Jazz Singer Nancy Kelly
Slated to be inducted into the Rochester Music Hall of Fame this year, singer talks about music, local roots, COVID-19 and the urge to perform
By John Addyman
Kelly
Spend a little time with Nancy Kelly.
Ask her to explain a song from the Great American Songbook. Listen while she talks about the lyrics of the song, about the rhythm of the music. Let the rhythm touch you. Think about the meaning of the words, and apply your own life experience to them. Decide how you’d speak those words to someone. Then watch as Kelly steps into a room and sings that song … and you’ll never think about a song the same way again.
Nancy Kelly, 70, is a jazz singer and her voice, personality and verve serve to construct a New York treasure. She is on deck to be inducted into the Rochester Music Hall of Fame, whenever that body can meet again.
She’s been waiting a year. COVID-19 has erased a lot of her plans.
“How can you plan anything when 40% of the country won’t get a shot, much less put a mask on?” she said from her home studio in Fair Haven.
When COVID-19 fell on us, it erased the Hall of Fame induction and Kelly’s booking a European tour.
Singing since she was 13, playing a piano since she was 4, and picking up a lot of other instruments along the way, Kelly has built a career that criss-crosses the state, the country and the globe.
And she’s done it her way, with six acclaimed CDs, a wall full of awards, including Downbeat magazine’s Best Female Vocalist (twice), Hall of Fame recognition from the Syracuse Area Music Awards, many more individual honors — even an Unsung Heroine Award from the National Organization of Women.
Looking back, she couldn’t help herself from being thrust into a world where an audience would focus on her for an evening.
She was raised in a Rochester home where dad, Orville “OP” Kelly, was a Honeywell engineer who was into acoustics and built his own high-definition speakers to listen to jazz. Mom, Ruth, played the piano and loved Fats Waller tunes. Granddad had a society band in Rochester. Uncle Charlie played music for a living. Sister Lynne and brother Gene watched Kelly develop.
“There was always music around me, all the time,” Kelly said. By age 3 or 4, “I would hear my mother play something on the piano and just go over and play it … play it by ear. They hooked me up with a great piano teacher. I took lessons from a woman who had been at Julliard — she was wonderful. She took me as far as she could. They told me I was at college level at age 13.”
Teen years
But then things changed dramatically. The teenage Nancy Kelly fell under the spell of John, Paul, George and Ringo. Her mom bought her a guitar and Kelly learned to play it. And drums. And bass. She got together with three girlfriends and started a band.
“We were horrible, but we were cute,” she said. “I got bamboozled into singing.”
Bandleader Bill Hooper saw her at one performance and asked her to jump bands.
“That was the start of my journey. I wanted to play tunes my way. I never wanted to play what was on the sheet of music — I wanted to play my own stuff. Everyone knew early on I wanted to be an improvisational musician.”
Her independence led to a young marriage and daughter, Kellie, but her career was starting to sprout. The young family moved to Scottsville, where Kellie could get a lot of attention from family.
“I chased around after a band called October Young, a Rochester rock band. I wanted very much to play for them, which never happened. They broke up and we formed our own group ’Crackers.’ Then came a second group, ‘Pearl Alley.’ We toured up and down the East Coast, the Midwest; I was singing light rock. We were all kids.”
She and Kellie moved to the Albany area when Kelly was talked into singing for Merlin’s Minstrels.
“They were very, very popular,” Kelly said. “It was not uncommon to have 1,000 people at the show. We played up and down the corridor of Saratoga, Troy and Albany. It was a real, working band.
“One night I was in the club, a pianist came in and said to me he had just come off the road with the Jimmy Dorsey orchestra. He said to me, ‘You know, you could sing jazz. You have great ears.’
“I said ‘OK,’ and came back to Rochester, where he proceeded to teach me all the standards. That’s when I sang with Jim Richmond’s band, Saratoga, with Oliver Wiggins. I did my Rickie Lee Jones thing and sang ‘Chuck E’s in Love’ and people went crazy.”
That was in the late 1970s, said Richmond. “She is a true talent and one of the best jazz vocalists anywhere! She was a real crowd favorite. We have remained friends and stay in touch with each other and being a board member for the Rochester Music Hall of Fame, I am thrilled that she will be inducted as soon as this COVID leaves or dies down.”
