- By Dan Veaner
- Entertainment
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"If I'm sitting in a studio with the clock ticking, dollars are going," Kempkes says. "There's another dollar, there's another dollar, there's another dollar. And not what you're trying to accomplish as a player and writer and the piece you're putting together."
So Kempkes decided to make his own album. "My original goal was to see what I could do all on my own without any other help from anybody, just all me," he says. "So I did all the artwork, I wrote all the songs, I arranged them, I mastered them." The result is a professionally pressed album that is available in some local stores like the Ithaca Guitar Works, as well as on-line on CD Baby and iTunes.
Paul Kempkes"My style leans toward smooth jazz, Kempkes says. "It's not really beebop, it's not really swing. There's a lot of blues on the record, and blusey feelings. It's not commercial pop -- it's all instrumental." Smooth Jazz is a style that evolved from contemporary jazz from the 1970s. It came from the radio-friendly, fusion movement that artists like Chuck Mangione and George Benson made popular. In the 1990s 'smooth jazz' was the name given to a commercial radio format that features modern jazz innovators. He adds that smooth jazz artists were among the first to take advantage of home studio recording. "They did it a lot like the way I did it," he notes.Kempkes plays five string fretless electric bass with two venerable Ithaca bands. He's played with The Ageless Jazz Band for about a dozen years, and he joined Purple Valley, a five piece swing/blues/rockabilly band that has been around for a decade, about two or three years ago. He also plays guitar, clarinet, saxophone and a little keyboard.
While he has recorded in professional studios, he enjoyed adding recording and studio mixing to his own artistic mix. "What's wonderful about recording on your computer onto a hard drive is that I can take 15, 20, 30 takes and if it stinks half way through the take I click my mouse, stop, hit rewind and hit it again," Kempkes explains. "Since I don't need to pay a sound engineer to work the dials, if I waste two and a half hours trying to make something sound good, it's not really wasted time. Even if I didn't come up with a keeper, I learned a lot about what I want to do for next time."
He also used software to fill in instrumentally, particularly percussion. Band In A Box is an accompanying program that can be programmed with chords and music style, and it plays 'instruments' you tell it to. The program allows Kempkes to round out the sound while remaining the only live musician. The danger of controlling everything is not knowing when to stop. But Kempkes says he had a handle on that. "Certainly when you go back to it there's always something where you go, "Oh, I could have done that a little bit better,' he says. "But when it comes down to making it that little bit better sometimes I think it's better just to start with a fresh canvas and start on the next tune and move on."
The title and cover photo come from his day job as optometrist at Sterling Optical at the Pyramid Mall. "The picture is a fundus, which is a retina," he explains. "'The Fundus Among Us' is a play on 'The Fungus Among Us.'" When pressed he can't remember exactly whose eye it is.
Kempkes made an earlier CD just for friends, that included two original tunes along with jazz standards. The new album exceeded his expectations for the project. "I was very, very pleased," he says. "When I got done with it I was really surprised that was all me. Some of the guitar riffs that I played, I really didn't think I could play guitar like that. It came out far better than I expected, and I'm really tickled about it." The result is a professional, smooth album that makes 'one man band' sound pretty good!
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