San Antonio Current ‘Romance’ connection Ken Slavin, with help from producer Barry Brake, makes a sultry, late-night ode to love A year ago, Ken Slavin worried that he was losing his voice. He’d been diagnosed with acid-reflux and found himself struggling to lay down acceptable vocal tracks for the long-awaited follow-up to his 2001 album, The Song is You. “I had moments during the whole process where I got kinda down,” says Slavin, San Antonio’s preeminent interpreter of jazz-pop standards. “I’d go in for six hours and work on a couple of tunes and everything would sound bad and we’d have to scrap it all.” For the first time, however, Slavin had an outside producer working with him in the studio, and that producer, Jazz Protagonists pianist Barry Brake, relentlessly lifted Slavin’s confidence whenever it started flagging. Slavin and Brake had known each other since 1990, when Slavin, then a 29-year-old St. Mary’s grad with a background in journalism and public relations, indulged his long-held dream of becoming a jazz singer, and Brake launched the Jazz Protagonists. They crossed paths frequently over the years, but didn’t get to know each other well until last year, when Slavin told the respected pianist/composer about his ideas for a new album, and Brake asked him who was going to produce it. Slavin responded that he always produced his own albums. But Brake wondered who would help to shape the arrangements, and who would be an advocate for Slavin’s vision in the recording studio. “He really wanted to do it,” Slavin says, “and I was blown away because he’s such a talent. I haven’t had that sort of team approach to my music before.” The finished product of Slavin’s smooth baritone and Brake’s gentle prodding is I’ll Take Romance, a seductive 16-song collection that features both the lushest textures (particularly with the string-laden bookends “Thoughts of Your Smile” and “I’ll Take Romance”) and the most intimate, casual vibe ever heard on a Slavin album. Slavin has always taken his time between releases, preferring to let a concept slowly unfold in his mind before venturing into a recording studio. He’s always imposed a definite set of rules on himself before embarking on a new project: that it sound different from anything he’s previously recorded, that he feels he’s made a leap forward as a vocalist, and that he has a unifying theme for the material. “No one can ever accuse me of flooding the market with product,” he says with a laugh. For Slavin, a major part of the creative process consists of sifting through his hundreds of vinyl LPs and searching for songs that speak to him (he’s resisted “millions” of requests over the years for “My Way,” because he doesn’t believe its “end-is-near” sentiment suits him). He accumulated a list of 40 contenders for I’ll Take Romance, before sitting down with his band and Brake and shaving off more than half of the possible tunes. More than most contemporary interpreters of the Great American Songbook, Slavin delights in turning his material sideways, making even the most familiar tunes sound like new discoveries. A prime example on I’ll Take Romance comes with “Tea For Two,” a song done to death for more than 80 years as a breezy, old-soft-shoe shuffle. Slavin and Brake, however, slow the song down to a dead crawl, and its yearning, emotional core miraculously reveals itself. For listeners, the effect is a bit like finding a diamond in a peanut shell. They take a similar tack with “I Could Have Danced All Night,” a boisterous staple of Lerner & Loewe’s My Fair Lady. Slavin’s recording owes nothing to memories of Audrey Hepburn’s lip-synch treatment in the 1964 film adaptation. Slavin’s performance feels like a slow, sultry, 3 a.m. capper to a night in which considerably more than dancing took place. Conversely, he speeds up “Come Rain or Come Shine” with a tough, bluesy treatment, and brings a lighter-than-air swing to Cole Porter’s reflective “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home to.” The album also allows Slavin to celebrate his private worship of Connie Francis, an admiration that he kept in the closet for years because he knew that his jazz-musician friends would find her corny and unhip. “I’ve become more open about it as I’ve gotten older,” he says. “I learned a lot of standards to her records. She had her hit stuff, and some of it was very bubblegum, but her concept albums had her singing with big bands and more mature stuff.” For this album, Slavin dusted off an obscure Francis b-side called “I Can’t Reach Your Heart,” which had previously been covered only once, by ABBA singer Agnetha Faltskog. When Slavin played Francis’s reverb-drenched original recording for Brake and pianist Morris Nelms, Nelms responded that it sounded like something from an old Star Trek episode, “with a beautiful green alien singing on a planet somewhere to Captain Kirk.” Slavin celebrates the release of I’ll Take Romance with an August 27 show at El Tropicano (coinciding with his 46th birthday), and he’s already plotting future projects with Brake: a modern-day version of Julie London’s stripped-down Julie At Home; Spanish and Italian albums; a Ray Charles-like country-pop hybrid; and even a reworking ’80s pop hits (such as Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams”) in Slavin’s style. “I’ve never wanted anyone to categorize me as just being a covers singer,” Slavin says. “I get that sometimes from people who don’t understand the elements of jazz. They don’t understand that jazz is an interpretive art and it’s not always about writing an original song. It’s about taking something established and making it your own: maybe altering the meaning or the mood of it. I don’t think there’s a song on the album that anyone does quite the way we do it.” •
