LIFE & LEISURE
MUSIC SCENE: R & B, Cuban influences help Kearney find her soul
By JAY N. MILLER
For The Patriot Ledger
Jen Kearney treasures a capsule description of her music that was posted on the CDBaby web site by someone who had heard her 2002 CD ‘‘Bravery.’’
‘‘It sounds like Stevie Wonder goes to Cuba,’’ said the blurb.
Which is a pretty impressive musical identity for a white woman from Hingham.
Kearney and her band The Lost Onion host a Christmas party Dec. 23 at Ryles Jazz Club in Inman Square, Cambridge.
‘‘I think that was such a cool comparison,’’ said Kearney, from her Lowell home. ‘‘Stevie Wonder was an enormous influence on me growing up. Then a few years ago, I was working at a bakery and discovered this great program of Cuban music at 4 a.m. I totally fell in love with it, and began implementing Latin styles like that into my own music. What I find so amazing about Cuban music is the way they can play piano almost as a percussion instrument - something that corresponds very well with my own style of playing.’’
Kearney, who plays piano and guitar as well as singing in her band, began her music career as a violinist from third grade to seventh grade. ‘‘My grandfather had played violin, and my mom was a singer, and my uncle Sal played piano,’’ Kearney recalled. ‘‘My brother and I would hang out with Uncle Sal and watch him play piano and teach us things about music all day. While I was playing violin in grade school, I also began singing in the school chorus.
‘‘Then I got away from it a little bit, until my senior year in high school when I joined a rock band.’’
Alas, the name of that long gone Hingham High rock group has been lost to history, but Kearney reports that they performed a heavier brand of rock than she’s focusing on now. Led Zeppelin, Living Colour, The Who and The Doors might have comprised an average set list. Kearney admits her own tastes had taken a slightly different turn.
‘‘I would listen to Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, and all these old soul records my mother had,’’ she said. ‘‘Like every kid with their own imagination running wild, I’d emulate them in my room every day, pretending I was a rock star. Today, my music totally comes out like Aretha, Otis and the Jackson Five - all that soul, and people always think my appearance doesn’t match the sounds coming out of me. I take it as a compliment, because I think somehow, by osmosis, that music has really become who I am musically.’’
Enthralled with the performing bug, Kearney looked for a good music school and settled on UMass-Lowell. The fact that she couldn’t read music when she went in didn’t deter her, but it was a major factor in her leaving school after two years.
‘‘Not being able to read music made it tough to get through the music courses there,’’ she said. ‘‘Looking back I wish I had learned how. But I came out a performer. And I met so many good musicians, we decided to play together, and eventually began writing our own songs.’’
Some friends in the rock band The Shods had a basement studio with an ancient reel-to-reel recording system, so Kearney became part of a loose aggregation of musicians who’d gather there to jam, compose their own tunes, and eventually record them for fun.
That funky basement setting became the home of Poor House Records, and its first project was a compilation album of area songwriters.
‘‘That’s what really got me writing my own music,’’ said Kearney. ‘‘I jumped right in, and I loved it. There’s a soul-baring quality to soul music that makes it almost therapeutic, and writing it feels natural to me now.’’
Currently Kearney has a four-song EP available on her web site (jenkearney.com) that’s a sort of appetizer for her forthcoming album, expected in March. The EP contains three new compositions, as well as a gritty cover of Aretha Franklin’s ‘‘Dr. Feelgood.’’ Some of the other cuts she’s been doing recently, which will be on the full album, features the Boston Horns.
Kearney had been playing in more of a pop-rock style in a trio, but this new work finds her back in soul city.
‘‘In the rock trio I was playing much more guitar than piano,’’ Kearney noted. ‘‘We were into pop-rock at the time, a bit like the first album I’m on, called ‘Kearney Square (1999),’ which was rock and soul. The trio was definitely more power pop, emphasizing the guitar. I think now I have really found my own voice, and a style I’m completely comfortable in.’’
Kearney’s band, the Lost Onion, includes Georges Lenoc’h on drums, Brian Coakley on bass, Corey B. on trombone, Henley Douglas on saxes, and Yahuba Garcia on Latin percussion.
Partly thorugh her own musical evolution, and partly because her music straddles genres, Kearney hasn’t performed much south of Boston, despite the many blues and R&B clubs. That’s a problem she hopes to overcome soon.
‘‘We haven’t really tried to play the Sea Note (in Hull) yet, for example,’’ she admitted. ‘‘I used to go there a lot as a kid to hear some great R&B, but we haven’t really played much outside Boston. I still have a lot of friends in Hingham, Weymouth, Scituate and Quincy, and they generally come into Boston to see us play. But we are playing in New Hampshire and Connecticut in January, and possibly at the Lizard Lounge in Cambridge after that.
‘‘We’d sure like to get into some of those South Shore clubs, and hopefully the new album in March will help.’’
Originals like ‘‘You’re Wrong This Time’’ and ‘‘Pick Yourself Up’’ show Kearney’s development as a songwriter, while that Latin influence obviously permeates ‘‘Peso del Mundo.’’ And don’t be surprised if her live show includes a Wonder cover, like ‘‘Livin’ For The City,’’ which she frequently does. One of those CDBaby customer reviews calls Kearney’s previous CD ‘‘a perfect combination of samba and soul,’’ and it’s a description she’ll also embrace. For the soul woman from Hingham, following her own path has always been the primary goal.
