Brendan O'Hara & The Big Bounce Collective: RAVE REVIEWS

***Please note the concert is March 19, 2010***

Best Acoustic Performer
THE BIG BOUNCE

South Beach loves music that inspires snorting lines or sweeping the ground with one's hind parts. But it's not so hot for the kind of melody that makes people swing-dance, two-step, and do the running man. Yet each Tuesday night at the Florida Room, the Big Bounce — Brendan O'Hara & Komakozie (comprising singer/piano man O'Hara, beatboxer Michael "Komakozie" Rodney, and a rotating band of artists consisting of an upright bassist, a trumpeter, a saxophonist, and a tap dancer) crank out tunes that can be described as the love child of KRS-One and Bob Dylan. And guess what? Ten fingers, ten toes, this baby is a gem. They play songs such as "Champagne and Apple Juice," a cheeky ditty about a steamy night out turned morning after that leaves the lovers thirsty for an unorthodox type of mimosa. The sound showcases O'Hara's pop-perfect potential to rock the airwaves, but when Komakozie adds his oral bass to a track such as "Mistress," you kinda want the pair to remain your little secret. Perhaps B & Koz should patent their time machine. Or better yet, maybe they should give some whacked-out perfumer an inch of their skin so the essence of blue-eyed soul and classic hip-hop vibes could be extracted, bottled, and placed gingerly into our icebox for the rest of eternity. Till then, we'll just take what they give us — a weekly residency on SoBe and countless other performances around the Magic City and the nation.

Florida Room at the Delano
1689 Collins Ave., Miami Beach 33139
305-672-2000

The Florida Room marked its one-year anniversary with heavy hitters De La Soul, on Friday Jan. 23. The event, which was put on in partnership with Giant Step Records, also brought out other groups such as Brendan O’Hara and The Big Bounce. Over the past year, Giant Step Records has brought Janelle Monae, Jazmine Sullivan and Alice Russell, just to name a few, to perform at the Havana–style piano bar, which was designed by Lenny Kravitz Designs. The Florida Room is also the only underground bar in Miami Beach and is located below the Delano Hotel.

Photo Credits: Metromix/Mychal McDonald

Brendan O’Hara- Singer, Performer, Troubadour

Brendan O’Hara is a sexy, soulful crooner who started performing on stage to cope with the loss of love and make beauty from pain. Born in Boston but raised in New Jersey and Washington, Brendan came down to South Florida to teach piano at the Arts Academy of Hollywood, an award-winning arts center built and operated by aunt Linda  and uncle Jeff Strutz, an accomplished musician who taught Brendan how to play guitar. He learned the piano and his deep love of music from his grandfather, a beatnik who played ragtime and was a boogie-woogie bugle boy. 
He also sings superbly and blows a mean harmonica, but Brendan’s forte lies in his moving live performances. Like  a modern-day troubadour, he combines his ample musical gifts with a compelling stage presence, incisive lyrics, 
simple hymns and the occasional joke, political commentary or honest moment of public self-reflection, weaving  tales and verses of bliss and woe for live audiences across Miami. Although he has always been blessed with 
heavenly pipes and an irresistible predilection for storytelling, he has put out a few modestly successful recordings  and is currently enjoying the most significant recognition and acclaim of his career due to his stirring live shows at the Delano’s Florida Room on Tuesday nights, accompanied by his band, The Big Bounce, and Komakozie, a brilliant 
local beatbox performer.

Sing, Song, Sung
Listen in to Brendan O’Hara

If you haven’t yet heard him, then you haven’t been out — at least not to Circa 28, Transit, Love/Hate or the Florida Room anyway. And if you haven’t been out to even one of the above over the past month or so, you’re not only missing much of the best Miami has to offer nightlife-wise, but you’re missing the best our town’s got music-wise as well.

Why? Because in each and every one of those bright dark nightspots, a man named Brendan O’Hara has come to sing his swinging songs — and in each the crowd has come undone.

The crowd could hardly fail to do otherwise. After all, O’Hara’s a showman, and even show-offs dig catching a show every week or so. Better, the cat’s a saloon singer, in the grand tradition of that fabled breed, and he’s got the pipes to prove it. Best, the man not only knows the strength and the beauty behind a melody, he shows how such great strength and beauty can burrow to the core of our soul.

