Sweet Storm

Crooner Jon Lucien recounts his career.

by Brian Glaser

A funny thing happened to singer Jon Lucien in 1999: He assembled one career-retrospective CD and ended up with two.

Frustrated that his old recordings had gone irretrievably out of print, Lucien tallied the most requested tunes from his Web site (www.jonlucien.com) and re-cut them for By Request (Shanachie). Once he finished, a friend called up and told him that somebody had just brought the original RCA and Mercury tracks back into the light of day.

"It’s about time somebody thought about me," Lucien says, laughing, about Razor & Tie’s 17-song collection Sweet Control. "I’m still alive!"

Lucien is not only very much alive, but the 57-year-old Doylestown resident is experiencing a minor renaissance. The fan base that he’s accumulated since the ’70s with a string of not-quite-hit songs and suave live performances has been counted via the Web and CD reissues, and discovered to be larger than anyone realized. There’s also the little matter of timing — after years of not fitting into any format that radio or his labels knew how to approach, Lucien has found that the formats have bent to what he’s been doing all along.

"According to many of the jocks that were familiar with me, they said that the music I was making was what ‘Quiet Storm’ came to be about," says Lucien, though he doesn’t quite see the match. "When you listen to ‘Quiet Storm’ programming, it ain’t my music," he says with a bouncy Caribbean lilt. It’s easy to hear why other folks think Lucien is a Stormer — his laid-back melodies and fluid rhythms wouldn’t sound out of place next to Luther Vandross or Smokey Robinson.

But Lucien doesn’t like thinking about where he may or may not fit in a fickle marketplace.

"I can’t tell you that it’s jazz, because it’s not," Lucien says of his tunes. "I can’t tell you it’s R&B, because it’s not. I can’t tell you it’s funk, because it’s not. But it has all of those elements inside."

You can almost hear Shanachie’s marketing exec tearing out his hair.

The problem may not be Lucien’s commercial instincts, but that he got to the Storm front via an indirect route: Unlike the format’s urban R&Bers, Lucien hails from the Caribbean island of St. Thomas and spent his childhood soaking up Afro-Cuban sounds and being spot-tested by his musician father

"He’d say, ‘OK, tonight you’re going to play the piano’," Lucien recalls, remembering how he’d plead, "I can’t play piano, Pappy," only to be told, "Tonight you’re going to play it."

Once Lucien came to America with a melting pot full of both his native music and the songs of vocalists like Nat King Cole, he began crafting a sound that tied together the styles he’d learned: Cuban rhythms went alongside R&B bass lines, and Lucien’s baritone scatting would move atop romantic pop.

Though far from topping the pop charts, Lucien is a busy man, playing dates around the world, writing music and keeping his hand on the mouse. Lucien has been using computers for years (he remembers arranging tunes on an old Atari computer back when those were around), so it was a smooth transition to the Net. In addition to his own site, Lucien is one of the flagship artists on Jazz Date at www.jazzcorner.com, and he continues to use high-tech music software to compose and arrange new tunes.

But the further he moves forward, the further back Lucien looks. Many of the tunes on his hard drive are inspired not by contemporary styles, but by classical music.

"If you take the rhythm out of ‘Creole Lady,’ you’re listening to a classical kind of music," he asserts, acknowledging that adding yet another influence isn’t going to get him any closer to simple mainstream acceptance. "Because I’m a Caribbean man, I have these rhythms in my soul, and because I’m of African descent, I have these elements in my soul. So I put them all together, and so far nobody has given me a title for them."

Jon Lucien will play Sept. 17 and 18 at Zanzibar Blue, 200 S. Broad St. (in the Bellevue), 215-732-5200.