Ken Ormes

Ken Ormes at Central Wave

Ken Ormes is a busy guy. Last year, while maintaining a full-time law practice, the guitarist and singer performed over 70 gigs, including weekly shows with the Ken Ormes Trio at The Central Wave in Dover and performances with Sharon Jones, Tim Webb, Maureen Benson, Ray DeMarco and Chronic Jazz Syndrome.

“It’s a challenge practicing, rehearsing, developing new material and pursuing new venues while maintaining a one-man law practice,” said Ormes.  “But I have a fair amount of control over my own time scheduling.”

Ormes was introduced to the Seacoast music scene in 1979 when his job brought him here several days a week.

‘I was dumbstruck by the quantity and variety of live music here,” he said.

“I thought if there’s this much jazz and bluegrass and folk and blues pouring out onto the street on Wednesday and Thursday nights, what’s it like here on weekends? This is heaven. I have to move here.”

He soon moved from Keene, and in those early days, he said he had the privilege of playing with Sharon Jones, Straight No Chaser, The Seacoast Band, Jim Howe, Les Harris, Jr., Charlie Jennison, John Hunter, TJ Wheeler, Charlie Kohlhase and Larry Garland.  

Ormes’ musical awakening came when he watched The Beatles perform on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964.

“My friends and I used to pick up brooms and pretend to play guitar,” he said.

At 15, he started guitar lessons, and at 19, he began playing with other musicians, and discovered the jazz of John Coltrane, Miles Davis and Joe Pass.

Later, Ormes attended Berklee School of Music in Boston in order to catch up on the music theory and harmony knowledge that he said many guitar players (including him) often lack. He attended only two semesters, but, “They gave me stacks and stacks and stacks of material that I’m still working on,” he said.

“Practicing guitar to me is relaxing. I try to be systematic. I regularly do fingering problems, arpeggios, scales, chord substitutions. It’s not work. It’s relaxing. “

His studying came in handy when he was called in on short notice to play the guitar parts in a theater production of A Chorus Line.

“The music was guitar heavy with many chord changes. Not an easy book to play,” he remembered.

“There was going to be a run-through, then an open house, then the actual opening.”

“I screwed it up,” he said, referring to the run-through.

“I apologized to the musical director, and he told me not to worry. He gave me all the music to study and I went home and played for 15 hours to prepare for the next night.”

“I ended up doing well, but the funny thing is that, afterward, a trombone player complimented me and told me I should have heard the dufus who was playing the night before,” said Ormes.

Though known as a jazz guitarist, Ormes’ roots surface when he performs with his trio, as his music transitions from jazz to rock, blues and R&B. Regarding those rock and roll roots, Ormes mentioned that seeing both Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin perform live in 1968 are two of his best musical memories.

Ormes will accompany Sharon Jones on Friday evening, February 22, when she and The Downtown Express perform at the Dolphin Striker in Portsmouth. When Jones debuted her newly-formed band last year at Grill 28 near Pease Airport, a contest was held to name it. That band with no name has become The Downtown Express, and is usually comprised of Ken Ormes, Papa Duke on keyboard, and Ed Raczka on drums. The same trio also performs as the Ken Ormes Trio when not accompanying Jones.

“I love playing with Sharon. She’s a star,” said Ormes. “She’s a treasure. It’s amazing to me that someone with her talent is still on the Seacoast rather than in New York or Los Angeles.”

Ormes has known Jones since his early days on the Seacoast, but his first performances with her, as well as with Duke, didn’t occur until last year at the now closed Pannaway Restaurant in Rye. Those same sessions led to the formation of his trio and The Downtown Express.

Ormes also has immense respect for his keyboardist, saying, “Papa Duke used to be with the house band at Wally’s Jazz Café in Boston, where he played with some very heavy cats.”

Ormes said he has never considered giving up his day job.

“It’s very hard to make a decent living just playing music,” he said. 

“There are people who do it, but they have to work at having several income streams. Those that do it, perform, compose, record, and do arranging for others.”

“I have been happy with the balance in my life,” said Ormes.

Larry Garland

Larry Garland sits at the old console piano near the back wall of the Press Room in Portsmouth, accompanying a sax player’s solo with lean, staccato chords. He continues to play as he looks up from the keyboard to the guest musician, then beyond, to the nearest tables where many of the weekly regulars are eating and talking while they listen.

Garland has been doing this Tuesday night gig for 35 years.