Make that hot-buttered, blue-eyed soul, as much Isaac Hayes in his ballad days as Sinatra at his most circumspect. Or, to be rudely blunt, kinda like the cracker equivalent of John Legend, had the soul stirrer spent his nights in indie land rather than church. With a little of Waits’ way with a throwback, The Boss’ innate ability to bleed sweat and Randy Newman’s classicist approach to songcraft thrown into the mix just for fun.

But it’s to Jamie Cullum that O’Hara is rightly kin, as well as, perhaps, Jack Johnson, when he’s not stoned. And as fun as this back alley troubadour makes of the night, his nonstop gigging indicates the cat is nothing if not serious about his career. Monthlies at LA’s Hotel Café and New York’s Bitter End; semi-monthlies up in Philly’s World Café Live; regional run-throughs by the season — hell, even when O’Hara’s at his Hollywood, Fla., home, he seems to be on tour, with his weekly Florida Room residency (opening for the dynamite Angela Laino), just the most regular of his increasingly hectic schedule.

O’Hara, natch, wouldn’t want it any other way, and he couldn’t have it even if he did. Like we said, he’s a troubadour, born to bring his verse from place to place. Sure he was birthed in Sopranos land; yes, he counts stints in Encino, Calif., and Seattle among his pasts; and it’s true he’s been consistently startling South Florida audiences for four years now. But his real home is on the road, among high balls and heartbreak, cigarettes and swoon, even if said road is sometimes only a causeway.

So the next time you hear word that a man named Brendan O’Hara is set to stage near you, head on out, hit the joint in question and revel in the reveal of a song-struck singer who refuses to be anything but sung. You might just hear something you’ve been listening for all along.

See if O’Hara’s on the road again at
www.brendanohara.org

Brendan O’Hara

Just about every Wednesday, a smooth alley cat named Brendan O’Hara breaks out the kinda songs that make the whole world sing along. Funny thing is, they’re usually his own. But it doesn’t take but a beat to get where this songman is singing from, and no more than a verse before you join in on the heartbreak and the hope, the long nights and the darker days, the wine, the women and, yes, the song, which remains the same only in its universal appeal to everyone with enough guts to sing it.

South Florida's own Brendan O'Hara put on a freaking entertaining set at Genghis Cohen in Los Angeles on Thursday night.
It's pretty amazing what one man can do with a piano, a guitar and a mouth that functions as both beat box and horn. Ink Pen has seen Brendan perform with his very entertaining group Brendan O' Hara and the Humbles Ones once or twice in South Florida, but thinks it's pretty amazing the way that this guy gets around the country. He maintains a rigorous touring schedule, the details of which he's going to share with Ink Pen soon.

He also has an amazing voice and, we needn't mention but will, is very, very easy on the eyes. We want to see more of him in LA and we want to see more South Florida bands in LA.
Back in the day in S.Fla, Ink Pen was too cynical to fully appreciate the magnitude of Brendon's funky styling. Now, we simply love it. For pure refreshment, check out Brendan O' Hara.

Thanks for coming to LA, Brendan. Loves it.

One of the best I've received in a long time. Sounds like a young Ben Harper or Jeff Buckley.

"Stick around too much and people won't miss you," Brendan O'Hara muses over drinks on Hollywood Beach, where the 24-year-old singer/songwriter/activist has settled down for close to two years. That's after a case of wanderlust had taken him to cities on both coasts since he left New Jersey in 1998. But talk to him about South Florida and he smiles big.

O'Hara doesn't hide his emotions well, one-on-one or in his music. He's got all the swagger of a ready-made celebrity and the looks to boot — long dark hair, scruffy beard and goatee, improbably white teeth, paint-splattered T-shirt and jeans, and a gold-flecked fedora. It would be easy to assume that the name of his backing band, the Humble Ones — bassist Billy B. Bowin and drummer Jon Weiner — was a toss-off, something that just sounded good after his name. When I suggest to O'Hara that he doesn't act like the "quiet, lovable loser" he suggests he is, he nods. "You're right," he says, motioning to Bowin and Weiner. "They're the humble ones."

Formed in January 2005, the trio has become one of South Florida's most earnest live acts, clocking in three-hour shows of original material and building a wellspring of good karma due to their philanthropic endeavors. "I was always a performer," O'Hara says of his early days spent doing community theater and learning music from his grandfather, a "beatnik" who played ragtime and boogie-woogie piano. "He was the most original thinker I ever met and a great musician. He was the life of the party. If he spent a few minutes with somebody, they instantly felt like a friend, and he definitely knew how to command attention."

