Sunday, October 20, 2002

The Record

Ain't he sweet?

Paramus  NJ — Musician Ken Lelen has his own idea of harmonic convergence. The right guitar, for the right song, for the right audience. "I since songs that were popular in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, and I play guitars from the same decades," says the Titusville resident, who appears today at Brighton Gardens, a retirement community in Paramus. He's performing at the residence's third anniversary open house, which is free to the public. Of 90 gigs Lelen will do this year, about 70 are retirement communities, he says. That means his audience is mostly people in their 60s and beyond — the listeners the songs were written for.

Ken Lelen plays vintage instruments to
get an authentic sound for older tunes.

"They know the music, it's music they comprehend," says Todd Aronson, spokesman for Brighton Gardens, 186 Paramus Road. "The reason we have performers like Ken is to bring back memories. We have entertainers on a weekly basis. The majority are for our residents only, but this is a celebration of our third anniversary, and we wanted to share it with the community." 

From 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., Lelen will be joined by bassist Kathy Ridl of Hamilton. They will take a tour of Tin Pan Alley courtesy of such classics as Pennies From Heaven, Blue Moon, Ain't Misbehavin' and Tip-Toe Through the Tulips. Such tunes can be appreciated by people of any age, Lelen says. But it's the older audiences that really connect with them - just as he connects with that audience. "I feel comfortable playing for those people," says Lelen. "These are songs they know. What they get from my rendition is my affection for the music."

As a collector, Lelen has more than 20 guitars, ranging in age from a 1900 Bay State parlor guitar to a 1948 Martin 00-17, and he makes a point of matching a period instrument with the tune's era. That's what he's done for five years, ever since he started his Vintage Music Concerts. Lelen had been playing folk and bluegrass music since his teens. About six years ago, he bought a circa 1938 guitar in a store in Lambertville.

"I tried playing the folk music I had played as a teenager, and it sounded terrible," he says. "What the guitar wanted to play, what sounded good on it, was ragtime."

Soon after, he was sitting on a porch with his mother and began strumming tunes he heard, vaguely, in his head. They turned out to be Ain't She Sweet, Glory of Love, Pennies From Heaven. "When I did that, my mother said, 'Do you remember those songs? You used to listen to them all the time.' My mother had a big collection of 78 r.p.m. records that I used to listen to. All those songs went into my brain. And 40 years later, I'm on the porch playing them back to her. They were just coming right out of my fingers and my brain."

Lelen says he likes to play old tunes for people as they remember them. And the way people often remember the hits of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s is not always in a recording by a major star, but by playing or hearing them on a parlor piano or guitar. The Depression-era generation may be the last that routinely made its own music at home.

"My biggest thrill is when somebody comes up to me and says, 'I haven't heard that song played that way for 40 years,'" Lelen says. "People also come up to me and say, 'I used to have a guitar like that,' or 'I used to play music with my brother and father in a trio,' or 'My sister had an accordion and she used to play that song.' "

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© 2002 North Jersey Media Group - Hackensack NJ