Hire on the spot
In her music progression, Kelly found another mentor, Joey Santora. “He got me going with jazz,” she said. Now in Philadelphia, she and Santora started a new band, ‘Rage,’ that toured in the Philly-Atlantic City area. Then again, Kelly found herself back in Rochester, eventually meeting two guys from Syracuse to begin the Nancy Kelly trio that nailed down a four-year weekend gig at Sakura’s Japanese Restaurant in Syracuse. “It was standing room only on weekends,” she said.
She had also settled for almost the last time in Fair Haven, in what had been the summer home for her grandparents. The house was the former Portmaster’s House, the old North Fair Haven Post Office. “I love it here,” she said. “It hasn’t been good for my career, but I love it. I’m close to my family, my grandson, Graham, is here. You have to choose between your family and your music sometimes.”
By now she had started to develop a career that was thriving in Rochester and in Syracuse, but another trip to Philadelphia really opened things up. “I met a fellow who was up here summering. We moved to Wilmington, Delaware, and I went looking for work. I marched my little butt straight into a jazz club in Philly, a Black jazz club, ‘Jewels.’ And I found something out. Here in New York, we’re used to diversity. I didn’t realize the further south you go, the more segregated things get. I didn’t know that. I walked right in the club. Anybody who knows me knows I’m a little fearless. And then I asked the organ player if I could sit in. If I had a picture of the look on his face, it would be worth millions. ‘Yeah, right – she wants to sit in,’ he said. And I did, and I became the house singer for four years. I was hired on the spot.”
That was 1986.
Someone sent a cassette tape of Kelly’s singing to Jeff Tyzik, who was producing records for Doc Severinsen and would become familiar to Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra fans later on. Tyzik shared the tape with Lenny Silver of Amherst Records in Buffalo.
“Lenny adored me,” Kelly said. “He put a lot of money in me. We went out to Hollywood to produce my first record. It was a thrilling, thrilling thing. My first album is called ‘Live Jazz’ and that’s what Lenny wanted to do. I’m one of those singers who’s better live than recorded. Some people just do better live. Lenny wanted to put an audience in the studio and make it feel like it was being recorded live. There was very little editing on that record — what you heard, happened. I was very young, courageous.”
People connected with that young, courageous voice and the album reached 11th on the Billboard charts. Charlie Graziano, the manager for the Spyrogyra jazz group, was tasked to get Kelly jobs.
“It’s a timing thing,” she explained. “As your record goes up, you have to be working, but he never got me any work. That whole record climbed and fell. I’ve been struggling ever since. I’ve been groveling to get back where that was. Lenny did two more records with me (‘Singin’ & Swingin’ in 1997 and ‘Born to Swing’ in 2006) but didn’t put the money in those that he did on that first record.”
But her songs were getting played, and Kelly started touring. Two three-month residencies in Japan followed where she sang in the country’s jazz clubs. She sang in Hong Kong, Indonesia, Turkey, Switzerland, Thailand…and was planning that European tour when the coronavirus changed everything. She traveled with a pianist who chose the other accompanist by location, filling out Kelly’s trio. That was Dino Losito’s role over a period of 30 years.
Three more CDs came out — “Well, Alright” in 2009, “B That Way” in 2014 (eight weeks in the top 50 Jazzweek charts), and most recently, ‘Remembering Mark Murphy’ in 2019 on the Syracuse-born SubCat label.
Studios in East Rochester
Singing in person, Kelly is a force.
Losito saw it first-hand. “She has a big personality, an eye-catching stage presence. She’s not a docile little woman. Lots of singers have wonderful voices, but what’s different with Nancy is what she brings to the music. She has more of a raw approach, a little more on the cusp, spontaneous, on-the-edge excitement.”
Kelly’s singing, as described by pianist Rick Montalbano, is “big, swinging and flashy, then suddenly thoughtful and intimate. Always warm and humorous too. She loves doing it and it’s the best thing she knows how to do. Her music spurs people on and in turn they spur her on further. Nancy moves people. She seeks sounds that are fresh to her ears and of course, it’s a lot about the spaces, because you’ve got to play those too. But at its best, it’s about her heart.”
That approach to music is something Kelly teaches to a couple dozen vocal students each month. She has studios in East Rochester and SubCat in Syracuse, and can easily log 500 miles of highway a week getting to the lessons.