Seeking attention of his own, O'Hara joined the City Kids Repertory Company in Jersey, crediting his trouble-making skills with landing meaty rolls in the company's socially minded performances. "They gave me the lead so they could keep an eye on me," he says. In fact, O'Hara blames "high jinks" for his earliest works of public service. After Peter Jennings' anti-drug prime-time TV special the Repertory taped, he stole the rainbow-colored rolling papers from the paraphernalia segment. When his family moved to Seattle, he didn't show up for the plane. "I was born rebellious," O'Hara says, and some of that rebellious streak wormed its way into his music.

Driven to "capture the moment rather than get all nostalgic about the past," he began writing and noodling with a guitar but found the piano a more reliable vehicle for his reflections. He eventually moved to L.A., where he enjoyed a brief role as Ashton Kutcher's stand-in on That '70s Show but was enticed by frequent visits to Miami. "My friends called me 'Drive-By.' I'd fly in for the summer, make a mess of things, then fly out," he says. When subway-station gigs in New York didn't pay the bills, he relocated to South Florida in 2004 and looked to form a band.

Enter Bowin, an accomplished guitar player and art teacher at the Arts Academy of Hollywood, where O'Hara teaches drama and music. "Moving to Florida allowed me to become a better musician and actually make a living," O'Hara says. In fact, unlike many local artists who bemoan the state of live music in South Florida, O'Hara and his Humble Ones embrace it. "The scene may be more fragmented here than in Seattle or New York, but that's worked for us," offers Weiner, who teamed with O'Hara and Bowin early last year. "There's far less 'pay to play' here. As a result, we got to play a lot more and were able to develop a following. And it's our experience that since there's fewer venues, it's easier to weed out the unpassionate musicians."

For musicians who speak of "rarely practicing" in the classic sense, the trio is tight, finishing one another's sentences and embracing a jam-band, improvisational-style in its performances. The group rarely plays tracks from its first studio album, Perceptive Inception, as they were recorded. "We play the songs the way they feel that night. Sometimes it's reggae; sometimes it's rock," O'Hara says. That off-the-cuff merriment, buoyed by the band's sound — a sonic stew of jazz, saloon-style swing, pop, rock, and hip-hop — has allowed the trio to get political without alienating folks just looking to get down.

"The album captures the vibe we have when we play live and honors what we do [socially]," Weiner says, including an array of benefit concerts and fundraisers, combating everything from AIDS in Africa to world hunger. "We like to think that the work we do for charity is representative of the fact that we're conscious about what's going on around us," Weiner says. "We're invested in charity work because circumstances compel us to be," adds O'Hara, citing his mother, a nurse practitioner who has worked in Africa for the CDC, as inspiration. "I don't know how you read the paper every day and not get involved."

In between saving the world, O'Hara and his mates are in the process of recording a new EP and planning their next move: going national. "The challenge in the beginning was to make a living," he says. "Luckily, we do that now and are far from starving artists. But we're still hungry." And still humble?

"Ah, man," O'Hara says, "we're always up for a little self-righteous trouble."

Brendan O'Hara is a natural pitchman. "That's a good pen," he tells a waitress at a seaside café on Hallandale Beach, flashing a megawatt smile as she cops his Pilot G2S7 fine point to take our order. "You'll never want to go to another pen."

When I remind him to get his pen back after the server walks off with it, he says, "I might have to give it to her," adding with a laugh, "I'm trying to get sponsored by the G2S7."

With the ease of the silky writing implement he uses to jot down lines and phrases in a pocket-size moleskin notebook, O'Hara thoughtfully expounds upon his music, his career, politics and his sprawling family, which stretches across the country from Pennsylvania to Washington. Having just returned from a multicity solo tour that yo-yoed him up and down the East Coast, the 24-year-old, North Miami-based singer-songwriter is kicking back with a few beers and munching on fish dip and crackers. Rested and relaxed, a stingy-brimmed hat perched atop his long, dark mane, he eyes the aquamarine horizon visible just over a manicured copse of sea grape.

