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TEN- year-old Asmar Johnson is a prodigy on the bass. He’s already played three times at Asbury Park, NJ’s famous Stone Pony nightclub. And even though Asmar is just in the fourth grade, he’s been on TV and has done dozens of live performances, including one recently at a wedding on the beach.
If you catch him on the boardwalk, he’ll play requests, like Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me” and Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Ground.” In the absence of passersby requests, his dad, who is also named Asmar, will bark out song titles.
Big Asmar, as I’ll call the father, then calls out a somewhat strange request: “What’s the one thing you’ll never get?” “A state number,” his son replies. Just so the audience isn’t confused, Big Asmar then asks: “What’s a state number?”
“To go to jail,” the son says, not missing a beat.
Little Asmar has already gotten a lot of publicity because of his musical ability. This column isn’t about him. It is about Big Asmar, a former gangbanger who spent 16 years in prison and who, in his own words, was “a terrible guy. I was dangerous.”
“I tell him I want him to be better than me. Better than what I used to be,” Big Asmar says to me over lunch. I asked him not to bring his son because, first, it was a school day and, second, I couldn’t stand for the kid to be there while Big Asmar told me his life story.
Big Asmar has fathered seven kids, and he takes care of all of them financially.
He hasn’t been in prison for a decade and half. But there were many lockups — Jamesburg, Skillman, Yardville, Trenton, Rahway (twice), Northern State (twice) Annandale and South Woods — resulting from a variety of charges.
“You name it,” he says. Drugs, assault, robbery and aggravated assault, along with the ever-present ‘resisting arrest.’
“When you are young, you make poor decisions,” he says of his past.
During one of his stints at Trenton State, Big Asmar, who’ll turn 51 next month, says his young daughter came for a visit and asked if Daddy loved her. “Of course, I do,” he said. “Then why do you keep going back to prison?” she asked.
Later, Big Asmar found himself crying in his cell. “I told my bunky, and he started crying” [too].”
You’ve probably already read — or even noticed — a serious problem with many black families in America. Poverty. Jail. Households with only a mother. Kids on the street and running in gangs.
At the end of the Great Recession, the US unemployment rate among adult black males was 18 percent. Big Asmar is determined to keep his 10-year-old son from becoming a statistic.
The ex-con, through the Impact Tabernacle Church in South Plainfield, NJ, now counsels at-risk kids.
“I’m a changed man today and I try to help make people and children better.” And, Big Asmar says, people seem to listen because “they believe in me because I lived that life once.”
Sadly, there is still danger in the streets. His adult goddaughter was recently murdered, and he couldn’t do anything about it.
“I finally got myself together because of my kids,” Big Asmar tells me. “Everything is good.”
He has learned in recent years that men are important in their children’s lives. “Our voices change kids,” he says. “Black men should become a father to their kids. It’s so important.
“A man can only be a man. A woman can only be a woman,” says Big Asmar, who has full custody of his three underage kids. He used his time in prison to get his GED and take some college courses. “I tried to enhance [myself] while I was there.”
Big Asmar is on disability for a back injury. He sold five of the 10 bass guitars he owned to get Little Asmar’s career going. The money the kid earns goes toward that career — publicity, equipment, travel expenses and such.
“Sometimes, we get offered to go places where they don’t pay,” Big Asmar says, and the donations his son earns playing on the boardwalk or the $200 he got for playing at a boardwalk wedding last Saturday go toward those gratis gigs. The happy newlyweds also gave Little Asmar a five-string bass as a gift, which was worth about $1,000.
Music has already helped Little Asmar by bringing him closer to his dad and, he hopes, keeping him out of trouble. “When you put your time into [music], it takes you away from a whole lot of other stuff,” Big Asmar says. Bad stuff. Big Asmar bills his son, who has been playing only three years, as The Baddest Kid Bass Guitar Player in the World. (His Web site is www.LilAsmar.com.) Yes, that is a lot better than a state number.