Jordan Martin and Jim Maneri – Just Trying To Find The Song
by Jon Dunn
The life of a musician is not always a chosen path, it’s often chosen for you. Something stirs the desire to find a voice and share that voice with others, no matter how soft or how loud. From three chords to a symphony, music is an autobiography written with notes instead of words. And even if we share the same notes, just like words, it’s how you arrange them that make them your own. This month, we talked to a pair of out musicians in Columbus and found that even with such different backgrounds, both musicians shared more than just a love of music.
Jordan Martin
Columbus native and aspiring songwriter Jordan Martin has a simple philosophy: just try to find the song.
Catching up with her at The Stonewall Center on High, the 17-year-old is carrying a well-thumbed copy of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair and remarks that the book is actually only a month or so old; she’s just hard on them. “It’s for school, and oh my God, what a horrible story!”
Books have always had a big influence on her. “I have a tendency when I read a book, to become that book, acting like the characters and imagining I’m in wherever the book takes place,” she offers. She thinks that books and TV may be where her artistic endeavors began. “I was always acting out TV shows, cartoons, I just loved to perform.” Eventually the performer in her sought out music, which led to her experimentation with musical instruments.
“I would set my little keyboard to ‘demo’ and then make up songs around that. My cousin and I would sing all of this nonsense, just whatever we thought of and we called ourselves The Cookies.” She developed a love for instruments and found that experimenting with them gave her creative license to make what she found her own.
“I started out with an old acoustic guitar and I just started moving around on it until I found sounds that I liked,” she explains. “I didn’t know the name of chords or stuff, I just moved my fingers until it sounded right,” she offers, smiling. “This way everything sounded new to me, like I made it up. Everything I find on the guitar is mine.” And while this posture may seem like she doesn’t quite know what she’s doing, her hands move across the guitar’s fretboard with assurance and ease. Some of the chords are jazzy and sophisticated, belying the “no formal training” aspect of her technique. Jordan does admit to having a friend act as a guide in her travels along the strings, offering advice and some chords to mess around with. Even though she is still learning, Jordan has already begun to branch out, citing the electric guitar as her current favorite.
“Because it lets me make noise!” she laughs. “I’m really into noise music and random sounds and it’s just fun to play loud and make noise. I also like punk music.” Her songwriting approach also finds its way through simple experimentation with various styles, instruments and random rhyming of subjects and words. “I take a thought and then try to express it in a genre that fits,” she explains.
A veteran of the Girl’s Rhythm and Rock camp, a program sponsored by Stonewall Columbus, Jordan credits the camp with fueling her artistic pursuits and making her feel part of a larger community. “It was sort of magical,“ she says of the experience. “I brought my girlfriend and we met all sorts of hilarious people. They put you together with other girls to form a band and at the end of the camp, we had a big show for everyone.” Jordan also feels comfortable with other out artists and musicians and hopes to keep finding that acceptance. “I’m going to study performance in college, so I hope to fuse music and art into something, I just don’t know yet. But I can’t wait to start!”
Jordan will be performing with the Girlz Rock and Rhythm Camp group at the Hot Times Community Arts and Music Festival on September 11 at 12p on the main stage. (The festival runs from September 10 through 12 at Main Street and Parsons Avenue) Jordan admits to being a little nervous, but that playing with everybody else will make it easier. “Besides,” she adds with a wide smile, “I’m always looking to put on a show!”
Jim Maneri
At the other end of the spectrum is Jim Maneri, another Columbus native and professional musician for over 30 years; Jim knows the life of a musician and trying to make it in the world of music while being openly gay. Since turning pro in the late 1970s, Jim has accompanied a number of famous jazz and popular musicians on the road and in the studio. Though he spent nearly two decades on the road, he explains that he was “one of the last working musicians to make a living on the road playing jazz, up until the early 1990s,” but by then the touring had become sporadic and Jim found another calling by producing music for film and commercials.
I do most of my composing now at the computer,” he laughs, “but for a living its not always easy to be creative NOW; on demand like that.” Jim splits his time between Columbus and New York, and deals with the commute pragmatically. “Most of the work is in New York, but it is so much cheaper to live here!” he says. He does some work here and plays in several local bands. “I’m currently working on an Ohio Public Television show about German Village,” he explains “and its combining bier hall music with 20th century dissonance. I try to be careful to it from being too specific, so that you don’t stop watching the film to listen to the music.”
A lifelong musician, Jim was inspired to play jazz music from many influences. “Like everyone else, I lifted solos from Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock and the rest, but Art Tatum was a huge influence on me,” he explains. As he worked his way into the jazz musician’s circle and lifestyle, he had to adjust to working in an environment where his sexuality had to remain a secret.
“Jazz music was especially homophobic. For gay musicians, there was really no tolerance in the jazz community at all,” he explains. “Even though there were gay musicians, all of us stayed closeted for fear of losing a gig because of it; it was very rough.” Even today, Jim feels that the jazz scene is still a semi-hostile environment for a gay musician. “There are plenty of musicians, many of them famous, who are gay but still won’t come out to the fans or the musicians; it’s still pretty closeted.”
In the Columbus music scene, he finds being gay is much more accepted. “In my local band, Hairplane, the target audience is gay! The scene is so much more happening here, much more accepting. Things have begun to turn 180 degrees from 20 years ago; people aren’t as uptight about someone’s orientation. It’s more about the music.”
Though these two musicians are separated by a lifetime of experience and different backgrounds, an invisible but tangible thread connects them. Jordan doesn’t read music or know theory, but she can still write her story in notes and words. Jim has a master’s ability to read, write and compose in the language of music, yet he finds more mystery in music everyday when he creates something new. The thread that winds around and between them is the creative muse that drives them to express themselves in one of the oldest but most vibrant art forms. Sitting at the piano or holding a guitar gives them the promise that someone’s beauty and character is best exhibited through their art. And that all the labels people use to describe them will fade beneath the sound of their stories.
