What you do for love
American musician pulls up stakes and reboots his career here after falling for Kitchener woman
HE WAS A ROCK MUSICIAN in an American band that opened for the likes of Hootie and the Blowfish.
But when Tim Louis saw Kitchener-born Brenda Shiry in a New Jersey club, it was clear the star was not on stage. She was in the audience.
“I was smitten. It was like a lightning bolt,” Louis says of their 1992 encounter.
Today, Louis, 43, is a popular jazz singer, songwriter and pianist with three CDs and a compilation album. He has performed with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony and the Canadian Big Band, and in front of heads of state and royalty.
You can hear his passion for jazz during his weekly one-hour radio show, Jazz Sessions, on FM 92.9.
The New Jersey native is a classically trained pianist with an undergraduate degree in music from Rutgers University where he studied under jazz great Kenny Barron.
When the “lightning bolt” named Brenda hit him in 1992, Louis was working on his master’s degree in elementary education in New Jersey. At the same time, he was substitute teaching and playing in clubs with a rock band. >>
HE WAS A ROCK MUSICIAN in an American band that opened for the likes of Hootie and the Blowfish.
But when Tim Louis saw Kitchener-born Brenda Shiry in a New Jersey club, it was clear the star was not on stage. She was in the audience.
“I was smitten. It was like a lightning bolt,” Louis says of their 1992 encounter.
Today, Louis, 43, is a popular jazz singer, songwriter and pianist with three CDs and a compilation album. He has performed with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony and the Canadian Big Band, and in front of heads of state and royalty.
You can hear his passion for jazz during his weekly one-hour radio show, Jazz Sessions, on FM 92.9.
The New Jersey native is a classically trained pianist with an undergraduate degree in music from Rutgers University where he studied under jazz great Kenny Barron.
When the “lightning bolt” named Brenda hit him in 1992, Louis was working on his master’s degree in elementary education in New Jersey. At the same time, he was substitute teaching and playing in clubs with a rock band. >>
>> It was a killer schedule, even for Louis who’s known for hard work.
“It was getting too difficult to keep in both worlds,” Louis recalls.
Figuring that he could go back to school and finish his master's degree any time, Louis chose rock ’n’ roll.
He played keyboard and sang backup for Soul Engines, an American band that performed original music. Soul Engines opened for high-profile groups like Tom Cochrane, Hootie and the Blowfish, Sass Jordan and Spin Doctors.
Shiry, meanwhile, was a big Bruce Springsteen fan. Back then, she and her best friend drove from Kitchener to New Jersey to visit old Springsteen haunts like Asbury Park and the Stone Pony club.
They heard Soul Engines perform at the Stony Pony club just before Louis joined the band. The young women became friends with the manager and made plans to see the band again.
“We really liked the music, so we bought a cassette at the record store and we listened to it over and over and over again in the car,” recalls best friend Nancy Nuzzi, about the band whose sound she called “Beatle-esque.’
“They were silly and funny and creative on stage.”
It was the next time the two friends were in New Jersey that Soul Engines’ newest member spotted the beautiful Shiry. “In a crowded club, she stood out,” Louis says, smiling.
They saw each other again at an upstate New York ski resort where the band had a gig. Louis’ manner, not his skiing, impressed her, she says. “He’s just so nice and kind and genuine.”
Back home in New Jersey and Kitchener, the two racked up hundreds of dollars in
long-distance telephone bills during their three-year courtship. There was no internet to help a long-distance romance then.
Shiry, who had been working at then-Prudential Insurance Company since graduating from high school, travelled to New Jersey whenever she could. Soul Engines toured up and down the East Coast.
“We were based out of Jersey, but played New York City a lot and Baltimore and Philadelphia and Jersey Shore,” Louis says. “We travelled a lot, a typical rock band.”
In 1994, the band’s independent record label folded and Soul Engines band members, some of whom had families, decided to throw in the towel. Louis and Shiry were engaged. “I decided to get in the car and drive to Canada,” Louis says. They married Sept. 21, 1995. It isn’t very common for a musician to leave New York City behind to move to Canada, Louis says. “Usually everyone is moving to New York or Los Angeles.” But love won out. And Louis discovered a generous musical community in Waterloo Region.
“It wasn’t as cutthroat here,” Louis says. “There’s a musical community and people would generously try to help you.
“When I came here, people looked out for me without an agenda.”
Tim got down to work distributing demo tapes while looking for studio work.
“It was a struggle to find work because no one knew me,” he recalls today.
