Cormac Kenevey left a financially rewarding career in IT to become a jazz singer, but he didn't leap without looking, he tells Arminta Wallace.
He sounds like he has been singing jazz all his life - and he has a cheeky, effortless way with a song which makes him very easy to listen to - but Cormac Kenevey is in his 20s, which, for a jazz singer, means his life is just beginning. And he has made a pretty good start. His debut album, This Is Living, is a mixture of his own compositions and smoothie standards. It opens with a layered vocal groove about e-mails and semi-detached houses and the sort of contemporary paraphernalia you don't normally find in songs called We've Got A World That Swings and I'm Through With Love.
"I didn't want to do another album of standards," he says, by way of explanation. "That's what everybody does. I wanted to make it sound like my own thing. But even if you are doing the same material as someone else, the whole idea is to make it your own. So even with very well-known stuff - Fly Me To The Moon or something - I do my best to make it sound different." He does this by scatting, improvising and embroidering. "You can do whatever you want, really. That's the joy of the music."
Kenevey isn't just making it up as he goes along, needless to say. He has had some good teachers. "I suppose it all started with my dad's record collection," he says. "He's a session piano player. He does a lot for theatre and TV. I've always been singing. I always copied Sinatra and people like that when I was a kid. Then I got into Harry Connick junior, and my dad said, 'Well, if you think he's good, you should listen to this guy, Mel Torme'. And I did." He also studied for a while at a jazz college in Munich. "You have to do it properly - learn to sing - otherwise you'll get strain in your voice. You have to breathe properly."
Kenevey could do a stint in the wind section if he wanted: at the age of 12, he took up the clarinet and learned to play well enough to play with the Royal Irish Academy Orchestra. While he was in college, he directed and conducted the UCD Concert Band. But he never reckoned on earning his living as a musician. "I stuck to the straight and narrow," he says. "Went to college, did a BA, did computer science and then did programming for a few years." He was, by all accounts, pretty successful in the IT department. He worked for the company formerly known as KPMG and, by his own admission, made a lot of money. "The last project I did was for the passport office," he says. "I wrote the software which checks people out when they're applying for passports. Then I decided to give up the day job and do the singing thing."
He didn't just leap into the big blue unknown, of course. Shrewdly, he saved up enough of the computer-consulting dosh to make a good-quality debut album, which in turn led to him being signed by the Candid label, which means he shares a record label with Jacqui Dankworth and Jamie Cullum. He also used his computer expertise to set up a smart, attractive website.
Above all, though, Kenevey is still listening to music - which is, he insists, the way for a jazz singer to learn how it should be done. On his website he lists the three albums he has been listening to most recently. The current three are Sammy Davis junior, Shirley Horn and Kai Big Band, but his hero is the Chicago jazz singer Kurt Elling. "He's an inspiration, because he's taking the whole thing to the next level. He's not just doing what's been done before. He's really moving forward with the whole jazz scene, writing lyrics for famous sax solos and interpolating poetry into his stuff. I was in London a couple of weeks ago and I met him at Pizza Express. He was doing four nights there and I went three nights in a row and on one of the nights, Tony Bennett came and sat at the table next to mine. Tony Bennett!"
Visual evidence of this night of hobnobbing with the coolest of cats will soon be uploaded to the Kenevey website. Come the New Year, he will be off on a tour of Germany. Meanwhile, he's doing a Christmas concert at The Helix in DCU in Dublin with tenor Paul Byrom and the RTÉ Concert Orchestra. "It'll be croony Christmas songs," he says. "But I don't mind. I'm happy doing all that. The only thing is, I'm trying to get them to change some stuff." Such as? "Well, there's a song called Mistletoe and Holly where the lyric goes 'Oh my gosh, oh my golly, it's a time for mistletoe and holly'. I'm trying to get them to change that." To? He shrugs. "I dunno. 'Merry Christmas, baby' - or something that I could get my chops around more easily." So that he can make it his own? "Exactly." And what is his own sound, exactly? He shrugs and grins. "I'm still flailing around," he says. Sounds like a song title to me. u