Kareem Kandi photo by Daniel Sheehan
“It all just kind of happened by chance, I guess, and worked out well,” Kareem Kandi says of his career as we settle in to a not-so-quiet corner of Vito’s on First Hill. He had just finished the last of three sets with his trio (Kandi on tenor sax, Delvon Lamarr on Hammond B-3, Julian McDonough on drums) at Seattle’s finest former Mob hangout. People were trickling out and the band was packing up when I had a chance to sit down with Kandi and learn a little bit about what keeps him busy and what makes him tick.
Let’s start with the busy. Consider that an average week for the Tacoma-based tenor player finds him teaching 35-40 private lessons and gigging three to five nights from Bellingham to Olympia and beyond. He’s in his 14th year as Artist-in-Residence at the Tacoma School of the Arts and his 9th at Pierce College, where he teaches saxophone and, until this year, directed its big band ensemble. He also plays and tours with the folk super-group The Paperboys from Vancouver, BC, and has done some international dates with his own groups.
If that sounds like a lot, note that Kandi’s also wearing the various other hats that go along with a music career: management, booking, publicity, etc. But you won’t hear him complain. In fact, he feels “blessed” to be able to make a living doing what he loves while living where he wants to live.
“Things have always kind of manifested at the right time,” the Northwest native later confirmed. “When opportunity knocks, you have to be ready to make the most of it. Fortunately, when opportunities have come my way, I’ve been able to capitalize on them.” He’s done so in part by approaching every situation as an opportunity to learn how to build a career and grow as a musician. That’s what makes him tick.
Kandi was already teaching and playing significantly before he finished high school. He broadened his musical horizons at Olympic College – jazz, classical, theory, composition, and more. When he won a scholarship to the Bud Shank Workshop, he got to play some of his original compositions in a quintet with Chuck Deardorf. Impressed with Kandi’s skill, Deardorf encouraged him to apply and audition at Cornish College, from which he subsequently received a full scholarship and, later, a bachelor’s degree.
Illustrative of his knack for seizing opportunity is when Kandi’s first private teacher, Tracy Knoop, asked him to work the door for some gigs. Kandi agreed, and as a result got a behind-the-scenes glimpse of both the music business and the life of a musician. He recalled one particular night when an unsuspecting Bill Ramsay showed up to one of Knoop’s gigs and tried to waltz in without paying. Kandi stopped him and told him he had to pay like everyone else. The kerfuffle was quickly resolved when Knoop introduced the two, but it worked out in Kandi’s favor in the end. “From that moment on, Bill [Ramsay] would hire me to work the door for him because he knew I was going to make everybody pay,” he noted with a laugh.
Working the doors led to opportunities to sit in with bands, which provided access to a wealth of knowledge not easily obtained. “I was playing with a lot of the older guys, observing them and seeing how they did things. And they would always tell me not to be a musician because [of all the difficulties]. And so I would look at that say, okay, well how can I solve these problems and make it work.”
When Kandi later did some booking for clubs, he would take note of how the most successful groups operated – how they filled the room and worked the audience. “I kind of look at it as a business. Our product is our writing and our playing and our band. I want to always be able to put on a good show – where we feel good about what we’re doing and the audience is enjoying it and comes along with us.”
But if the foregoing makes you think Kandi’s focus is more business than music, you haven’t heard him play. The crowd at Vito’s on this night seemed most interested in socializing. But the band had them turning their heads toward the stage all night. There was a palpable change in the room’s atmosphere each time the trio hit a groove, and a few folks even got up to dance. The solos were smoking, the band was swinging, and the bass lines provided courtesy of Delvon Lamarr’s left hand were so spot on that I had to keep looking to see if a bass player was hidden somewhere. Whatever business acumen he has, when he’s on stage he has the chops and the musicality to back it up.
Kareem Kandi is a man with a purpose, and his let-no-opportunity-pass approach has served him well. He’s worked the doors, booked the clubs, done the promotion; he’s probably even driven the van a few times. He’s put this diversity of experience to work in the service of furthering his own career. With two CDs under his belt (and two more in the works), a growing fan base, and an increasingly busy gig schedule, things only seem to be looking up.