He was living in Newburyport in 1978 when the Press Room’s owner, Jay Smith, told him of his idea for live music.

“I don’t want rock and roll. I want jazz, and I want folk. The real thing,” Garland remembered Smith saying.

“I’ll do the jazz for you,” Garland told him.

“And I brought in the iron - musicians from Boston - ones I’d played with,” said Garland.

Decades later, at 79, Garland still takes his seat at the Press Room’s piano. His hair is now white, his eyeglasses thicker, and there are times when he does not feel well enough to perform.

It wasn’t the first time Garland inaugurated live music. In 1958, he helped transform a popular roadhouse in West Peabody, Mass., with “the best jazz jukebox on the east coast,” into the legendary Lennie’s on the Turnpike, a live jazz club that became host to great musicians such as Buddy Rich, Woody Herman, Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. The first live act at Lennie’s was Garland’s band.

Larry Garland and Sonny Carrington 1958

Very early on, Garland adopted an approach to learning music that has somewhat defined his style, and, at times, created problems.  

“When I was a kid, my father was a minister of a big church on Nahant Street in Lynn and there was always a piano in the parsonage. My mother was a classical pianist, and when I was 10 or 11, I used to watch and listen to her play. One time she played Debussy, which interested me. So I walked over to the piano and sat down next to her and played it as she had played it. She looked at me and asked, ‘How’d you do that?’ “

Garland’s mother immediately signed him up for piano instruction. After three lessons, the teacher reported to his mother that young Larry was hopeless. 

“I hated lessons. I hated school - the regimen. I still do,” said Garland.

After those failed piano lessons, Garland continued to learn and play his own way, without instruction, by listening and watching.

His mother refused to ever listen to him, “probably because she was classically trained and thought that was the only way to learn,” Garland said.

“Even much later, when she was in a retirement home in Melrose, Mass., and different musicians would come in to perform, I offered to bring in my group to play, and she said no, no, no.” 

Garland couldn’t answer his mother’s question as to how he played Debussy back then, and he still can’t.

“People have asked me, would you teach my daughter or son how to play piano, and I say, no, I can’t. I don’t know what I’m doing myself. “

At the insistence of his father, Garland joined the Army at 18, where he played with his first real band.

“I was playing piano in the service club one day when an officer came over and invited me to join the Army band. I ended up playing bass drum and cymbals in the marching band, and when we had a regular gig, I played piano. I’d have all the sheet music in front of me, but I was just faking it. I wasn’t even looking at the music.”  (In basic music terms, faking is improvising.)

“I cut my teeth on the Boston scene after I got out of the service in 1956,” said Garland.

“At one time, I was going to night school at MIT, working 40 hours a week, and playing piano at nights.

 Given a choice, I would have just played music - like most musicians.”

In spite of his distaste for lessons, Garland was slipped a bit of music education when he attended teachers’ college in Connecticut, where composer and arranger, Walter Kopsick, and he would cut class and head to the music room.

“Walter showed me the mechanics of music - relative majors and minors, thirds, the cycle of fifths. Stuff like that. He just about made a piano player out of me,” he said.

Garland’s opinion is that many formally trained musicians “are controlled by the book.”

“I’m not,” he said.

Unlike most jazz musicians, Garland doesn’t even read chord charts. He learns songs by listening, and then spreads his fingers on the keys in a trial and error method to create the sound he wants. He will modify his harmonies according to the mood, and to complement what he hears his band doing. On Tuesday evenings, his band, River City Jazz, includes Woody Allen on guitar, Jim Lyden on bass and Gary Gemmiti on drums.

River City Jazz; Garland, Allen, Lydon, Gemmiti

 Sometimes those harmonies are not what musicians expect. Bassist Jim Lyden said that when he first played with Garland in the ‘80s, he was experienced at playing jazz standards - but not the way Garland sometimes plays them. Lyden said that playing with Garland has forced him to become more musically aware, and to keep on his toes. But Lyden also noted that some guest musicians have gotten angry at Garland’s penchant for nonstandard harmonies and rhythms.

Guitarist Brian Richardson, who performs with Garland on Saturday afternoons at the Press Room, offers his own perspective. He remembers the first time he played The Boy Next Door with Garland.

“Larry wasn’t playing the chords we were familiar with,” said Richardson. “But it was obvious he knew the song. And the harmonies he came up with sounded like he was composing a symphony on the spot.”

Back at the Press Room, the sax player finishes his solo and the audience claps. Garland smiles, and moves his attention back down to the keys.