Part 2 — As a producer:
It’s a busy time. Spent the weekend in the studio working on two projects. Will spend today, the day after Valentines Day, celebrating 14 year anniversary with the Missus. I’ll actually take the day off.
The rest of the winter months and spring are loaded with music projects for Watchfire Music – so many that I must get better organized and get my arms around them all. Here’s a list: (more…)
As a composer and producer I’ve had a long-standing relationship with vocalist, Jenny Burton. I’ve often found her erudite in her ability to describe her craft and art. In the following interview I find her no less prescient. Jenny is a singer blessed with an amazing instrument that can shake the heavens and seed the clouds. She also is a performer extraordinaire. On top of all that, in the studio, she’s a totally experienced pro. I had the chance to interview her lately for Watchfire Music. – PL
Peter Link: Why have you chosen music as your instrument of communication?
Jenny Burton: Without managing to sound too unoriginal or sappy, I must say that it’s more that music chose me — was infused into my bones and my life this time around. I have had the great joy of “just waking up” to it and living in it for these many years. Music is an essential part of who I am. It feeds me on the deepest of levels. I know as well that singing and performing is an honor and affords me the chance to give something back from the highest, most unencumbered parts of my self.
What central idea is most important to you in your communication with your audience?
Truth and clarity are very important to me. The closer I can get to these two aspects of life, the better. There is much that can be accomplished with music that is transcending. I believe one of the reasons “the musical” was conceived is because once the playwright/composer has said all he/she can with the written and spoken word, he then finds it imperative to lay those words atop a groove, give them rhythm, and then a melody. The composer then gives this to a singer to take the scene the rest of the way home.
James Taylor
If you were to ask me, “Who has been your favorite pop star throughout your life?” I’d have to answer that it is a tie between The Beatles and James Taylor. Perhaps that dates me; perhaps, on the other hand, it doesn’t. Both have had such musically triumphant careers and both are sure to be long lasting.
Also both churned out mountains of great music and for me that’s the bottom line. The Beatles were perhaps more eclectic, but Sweet Baby James was, well, just so sweeeet!
As a lyricist, James can be somewhat impressionistic like Paul and Joni, but also could just nail it down with the best of them. He wrote this song for a musical, “Working”, and as a story-telling song, it’s one of the best. It wins my Ira Award for Best Song for a Musical Written by a Pop Star.
Certainly one of my favorite projects of my life has been my work with The Jenny Burton Experience. This truly inspirational group broke all box office records and played to packed houses in their more than seven year run at one of New York City’s top clubs.
In 1996 The Jenny Burton Experience swept all the major music awards in New York City for best vocal group including the MAC Award, The Back Stage Bistro Award and The Critic’s Choice Award. Named as one of Theater Week Magazine’s Top Ten Acts of the ‘94/’95 season, they also won the CAB Award for Entertainers Of The Year.
I had the great privilege of being the principle writer, director and producer for this amazing act and gladly sat through hundreds of their performances over that 7 year span. People would come up to me all the time after shows and say things like, “This is the 9th time I’ve seen the show” or “ This is my church.”
On Broken Pieces – inspirational music
As I begin this post, I can look out the window to my left and there shines up into the sky a beacon of light where a building once stood. It seems to be searching the sky for the people that were lost there. New York City is reminded once again of September 11, 2001.
It’s par for the course. This past week has been very tough on my spirit. As they say, “Sometimes life just ain’t a bowl of cherries; it’s the pits.”
Turn Around Time
We’re going to be all right. I can feel it in the air. The air is still not the normal air of security because we’re still in the woods, but it’s a good clean air of promise and hope.
We’re turning it around. Not only the economy, but the plight of nature, the sad problem of national obesity and even the wreck of the music business. I’ve always heard that the first step of healing is to recognize the problem. If that is so, and my many experiences with healings do prove that out, then we, as a nation, are beginning to turn it around.
It’s a turnaround time.
And what is it that we’re turning around from? It’s simple really. Look at the four major problems above and one concept, one word jumps off the page. Greed. Good ol’ American greed.
I sat at a table having lunch with 8 men all in the prime of their lives, all stricken with AIDS. None of them are with us anymore today. From the experience, only the song, “I Want My Life Back” and I remain on Planet Earth.
I had been commissioned by the Manhattan Plaza AIDS Prevention organization to write a song for their upcoming benefit about AIDS. Not at all the usual request. Not at all a subject that I was excited to write about.
But having lost over a hundred friends to the disease back then in the middle of the epidemic, I took the job because I knew I had something to say; I was qualified. Then, when I started to write about it, there were so many conflicting ideas that I lost my point of view and was struggling to write a single line. I did not want to write something morbid, but could not write something happy, promising or, at the time, particularly hopeful.
Aids was a killer and young artists were dropping like flies all around me here in NYC. Those of you in the hinterlands of America were shielded from the experience and many of you probably never even knew a victim, but here in NYC, it was a whole different story – especially in the theater where a couple of generations of fine young artists – actors, directors, designers, costumers, choreographers and dancers were lost. (more…)
From the weekly feature – Insight – written by Peter Link for Watchfire Music subscribers.
I’ve been most fortunate to spend the last 25 years working with one of the great inspirational music artists of our time – Jenny Burton.
Anyone who has ever had the opportunity to catch her performances with The Jenny Burton Experience (JBX) here in NYC where she ran sold out for 7 years, will attest to the force of her stage personality, the power of her voice and to her depth of commitment to the moment.
Night after night I sat in the back of the hall and watched as she tore the house down, brought people to their feet and rocked their proverbial boats. (more…)
