Angela
The Kenny Wright Experience has for years been one of the top jazz concert acts in the Mid-Atlantic region,having performed as an opening act for the likes of Roy Ayer’s ( Baltimore County African American Festival ), Glady’s Knight ( Artscape Festival ), Kim Waters ( Fort Dupont ) and other major shows in the region featuring national artist.
Also Kenny has released six CD’s since the late 1980’s and much of this music can be heard on forums like iHeart Radio and Pandora which compares Kenny’s music to the likes of Norman Brown and ‘The Yellowjackets’. High praise indeed. Also much of this music can be heard daily in restaurants, airports, office buildings, the mall and other business establishments that wish to present a stimulating enviroment for their business, through the bands relationship with Mood Music, the successor to the merger of Muzak and Digital Music Express. This CD Baby review of Kenny’s music sums it up well, “Virtuoso Bassist/Composer Kenny Wright displays his flair for melodic, harmonic and rhythmic expansion with a style best described as a ‘true smooth jazz fusion,.His compositions may be sweet and tender or fiery and ferocious. And sometimes all of the above.”
The evolution of Kenny Wright the jazz artist began back in the 1960’s. Born to extremely poor and challenging circumstance, his early musical influence’s were the sounds of Motown and the British invasion of the Beatles and Rolling Stones. Attracted to the warm sound of the bass guitar, when he actually started to play at seventeen, the challenging circumstance of poverty and inner city life led him to the blues, where all of his frustrations could be verbalized by making the bass guitar talk. It is a trait that has followed him into every musical style that he has mastered from Motown to Bebop. As time marched on and as he mastered these styles, there was a natural evolution from one style to the next. Today Kenny’s jazz is a reflection of having ‘lived the blues of Muddy Waters, of having lived the Motown experience, of having lived through the psychedelia of Jimi Hendrix and having lived through the funk of James Brown and Sly Stone. The Kenny Wright Experience is a reflection of this experience. Which is where the ‘Experience’ in the moniker comes from.
The Kenny Wright Experience band is a unique one. Playing with the eclecticism of Charlie Parker and Miles Davis as easily as the funk and groove of James Brown and The Commodores, this unit can do it all.
Whatever the occasion, this band conforms it’s style to produce a one of a kind and outstanding musical and sonic experience.