Passage II

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from the article "Notes from a Wedding" by Lauren Wilcox Puchowski (˝@2010 by Lauren Wilcox Puchowski).

It was never Kenney Holmes’s intention to become a wedding singer. The grandson of West Indian immigrants, Holmes was raised in Gordon Heights, on Long Island, in what he calls "a small black community founded by like-minded thinkers," families of immigrants and Southern blacks who, as Holmes says, "didn’t come here to fool around" and who handed down to their children their own keen sense of ambition.

"We grew up in that kind of atmosphere," he says, "of positive thinking, of getting educated, whether or not you had a degree."

Like any American boy in the 1950s and ’60s, he was fascinated with popular music: He listened to the area’s one radio station, which "mostly played Sinatra"; sometimes in the evenings, with a coat hanger stuck into the top of his portable radio, he could pick up a faint signal from WWRL, a rhythm and blues station in New York City. When he was a teenager, his brother brought home a guitar. "I was 16, it was a Sunday night," he says. "I sat down and played 'I Can't Get No Satisfaction.' I was addicted."

While he was not a virtuoso, he was, he discovered, good at making money at it. He learned three songs—"Satisfaction" by the Rolling Stones, "And I Love Her" by the Beatles, and "Shotgun" by Junior Walker and the All Stars—and formed a band. "We went out and sold it," he says. "We could play those three songs all night. We got pretty popular out on the island, playing battle of the bands, fire halls, high school proms, for $10 a night."

Still, a career as a musician was not what he, or his family, had had in mind. Over the next few years, he says: "I did everything I could not to be a guitar player. I went to college not to be a guitar player." Thinking he would be a psychiatrist, he took pre-med classes but didn’t complete a degree. Along the way, he continued playing nightclubs and parties.

In his mid-20s, he visited his brother in Washington. Washington looked, to Holmes, like a good place to be an ambitious, career-minded black man, but it also had a thriving music scene in nightclubs and hotel lounges, and the next 15 years played out as a sort of tussle between his creative pursuits and his more business-driven impulses. Trying to work his way up in the music scene, he played five and six nights a week in nightclubs and wrote his own music. He started a recording studio called Sound Ideas, which trawled local talent for the makings of a hit song, but he found the pickings slim.

The club scene, after a long while, began to wear on him, as well. Unwilling to resign himself to the life of a starving artist, when an agent approached him in the early ’90s about specializing in wedding and private parties, Holmes decided to try it.

It was a revelation. "I could make in one night what I used to make in five," he says. And "it changed the culture of what I was doing."

Holmes was well-suited for the role of event bandleader. His production skills helped him control his band’s sound, and his familiarity with country, big-band and classical music made him popular with audiences who wanted, as he says, "a tango or a Viennese waltz," as well as Wilson Pickett.

Because business ebbs and flows with the seasons and the economy, Holmes has always kept a variety of sidelines, including a job driving a limousine for nine years to put his oldest daughter through a private high school and college. These days, at gigs, he hands out a stack of million-dollar “bills” printed with his image and his current enterprises: bandleader, commercial mortgage broker, hard money lender.

Holmes uses as many as eight musicians and two singers for weddings. He accepts turnover as a fact of running a band, but his current core lineup has, in the mercurial world of part-time performers, been fairly steady. Sam Brawner, the drummer, and Atiba Taylor, the sax player, have played with him for three and four years, respectively, and Bruce Robinson, the keyboardist, has played with him for 15.

This is perhaps partly because Holmes insists on making music. During performances, he lets his musicians take the lead and uses specialized, stripped-down tracks, called digital sequences, to set the tempo and fill in musical parts when necessary, ultimately preferring the messy alchemy of live music to something more canned. The musicians say that this is in contrast to other bandleaders they’ve worked for, who often rely heavily on recordings and use musicians more as visual props. Holmes’s respect for the music endears him to his musicians. "These guys play from the heart," says Robinson. "They’re not just trying to get through the gig."