Rob Kendt

It’s all about who you know in this business. The fabulous Rebecca Hart, who I worked with last year on The Devil and Tom Walker, has invited me to do a short opening set for her upcoming gig at Joe’s Pub, Feb. 15 at 9:30 p.m. If you haven’t heard her, you’re in for a treat, and if you haven’t heard me in a while, here’s your chance. I’ll be debuting a few newish numbers, and/or songs so old they’re like new again. I hope to see you there!

2008, folks, was the big 4-0 for me, and if I were looking for a better way to ring it in than to write and perform the score for an original off-Off-Broadway folk musical, stage a show of my songs at Ars Nova, travel to Mexico and the south of France, meet my birth mother and half-brothers, see Obama overwhelmingly elected our 44th president, and, above all, get married to the most beautiful woman on earth, I don’t think I could have arranged it. In the works in the coming year will be more of the Ed Wood musical, another possible off-Off-Broadway folk musical, a gig or two at major New York venues, and oh, so much more.

For now I leave you with this hymn by Sibelius, as sung by myself and Laura Weinert-Kendt. Blessings of the season to you and yours.

I still like to call albums of my music, whether recorded digitally and pressed onto compact discs or sent through the Interwebs as digital squiggles, “records.” After all, they’re still recordings, aren’t they?

In any case, it’s a good and busy time in my world because I’ve got two new such records finished and ready to send out: the cast album of The Devil and Tom Walker, and a first-rate live recording of “The Rob Kendt Songbook” from last week’s show at Ars Nova (a smashing success, if I may say so).

Now, admittedly, these are not records you are going to see on iTunes any time soon, or on CDBaby. They are not professionally mastered and pressed, and quite frankly there are union performers on them who would, quite appropriately, require compensation for their invaluable pro bono contributions to the efforts. But still, they’re done, and they’re being made available to friends, family, participants, industry, and actually anyone who asks nicely and really wants to hear some of my best work yet.

To sum up: I’m proud of the work, and that matters more than anything to me at this point in my virtual “career” making music.

Here are some samples for your list’nin’ pleasure.

From The Rob Kendt Songbook:
Kurt Robbins nails “Angora,” from my and Justin Warner’s upcoming musical about Ed Wood

The brilliant Kevin Ray elevates “If Misery Loves Company”

The awesome Rebecca Hart tugs the heartstrings with a rendition of my tribute to my birth mother, “The Girl Who Went Away”

The dulcet tones of Annie Crane on “Madame Bovary”

Andrea Frierson’s powerhouse interpretation of “Every Reason”

Pearl Sun’s sultry take on “Make My Mind Up On You”

The New Students (and the whole cast) join for a down-home version of “Train My Ear”

And from The Devil and Tom Walker:
The rousing opening numbah (featuring Marc Donovan as the Devil, Mike Durkin as Captain Kidd, and Sarah Hund on fiddle)

Tom Walker’s Theme (featuring Erik Gratton and Rebecca Hart)

The Farmer’s Curst Wife (with the whole cast)

Petitioners’ Proposals (featuring Justin Flagg, Rebecca Hart, and Mike Durkin)

I Have Known Men (Marc Donovan and Erik Gratton)

Enjoy in good health!

Joining me for this special night to bring new life to my songs will be Kevin Ray, Rebecca Hart, Lance Rubin, Pearl Sun, Andrea Frierson, Annie Crane, The New Students, and Kurt Robbins. Tickets here.

It’s been a very eventful summer for me, ladies and gents. Long story short, I was very happily married a few weeks ago (and yes, I did perform at the reception, along with some illustrious guests, including my new father-in-law). Capping this great summer, I’ve got a big show coming up at New York’s hippest alt-music-theatre showcase, Ars Nova. And I’m really, really excited (and a little daunted) by the concept: The Rob Kendt Songbook, which means I will turn over the mic to singers far, far better than me to interpret my material (one of them, the estimable Kevin Ray, did a similar evening at the Laurie Beechman last year, and I’m basically stealing his idea). Save the date: Tuesday, Sept. 16. There will be a lot more updates about it soon, but for now you can buy tickets here.

So a number of musical projects have come, if not to an end, to a momentary stop, at least: The folk musical The Devil and Tom Walker ended its acclaimed run at the Metropolitan Playhouse about a month ago, though a full cast album is in the works and we co-authors are talking licensing (it would make a great show for colleges and high schools). And a new musical about ’50s filmmaker Ed Wood, which I’ve been working on in the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop with the estimable Justin Warner, reached a new milestone with an audition/presentation on June 10 for the advanced ongoing workshop. More news will be forthcoming on that, to be sure.

In the meantime my longtime producer/drummer/gadfly Matt North has been adding drums and other assorted tasty elements to a number of new songs, and I’m arranging tunes for my next big “show”: my wedding on July 26. And New York City weather continue to remind me why there’s never a dull moment–or a stable guitar set-up–in this crazy town.

Onward and upward!

I didn’t even know a musical was what I was going to write when I started collaborating with Yvonne Conybeare and Tony Pennino on The Devil and Tom Walker, the folkish musical I’m performing in at the Metropolitan Playhouse through May 18. But NYTheatre.com has rendered the verdict, and who am I to argue with it?

It’s certainly not a traditional musical in any sense, but there’s lots of music, and it’s vital to the telling of this sprightly, oft-resonant tale. It is one of the finest new musical comedies of the season…Pennino tells the story in rich detail, supplemented always with appropriate songs (by Kendt) that either sound authentic or really are…The pacing is brisk and the music is beautifully played…The show is a treat….a treat with a message that’s clear, pertinent, and unimpeachable.

