When Dreams Come True—A Homegrown Concert Tour

By Marjorie Smith, 12-04-06

Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue
And the dreams that you dare to dream
Really do come true
- Yip Harburg, (The Wizard of Oz)

When Jeni Fleming sang those words last weekend to a packed house at Bozeman’s Emerson Cultural Center theater, I’m sure mine weren’t the only eyes that were a little moist.

It wasn’t just the nostalgia of the familiar tune, the conviction in the voice, or the fact that Jeni Fleming is just one of the most adorable songstresses on the planet. It was the words, and the size of the dream she, her husband guitarist/sax player Jake Fleming, and bass player Chad Langford had dared to dream.

While it is not at all improbable that three people who are as good at what they do – playing an easy listening kind of jazz/pop music – could draw a crowd in their home town, or make a fifth successful recording, the idea that they could produce a fully orchestrated album and concert tour, working with two dozen other musicians, was ambitious, to say the least.

They made the album and are playing the concerts in collaboration with the String Orchestra of the Rockies, an ensemble made up of leading classical string players from around Montana. Although the SOR’s artistic director is Bozeman’s Johann Jonsson, it plays most of its concerts in Missoula. And then, beyond the 15 string players, the trio also wanted some classic big band elements: horns, flutes, percussion. They included Bozeman guitarist Craig Hall in their merry band as well as Billings drummer Brad Edwards, the voice of jazz in Montana east of the divide. (When loyal listeners to Yellowstone Public Radio’s afternoon jazz broadcasts heard a replacement DJ say last summer that he was filling in for Brad Edwards who was “away on jazz business,” one of those times it was an expedition to Nashville with Jeni Fleming, etal. that had taken Edwards away from the microphone.)

To make a quality recording with a group the size they had assembled, they had to leave the state. “There simply isn’t a recording studio in Montana with the space and equipment to record something this size,” Jeni told me last summer when she had just returned from Tennessee. “And the music business is so competitive in Nashville we got a very good price.

“Doing an orchestrated album, collaborating with my mentors -- it had been in my mind for seven years,” says Jeni who graduated with a major in music from Montana State University in 2000. (Her husband, Jake, and co-collaborator Chad Langford are also MSU music alums.) Originally a classical pianist, Jeni had grown up in Billings, the daughter of a church pastor, “required to sing in every church choir there was,” she told the concert audience.

For the Nashville sessions, the group picked up horn players from that area, but for their Montana tour they’re using Montana musicians, including the man who first introduced Jeni Fleming to jazz singing, trumpeter Ralph Sappington who settled in Billings in 1991 and now teaches jazz music at Rocky Mountain College.

Also in the horn section for the Montana tour is the man who gave Jeni her first jazz singing gig with an MSU student jazz combo, trombonist and MSU music professor emeritus Glen Johnston who wrote several of the arrangements on the new album. (At the Bozeman concerts, Jeni was careful to refer to Johnston as “Sir Glen Johnston,” and that’s how he’s listed in the album credits, having been recently knighted in Germany for his work with traditional hunting horns.)

How did the String Orchestra of the Rockies, whose repertoire ranges from challenging classics to serious new music (the Saturday night concert include a gorgeous tone poem by SOR cellist Janet Haarvig), get mixed up with a project like this? “We had been talking about our 2006-2007 season,” Jonsson, the SOR artistic director and head of MSU’s music department, told me. “We thought it might be fun to try something with a jazz or pop group.”

All three members of the Jeni Fleming Trio count Jonsson as one of their main mentors and although Jeni worried that the trio’s arrangements might seem too simple for classical musicians, the SOR members apparently had a great time in Nashville, as they do on stage during the concerts.

Another mentor for the trio is MSU adjunct professor Eric Funk, who composed and arranged some of the cuts on the album and introduced the concert evening. Funk is the ultimate “cross-over” guy -- he’s a highly respected composer of serious modern symphonic music which has been recorded by several European orchestras – and he is the pianist and leader of the mellow jazz quartet, Backburner. He tapped the trio to feature in the first episode of the MontanaPBS production “11th and Grant with Eric Funk” last year. Funk said the trio was the perfect group to kick off his series. “It’s hard to classify their music,” he says. “I guess I’d call it jazz-folk-pop. Their sound is intimate and they’re beautiful to look at. And their music is accessible.”

And judging from the crowds that turned out Friday and Saturday for the Bozeman concerts, their fans span all age groups. Men “of a certain age” were among those lining up after the concert, hoping to get Jeni’s autograph on newly purchased CDs. And although I am too polite to ask how the trio came up with the money to transport 20 musicans to Nashville and pay the recording studio, I have reason to believe that one or more devoted fans provided the artistic angel funds to launch the project.

The title of the new album, “We’ll Be Together Again” is not only the name of one of the most poignant jazz standards on the disk, it’s a promise the trio is making to themselves. In addition to launching the new CD, the current tour is also billed as a farewell tour, as it’s the last one Jeni and Jake Fleming will do with Chad Langford, their hugely talented bass player. Langford, who wrote many of the arrangements for the new album, is leaving for graduate school in the Netherlands where he’ll concentrate on composition. There is no question that Jeni and Jake will go on in some direction without Chad – they toured for some time as a duo before he joined them four years ago, and Jake composes and arranges many of their songs – but fans will have to wait until the current tour is over the learn what comes next. But let me tell you, the words “farewell tour” caused alarm throughout the Bozeman area.

“I think this album could easily go national,” Funk told the audience when he introduced the concerts in Bozeman. Which led me to muse thusly: if Jeni Fleming does become a national celebrity, I suppose she’ll have to keep her distinctive hairdo for the rest of her performing life. Not that it would be a problem. That very short cap of dark hair is going to look great at any age, and Jeni will never share the fate of Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary, who is apparently condemned to spend the rest of her life in her 1960s hippie hairdo.

One friend who is a very serious classical musician didn’t want to comment for the record on the music produced in this great crossover collaboration, but said that to him, the important thing was the size of the project Jeni Fleming and her friends had imagined – and the fact that they had pulled it off with such class.

The CD-launching-farewell-concert-tour continues:

Friday, Dec. 8, at the Alberta Bair Theater in Billings (tickets at 256-6052 or online at www.albertabairtheater.org

Saturday, Dec. 9, at the Mansfield Civic Center Theater in Great Falls (455-8510)

Friday, Dec. 15, at the Hamilton Performing Arts Center in Hamilton (375-6074)

Saturday, Dec. 16 at the University Theater in Missoula (728-8203 or online at www.sor-montana.org; tickets also available at Morgenroth Music, Fact and Fiction Bookstore and Rockin’Rudy’s.)
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