Singer Nancy Kelly reinventing herself as music educator
By Lou Sorendo
She’s still jazzing it up! At the age of 57, jazz singer Nancy Kelly is nowhere close to slowing down. In fact, she’s ramping up her activity. Kelly’s captivating singing voice, rhythm-driven vocals and good time energy have netted many awards as well as the hearts of many fans around the globe for over 30 years.
Kelly’s longevity and passion for music is in her blood.
For Kelly, her jazz career is indeed a calling. She shares this calling with Tony Bennett, who quipped, “I don’t want to sing. I have to.”
“It’s a drive. It’s a love. It’s no different than wanting to have a great meal or wanting to see great scenery,” she said.
“It’s an experience that you enjoy being able to give people,” she added. Kelly said jazz is a “reciprocating thing” as musicians are fueled by the feedback received from appreciative audiences, and vice versa.
“I look out and see people smiling and it’s just a joy,” she said. “It’s just a joy that I can do something I love and people enjoy watching me do it. “Entertaining is a byproduct of me just doing the music. It’s a result of my interpretation of music.”
Kelly was born on Oct. 12, 1950 in Rochester. Starting at age four in her hometown, Kelly studied piano, clarinet, drama and dance with private instructors, and voice at the Eastman School of Music.
Words of wisdom
Kelly is quite succinct when offering words of advice to someone interested in breaking into the jazz music industry. “Make sure you have a real job,” she said with a laugh. “Seriously, I would not discourage anyone.” She has several young hopefuls who are studying voice with her, and that’s just in the Upstate region. Thirty years ago, there were only two colleges in the country that taught jazz, she said. Now, every college has a jazz program, and high schools are following.
“We’re turning out jazz players one right after another, and there’s no place for them to play,” she said.
Kelly said the country now only features 10 major jazz clubs. “We’re not talking little jazz joints. We’re talking about major marquee rooms that even I have a hard time getting into,” she said.
Kelly said the jazz industry has turned into “what we call magazine cover jazz. If you are 19, you can get somewhere in the business.”
“All of us over 55 know how difficult it is to compete in a youth-oriented society,” she added.
She said there are the established famous performers—such as Nancy Wilson and Winton Marcellus—and then the young “magazine cover” musicians. “If you are young and good looking, then you have a shot in this business,” she said.
“I’ve established myself and I’m respected, so I’m cool with that,” she said. She advises the up-and-coming jazz performer to get into the New York City or Los Angeles markets, and even go to school in those cities.
The marketing game
Kelly said jazz musicians are different in the respect that they generally perform simply for the love of it.
“We don’t even think about making it or marketing ourselves,” said Kelly, who has mastered “scat” and “swing.” Scat is a style of jazz singing that uses nonsense syllables to approximate the sound of a solo instrument. Swing is a style of big-band jazz music suitable for dancing.
However, when Kelly became single several years ago, she had to intensely begin a marketing effort. “I was going to have to get better known or find something else to do,” she said. “I did both.”
She entered the world of teaching and built her own Web site. “You have to have a presence in this business,” she commented. “I was on the scene when record companies did marketing for you,” said Kelly, referring to alternatives such as the computerized trend of downloading music. The role of record companies has since been diminished.
She said a phenomenon exists in the music world that features the prevalence of “vanity CDs.”
“Anybody with a desire to make a recording of themselves and has money can go into a studio and make a CD,” she said. These same folks then pay for marketing. “It costs $3,000 to get a record played on the radio nowadays,” she said.
Conversely, Kelly said her CDs are an intricate part of my gaining work. “They are part of my whole scene, not just because I want to see my picture in Down Beat magazine,” she said.
Jazz radio stations throughout the country—including WAER in Syracuse—are literally inundated by CDs from performers who no one has ever heard of, Kelly noted. She said the key is to utilize an influential radio promoter who can access airtime. She said there are only a handful of solid radio promoters in the country, and the product has to be strong enough to meet their lofty standards.
“You have to buy a radio promoter and your product has to be good enough to hire the good ones,” she said.
“It’s going to cost money to be in with the right people,” she said. “The good news is that a lot of that vanity stuff doesn’t get through to hard-core jazz guys.”
“They’re really promoting good jazz and won’t take that on,” she added.
She blames capitalist tendencies on watered-down music for the sake of the almighty dollar. Musicians get exploited for the sake of profit, she said. “They don’t care who they use,” she said. “Nothing is solely about talent anymore.”
New teaching career
Kelly teaches people how to use their voice, and doesn’t limit her teaching to strictly jazz singing. There’s classical and pop, and everything that is not classical is considered pop, she noted.