Members of a country band liked what they heard “and the next thing I knew I was touring in northern Ontario in winter,” he says.
For the next couple of years, he played in the band and did back-up vocals for contemporary country singer-songwriter Jamie Warren. The popular act took them as far away as the Middle East.
That gig led to invitations to play in seven or eight different bands, including Lace, an award-winning Canadian country music
>> group formed with the backing of music producer David Foster.
After four or five years, however, Tim began questioning what he was doing. He was at the “top of the game” in the pop-country genre, he says, performing in front of tens of thousands of people and travelling in the Mideast and Europe with different bands. Tim and Warren won the SOCAN Songwriter of the Year award for Sunny Day in the Park in 2002. The country song was in the country’s top 20. But something was missing. “I remember waking up in Calgary during the Stampede and thinking and soulsearching,” Tim says. “My heart wasn’t in it anymore.”
Up until the birth of their son, Satchel, in 1999, Brenda had kept her job in the insurance industry. Now she was home with their son. When Tim was travelling, she was glad her parents and brother were close by.
“It was always part of the deal,” she says. “It didn’t faze me because I knew having a musician husband, that’s how you deal.”
Just the same, Tim wanted to be home with his wife and child. And “I felt like I wanted to do my own thing.”
Tim felt he had come full circle, having played and written music for classical, jazz, rock ’n’ roll and country genres. “I wanted my own sound,” he says.
Brenda, his musical muse, was instrumental in helping him find it.
“I remember writing all different types of music,” Tim says. “One night, I said I was having writer’s block.
“Brenda said, ‘Write what you feel. Don’t worry about the genre.’ I wrote a song and left it on the kitchen table.”
The song, A Love out of Time, with its “timeless, jazzy sound,” is on Tim’s first album.
“To walk away (from country music), it was difficult,” Brenda recalls. “He was always busy. It took a long time to say ‘no.’
“But he wasn’t feeling the country thing. We’ve chosen this life and . . . this is what Tim loves to do. I can’t imagine him doing anything else.”
It was the second time that the couple had made a decision that wasn’t the norm. First, Tim swam against the stream when he left the U.S. and the bright entertainment lights of New York to live and work in Canada. Then, he stepped away from a fruitful career in country music to find his own way.
But Tim has a saying: “The enemy of the best is often the good.”
It means “if things are good, you don’t tend to shoot for what’s better,” he says.
“I wanted to see if I could improve even if it meant taking a couple of steps back.”
The “lean years” had a silver lining as Tim worked to establish himself as a jazz musician.
“The interesting part is that all through the lean years, it was really an important time for both of us,” says Brenda, 44. Tim wasn’t travelling so much, and Brenda continued to stay at home with their children, Satchel and Brooklyn, born in 2002.
Brenda, who has studied graphic design and marketing in college, does Tim’s marketing and design jobs. She maintains his website and did the art work for his compilation album.
As her friend Nuzzi says, “She’s creative. She’s not a sit-around kind of girl.” “We’re in business as a team,” Brenda says. They live on the income of a selfemployed musician. Some days, it isn’t so easy. “But if it’s important, you tighten your belts,” Tim says.
“I’m a very social person. I like to chat with people,” says Brenda, smiling.
“But Tim’s job is all over the place” and when that’s the case, she keeps the
home fires burning.
Tim harkened back to his university years when he fell in love with jazz and the feeling of freedom and creativity it gave him.
He produced his first album, Til It Be Tomorrow, featuring all original jazz tunes, in 2005. The blend of Tim’s warm, creamysmooth voice, clever lyrics and confident, relaxed piano-playing remind one of jazz greats, but with a contemporary flavour.
“I’m proud of it,” he says. “I wrote the songs and my name is on the cover. It was my band and musicians. “I think it stands the test of time.” Rick Hutt of Cedartree Recording Studio in Kitchener produced Tim’s next two jazz albums, Untrue and Snowflakes in Bloom, a blend of original holiday tunes and reharmonized Christmas classics which includes the gentle Sleep and Dream.
A music video of Sleep and Dream, featuring daughter Brooklyn can be seen on Tim’s website, www.timlouis.com and on Youtube.
Hutt, an award-winning music producer, also produced Tim’s recent compilation album, Snapshots.
In 2010, Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony played some of Tim’s tunes, which he arranged, from Snowflakes in Bloom. Tim was asked to headline the symphony’s yuletide show, which included the Grand Philharmonic Choir and the children’s philharmonic choir. “It was wonderful,” he says. He played piano and sang, and even danced during an instrumental interlude with his daughter. Brooklyn, then eight years old, was led to the stage by big brother Satchel where she confidently spun around the floor with her dad.
