With New Album In Hand Jazzman Keenan Is Still Celebrating The Spontaneity Of Jazz

By Shannon Hicks

Former Newtown resident Wayne Keenan and his wife Alma regularly spend their summers in Newtown, traveling north when the weather gets too hot in Mexico, where they live the rest of the year. This year Mr Keenan is celebrating the release of his second album, called Blue-Out. So while the couple continue their annual visit to southern Newtown, Mr Keenan is preparing for something he has not done in ten years: He will be performing, with friends, in Edmond Town Hall’s Alexandria Room on Saturday, August 11, at 8 pm.

“The music [on the new album] is real jazz, as compared to contemporary smooth jazz, the stuff you usually find on the radio these days,” Mr Keenan said recently. ­Blue-Out offers listeners everything from Latin and bossa nova to swing and even a pair of cover songs. Audiences can expect plenty of the same next week.

“The new CD has more variety than the first,” said Mr Keenan, who is spending a number of weeks, along with his wife, in Newtown with some friends.

Mr Keenan began playing music in college. After graduating from Newtown High School (he was in the first class to graduate from the then-“new building” on Berkshire Road, in 1971), he started classes at Western Connecticut State University. He also began practicing saxophone up to seven hours every day. At that pace, he quickly found himself caught up, technically, with the music students who had been playing for years.

“The only problem was, I was practicing jazz and they were doing classical. There was a bit of a conflict there,” he told The Bee for a 2001 feature. With classical music a performer or group of musicians strives to play someone else’s composition to perfection, whereas with jazz the musician or musicians create something new each time a work is performed, Mr Keenan says.

After Mr Keenan finished WCSU with a minor in music, he studied for a few years with Jackie McClean, an alto sax player who had played and studied with Charlie Parker. Mr Keenan studied with Mr McClean before Mr McClean went on to teach at Hartt School of Music.

“[Jackie McClean was] the one who taught me not only who Charlie Parker was, but really, what jazz is all about,” Mr Keenan said ten years ago, when he was celebrating the release of his first album, Counter-Logic. “It’s about creativity, and being proficient on your instruments. It’s about continuously expanding your limits.”

Mr Keenan is still devoted to “progressive, mainstream” jazz, he said recently, and is frustrated by what he sees as a loss of creativity and experimenting in the genre.

“It’s very difficult to keep up the art of jazz,” he said. “People just aren’t following the masters any more. People are listening to smooth jazz, and radio is playing danceable jazz. Most are not looking for foundations.”

Like Counter-Logic, Blue-Out was recorded on the spot in the studio. This time around Mr Keenan gathered friends at Manor Recordings, a studio in Middletown owned by longtime jazz guitarist and bassist Norman Johnson.

Blue-Out album has nine songs; unlike its predecessor there are a pair of cover songs. The album includes offers jazzy arrangements of the Beatles’s “Eleanor Rigby” and Janis Ian’s “At Seventeen,” the latter offering a 9 minute, 20 second, contemplation of Ian’s 1975 single about adolescent cruelty and the illusion of popularity (without the lyrics, naturally).

The collection’s remaining seven songs include “Back Alley,” about the places we should not be at night; “Dos Suenos,” the notes for which came to Mr Keenan while he was sleeping; “La Sombra,” Spanish for “the shadow,” because, the musician wrote in his liner notes, “we are mere shadows of our true selves”; “Lilies In The Wind,” for “dreams that are waiting”; “Third Down,” “just an early jazz, bop, swing thing”; and “Seismograph,” an eerie melody that pays homage to “the devastation from natural disasters.” The album’s closing track, the song opens with crashing cymbals that sounds like they could set off a seismograph before the track mellows into a calmer, musical aftermath.

The album’s title track, Mr Keenan says, offers “a 13-bar head [and] some Thelonious Monk influence.”

Mr Keenan handled the writing of seven songs on Blue-Out in addition to performing tenor, alto, and soprano saxes and flute.

Copies of Blue-Out can be purchased online through CDBaby.com and Amazon.com for $15 to $20. “It’s on multiple sites, you can just Google it,” he said, and then offered a lead for those who want to purchase one from the source: “You can also purchase Blue-Out at the [August 11] show, for a discount.”

Mr Keenan will have copies of the CD available at Edmond Town Hall, and will sell those for $10 each.

All but one of the musicians who played in the studio for the recording of Blue-Out plan to be in Newtown for Wayne Keenan & Friends. Arti Dixson (drums, percussion, toys and sounds, who performed with Janis Ian, among others), Mike Asetta on acoustic bass, and Joe “J. Mac” McWilliams on grand piano made up the rhythm section in the studio. John DaSilva provided trumpet for one song and flugelhorn for another pair, and Norman Johnson added acoustic guitar for three of the album’s tracks. All except Mr DaSilva will be performing in Newtown.

“The last time these guys and I played together was when we recorded the album last year,” said Mr Keenan, who will not rehearse with his friends and fellow musicians before the show in Newtown. “They’re all professionals, so I know I can count on them again in a few weeks. We’ll go over the heads [melodies] before the show, then set our forms, and then the show will be spontaneous from there.

“And that,” said Mr Keenan, “is what jazz should be.”

When he performed in Newtown ten years ago, tickets sold out. Mr Keenan is certainly hoping for the same response again, and is encouraged at the number of tickets that have already been sold or reserved for next weekend.

Tickets for Wayne Keenan & Friends on Saturday, August 11, are $15. They can be purchased at the town hall’s box office, or reserved by calling 203-270-9525 or sending an e-mail to wankancun@aol.com. The Norman Johnson Trio will offer an opening set.