|
Daily Bulletin
KEEPING THEIR DAY JOBS
Members of Reno Jones find artistic freedom away from commercial pressure
BY RICK MORTENSEN STAFF WRITER
The life of a working musician can be a grind. Setting up enough gigs to pay the bills is a constant concern, and the demands of the marketplace can stifle creativity.
For the nine-member blues band Reno Jones, having day jobs are small prices to pay for artistic freedom.
Fronted by a powerful female singer and flanked by a four-piece born section and four-piece rhythm section, Reno
Jones intersperses its distinctive originals with covers by such artists as Aretha Franklin, Al Green, Junior Wells and Johnny "Guitar" Watson.
Most of the band members have peen professional musicians and now have other careers with more financial security. "l don't think any of us would balk at the idea of doing this full time if given the opportunity, it's just that the pursuit of that got to be so tiresome for most of us," said singer Jerri-Sue Dawson. A native of Minneapolis, Dawson sang in a variety of cover bands before getting in a house band that included Prince's horn section. She said her best musical opportunities came after she became a manicurist. "Before that, I was in a road band, and it was like musical factory work, and I hated it," she said. "When I was freed up from having to rely on music for an income, then I was free to make choices. That's when I started getting to meet the Prince people and the Janet Jackson people. I would have never gotten those gigs, because I would have been too busy playing the Holiday Inn."
Reno Jones started in 1996 when guitarist Doug Chapline met trombone player Mike Crandall. They met when Chapline was selling Crandall an air-conditioning system. "l noticed a trombone in his bedroom, and we started talking," Chapline said. "We'd both been around and played a lot, and we decided we wanted to start a project that was more than just to get together and make a couple bucks." The band they formed consisted of alumni from such funk and R&B outfits as Groove Therapy and the Marshall Hooks Band. Among them was keyboardist David Jones, who bad collaborated with Chapline in the Red Meat Band. Dawson had given her phone number to sax player Mark Norris in November 1996, shortly after she moved to the L.A. area. She got a call a year later, after Norris joined Reno Jones. "In the meantime, I met my husband, got married, got pregnant, and in June 1997, I get a call out of the blue," Dawson said. "I was pretty impressed that he'd hung onto my number for so long. I'd been doing coffeehouses and singing standards, and I was itching to do something more involved than the two and three piece things that were happening there."
AII the originals on the band's self-titled debut album were written by either Chapline or Jones, and the two have very different writing styles. Jones writes earnest ballads drawing on his life experience while
Chapline tends more toward humorous, larger than-life tunes be calls "gut-bucket songs." "A gut-bucket song is a song that expresses certain truths about people that we don't like to advertise," Chapline said.
Chapline has a song on the album with the refrain "I may be old enough to be your daddy, but I'm young enough to be your man." It includes lines about eating fiber and taking vitamin E. Another Song "Feed Yur Dawg," is a thinly veiled metaphor, advising women to "feed" their "dogs" regularly, lest they stray.
Chapline takes the lead vocals on his gut-bucket songs, while Dawson sings Jones' tunes. The live show is a mix of gut-bucket tunes, ballads and covers. Chapline said shifting moods at live gigs is sometimes a challenge.
"We played at 'BB Kings' a couple of weeks ago, and Jerri-Sue just belted out one of David's slow ballads and it brought tears to my eyes, and then I was like 'Oh My God, I've gotta sing 'Feed Yur Dawg' next. How am I going to follow that?' "
Rick Mortensen can he reached by phone at 909.987.6397 ext 218
or by email at r_mortensen@dailybulletin.com
|
|
|
