Still making music 18 years after graduation

A young Kyle Hollingsworth and his band were once asked to leave a popular downtown Baltimore bar.

He hadn’t started anything; he wasn’t even drinking.

In fact, he had just performed onstage.

“I wasn’t even old enough to be in the club, and we’d have to sneak in the back door and [the owner] would let us play. But he wouldn’t let us into the audience because he didn’t want us drinking beer. So then we had to play our set, then go out the back door and leave,” he said. “It was a lot of fun in those days.”

Those days were the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The club was The 8x10 in Federal Hill.

Hollingsworth, a 1991 Towson graduate then in a band called Black Friday, went on to play keyboards for The String Cheese Incident, a popular jam band.

On Friday evening, he returns to The 8x10 on tour, promoting his second solo album, “Then There’s Now.”

Hollingsworth, a Ruxton resident, majored in jazz performance while at what was then Towson State University, with a focus on piano.

While classic jazz tunes are a far cry from the work he did with The String Cheese Incident, he credits his time at Towson greatly.

“My education there really helped to train my ear. It helped me listen to other players and be involved in a musical conversation,” he said.

While in college, Hollingsworth played with Black Friday, partly as a way to mix things up.

“Jazz is really cool, but I still want to rock out,” he recalled saying to himself.

The band garnered a small following, selling out local clubs and taking Hollingsworth to Washington, D.C. and New York City.

“I got that first addiction of wanting to perform live,” he said.

After graduation, Hollingsworth moved to Colorado.

He wanted to work on the Colorado trail while pursuing a master’s degree in jazz at the University of Northern Colorado.

After a while, The String Cheese Incident came knocking.

“They were all ski bums hanging out in the mountains, then they decided to be a band,” he said.

The band, formed in 1993, was playing in the mountains and ski lodges of Telluride and Crested Butte, Colo.

“So they moved to Boulder, which was where they were living at the time, and my band opened up for them,” he said. “They had me sit in and I told my band I had to leave. ‘I’m going on the road with String Cheese!’”

Hollingsworth spent more than a decade with the band, which went on hiatus in 2007.

While he said he owes a lot to his education at Towson, he also owes a lot to his time in the band.

“I learned so much being in school, but that being said, I learned so much being out of school and being a musician, just performing on the road 300 days a year with String Cheese was an entire education unto itself,” he said.

He hinted at a full reunion of the band, which currently gets together once a year to play at the Rothbury Festival in Rothbury, Mich. Talks are currently getting started to get another album in the works.

“We walked offstage and we had such a blast that we said we’ve got to get together again and do some more shows,” he said.

For now, Hollingsworth is focused on his solo material. His first album, “Never Odd or Even,” came out in 2004.

Hollingsworth described it as more of a jazz and funk album, similar to the music he played with The String Cheese Incident.

He said “Then There’s Now” better represents “where I am now post-String Cheese.”

“I’ve been kind of taking my funk world and fusing it with my improvisation and fusing it to speech,” he said. “I really love albums that are sonically interesting, so I didn’t want to do an album that wasn’t hip-hop; [I wanted to do one] that was funky with really great sonic landscapes around.”

Comments

1 comments

tom

Mon Nov 16 2009 13:46

Check out Black Friday's 2008 Release Black Friday 4 as well as Black Friday Redux due out Nov. 27th. Kyle is featured on both CDs. Black Friday sat in with Kyle at the 8 x 10 during his Nov. 13th performance. Guitarist, Shawn Heming is also a Towson Alumn. Vocalist Andy Belt, is a Towson ALumn and current Towson adjunct instructor. Black Friday plays the Recher on Nov. 27th

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