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Passage II
INFORMATIONAL: This passage is adapted from the article
“Notes from a Weddi ng” by Lauren Wilcox Puchowski (©2010
by Lauren Wilcox Puchowski).
It was never Kenney Holmes’s intention to become
a wedding singer. The grandson of West Indian immi-
grants, Holmes was raised in Gordon Heights, on Long
Island, in what he calls “a small black community
founded by like-minded thinkers,” families of immi-
grants and Southern blacks who, as Holmes says,
“didn’t come here to fool around” and who handed
down to their children their own keen sense of
ambition.
“We grew up in that kind of atmosphere,” he says,
“of positive thinking, of getting educated, whether or
not you had a degree.”
Like any American boy in the 1950s and ’60s, he
was fascinated with popular music: He listened to the
area’s one radio station, which “mostly played Sinatra”;
sometimes in the evenings, with a coat hanger stuck
into the top of his portable radio, he could pick up a
faint signal from WWRL, a rhythm and blues station in
New York City. When he was a teenager, his brother
brought home a guitar. “I was 16, it was a Sunday
night,” he says. “I sat down and played ‘I Can’t Get No
Satisfaction.’ I was addicted.”
While he was not a virtuoso, he was, he discov-
ered, good at making money at it. He learned three
songs—“Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones, “And I
Love Her” by the Beatles, and “Shotgun” by Junior
Walker and the All Stars—and formed a band. “We
went out and sold it,” he says. “We could play those
three songs all night. We got pretty popular out on the
island, playing battle of the bands, fire halls, high
school proms, for $10 a night.”
Still, a career as a musician was not what he, or his
family, had had in mind. Over the next few years, he
says: “I did everything I could not to be a guitar player.
I went to college not to be a guitar player.” Thinking he
would be a psychiatrist, he took pre-med classes but
didn’t complete a degree. Along the way, he continued
playing nightclubs and parties.
In his mid-20s, he visited his brother in Washing-
ton. Washington looked, to Holmes, like a good place to
be an ambitious, career-minded black man, but it also
had a thriving music scene in nightclubs and hotel
lounges, and the next 15 years played out as a sort of
tussle between his creative pursuits and his more busi-
ness-driven impulses. Trying to work his way up in the
music scene, he played five and six nights a week in
nightclubs and wrote his own music. He started a
recording studio called Sound Ideas, which trawled
local talent for the makings of a hit song, but he found
the pickings slim.
The club scene, after a long while, began to wear
on him, as well. Unwilling to resign himself to the life
of a starving artist, when an agent approached him in
the early ’90s about specializing in wedding and private
parties, Holmes decided to try it.
It was a revelation. “I could make in one night
what I used to make in five,” he says. And “it changed
the culture of what I was doing.”
Holmes was well-suited for the role of event band-
leader. His production skills helped him control his
band’s sound, and his familiarity with country, big-band
and classical music made him popular with audiences
who wanted, as he says, “a tango or a Viennese wa
ltz,”
as well as Wilson Pickett.
Because business ebbs and flows with the seasons
and the economy, Holmes has always kept a variety of
sidelines, including a job driving a limousine for nine
years to put his oldest daughter through a private high
school and college. These days, at gigs, he hands out a
stack of million-dollar “bills” printed with his image
and his current enterprises: bandleader, commercial
mortgage broker, hard money lender.
Holmes uses as many as eight musicians and two
singers for weddings. He accepts turnover as a fact of
running a band, but his current core lineup has, in the
mercurial world of part-time performers, been fairly
steady. Sam Brawner, the drummer, and Atiba Taylor,
the sax player, have played with him for three and four
years, respectively, and Bruce Robinson, the key-
boardist, has played with him for 15.
This is perhaps partly because Holmes insists on
making music. During performances, he lets his musi-
cians take the lead and uses specialized, stripped-down
tracks, called digital sequences, to set the tempo and fill
in musical parts when necessary, ultimately preferring
the messy alchemy of live music to something more
canned. The musicians say that this is in contrast to
other bandleaders they’ve worked for, who often rely
heavily on recordings and use musicians more as visual
props. Holmes’s respect for the music endears him to
his musicians. “These guys play from the heart,” says
Robinson. “They’re not just trying to get through the
gig.”
11. The main purpose of the passage is to:
A. explain why Holmes’s musical tastes gradually
changed over time.
B. describe how Holmes’s hectic professional life
affects his personal life.
C . highlight the different instruments Holmes mas-
tered in becoming a famous musician.
D. document how Holmes eventually became an
enterprising bandleader.
GO ON TO THE NEXT PAGE.
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