What's on the horizon for O'Hara, however, is a little less clear. At this point in his career, he's at something of a crossroads. On the one hand, the charismatic pianist and vocalist has built a strong local following for his funky, house-rocking trio, Brendan O'Hara and the Humble Ones, which was named Best Rock Band in City Link's Best of 2006. On the other, he's stretching his wings as a solo artist, introducing audiences to the quiet, intense acoustic tunes he plays on guitar and piano that will eventually be heard on an album titled Soap Box.

While songs with a political bent do indeed appear on the recording, they are, by design, less overt and aggressive than tracks such as "Red, White and Blues" and "Kick Me" from his 2005 band recording Perceptive Inception. Interwoven into delicate love songs and accompanied by unshakably pretty melodies, the political messages on Soap Box are no less pointed, but they are sweetened with gently strummed guitar, dramatic piano, mournful cello and muted trumpet, and sung in a nakedly emotive vocal.

"I guess what I'm doing these days is trying to make my opinions a little more palatable," O'Hara says. "And what's the most accessible thing? I think relationships and love. There are so many [political] opinions, but I think we all feel similar about love. We like it, it feels great, and it hurts. And that truism is a basis for so many other things."

Duality is among O'Hara's favorite concepts. He finds the often-contradictory relationships of exteriors and interiors fascinating and admits to being fully complicit in the very human conceit of donning masks. Onstage with the Humble Ones, O'Hara's the broad-smiling master of revels, pounding his piano and singing in a stentorian vibrato that's nearly as operatic as Meat Loaf's or Freddie Mercury's. His solo acoustic stuff reveals a more vulnerable side.

"We're all human, and we're all fucked-up," he relates with a laugh. "We all have our shit. I think I'm super-fucked-up and have tons of shit. And no one wants that side. People only want the real-together, big, brash person. And in everything, there's this dualistic nature of being really strong and being really weak."

A New Jersey native, O'Hara wandered around a bit before settling in South Florida, trying his hand at acting in Los Angeles and taking a halfhearted stab at a humanities degree from Seattle University. In 2004, he relocated to South Florida, drawn by his love for the area where his uncle, a drummer with the band Haze, and his aunt, who runs the Arts Academy of Hollywood, reside. Hooking up with bassist Billy B. Bowin, who was also in Haze, and drummer Jon Weiner, O'Hara formed the Humble Ones and began building a fan base with high-energy shows at Sneakers, Jazid and Transit Lounge.

"Billy was part of the inspiration for me to come down here," O'Hara says. "He's also the person who really inspired me to go solo as much as I go with the band, because he knows he can't make the commitment to rough it out on the road. But he goes, 'Dude, you need to do this.' "

Touring is more difficult for Bowin and Weiner, who have day jobs and families to think about, than it is for O'Hara, whose entire life, at this point, is wrapped up in his music. Fully appreciating the energy with which his bandmates infuse him onstage, O'Hara also wants to realize his more-introspective side, something that often remains unexpressed during the trio's hard-driving sets. While he insists that the Humble Ones are still very much a viable entity and have even recorded a new album, Souled Out, O'Hara seems to be straining at the tether, trying to see what may be waiting for him up the road. The question is whether the Humble Ones will be along for the ride.

"I suppose that's entirely up to them, and whatever the decision, we're family," O'Hara says. "We wouldn't be here without each other. … They taught me so much, and I've admired so much of them. And the idea that I'm not in a band where I'm picking the drummer up off the floor and he's puking or doesn't have a car, … it's made me a musician who knows the responsibility side a lot sooner than I even wanted to know it. I just wanted it to be a big party, because it's kind of hard and it can get a little lonely or depressing or frustrating. … I never wanted to give it up, but I've wanted to alter or switch and try new things, and I think that's what I'm going to do: keep trying, always be who I am."

Brendan O'Hara and the Humble Ones will perform 9:30 p.m. on the Street Stage at the City Link Music Fest.

(regarding Perceptive inception- studio CD)Standout Tracks include "Hole in the Wall, Doe, Prettiest Corpse, and Don't Go Down" Take the Chilli Peppers, a little Sublime, Bob Marley, lounge Jazz, and blues and you just begin to get a taste of Brendan O Hara & The Humble Ones......grab a copy before it's too late. -Justin Enco

A standout is Brendan O’Hara, also a musician, as the Paper Dolls’ sweetnatured hanger-on who pines after Reggie.