Kelly has started teaching “The Art of Popular Singing” at Onondaga Community College this fall. Teaching represents a second career of sorts for Kelly, and she looks forward to interacting with people associated with academia.
“In my world, a lot of jazz players are all teaching because there’s not a lot of places to play anymore,” she said.
Kelly said her goal is to teach at a major college and she would relocate for such venture.
In fact, Kelly is helping to pioneer a teaching approach called “speech singing” or “conversational singing.”
“I know of only one other teacher in the country who is using this approach,” she said.
Speech level singing involves making vocal cord adjustments in order to sing high and low in a particular range.
“I’ve uncovered a way to get them to understand this music that I think is unique. I’m going to write a book and produce a video,” she said.
Kelly said while every high school and college in the country teaches singing, it is of the classical variety.
“No one is teaching popular singing,” she said. Even those who teach jazz are classically trained, she noted.
Kelly intends on getting grounded at OCC and perhaps use the experience as the basis for her book.
“That old phrase, ‘When a door closes, another opens,’ is really true,” she said.
Where is jazz headed?
Kelly has toured the world with her prized voice, but doesn’t necessarily prefer being in concert.
During her 30-plus year career, she has honed her trademark swing/bop style in front of audiences across the U.S. and abroad, including Singapore, Switzerland, France, Turkey and several tours of Japan.
Nancy appears regularly in New York City, and works frequently in Los Angeles and Miami, as well as countless jazz clubs, festivals, and symphony orchestra engagements across the country.
She has a daughter and grandson in Manhattan.
“Jazz is something that an audience should be part of. They should be feeling it, smiling, clapping and egging you on,” she said.
She said jazz has turned into a “black tie affair, something that it’s just not.”
“Jazz belongs in a small, very intimate club. That’s my favorite venue,” she said.
Kelly is engaged in what she terms “salon jazz.” With jazz clubs struggling, wealthy families in cities across the country are using their homes as venues to host jazz shows.
People pay $40 to $50 to hear world-renowned performers, she said.
She also enjoys working at Dizzy’s Club at Lincoln Center in New York City. “It feels good there,” she said.
Kelly also plays at Patz on the River in Oswego, which gives her a chance to bond with local fans.
The next step
Kelly is planning to produce a live CD. She acquired a new manager, Joan Merrill of “Saying it With Jazz” based in Seattle, who decided to produce the CD.
Kelly has had several managers, but “their agenda was perhaps not what it should have been.”
“I’m in the right place I need to be right now,” she said.
This first venture is seen as quite a challenge to a singer who has been told that she sounds better live than on a CD.
“We’ll see. It should be interesting,” said Kelly, noting that the CD is scheduled to be recorded in late November and released in January.
“I’m always excited about making a record,” she said.
“The jazz world is becoming more like the pop industry,” she said. “You have to be current.”
Her “Born to Swing” CD was released in 2007, but Kelly already characterizes it as being “old.”
“You have to be constantly present and on the scene. People have to be hearing and seeing you,” she said.
Her loving fans
Kelly characterizes her fan base as being mostly older, although she does see a lot of young faces in the audience.
The young fans, however, are those who are being taught jazz.
“These are young people who are being exposed to it, so they want to come out and see it live,” she said.
Kelly said she doesn’t foresee a resurgence of jazz in her lifetime, but through education, the fan base will grow.
“It’s a matter of them just getting educated and listening to it,” she said.
Kelly said jazz won’t ever develop a mass appeal because it takes a certain kind of intellect to appreciate it.
“We’re living in an immediate satisfaction culture,” she said. “A lot of people are so used to having information thrown at them.”
“Anytime someone has to sit and listen and pay attention, they lose focus,” she said. “Jazz requires your attention, and at this point in our social growth, the country is not in a place where people want to spend much time paying attention,” she added.
“That may change because of the spiritual awakening that’s going on in the world,” she said. “At that point, we may see a resurgence of art forms that demand attention.”
Kelly said the key to drawing in an audience is simply being yourself.
“I’m a little fireplug,” she said.
She said audiences expect to be entertained. “Where I go musically, they want to go. They want to experience what I’m experiencing. It’s my responsibility to perform music in a way that takes them with me.”
“That’s what makes you a success. You got to give. You better tell it. Give it up. Bring it. Or people are going to get bored,” she said.
For more information, check out www.nancykelly.com on the worldwide Web. Kelly designed and built her own Web site, and considers herself somewhat of a computer geek.”