Originally, it had been suggested that his wife be his dance partner.
“I said: ‘There are a lot of things I’ll do. This is not one of them,” Brenda says, laughing.
Hutt predicts Tim, whom he calls a gifted performer, songwriter and lyricist, is going to “break through in a big way.”
He has a “spark” and a “gift with words and melody,” Hutt says. He’s ready when an opportunity arises, and he makes them happen too.
“Tim is an extremely hard worker,” Hutt says. “When he first came to Canada, I produced a number of acts that were more country and he played with Jamie Warren and Lace and Beverly Mahood, and he wrote with them.”
For a lot of performers, it’s all they can do to keep up with their performance schedule, Hutt says.
“Tim is writing and has a radio show and as of late, a TV pilot.
“He’s very adaptable. He’s got that goodold-get-down-to-it Jersey attitude that anything is possible.”
It’s working, Hutt says. “He’s starting to make inroads” on the national scene. Tim’s dance card has been filling up. He has performed for former U.S. president Bill Clinton, former prime minister Jean Chretien, Prince Andrew and British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking.
“These are high points that you keep in mind when you struggle,” Tim says. “You get these fantastic opportunities.”
In the last two years, he has sung with the Canadian Big Band, which has some of the finest jazz and big band members in Canada.
He loves the chance to celebrate classical and contemporary jazz, to research and tell “stories behind the songs” on his weekly radio show. In addition to FM 92.9, Tim’s Jazz Sessions is being added to the lineup of Erin radio station, FM 88.1.
“It’s fantastic fun,” he says. “It wasn’t on
>> my list of things to do, but if an opportunity comes along, you just grab it.”
Last summer, helped by a Waterloo Arts Fund grant, he hosted two pilot episodes for TV, featuring interviews and performances from top Canadian musicians like Juno award-winner Kellylee Evans.
In the fall, Tim jumped into the pressurecooker to perform in front of festival and theatre booking agents in Kitchener who were checking out the talent for their programs.
“It was awesome,” Brenda says. “We talked to a lot of people.”
At the same time, Tim was busy preparing for a national musical competition for talented musical seniors, called Senior Star. It was his sixth year participating and he was a judge and musical director for the finals in Niagara Falls which would be aired later on TV.
Tim wrote the show’s theme song. He also writes the music going in and out of commercials and arranges the competitors’ music, played by his band. At the last minute, his duties expanded to include vocal and performance coach after another person on the show became ill.
It was a wildly busy time, but Tim is grace under pressure. Contestants appreciate his warm style and thoughtful, friendly chat.
In the future, Tim would like to release another album, tour, and “widen the net” by playing at more festivals and theatres.
“Often there is that one thing that will catapult you to the next level,” Brenda says. “There is no such thing as an overnight success unless it’s a reality TV show.”
The couple feels fortunate to be doing what they love, and for being able to have a rich family life and many friends, some of them former band mates with whom Tim gets together to perform occasionally.
Brenda and Nuzzi are still best friends, despite the fact that Nuzzi lives in New Jersey after marrying Soul Engines’ lead singer/guitarist Mark Nuzzi, from whom she’s separated.“Brenda is a very good communicator,” Nuzzi says.
Hutt says he’s impressed with the couple’s commitment to each other and their children.
“It’s challenging. Music is living gig to gig and judged gig to gig. That’s tough on a couple. Say things are fine this month and next month, lean.
“They are remarkable and they pull together.”
These days, Brooklyn, 10, and Tim are writing songs for each other. Brooklyn’s penciled notes are in a workbook on the dining room table of their Kitchener home. “We brainstorm together,” Brooklyn says.
Satchel, 13, who plays drums and is learning piano, is in the band and choir at school.
They all snowboard in winter and Tim makes a skating rink. They swim in their backyard pool in summer.
Meanwhile, Wisdom, a rescue boxer that they recently adopted, is hovering protectively around her new family. The family provides a foster home for rescue boxers.
In the living room, Tim sits at a shining Yamaha piano with a wooden metronome and an arts trophy sitting on top. The piano has a broken key, the result of an enthusiastic performance by a member of a 12-piece salsa band from Chile recently. The band was invited to their home for an evening of music and food that lasted until 5 a.m. the next day.
“That was the best night,” Tim says happily.