She teaches technique and heart and listening — and urges experience. “I’ve learned so much from black musicians who couldn’t read music,” she said. “Jazz is a conversation between instruments,” and her voice is one of those instruments.
“It’s no different than standing in a room with four people,” she explained. “They all have read books on a certain subject. They’re well-read. Then you get together and discuss that in a democratic, peaceful way, while voicing your opinions that complement the conversation: that’s what jazz is. We study the music all our lives. We have renewed the language when we get together with similar musicians.
“There are all kinds of jazz musicians – not everyone feels the music like I do. I find people who feel the same way about the subject but have their own life experiences that they bring to the table when we play. When I’m recording a record, I know who belongs on that record. Who fits.”
For her students, learning dialect begins with one song, “Route 66.” She teaches familiarity with 12-bar blue progressions, then how to do speech singing, because you don’t sing “Route 66,” you speak it. Then she helps students understand all the options there are for improvisation — real jazz singing.
“My main focus with students is teaching them to listen to the chords. ‘Where are you?’ I ask. ‘What’s in the room with you? What are those chords doing? Where are they moving? Where are you going to find your note in that chord?’ Getting people to listen is big to me, really big. Be aware of your music surroundings.
“The song is a room, an environment. You’re in a virtual environment, things are going on. ‘What do you hear? What do you feel?’ There is so much to that, it’s almost another dimension,” Kelly said.
Her students investigate all the roots of American music.
She talks about lyrics, telling the story. “When I go off on a riff, I do it because that’s what the lyric did to me,” she said. And in her students, she instills the truth in a song — what the composer was trying to do, and what the singer can do from the heart. As an example, she listed Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child,” and how that same tune has been handled by so many others, each with their own imprint (for example, Whitney Houston, Annie Lennox, Stevie Wonder, George Benson with Al Jarreau and Jill Scott, Aretha Franklin, Sonny Rollins, Steve Miller, Oleta Adams, Tony Bennett, Anita Baker and David Peaston – among many others).
Right now, with her explosive laugh and sanguine good humor, Nancy Kelly is itching to perform and worries about how long she’ll have to wait for the next opportunity. Her calendar, beyond the vocal lessons, is empty and COVID-19 is the villain.
“Nancy and I are both big on making the music feel good and swinging,” Losito said. “She’s great to play with in that regard. She is very sensitive to that. We all play off the energy of the crowd, especially in jazz. Swing music is built for dancers to get up and have a good time. When we’re doing something they like, they holler out. That keeps us playing. We’re missing out on people and their feedback.”
That pandemic thing.
“People are afraid to do things,” Kelly said. ‘We just don’t know how this is going to unfold.”
Zooming With Nancy Kelly
By John Addyman
Writer John Addyman interviews jazz singer Nancy Kelly on Zoom.
While trying to set up an interview with Nancy Kelly for this cover story, it became obvious that distance, weather and COVID-19 were going to be issues. After a week of trying to make arrangements, we settled on a Zoom interview — the first I’ve ever done.
As a rookie Zoomer I was pretty concerned about some technical thing blowing up in the middle of the interview. I always try to be as prepared as possible to make the interviews go professionally and quickly — people’s time is valuable — and I didn’t want to look like a hoo-hah bumbling through the thing while I tried to fix a technical issue I couldn’t begin to understand.
No worries. Nancy was not only a vivacious interview, she is technically proficient, and promised that if I screwed up, she would save me. God bless capable, charitable women.
In the hour and a half we spoke, she searched the internet, took pictures, checked email and kept the conversation light and informative — and Zoom never wavered, never hiccupped. I even managed to record the thing. Marvy.
To commemorate my departure from rookie status, Nancy grabbed screen shots of our interview: she in her Fair Haven home, and me in my Newark home. And here they are.
Jazzing Up the Music Scene
Celebrated jazz singer Nancy Kelly continues to wow public in a career that spans several decades
By Margaret McCormick
Nancy Kelly in January performing at The 443 Social Club and Lounge in Syracuse. Photo by Margaret McCormick.
Club owners usually reach out to Nancy Kelly about potential bookings. But in November, the singer contacted the owners of The 443 Social Club and Lounge in Syracuse about doing a regular monthly gig there.
