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Bio | Photos | Credits | |
| Seeking a better sort of obscurity Kenny White just wants a few fans and he deserves them Kenny White makes smart, sophisticated songs for adults.
"I don't have 15 years to develop anything more than a grassroots following," he says in the lobby of the Hyatt Regency Hotel. It's the morning after he performed a spectacular five-song showcase set on a keyboard in a tiny suite upstairs for a handful of hand-picked delegates at the 17th annual North American Folk Alliance Conference. "If I could make a living playing music, if I could do 150 gigs a year and have a small but devoted core of fans, I would be content. I'm a realist: I won't get a break, not at my age." White's unofficial "guerrilla" showcase was an electrifying 30-minute
presentation of songs from his new CD, Symphony in 16 Bars - it's released in North
America next week on Judy Collins' boutique roots music label, Wildflower Records,
distributed in Canada by Universal Music. Also, one key piece, "In My Recurring White stunned the small audience of talent buyers, booking agents and music industry hustlers with his soaring, cinematic melodies and symphonic arrangements, his acidic and mirthful confessions of regret, self-loathing and love, and his colourful, jazzy, oh-so-New York narratives enlivened by vivid characters and enriched with canny, sexy dialogue and a tender worldliness. It was an impressive entree by a new and important artist. "At last, music for adults," one of the small number of witnesses sighed when she had decompressed. And that may be Kenny White's saving grace. Though he says, "I hate stage
musicals, particularly Sondheim's, and a lot of what passes for folk music," White's
unashamedly mature and complex work conveys more than a passing acquaintance with
sophisticated strains of musical theatre - with Brecht, Weil and Sondheim - as well as
arcane forms of traditional song, Grateful Dead-inspired jazz-rock improvisation and
serious symphonic structures. His songs emerge from the surrounding jangle-and-strum In a way, White is a visitor from another world. A note on the booklet that
accompanies Symphony in 16 Bars pays homage to his populist intentions - Louis
Armstrong's famous line: "All music is folk music - I ain't never heard a horse sing a
song." But White is no folksinger, though he has worked as a long-time accompanist to
Boston's first lady of roots music, singer-songwriter Cheryl Wheeler. In the studio and on Sideman credits notwithstanding, however, White has spent most of his professional life writing, arranging, scoring and producing jingles in the lucrative Madison Ave. advertising marketplace - spoiled, he says, by being able to work with the cream of New York's musical crop. Some of them contributed to White's own recordings. "I've been writing songs all these years, but I was not connected to them," White continues. "In the 1980s I did open some shows for Jonathan Edwards, and each of those spots was the longest 40 minutes of my life. Now an hour alone on stage passes like two minutes. It's about the music now, what's inside the songs. Back then I don't think I had a voice. I was writing lots of songs, but not saying anything. "So I kinda drifted into the advertising business, which still gave me access to music but didn't ask anything personal." The watershed came in 2000, following the breakup of his 14-year marriage, when White underwent psychotherapy in search of reasons. Uninvited Guest is a howling, bittersweet, Bergmanesque chronicle of that painful dissolution, 16 Bars a diary of personality repair management, loaded with insight, a reporter's eye for detail, and a great deal of the kind of self-deprecating good humour that makes Woody Allen's romantic movies so memorable. "Therapy freed me up to go places I'd always kept hidden," White continues. "I was not a very revealing person up till then, always closed off. I thought hiding your vulnerability is what men do. I've learned that admitting to being vulnerable takes a lot more strength." One 16 Bars piece, "Five Girls," outlines White's new manifesto in unambiguous terms: "Maybe leave something more than ashes in a pile/You got a brain, you got style/So you might as well put it on the line once in a while." It's a song he's particularly proud of, now that he has started taking his own advice and finally, after 20 years, hit the road again - with a vengeance, on what seems to be a perpetual double-bill tour with Wheeler. They played Toronto's Hugh's Room a couple of weeks ago. Still, the anxiety that stifled White for so many years isn't far beneath the surface. "It's different on the road than it was in the 1970s, particularly at my age," he
says. "And I've always had to have some kind of tether, one foot in and one foot out. It's
nice to know there's nothing to go back to, but the idea of just heading on and on out
there ... it's frightening." |
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