‘‘I basically try to go by my gut,’’ Kearney said. ‘‘Like anybody else, I had my struggles and doubts at the beginning. You need people you can trust to bounce things off, but you also have to trust yourself and your own songwriting talent. It often comes down to having the guts to do it your way. I used to have this falsetto voice that I’d affect to try and sound girlie, while my speaking voice is obviously much lower. I had a good friend tell me to just find my own voice and let it out. I think it all started to come together for me when I finally found the guts to let my own voice fly out.’’
Jay Miller - The Patriot Ledger (Dec 16, 2005)
No Tears: Jen Kearney and the Lost Onion
by Rodney X
I f you're lucky and in the right place at the right time, one can come across music
that is not only great, interesting, meaningful and fun, but actually sustaining and
nourishing. Music that seems to take hold of the listener and makes sense out of
whatever doubt, fear, or desire a person may bring to it. Sometimes music can give
voice and physicality to a repressed desire. In my experiences in club land, I have
found that although bands with this quality are few and far between, they are there.
These possibilities make seeing live music worth it. Sometimes the band itself doesn't
know that soul is the key to this. It's not soul music per se, but the expression of the artist's soul through the medium of music. A case in point is Jen Kearney and the Lost
Onion.
Jen Kearney displayed this prowess on her earliest recordings. As an upstart teenager in 1994, she stole the show on the local Poorhouse Records Volume 1 Compilation CD with four live studio tracks. She opened the disc with “They Were in Love”, a cryptic
50s-style R&B song that displayed her blossoming songwriting skills. On “You're Wrong This Time”, her voice delicately and vulnerably climbed to an empowering soul wail in the span of a breath. The moody tones of her Fender Rhodes piano, all atmosphere, rang with heavy portent. Additionally, her vocals on local legend Rick Fuller's tunes were in turn ethereal and grounding. She became a favorite during the eclectic local music revival in the late '90s. Things got serious when she formed Kearney Square in 1998, a power trio featuring Jen on guitar and keyboard, Bob Nash on drums and Jim Pittman on bass. They played psychedelic hard rock with a heavy dose of funk, along with the
occasional show stopping AC/DC cover. They rocked. Testament to this fact lies on their debut CD On Fire, named after their set closing number. The song is a swirling Middle Eastern- flavored rocker that displayed the amazing range of her voice and tested
the confines of a three piece combo. After a couple of years of relentless gigging, Kearney Square disbanded. Experience and travel had broadened Jen's horizons
and taken her songwriting into new directions. In 2002, she released her self-produced solo record Bravery. This album expanded her sound tenfold with the addition of some stellar horn playing and tasty percussion by members of what would become
The Lost Onion. Jen explored Cuban-tinged dance music and straight-out pop. The new band became road-tested and tight, regularly playing the Boston to New York circuit in addition to local gigs. The current lineup consists of the following: Jen Kearney on
guitar, vocals and keyboard, Latin percussion guru, Yahuba on various instruments, Brian Coakley on bass, Corey B. on trombone, Georges Lenochon on drums, Rima Jakabauskas on sax, and Mark Mullins on trumpet. They are completing a full-length CD (still untitled) that Jen guesses is a couple months away. I met her in a workingman's pub, and after a pitcher and a game of pool, I let some questions fly.
R:Have you considered it a help or hinderance being a woman
in the music world?
J:Well it helps in some ways, but like most things there is the other
side where there have been some drawbacks.
R:Stalkers?
J: No not really, but like dealing with people pigeonholing you on the
first impressions they get and even people being intimidated in
some ways.
R:Well you are very talented, as well as being very attractive
and confident in your individual style, stage presence and
demeanor.
J:Aw shucks.
R:No, that's not quite what I mean. You are very at home on
stage and in a lot of circumstances that type of confidence is
a little intimidating, especially with such powerful music and
your delivery.
J: No, I'm not exactly a shrinking violet.
R:How much room is there for improvisation in your songs?
J: Everyone in the band has their say. I like to let them write their
own parts, but those parts are pretty much set when we play out.
Yahuba will write out the horn parts once we work it out. Then
they're pretty much set. In some of our newer songs, like there's
one with a Soca rythym, the horn parts are very tight. But there
are other songs that we play live that we open up and have more
room for improv or solos. Very rarely do I write with say, a bass
part in mind. If I do I'll suggest it, but the beauty of having a great
band is that the are versatile and can play it the way you wanted it
or with slight variations or can come up with something totally
different.
R:What was the worst gig?
J: Oh no, this is bad. In my first year at UMass, I hooked up with
some people from my dorm who wanted to form a band. And they
seemed nice. The music was kind of way out there and loud hippie
rock. The band was called Allah's Crystal Moon.
R:That should have tipped you off.
J: You live and you learn. Anyway we practiced together like twice
when the singer says he's booked a gig. I was psyched envisioning
a cool college gig; keg beer, dancing, illicit behavior, you know
fun. After a two hour drive, we arrive at a nursing home full of not
very ambulatory senior citizens who were wheeled down to the
function room for some "music". I nervously began playing some
light jazz on the piano while Allah's Crystal Moon was settingup,
knowing what was coming. We played the full set and it was just
not appropriate. I wanted to crawl away and die. Awful just awful.
R:What advice do you have for women or anyone who wants to
get into playing?
J: Be prepared for the worst, that way you'll never be surprised by
anything, just kidding. Kind of. Really though, get as many gigs as
possible, because they are all learning experiences. You must be
confident in yourself and do it for yourself, because there will be
times on stage when things aren't going great and you'll need to
focus on why you're doing it. Don't let the praise get you too high
or the criticism get you too low. If you're doing it for yourself the
praise and the criticism won't be important anyway.
Rodney X - NoMASoNHA magazine (Jun 5, 2005)