Perfect Arrangement
MISSOULIAN, October 30, 2003
by Sherry Jones

Preview
For 22 years Jeni Fleming studied classical piano, only to give it all up for jazz.

The Bozeman-based singer with a vocal range from sultry smoke to high pure-"a voice, " writes Scott McMillion of the Big Sky Journal, "as clean as a raindrop. "-used to express herself with her hands, winning prestigious awards for her piano performance such as the Junior Baldwin Piano Competition in 1988, the Billings Symphony's Young Artist Competition.

Yet, even as a very young child just beginning piano lessons, she knew her proclivities lay elsewhere.

"I know since the time I was probably 6 that I was supposed to be a singer, " says Fleming from her home in Bozeman. "I was so much closer to that medium than to piano.

"Musicians-all artists, in fact-have an idea in their head of how they want to execute something, how they want to delineate a note or phrase, how they want it to be put down on canvas.

"How do you get what's in your head to come out of your mouth or out of your hands? They will spend a lifetime trying to marry those two concepts. It comes so much easier for me as a singer than as a pianist. "

Singing is her first love, and sing she does with her Jeni Fleming Acoustic Trio, comprising her husband, Jake, on guitar and saxophone (not at the same time, although, she says, he's working on it with the help of technology.) and bassist Chad Langford. She'll sing almost anything, and does-not just jazz, but folk and pop as well, Cyndi Lauper and Jerry Jeff Johnson and "Amazing Grace" and "Round Midnight" and "Over the Rainbow. "

"That's the kind of style we've come up with, " she says. "All of us have studied jazz a long time. A lot of that comes out in our music in the end, but we play whatever we like and fell connected to."

The daughter of a Lutheran pastor, Fleming says she grew up singing in church. "I've never studied voice, except the fact that I've sung in 3,000 choirs, " she says.

As a music student, though, she's had her mentors, those who who led her down the syncopated beatway that is jazz.

"It's such an oral tradition. There isn't really a book you can buy that tells you how to swing. You do it by listening and by copying, and by having a mentor that walks you through it. That's just kind of the way jazz works. There are people who learned from their mentors, ant then your responsibility as a jazz musician is to pass down what you've learned. "

Keeping that circle truning is one reason she teaches jazz singing in her home studio, she says. Someday, she adds, she'd like to really study voice herself. Someday, she'd like to sing with a jazz combo-rhythm section, horns, the works.

Someday, Jake might like to play saxophone with a band, as well. Someday Langford, a classical composer, might like to turn his attentions fully to that aspect of his career.

Right now, though, the Jeni Fleming Trio is doing its jazz-flavored thing pretty much every weekend, playing towns and cities across Montana and getting ready to release its second CD.

"Right now we have this really unique and great arrangement going on. And, we all happen to be friends. "