Ken Slavin: CD-Release Concert El Tropicano "Slavin driver" Older music fans might conjure images of Joel Grey camping it up to “Money” or a feather-skirted Josephine Baker scandalizing Paris with the forbidden dance. But these days the cabaret movement represents simple, elegant intimacy: an attempt to render classic pop material in the most interactive possible setting, to create an eyeball-to-eyeball musical conversation with listeners. That is exactly the kind of experience Slavin had during Christmas of 1997 when he saw the legendary Bobby Short perform at the Café Carlyle in New York. Slavin recalls the thrill of being among the approximately 75 people who shared that evening with Short. Slavin, 44, lives for that kind of performing experience now, but when he began his professional singing career 16 years ago as a young throwback to the classic pop singers of the pre-rock era, he shied away from such closeness. “I think it was because I wasn’t as assured of myself then,” Slavin says between sets of a KRTU fundraising show at The Venue. “Now I really love it, I like to be able to see people’s reactions and feel like we’re feeding off each other.” Slavin’s cabaret debut, “Just You, Just Me,” is an ambitious two-act show designed to incorporate every color in this veteran crooner’s palette. Opening with a statement of intent in the form of Anthony Newley’s “Once In A Lifetime” (“because this is a new approach for me”), Slavin will move from theme to theme with a series of vignettes. These vignettes will cover jazz standards, Broadway show tunes, Spanish-language selections, country classics that that have become pop standards, and even a couple of Slavin’s comedic rewrites of familiar songs. To create a properly stark acoustic setting, Slavin will be backed by a bare-bones trio: pianist Morris Nelms, bassist Chuck Moses, and drummer Ed Torres. Because the show opens on the weekend of this year’s Academy Awards, Slavin also did a bit of research and picked some of the best songs ever to be nominated and fail to win the Oscar. “I’ve always been kind of an old movie song buff, because many of the old movie songs have become jazz standards,” he says. “Some of them I perform already and any jazz artist would, but people don’t necessarily know they’re from movies.” A Connecticut native who traveled frequently as a child, Slavin settled in San Antonio at the age of 17 when his father retired from the Coast Guard and moved his family here. The family’s San Antonio roots ran deep. Slavin’s grandfather led a Dixieland band in the Alamo City and Slavin’s father had been born and raised here. A self-described “child of the ’70s,” Slavin appreciated the pop and disco radio hits of his teen years, but his secret passion was the so-called Great American Songbook, the timeless standards crafted by composers such as George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and Harold Arlen. “It was something I didn’t share with people because I always thought they would think I was square or strange,” Slavin says. Comedian Margaret Cho has said she gravitated to stand-up at least partly because she saw how much her father loved watching comedians and felt it provided her a way to connect with him. Similarly, Slavin says that music enabled him to communicate with his father, a “gruff military man” who played the saxophone and loved big-band music. As a student at St. Mary’s University, Slavin indulged his love of musicals, but never won a singing lead in a college production. At an audition for Carousel, a student director advised him to “stick to speaking parts,” a critique which stung him for years. While he subsequently doubted the quality of his own voice, he couldn’t entirely resist the lure of musical performance. In the mid-’80s, he entered lip-synch contests at the now-debunct Studebakers club at Crossroads Mall. He says he won the $100 first prize six times, miming to Bobby Darin records such as “Mack The Knife.” These days, “Mack The Knife” is Slavin’s undisputed showstopper. The link with Darin is a natural one. In his time, Darin was a throwback to an earlier musical sensibility, but he was also a product of his times and brought a combustible rock ’n’ roll energy and youthful swagger to even his most Sinatra-esque recordings. By the same token, Slavin’s yearning, nostalgic romanticism can’t help but be informed by the music of his own era. An avid record collector (with more than 600 vinyl albums) who earnestly studies his favorite singers, Slavin nonetheless takes pains to avoid mimicking their vocal techniques. His phrasing might be as smooth and impeccable as his pinstripe suits, but it is also highly idiosyncratic. And he constantly seeks out obscure material that will set him apart from bandwagon-jumping standards interpreters (raise your hand, Rod Stewart). “I pride myself on never singing a song the same way twice,” Slavin says. “I have worked extremely hard at not being a parody of singers that came before me. I only sing a song if it speaks to me, if it does something for me. “There are a lot of great jazz standards that I don’t think work for me. They may be fantastic, but just because Frank Sinatra sang it doesn’t mean I’m going to. Some numbers just don’t work for me, some I just can’t sell.” By Gilbert Garcia ©San Antonio Current 2006 
Courtesy photo
Ken Slavin at work on his new album I’ll Take Romance at Keith Harter Music.
6-9pm Mon, Aug 27
Riverwalk Hotel
110 Lexington
SA’s favorite crooner gets intimate with the Great American Songbook
By Gilbert Garcia
03/01/2006
Ken Slavin hopes to take his cabaret show on the road this year.
Ken Slavin:
Just you, just me
Fri, Mar 3 thru Sun, Mar 5
Fri, Mar 10 thru Sun, Mar 12
$20
Church Bistro and Theatre
1150 S. Alamo
271-7791
