PEOPLE A JAZZMAN RISETH

Guitarist Kenny Pore plays chords that most guitarists have never heard of. He splays his fingers strangely across the fretboard and softly plucks a tune. “That’s the background.” he says, changing chords. Then he plays a pleasing, higher melody. “Imagine that.” he says, “over the background.” He smiles, then turns and flicks on the CD player behind him. The tune he just played booms from the speakers, a synthetic keyboard laying down the background and an enthusiastic soprano saxophone playing the melody. The smile gets bigger.

To hear him, you’d think Kenny Pore was a studio jazz guitarist and songwriter. And he is. But he can’t read or write music (“at least not very well,” he says), and he makes his money as a skycap at D/FW International Airport.

Pore is a purist-he pays his own way when he wants to make a record of his music. He hires a local Dallas guitarist to transcribe the tunes he plays on his guitar, the tunes he says stick in his head and won’t go away. He carries a tape recorder at work that he sings into when he gets a passage just the way he wants it. Then, with written music in hand, he rents a recording studio in Los Angeles for a couple of days, hires five or six of the top freelance studio jazz musicians in the world, and turns his musical dreams into reality.

Ed Budanauro. disc jockey at KZPS and a ten-year aficionado of jazz, says Pore’s music is some of the best he’s heard. In his jazz segment of the new television show “Dallas After Dark,” Budanauro rated Kenny’s newest album (his fourth), “Together As One,” as the best jazz album in the nation for three weeks running. Budanauro calls the music “contemporary jazz-and it’s certainly not New Age. I love it.”

Pore credits the energy of his music to the musicians he hires and the way he handles them during the recording sessions. “I’m not like the big-time producers who try to tell these musicians how to play,” he says. “They know how to play; they’re the best in the business. They have their own ideas about how a song should be and I let them have fun with it.” That’s the reason, Pore says, that musicians go out of their way to record with him. “All these guys are my friends and they don’t mind working cheap. If they were doing this for Billy Joel, they’d soak it for all it’s worth.” And that’s why Pore can afford to record his records in just a few days. “Big producers will cut up to thirty tracks of the same song,” he says. “I’ll do four or five, and I’ll get a quality of play they don’t get.”

Kenny calls himself a “self-contractor.” and he would like to make a full-time living off his music so he could quit skycap-ping. But that takes time, and he’s willing to wait. He recently “cracked New York,” where he’s beginning to get a lot of air play. Locally, his music can be heard on KOAI The Oasis 106.1 FM, KERA 90.1 FM. and KJZY 99.1 FM. And his tapes and CDs are available at Sound Warehouse. “It’s a shame,” says Budanauro. “that D Magazine isn’t an audio thing. All Kenny needs is to be heard.”