The 443 is an eclectic space with a small stage, careful attention to sound and lights, comfortable seating, a bar and food — everything a performer and her fans could want. On the evening of Jan. 29, dozens of guests paid $12 at the door and packed in to see Kelly, one of Central New York’s most high-profile and enduring jazz artists.
The singer, attired in flowing black pants, animal print jacket and ballet flats, took the stage with drummer Jimmy Johns and keyboardist Rick Montalbano. For some in attendance, it was like traveling back to the dark, smoky clubs where Kelly established a following in Central New York more than 30 years ago. For others, it was their first time seeing the celebrated singer of jazz, swing and scat. All were treated to a two-hour set of jazz standards, heartfelt ballads and vocal improvisation, up close and personal.
“It was an amazing night. She’s amazing,’’ said Jamie Ann Owens, 40, who grew up in a family of jazz lovers and has been seeing artists like Kelly and Ronnie Leigh since she was a kid. She attended the concert with her mother and a couple of friends.
“What a night… Sometimes, pure magic happens in this room,’’ Julie Briggs Leone, co-owner of The 443, said after the show. Kelly was equally enthusiastic. “Everything was right about this,’’ she posted on Facebook. “Everything.’’
Kelly has performed all over the country and the world, so that is no small praise. Before the coronavirus pandemic put live music in clubs on pause, she was scheduled to travel to Denver, Los Angeles and Miami, as well as perform at The 443 and at the Marriott Syracuse Downtown, as part of CNY Jazz Arts Foundation’s Jazz at the Cavalier series. When the outbreak hit, all engagements were canceled until further notice. Kelly has been working from her home in Fair Haven, on Lake Ontario, and taking time for some much-needed self-care, which includes giving her vocal cords a break.
“Quite frankly, I’m really enjoying being home and not driving 400 miles a week,’’ Kelly said in March. She answered questions for this story by email. “I teach. Work on new tunes. Relax. Cook. Catch up on things that needed attention in my home. I’m more rested than I’ve been in a very long time. I’m really kinda diggin’ it. We will pick up with local and national gigs when the threat has passed.’’
Kelly, who will turn 70 in October, grew up in the Rochester area. Music came to her naturally and she started piano lessons at the age of 4, later adding instruction in clarinet, drama and dance. After high school, she enrolled at the Eastman School of Music, where she studied voice. By 16, she formed a combo and performed at clubs around Rochester. In the early 1970s, she joined a rock band as lead singer. She liked it but felt a powerful pull to jazz.
“I was drawn to the freedom and ability to be very creative,’’ Kelly says today. “I love the rhythms of swing and the fast pace of be-bop and the space of deep ballads. The harmonic structure is more sophisticated than pop or rock. In that respect, I enjoy the intellectual side of it. It’s a very democratic kind of music. Everyone gets in on the conversation. I love the freedom of knowing what I’m doing and sometimes not and getting lost in the creative process. I love seeing the guys smile when I do something hip. I love its deep American history. Jazz is America’s gift to the world.’’
Kelly appeared on the Syracuse music scene in the mid-1980s, drawing crowds to restaurants and small clubs like Farone’s Café, Phoebe’s Garden Café, Soo-Lin and, perhaps most memorably, Sakura, a Japanese restaurant on West Fayette Street that also served up jazz.
Briggs Leone of The 443 Social Club and Lounge remembers those days well and says Kelly was her first real introduction to jazz. “She expanded my musical horizons in the best possible way and soon I was adding CDs from Dianne Reeves, Billie Holiday, Stanley Jordan, Miles Davis and John Coltrane to sit alongside the rock and hair metal albums I listened to in high school.’’
Nancy Kelly performing at LeMoyne College in 2015. Photo by Chuck Wainwright.
Around the same time, Kelly began her recording career. Her first album, “Live Jazz,’’ was released in 1988 on Amherst Records. It reached No. 11 on the Billboard charts. Her sixth (and latest) CD, “Remembering Mark Murphy,’’ is a tribute to the late, Syracuse-born jazz singer, who grew up in Fulton and spent summers in Fair Haven with his family. He recorded more than 40 albums and was known for his innovative vocal improvisations. Kelly has called Murphy her favorite singer and credits him with sharing with her what it means to sing “from inside the song.’’
