Marcus Johnson's Three Keys to Success

By Richard Harrington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 12, 2003

MARCUS JOHNSON should be able to work late at the office today and still make it to tonight's performance on time.

That's because the pianist and composer is playing at Takoma Station in Takoma Park, less than a mile from the Silver Spring headquarters of Marimelj Entertainment and Three Keys Music, the smooth jazz label of which Johnson happens to be president and CEO. He's also executive producer on a half dozen Three Keys artists' albums, most cut at Studio 8121, the recording studio made possible when Marimelj, the holding company that owns Three Keys, Studio 8121 and several music publishing companies, received financial backing from BET founder Robert Johnson.

Call it an ideal partnership between an ambitious young entrepreneur and a well-proven one -- Robert Johnson is, after all, the country's first African American billionaire. Those "three keys," incidentally, are not musical signatures, Johnson points out. They're "tenets of life . . . spirituality, artistry and strategy.

"I feel you have to have the passion to follow something first, and out of that passion comes a disciplined art," he explains. "Some people are just straight talented but when you're mixing it with the strategy, that last component has to be some form of artistry and discipline. Once you get that done, you can look beyond any kind of barriers that are set by society to get your art into consumers' hands."

For Johnson, that once meant selling CDs out of the trunk of his Toyota 4Runner. At Howard University, he double majored in music and business administration while supporting himself playing up and down the East Coast with the Marcus Johnson Project, a jazz group with an urban funk approach reminiscent of the mid '70s jazz funk movement.

He scored a demo deal with N-Coded, a subsidiary of Capitol Records, but after several personnel shakeups, nothing ever developed, except for Johnson's strong desire to take control of his own destiny. According to Johnson, the N-Coded experience was a case of "giving the traditional system a shot. But it was more of a jump-off point to do what I really wanted to do, which is to have my own label."

Johnson's dreams were seeded by the time he graduated from the old Montgomery Blair High School, also less than a mile away from Three Keys Music's offices in the World Building on Georgia Avenue (the address gives the recording studio its name). After graduating from Howard, he enrolled at Georgetown University Law Center, eventually doubling his JD degree with an MBA from Georgetown's McDonough School of Business -- somehow balancing studying for the joint degrees while continuing to play nights and weekends.

By the mid '90s, Johnson had founded Marimelj: the word is a combination of his names -- Mar for Marcus, r for Roosevelt, imel for "my second middle name," and j for Johnson. It's a mouthful, he admits, "which is why we've changed the label name to Three Keys. That's so much easier to pronounce and when you're dealing with brand names and people can't pronounce it, that's not a good thing."

After a summer internship in MCA Records' business and legal affairs department in Los Angeles, Johnson borrowed $3,000 from his sister to fund his 1996 debut, "Lessons in Love" (bonus lesson: fellow Georgetown students were a natural market). A year later, Johnson released "Inter Alia" at about the same time he was getting the double degrees from Georgetown. Two more albums followed, sold mostly at shows or on consignment at stores like Tower Records.

While working at MCA, Johnson says he "realized that I would always be just an artist if I only focused on Marcus Johnson," which didn't really fulfill his long-term project. There was another obstacle. "I recognized that there was no way to get distribution with just one artist -- me."

In 2000, Johnson went to MIDEM, the international music business conference in Cannes, securing a distribution deal for Marimelj with Light Year Entertainment, a part of the Warner Elektra Atlantic music conglomerate. The first releases were his own "Urban Groove" and saxophonist Jaared's "Foreward." Part of the attraction of signing with Light Year, Johnson notes, was being able to put that WEA logo on the back of his and Jareed's CDs, which then became a selling point for bringing other artists to his label.

"I'm always trying to kill two birds with one stone and if I can get five out of it, I'm trying to do that, as well," Johnson admits. "I don't even try to think outside of a box. I come from the perspective that there is no box, there are no lines; let's figure out how to get to where we need to get based on whatever resources we have or can think of."

It's an approach that earned Johnson a Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award from the Small Business Administration in 2001, which was also the year he had a fortuitous encounter with Robert Johnson at the Rehoboth Beach Jazz Festival.

"BET Jazz [Johnson's all-jazz channel] was sponsoring our stage, but I had no idea Bob was going to be introducing me," says Johnson. "He had just recently been featured in Forbes and I told him how proud I was of him, if I could be proud of him. We started talking about business and I asked him if he could give me some guidance on just navigating some of the ins and outs [of business]. I told him how, with the help of [chief executive] Doug Duncan, we had secured the first ever revolving loan in Montgomery County. As an infant company you're one second from the mistake that can send you over the edge, and that loan helped us get the 250 square feet that we had on the sixth floor of the World Building. Eventually, with the investment from Robert Johnson, we were able to expand the office and build the studio."

Ironically, Johnson notes, "I didn't ask Robert for money, but for guidance. Everybody asks Robert Johnson for money!"

Instead, Robert Johnson asked Marcus Johnson for a long-term business plan, wanting to know whether he had a model that worked.

"Was I nervous? Yes. But I knew I knew my stuff, or at least how I saw it in my head."

"Marcus has got that right brain, left brain thing, the creative and the analytical," says Robert Johnson. "He focuses on his business as well as his art and he wants whoever is around him to do the same. He understands the building blocks, the steps necessary to find, produce and present an artist. How can you not support someone like that?"

The BET founder was apparently impressed that Johnson had over the course of just four years turned his sister's $3,000 loan into a company generating $300,000 a year, particularly since Fully Loaded, a label Robert Johnson started when he owned BET (he sold it to Viacom in 2001 for $3 billion) never got around to releasing anything.

"I have a great partner in Robert Johnson. He's a great man, giving great guidance," says Marcus Johnson. "Sometimes it's just a few words: Go do it. Hang in there. Don't worry about it. Make more than you spend. Watch where you're spending. Keep trying."

Which Three Keys has done well enough to land at No. 10 in terms of radio share on Radio & Records contemporary jazz chart. "That's big news out of Silver Spring," Johnson notes proudly. A number of the label's acts -- saxophonists Jaared and Michael Lington, guitarist Nick Colionne and Johnson himself -- have done well on stations with smooth jazz formats, though Johnson describes the Three Keys sound as urban jazz rather than smooth jazz.

Locally, Three Keys artists can be heard on WHUR-FM (96.3) and WMMJ-FM ("Magic 102.3"), and XM satellite has recently featured live performances by Colionne and veteran jazz pianist Bobby Lyle, former conductor for Anita Baker and music director for Bette Midler. The Houston-based Lyle and Johnson are currently putting the finishing touches on "Straight & Smooth," a double CD that will showcase Lyle's impressive keyboard work in both styles.

Three Keys' biggest success at the moment is vocalist YahZarah, whose "Blackstar" album was released in September. A former background singer for Erykah Badu, YahZarah (born Dana Williams) graduated from Duke Ellington High School for the Performing Arts and her impressive neo-soul sound has garnered play on R&B, jazz and pop stations, as well as exposure on BET via her "Wishing" video.

Johnson's most recent CD, "In Person: Live at Blues Alley," featured Jaared and YahZarah and a new DVD, "In Person . . . Live," recorded at Northern Virginia public access station WNTB, features even more of the label's artists, including Lyle, saxophonist Jackiem Joyner and guitarist David Dyson.