A lot of the credit goes to Yvonne and Tony, and to the extraordinary cast of actor/singer/musicians. As Back Stage’s no less laudatory review put it: “John Doyle, eat your heart out.” Not bad company to be mentioned in.

Even better: Burkhard Bilger, a New Yorker writer who wrote an excellent recent article on folk-song field recording, is slated to join us after the show on May 11 to talk about American folk music and how I’ve used (and abused) it in my score.

I’m in the BMI Musical Theatre Workshop, dutifully working on a fabulous new tuner with the ultra-talented Justin Warner, and I even presented an excerpt at last night’s prestigious BMI Smoker, featuring an esteemed actor/writer/polymath I originally met in L.A., Jeremy Lawrence.

But as it turns out, my first musical in New York is not a result of that, though I would hope my work on it owes something to my studies at BMI (no false rhymes, for one thing!). Rather, it came about as the result of a friendly acquaintance with a local director, Yvonne Conybeare, with whom I took a SITI Suzuki/Viewpoints workshop in L.A. nearly four years ago (has it been that long? Yeesh). We’ve stayed in touch since I relocated to New York, and I’ve done some music for shows she’s directed at the Metropolitan Playhouse.

Long story shortened: She brought me in to do provide some folksy background music for a new adaptation of Washington Irving’s short story “The Devil and Tom Walker,” by playwright Tony Pennino. Before long, though, it turned into a full musical, more or less, with a score that’s about one part traditional folk from 18th and 19th century America (big props to this source) and two parts original music in a folky vein by yours truly. Moreover, in production it’s become a John Doyle-esque presentation, with the cast singing, acting, and providing all the instrumental accompaniment that’s not otherwise provided by myself.

That’s right–I’m in the darn thing, which has become a bit of scheduling challenge. But hey–if what it takes to get up my first musical in New York City is for me to be in it, I’m hardly going to look that gift horse in the mouth. Plus, the cast of actor/singer/musicians is pretty extraordinary, and I’m having a blast with them. There’s a reason a musician’s work is called “playing,” I think (and I suspect it’s not far from the reason that a piece of theater is called a “play”).

Previews start tonight; tickets are available here. An informative podcast about the creation of the show is here. To quote the show’s final line (not a spoiler, I don’t think): I’ll be there to greet you in Hell!

I just belatedly happened upon this amazing review of my CD, I’m Not Sentimental, by j. poet, for the All Music Guide. It’s up on the iTunes store. It’s a doozy, worth quoting in its entirety:

Kendt had a day job as theater critic, so the self-confessed musical junkie probably has seen more than his share of bad musicals. That musical theater vibe shows up in his work, but he’s also absorbed plenty of rock and Kurt Weill, so his tunes are more Soundheim dark than Rogers and Hammerstein breezy. On the side Kendt composes and performs incidental music for theatrical productions, so his melodic and stylistic range on this album should come as no surprise.

Droll, urbane, sophisticated and musically omnivorous, Kendt makes music for grown ups full of great melodies and witty wordplay. Kendt’s flexible high tenor is casually understated and his keyboard work is perfectly suited to his own compositions with enough flourishes to keep your attention without overwhelming the songs.

“Lullaby” is a salute to the insanity of living in a big city that alternates between the soothing music implied in the title and a raucous bridge full of big city clatter, provided by a pounding rock drumbeat with some sizzling cymbal work. “Pick Me” is a country two step with pedal steel that details the tribulations of a guy who’s “available and sensitive and invisible” as he watches the local musicians scoop up all the pretty girls. “My Life in Pants” gets a sprightly klezmer arrangement wherein the singer details his physical shortcomings, and wonders if he’d have better luck if he had a woman’s body instead of his own. It’s probably the first song to deal with gender reassignment surgery in a light, playful manner. “Quiet Girl” is a rock samba with a breezy “la la la” chorus, a fantasy about approaching the most beautiful woman in the room with images that portray the queasy emotional push and pull men feel as they imagine how various pick up lines might work, before they silently slink back into the shadows.

All Kendt’s tunes lyrics examine the vicissitudes of modern romance, and while the outcome is usually bleak, his insights and lighthearted cynicism make every vignette sparkle. The two medleys he put together for the album show off his wide ranging musical intelligence and skewed sensibility with covers. “Oops I Did Bungalow Bill” combines Britney Spears’ “Oops I Did It Again” and The Beatles “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill”. Combining a catchy, if almost unlistenable, teen hit with a tune from rock’s most venerable icons that uses the same chord changes for its chorus is just short of genius. He also sings “Only the Lonely” by The Motels over the changes of Erik Satie’s “Je Te Veux” giving the tune an odd cabaret aura, accented by a waltzing string section. These medleys, taken together with his own highly literate and delightfully melodic work, mark the debut of a singular new cabaret talent.

Wow. That is some attention. Thanks, Mr. Poet.

In other news, I’m working with director Yvonne Conybeare and playwright Anthony Pennino on a new adaptation of Washington Irving’s The Devil and Tom Walker, for which I’m combing the archives for early 19th-century and 18th-century American folk tunes (i.e., a lot of Irish and Scottish ballads). That will go up at the Metropolitan Theatre in April.

And in the BMI Musical Theatre workshop, I continue apace with the talented Justin Warner on a fabulous new musical about the terrible, irrepressible cross-dressing film auteur Ed Wood. It’s going extremely well. Here’s a demo of Ed’s ode to his favorite material, “Angora” (with my rather rough scratch vocal, but you get the idea).

Finally, the brilliant, peripatetic Ljova has invited to me join his incomparable Kontraband for a few songs at Barbes on Mar. 8. The occasion is International Women’s Day, and I happen to like women, so it’s a great match.

I hope to see you there!