Jenny Ferris sang regularly at Bay Area jazz clubs from the mid-70’s through the 80’s. In 1985 she recorded a well-received jazz album “Not So Long Ago” with some of the best musicians around at that time, namely, saxophonist Chuck Clark, pianist Bry [+]Jenny Ferris sang regularly at Bay Area jazz clubs from the mid-70’s through the 80’s. In 1985 she recorded a well-received jazz album “Not So Long Ago” with some of the best musicians around at that time, namely, saxophonist Chuck Clark, pianist Bryce Rohde, bassist Perry Thoorsell and drummer, Dave Meade.
In the mid-90's and after a two-year sojourn in New York, things slowed down for Jenny musically. She never stopped singing, but public performances got rarer as she spent more time with her family and at her day job as a special education teacher working with visually impaired students, a job from which she retired in 2004.
During this period, from the mid-90’s and into the new century, Jenny maintained close friendships with some wonderful musicians who encouraged her to return to singing more frequently professionally. But not until she happened to hear Terry Gross interviewing author Phillip Furia on “Fresh Air” did Jenny seriously think about getting back into music in a more intense way. In a word (or three), she got inspired.
On “Fresh Air”, Furia was promoting his book, SKYLARK, a generous and well-written biography of Johnny Mercer. Jenny had always been a Mercer fan. She read the book, felt empathy and admiration for its subject ( a most creative, talented and complicated man), and got busy selecting and learning, or re-learning, enough Mercer material to fill a concert program. For Jenny, the appeal of this music lay not only in the folksy, evocative lyrics of Johnny Mercer, but in the excellence of the composers he worked with, namely Harold Arlen, Hoagy Carmichael, Jerome Kern and Henry Mancini, among others.
Pianist Laura Klein, bassist Carol DeArment, drummers Tom Hassett and Bryan Bowman, guitarist/composer/arranger Tony Corman, and Jenny’s talented saxophonist husband, Rich Lesnik, jumped into the Mercer project with all twelve feet. There followed a series of well-attended “Mostly Mercer” concerts
Jenny and the band have now completed a CD of this concert material, DAY IN DAY OUT . Some of the songs included in the CD are: “Come Rain or Come Shine”, “Laura”, “Accentuate the Positive”, “Hit the Road to Dreamland”, “My Shining Hour”, “Day In, Day Out”, “Twilight World”,
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