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June 9, 2009

STEPHANIE SALTER: To connoisseurs, Kenny Rankin was nobody’s ‘pleasant folkie’

By Stephanie Salter

The news came in a late-night radio broadcast. At first I didn’t hear the name, just “jazz guitarist and singer-songwriter.” Lung cancer. Then the last line: “Kenny Rankin was 69.”

If you’ve never heard of Kenny Rankin or don’t have much interest in musicians who didn’t make it big and are difficult to pigeon-hole, you might want to take the day off from this space.

If, however, you are among the thousands of folks who are logging into various Web sites and wistfully watching a handful of Kenny Rankin performances on YouTube, welcome to the Wabash Valley wake for Kenny.

The official obituaries mention his guitar work on Bob Dylan’s seminal 1965 album, “Bringing It All Back Home.” They cite his composition, “Peaceful,” the Helen Reddy version of which made it into the Top 20 in 1973. The news obits also note that his and Ruth Batchelor’s jazz waltz, “Haven’t We Met,” was recorded by Carmen McRae and Mel Tormé.

Dylan, Helen Reddy and Carmen and Mel? As I said, hard to pigeon-hole.

Then, of course, there was Kenny’s voice. The obituaries say it was a tenor, which is like saying the Pacific is an ocean. In one phrase, he could propel through two octaves into falsetto, then reach cruising altitude — with no sign of turbulence — in a realm too high for some female singers to sustain. Then he would slide down again, making playful, cornetish loop-de-loops and level off in his lower register with a sound like a cello.

His pitch was close to perfect.

Decades ago, when Kenny was playing a gig in his native New York City, I remember bristling at a New Yorker magazine capsulation of him in the club listings. Somebody who so did not get his music referred to him as “the pleasant folkie, Kenny Rankin.”

Much more accurate, the journalist and musician R.J. DeLuke wrote this about Kenny in July 2002 for “All About Jazz”:

“He sings with a fluid ease, whether it’s a standard like ‘The Very Thought of You,’ the Beatles’ ‘Blackbird,’ a Latin-flavored ‘Berimbau,’ or his own ‘In the Name of Love.’ His soft voice caresses the most delicate phrases and gallops at fast tempos. But always, there is the twist of a phrase, taking a line somewhere unexpected, but inspired; a harmony tossed in that gives the song a lift, a tug here or there, a new way of showing you what the lyric is about. He’s an interpreter whose brushes are dipped in passion and feeling and beauty.”

DeLuke, whose Top 25 “Desert Island Picks” include five Miles Davis albums, a couple of Coltranes and some Muddy Waters, Tom Waits and Wayne Shorter, is responsible for the best interview of Kenny Rankin I can find on the Web. He knew the right questions to ask, when to push a little harder for clarity and when to let Kenny riff.

One of my favorite quotes:

“I’m just a singer. And I can sing anything that touches my heart. And I think anybody can. If it touches you, it moves you. You’re human. You’re real. It stirs a passion. You become compassionate for whatever the song is being written about, sung about; spoken about … I can sing ‘Blackbird,’ I can sing ‘’Round Midnight.’ I can sing ‘Billie’s Blues.’ I can sing ‘My Baby Just Cares For Me.’ And I can sing that, and friggin’ mean it. Because I’ve been there. Done that. I’ve got the T-shirt. You know what I mean?”

And there is this wisdom:

“When I was born and was a kid, I was blessed with this gift of music. Because it came so easily, I thought what I did was who I was. Most of my career I thought that. Not consciously, but I thought that. Because being appreciated and acknowledged is a very intoxicating thing. It’s very heady. Over the years I’ve come to understand that what I do is not who I am. Although I love my job, I’m not my work.”

Kenny came to that realization hard. As pop musical tastes changed and got meaner in the 1980s, as small, intimate clubs that so suited jazz performers like Kenny disappeared from American cities, the guy who already was niche-challenged couldn’t find a comfortable place to be himself.

During one bad stretch, Kenny got so disgusted with a noisy, boozy casino audience in Lake Tahoe, he told folks where they could put their bad manners and stalked off the stage after only a couple songs.

He was booking poison for a while after that. But he kept working — he had to; music was like breathing and speaking to Kenny Rankin. And he not only survived, he prevailed, carving out a place for himself among knowing musicians and audiences who recognized his subtle treasures.

Case in point: In 1987, Paul McCartney and John Lennon were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. McCartney asked Kenny to deliver the duo’s haunting “Blackbird” at the ceremony.

In interviews, Kenny credited the brilliant and eccentric Laura Nyro as a pivotal influence on his career. But he also was in love with jazz, with Latin (especially Brazilian) music, and with “American songbook” composers such as Cole Porter and George Gershwin. When he listened for pleasure, he leaned classical.

I don’t think Kenny made an album I dislike, including his 1999 Christmas disc. But his 1995 “Professional Dreamer” and the 1976 “The Kenny Rankin Album,” (reissued in 2007) with a 60-piece orchestra led by Don Costa, would be the two I might take to DeLuke’s proverbial desert island.

Kenny’s version on the Costa album of Hank Williams’ “House of Gold,” is so clean and beautiful, it’s profound.

Kenny Rankin had a lot more music to make; a new album was in the works. But it was not to be. Three weeks after he was diagnosed, lung cancer took him out. In the ’02 interview with DeLuke, though, Kenny confirmed he’d already made it to a place most of us only hope to touch.

“I get the opportunity to live my life,” he said, “and what a really interesting thing, when you get out of the way and just observe your place in it and be glad you’re still standing. My big attitude today? I’m glad I survived myself. That’s it.”

Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

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