Culture
Sean Carney and Jake Friel bring varied influences and generational POVs to Cobbler Coffeehouse show Friday
By: Emily Votaw
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MARIETTA, Ohio (WOUB) – On Friday, Columbus’ Sean Carney and Canton’s Jake Friel play the Gun Room at the Lafayette Hotel (101 Front Street) as a part of the Mid-Ohio Valley Blues, Jazz, and Folk Music (BJFM) Society’s Cobbler Coffeehouse series.
The Cobbler Coffeehouse concerts support the programs and activities the BJFM Society organizes throughout the year, like their Blues In the Schools initiative, which aims to preserve roots music by making it possible for blues musicians to present their craft to students in regional elementary and high schools.
Carney and Friel perform as a duo Friday, bringing together two independently successful careers founded on two unique interpretations of the blues united by an underlying passion for the genre.
Carney has been at it for more than three decades. Things really took off in 2007, when Carney won first place at the International Blues Challenge in Memphis, TN. This accomplishment led to 15 years of international touring, ultimately playing 29 countries.
Winning the International Blues Challenge wasn’t Carney’s only notable accomplishment from 2007 – that’s also the year he founded Blues For A Cure, a program that has raised more than half a million dollars for cancer research. A large part of the fundraising effort happens each summer when Blues For A Cure organizes a large benefit concert in Cadiz.
Quite notably, Blues for a Cure has funded the Heather Pick Music Program at the OSU James Cancer Hospital, fostering a robust music program for patients undergoing treatment at the James.
Carney is also involved in the CAMP Blues Program at the Jazz Academy in Columbus, which is an outlet that has allowed him to connect hundreds of young musicians to the same roots music that catalyzed his own career.
Perhaps most notable is the diversity of influences Friel and Carney bring to their collaboration.
Friel is a younger musician than Carney, but he’s still got 15 years of professional performing under his belt – including domestic and international tours. Friel has generated acclaim harmonica playing – something he will showcase during Friday’s show.
He describes the music he plays as “blues with a twist,” and when you consider how he developed his chops, that makes sense. He brings flavors from Americana and country western music to his performances.
Like many, his passion was sparked by exposure to a vintage record collection. For Friel, that record collection was his grandfather’s, and notably a copy of Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music.
“We listened to that thing until the needle broke,” Friel recalls, noting that this memory dates back to when he was only a toddler, three or four years old.
Friel says his introduction to the harmonica was not quite as romantic. It happened when he was about eight years old, recalling that he picked up a harmonica “at a Cracker Barrel or a House of Blues.”
His development on the instrument came both from the ever present post modern university that is YouTube (in particular, Adam Gussow’s Modern Blues Harmonica); as well as early involvement with the Northeast Ohio Blues Alliance.
While Friel finds his music is intuitively impacted by Americana and country and western music; Carney’s music finds its bedrock in jazz.
Carney says a major early event in his trajectory as a musician was when his father – at the time a music teacher – took him to see saxophonist (and Columbus native) Rusty Bryant play live. At the time Carney’s uncle was a professor of jazz studies at Ohio State University and a member of Bryant’s live band.
Carney says that while Bryant had “some notoriety” in the ‘50s, by the time Carney and his father were seeing him play, “he was an older guy and his stardom was in the rearview mirror.”
This wasn’t the important part – of course it wasn’t – because Carney was impacted not by the magnitude of Bryant’s fame but by an intuitive understanding of Bryant’s importance as a musician and artist.
“I just had a feeling that he was somebody special and somebody important, and he had this air about him,” recalls Carney.
Carney credits the older musicians he played with and for throughout the early part of his career for his abilities as a performer and his development as a musician. Some of those mentors included boogie woogie pianist Big Joe Duskin, Detroit-based pianist and bandleader Joe Weaver, and jump blues shouter and songwriter Jimmy “T99” Nelson.
Carney says it’s been difficult to lose his mentors over the years.
“They just get old, and that’s what happens,” he says, going on to say that experiencing mortality in this way has allowed him to pivot to trying to “pay forward” the gifts of mentorship those musical greats gave him.
Lucky for us, this focus on “paying it forward” has resulted in Carney connecting with musicians such as Friel.
Admission for Friday’s show is $15 cash at the door or advance ticket purchased via eventbrite. Doors open at 7:30 p.m. Find more information at this link.
The 32nd River City Blues Festival happens March 14 – 15 at the Lafayette Hotel. Find more information at this link.