Break Out Artists

Bernie Kenerson

JUST YOU& ME

My reaction to multi-instrumentalist, producer, composer & arranger, Bernie Kenerson’s latest release, Just You & Me, is pure exhilaration. And when Kenerson asked, in a recent conversation we had about his art and his music, which of the ten songs from the CD evoked those feelings, I said, they all did. The title track, the first song on the CD, got my attention. Impressed by what I’d heard, I stayed to experience the rest of the music. Honestly, Bernie, I added, if you wanted to know which track I liked best, I would have to say, I don’t have a favorite song. For me, it was the collective rather than a portion of the whole that spoke. Just You & Me is a feel good, high-energy montage of well written and arranged tunes featuring Bernie on EWI (Electronic Wind Instrument) and a wonderful live rhythm section. “These songs were designed with the jazz listener in mind,” Kenerson explained. He went on to say, “my intent with this CD was to make sounds that would encourage my fans and new converts to get excited about life and hopeful about what the day might bring them.”

Bernie Kenerson started his professional music career at age 16 as a member of the local jazz-rock group, Seawind, in his hometown, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. At 17, he joined the U.S. Army, assigned to the 214 Army Band in Atlanta, GA as a clarinet and saxophone player. From the Army, it was on to Berklee College of Music in Boston where he studied jazz saxophone, composing, and arranging, eventually earning a two-year professional diploma. His next stop was Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, a Bachelors Degree in Performance, majoring in saxophone, a teaching position followed and the formation of the Neo-jazz band, Slipstream. The group’s self-produced album, Afterglow, received Downbeat Magazine’s DeeBee Award for best college group and Bernie received an Outstanding Soloist award for his work on the Lyricon, which he started playing in 1978.

Slipstream disbanded and Bernie reentered the Army spending 11 years as a musician, which were highlighted by five years in Europe, stationed outside of Brussels, Belgium as a founding member of the prestigious S.H.A.P.E. International Band.

They performed at concerts and festivals throughout Western Europe, including a tour in Morocco. After getting out of the Army, this time, Kenerson moved to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina in May of 1995 and has become an integral part of the cities’ bustling music scene performing and sharing the stage with artists like Gato Barbieri, Kim Waters, Yellowjackets, Bob James and the legendary Jimmy Smith, among others.

Kenerson has been performing on electric wind instruments for nearly three decades starting with the Lyricon and is an innovator and world-class master on the new Akai EWI 4000’s. “My goal is to establish the EWI and bring it into the mainstream. I want to show that it’s a wonderfully expressive artistic instrument in its own right. At present, my playing style is the opposite of everyone else’s. The EWI is my main instrument and I pick the sax or flute up occasionally. What it comes down to is that as an artistic improviser, you want the instrument that you play to have the least lines of resistance between your creative process going inside your soul and the sound that’s coming out. And for me, I make the best connection with the EWI.”

Kenerson is busy in the studio working on his next CD project, Bernie Game, and promoting his latest release, Just You & Me, ten instrumental tracks of original jazz tunes in a variety of contemporary jazz styles played on, … the EWI, of course!

by Lyndah Malloy-Glover