Kelly has received numerous accolades and awards. She was twice named “Best Female Jazz Vocalist” in the Down Beat magazine reader’s poll. She is a three-time Syracuse Area Music Awards winner and was inducted into the SAMMY Hall of Fame in 2006. She is scheduled to be inducted into the Rochester Music Hall of Fame later this year.
In addition to performing, Kelly serves as a teacher and mentor to both up-and-coming and experienced performers, working with them on repertoire, song delivery, audience interaction and more. She has a studio at SubCat Studios in Syracuse, travels to Rochester to teach several days a week and works with aspiring singers as part of CNYJAF’s Nancy Kelly Vocal Jazz Jams and Stars of Tomorrow Cabarets. Others might be new to Zoom, but Kelly has been using the online app to teach students from a distance for years.
With her spikey platinum blonde hair, stylish eyeglasses and signature red lipstick, Kelly commands attention in a room and on stage. She is relaxed and conversational, chatting back and forth with her accompanists, the sound engineer and the audience.
In concert, she leans into her vocals, perches on a stool from time to time and uses a reader attached to a microphone stand to assist with song lyrics. “The older I get,’’ she tells the audience, “the more I can’t remember all the lyrics.’’
“She sounds great,’’ Jamie Ann Owens said after seeing Kelly at The 443 Social Club. “I think her voice has become more seasoned.’’
In her leisure time, Kelly enjoys cooking healthy meals with a minimum of meat and lots of vegetables, which she enjoys with wine. She’s an avid walker and works in a weight routine when she can. “I am not a sedentary person and never will be,’’ she says. “As long as I can keep moving, I will.’’
Kelly considers Fair Haven a sanctuary and loves living there, although it has been a challenge at times to manage the touring and performance side of her career from outside of a major metropolitan area. Her sister, Lynne, and brother, Gene, live nearby, and she sees them often. Kelly was married briefly many years ago. Her daughter and son-in-law, Kellie and Greg, live in Rochester. Thirteen-year-old grandson Graham is “a piano virtuoso’’ and attends The School of the Arts.
“They are all my world,’’ Kelly says. “We all love music.’’
Kelly says she has no plans to retire and looks forward to touring again when it is safe to do so.
“I was planning a European tour when the pandemic struck,’’ Kelly says. “Hopefully we will pick that back up.’’
Follow Nancy Kelly
For more information on Nancy Kelly and her performance schedule, follow Nancy Kelly Music on Facebook www.facebook.com/NancyKellyJazz/and visit her website, www.nancykelly.com.
A Music Venue for the Times
What does a jazz singer who usually has a full calendar of live gigs do for fun during the coronavirus shutdown?
She brings jazz to an audience via webcasting.
On May 6, Nancy Kelly performed as part of a “Zoom Cocktail Hour” on the teleconference and distance education platform. The hour-long event, hosted by entrepreneur and former Constellation Brands executive Howie Jacobson, also featured Rochester-based pianist and music educator Andy Calabrese.
Calabrese opened the show, playing piano from his home, before introducing Kelly, live from her home. She sat down in her sunny music room and sang to three piano tracks Calabrese recorded earlier in the week. She kicked off her set with “Summer Wind,’’ noting she and fellow Fair Haven residents can’t wait for the season that gets everyone outside. Next was Mark Murphy’s “Sunday in New York,’’ featured on Kelly’s latest album, “Remembering Mark Murphy.’’
New York on Sunday,
Big City taking a nap!
Slow down, it’s Sunday!
Life’s a ball, let it fall in your lap!
If you’ve got troubles,
Just take them out for a walk.
They’ll burst like bubbles
In the fun of a Sunday In New York!
She closed her set with “God Bless the Child,’’ a song written and originally performed by the legendary Billie Holiday.
Kelly told the audience that her thoughts these days often turn to New York City, where she once lived and has performed often, now ravaged by coronavirus. “I hope to get back there when this is over,’’ she said.
By Margaret McCormick
Neon Jazz Interview
Thank you to Joe Dimino of Neon Jazz, for the edifying interview with Nancy Kelly. Dimino says; "Welcome to a new edition of the Neon Jazz interview series with Acclaimed Veteran Jazz Vocalist Nancy Kelly .. We talked about her interesting life in music, COVID and her new 2022 CD Jazz Woman ..
