Although he started taking piano lessons at age eight, Johnson was driven to the tuba and became quite accomplished on the instrument. After a year at URI, he transferred to Berklee College of Music and continued to pursue a tuba major. But the piano kept calling him. “I just really wanted to play the piano, I guess,” the keyboardist said.

After finishing his studies at Berklee in 1980, he was with a progressive rock band in Toronto for a year. Then he joined the Navy as a keyboard player and had three fascinating posts – Naples, Italy; San Francisco; and Newport. (Johnson owns Spring Street Spirits and jokes that he discovered his other obsession, wine, in Naples).

When he left the Navy, the musician played in a hot San Francisco reggae band for four years before returning to Newport in 2000 when he, along with bassist Peter Davis, launched a new jazz combo called MSD. Taken from the Latin phrase Modus scholasticus dominus, it loosely translates to “musical schoolyard.”