Jazz Condition -- UPI Arts & Entertainment

Singer Kenny Rankin has more than survived the fickle tastes of the American music-consuming public and the foibles of the music industry these many years by staying true to himself and letting others discover -- or rediscover -- him along the way.

In a span of some 35 years he has moved from being a teenaged pop singer and guitarist to an entertainer who loves sharing his music with an intimate audience, usually as a solo performer, and who finds himself in both jazz and adult pop categories.

"I don't know that I've changed as much as the demographics have changed in what they call themselves," said Rankin recently. "I was like soft rock and soft pop. Some of those recordings ultimately ended up on jazz stations as well. I found my recordings still in rock bins because that's where I was, sort of a rumor in my own time.

"The focus of the music has always been on the lyric. 'What does that do to me? How does it make me feel? Do I relate to it? Do I empathize with whoever the character is?' I look at them as little stories, little movies. I don't know that I consciously place myself in them but I relate or I empathize. The music comes up from more my experience or how I have perceived someone to experience it," he said.

He's just out with "A Song For You." The Verve release, his label debut, was produced by industry veterans Tommy LiPuma and Al Schmitt -- "amazing producers and even nicer people," said Rankin. It is his first CD in five years.

This genial man with a dry, and often wry, sense of humor said there is no secret to finding material to perform or record.

"I keep it simple," he said. "The songs find me. I read them and if the hairs on my arm will stand up and I say 'I know what this is about.' I just speak from my heart. That's where I sing from.

"I've been accused of straying from the melody. And sometimes that's true after the first pass. Because when I'm singing I'm not thinking, I'm feeling. I have to just be true to myself and sing what I feel. If I don't know what I'm talking about then I don't talk or I don't sing or I don't speak. Although that's not always true. Sometimes I open my mouth just to change feet."

In conversation, Rankin's voice is quite a bit deeper than the distinctive, falsetto-charged tenor we hear in his songs.

The new CD teams him with guitarist David Spinozza, bassist Christian McBride, pianist Leon Pendarvis and drummer Lewis Nash. Guitarist Russell Malone, trumpeter Roy Hargrove and tenor saxophonist Chris Potter are featured on select tracks. McBride, Malone, Hargrove and Potter are fellow Verve artists and bandleaders in their own right.

"I now understand what it is like to be involved good work, much like a film by Martin Scorsese or Ron Howard. First there was the song selection and then they surrounded me with virtuosity," said Rankin. "It is all about the work. And it is wonderful. They blew out the budget and brought in orchestrators."

"A Song for You" is loaded with gems. Several that stand out are his fresh interpretations of Thelonious Monk's "'Round Midnight," "Where Do You Start?" by Johnny Mandel and Alan and Marilyn Bergman, and Lennon-McCartney's "I've Just Seen a Face," which extends his Beatles songbook covers since recording his version of "Blackbird" in 1975.

Let's let California-based Rankin talk about them.

"(On 'Where Do You Start?' they just carved out this extraordinary image with their words of just what it's like to for one person when hearts separate. If you've lived the life you've had that experience in some way or another depending on your time of life," Rankin said.

He calls the original "'Round Midnight" a "morose description of loneliness at midnight. Why do things the way they were done before? That song is so depressing, I wouldn't want to do it that way. I just decided to put that on a cushion of optimism."

As a result, we hear it with a Samba beat and an uplifting feel.

"The most interesting piece for me was "I've Just Seen a Face" by Lennon and McCartney because the lyrics were so stunning and sophisticated that I wanted to highlight them and made it into a ballad -- 'I've just seen a face. I can't forget the time or place when we first met....

"The Gershwins might have been the Beatles of their day when it came to composition. Lennon and McCartney were legitimate songwriters in the same vein," Rankin said.

He also added a version of "Spanish Harlem," as an ode to his old neighborhood, New York's Washington Heights, and his first love, whom he met and married there. In October, Rankin returned to the neighborhood to speak with students and perform at a public school three blocks from his boyhood home on 183rd Street.

Rankin said his irreversible decision to become a singer (and self-taught instrumentalist on piano and guitar) came in the fourth grade. He had just sung "Oh Holy Night" when his teacher, Miss Isabel Pringle "came over and patted me on the head and said 'That was lovely.' That was it. I was gone. I didn't have a choice.

"I had found a way to get love and affection. At first it was very intoxicating and for a long time I thought what I did was who I was. Once I realized that I was not the center of the universe, then the pressure was off and I began to have the time of my life."

"I am in my own skin, I come from my own place," Rankin said. "I don't really consider myself a jazz singer, I just sing the story and I tell the song. I'm just glad I'm still invited into an audience's evening, because that's what it's about, to be invited in and to share what I've discovered."