputation in jazz and blues during first half of the 1960s. By 1967 he was an imposing musical presence, but not well known outside of jazz, which had receded to a cult interest amid the 1960s boom in rock music. That was before he stepped in front of 50,000 people one weekend in June of 1967 at a festival in Monterey, CA, as a member of the newly reconstituted Paul Butterfield Blues Band. The Butterfield band that played the Monterey Pop Festival was a decidedly different one from the one that had built its reputation on Chicago blues on one album and raga-blues on another -- and Johnson, as a trumpet player and sometime organist, was one of the major differences, along with two saxmen and a new rhythm section.

Johnson stayed with the group for three albums and a lot of live shows, providing some beautiful solos on In My Own Dream and Keep On Moving; he'd switched mostly to organ by 1969 and the time of the performance at Woodstock, while Steve Medaio took over most of the trumpet parts -- though by Medaio's and Johnson's own accounts, quoted in Blues Access, when they did duet on trumpets during the band's 1969-1970 experimental phase, the results were extraordinary, and help account for the Butterfield band's ability to get a full schedule of gigs even as the group's record sales were flat or declining.

By rights, Johnson might have built up a serious following from the three albums and the massive number of shows he played, but for the fact that the Butterfield band's shift into jazz had been a little too abrupt for a lot of the group's established fans, and timed a little too early to pull in a bigger public -- it would take Blood, Sweat Tears as well as Chicago, both working in much more of an accessible pop/rock idiom, to ease America's rock listeners a little bit toward jazz, and that was a year or two away. Johnson left in 1970 -- he was later a member of Elephant's Memory, and also played on Moogy Klingman's first Capitol album, Van Morrison's His Band and the Street Choir, and Martha Velez's Hypnotized album, and also with Etta James, both in the studio and on tour. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi