I’ve known Jenny Burton for many moons now.  And during those many moons, we’ve made a lot of music together.  Watchfire Music is one of the leading companies in the world today in the genre of Inspirational Music and you might say that Jenny and I discovered and developed this genre together during one of those moons.

I first met Jenny when I saw her at an, at the time, famous NYC club called Reno Sweeney’s.  She came out of the audience as a plant and sang James Taylor’s Fire And Rain and I got so excited by her performance that I ended up standing on the table during the crowd’s standing ovation for her.  I’ve been standing on that table shoutin’ her praises ever since.

Back in those days she was raw – what I would call a church screamer – but infused with such a huge talent that you couldn’t take your eyes off her.  A week or so after that performance I asked her to audition for me for a production of my musical called Island, that opened at the Milwaukee Rep.  She came in and sang a song and for the first time ever in an audition (and last time) I immediately hired her on the spot for our show.

She proved to be a brilliant hire.  She was terrific in the show and helped get the show off the ground.  She got great reviews and that began a multi-decade trip down music lane that hasn’t stopped since.

Out of that show came an act called Jenny Burton and the Other Brothers, a 12 piece horn band that played pop and R&B and blew the roof off the joints all around NYC for a year or so.  I did a lot of the writing for the band and along with arranger/keyboardist, Alan Smallwood, created a sound for Jenny that had audiences building to sold-out houses.

She was puttin’ in her 10,000 hours developing her craft and learning the business along with me.  Back in those days the whole idea was to get a record deal.  That deal came within a couple of years when an innovative Dance Music producer named John Robie saw her perform and produced a dance song for her under the boring name of C-Bank.  Why he didn’t use her name, I’ll never know, but C-Bank’s first single, One More Shot, shot to the top of the dance charts in the early 80s disco-mad era. One More Shot became a #1 Dance Music song in the country and even crossed over into the Top Ten of the R&B charts.

All this action attracted the attention of Atlantic Records and their giant of the industry, Ahmet Ertegun.  They signed her and Jenny went on to become one of America’s disco queens and had a string of dance hits under her own name for the next several years.  She toured all over the country and sang at the then flourishing discos for thousands.

Unfortunately for me, I was left a bit in the dust.  Her producer was not interested in collaboration and really did not care about any of her pervious music development, wanting, instead, to write all of her hits himself.

After several years of meaningless disco lyrics and four-on-the-floor boring bass drum disco beats, Jenny began to ask, “Isn’t there something more to music than this?”  We went to Atlantic Records and asked that they expand her genre into more of an R&B direction.  Truth is, the folks at Atlantic had no idea of her talents.  To them she was just a cash machine disco queen and they weren’t going to change what they perceived was a good thing.

Trouble was, the disco era came to a rapid end, fads being what they are and the unwieldy major record companies being what they were back then, they couldn’t see past their checkbooks and had no idea that a disco singer could be anything else besides a disco singer.

Both Jenny and I saw a career going nowhere, an era ending, and so when her time for contract renewal with Atlantic came up we decided to move on from a company that had no clue as to the talent under their wings.

I had gotten into the lucrative field of writing music for and directing major Industrial Shows around the country for companies like Master Card, General Motors, Apple, etc. and needed singers to perform in these multi-million dollar extravaganzas and so I turned to Jenny to be one of my lead singers.  This became a 12-year stint where we did hundreds of shows together and I wrote and produced hundreds of original songs for these shows.  Jenny became the queen of the industrials and both of us were the East Coast first calls for many of the production houses producing these shows.

Jenny was the reason why we won most of these shows.  We would go into a company’s board room and pitch concept, song and style to the various executives of these Fortune 500 companies and around the time Jenny would get up and sing, no matter how they were feeling before, after she sat down, they were sold.  They just had to have this lady represent their company.  She could turn a sterile boardroom into a Broadway theater or a concert house within the first 5 notes of the song.  She was an amazing presence.

But we worked for 12 years in a vacuum.  These were closed to the public performances, usually only for the company’s sales forces.  The money was great, the experience, invaluable.  I built my recording studio on the money made, lived the good life and traveled the world.  Trouble was, it was all a well-kept secret.

Also, for Jenny, it became a constant battle to learn a new song, perform it once and then move on to the next show.  She never had a chance to develop a repertoire of established songs that she knew in her bones.  She was always learning a new one and every show was always opening and closing night.

She began to hate performing.  The pressures of singing a new song just once show after show were just far too weird.

The mid-90s came along and with it came a national recession.  The first things cut in the industrial shows was the music.  A strange choice considering that it was always the music that was most inspirational to the sales forces.  But, hey, we were both getting tired of the gigs anyway.  After all, how many songs can you write about teamwork?

But in those 12 years we did learn how to inspire an audience with a song.  We had great budgets and were able to hire the best of the studio singers in NYC (which means the best in the world) for the pre-recorded tracks of the songs.  We befriended the cream of the crop in NYC and kept them coming in to the studio on a regular basis.

In essence, in those 12 years, we developed our own brand of Inspirational music.  We learned what worked, what inspired, what would send an audience into a frenzy and most importantly, how to win over complete strangers to our music.

As the industrial period began to wind down, we created together The Jenny Burton Experience, an Inspirational music act featuring Jenny with a 9-voice choir made up of the top studio singers in NYC who were now our friends.  Each had a sub, so really we always had 18 to 20 singers on the roster that knew the book of music.  I wrote the music and produced and directed the group and we opened the act at a now famous club here in NYC called Don’t Tell Mama.

The act was a smash.  Both Jenny and I garnered the best reviews of our lives and audiences came back again and again.  The Jenny Burton Experience won every NYC award in site for best vocal group year after year and the show ran for seven years every Thursday night in NYC to sold-out audiences.

The act went on to open for Stevie Wonder at Lincoln Center, national tours, and was the first Gospel group ever to headline in Atlantic City – at Resorts International.  It was one of the great experiences of my life working with those people, watching that show work night after night, developing new material for the act and having that group sing my songs.

But the best part of it was watching Jenny Burton.  In the beginning of the run, she didn’t even want to talk in between songs.  She would say to me, “Oh just let me sing the songs.  I don’t want to say nothin’,”  In the end she had become the consummate performer and had actually developed into a very funny comedian as well as a singer who could readily touch hearts and inspire minds as well a keep ‘em laughin’.

And then that experience too was over.   Weary from the grind of show after show, year after year, we both sought something else.  Jenny spent a couple of years managing my recording studio, Westrax, and then went to work as a manager in the corporate world.  What started out to be “for a short time only” went on far too long for this major talent.

During that time we recorded a CD for Watchfire Music entitled I Think On These Things, but we did not build an act and tour behind the CD because we were still trying to get Watchfire Music off the ground and money was scarce.

What a waste of this woman’s talents!  For her not to be performing was just a sin.  All performers have their up and down moments.  For Jenny, this was very tough.  To have spent so many years working on such a high level and now not to do it at all was frustrating and sometimes defeating.  She called this period of time, “A Dream Deferred’ after Lorraine Hansberry’s famous poem that begins the movie A Raison In The Sun. She struggled with a couple of physical problems along the way that kept her from getting started again and watched for the moment of rebirth to come along.

And now here we are at that moment.  Ladies and Gentlemen, she’s back!

I’m not going to talk about this much because you just gotta come and see for yourself.  We’ll be doing a series of shows for the next 6 months at the Watchfire Music Listening Room here in NYC.  The first show is Thursday, December 16^th at 8:00.  You might just want to be there and experience this phenomenal performer.

I know I’ll be there.  I wouldn’t miss it!