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By Tony SauroRecord Staff Writer
May 17, 2014 12:00 AM
Former mortgage banker sets business aside in favor of jazz career
As a mortgage banker, Phil Denny didn't do sub-prime riffs on people.
Now, his major interest is gaining some premiere listening time for his smooth-jazz music.
"I hadn't expected to take it this far," said Denny, 36, a businessman by education who's been playing tenor, alto and soprano saxophone in full-career mode since only 2012. "I'm just kinda ridin' it as long and as far I can go."
With a successful debut album and a gathering of loyalists in Michigan and the Midwest, he's not anticipating one of those calamitous 2008-like economic collapses in jazz.
He travels from Lansing, Mich., to Stockton for Sunday's concert - 60 to 90 minutes -with Sacramento's Cecil Ramirez Group at University Plaza Waterfront Hotel.
"I like to say I rode a roller-coaster through the ups and downs," said Denny, who'd studied business administration and marketing at Olivet (Mich.) College but was unemployed for a year. "We primarily did government loans. We didn't go into subprime. It got to become too financially stressful. We were very successful. "It was just too taxing on me emotionally. I started to spend all my savings. I had to make a move."
Jazz - as a hobby, affection and avocation - offered the opposite direction, except maybe financially. Denny was co-parenting two sons (now 15 and 12) after he re-married. He'd been playing saxophone since sixth grade, in a variety of iterations.
Raised by a single mom, he got his first appraisal from producing "my own" Mother's Day concert in Lansing. That led to monthly jazz shows in the "tri-state" area (Michigan, Ohio, Indiana). Not a big jazz breeding ground.
Denny's "desire" evolved into a group (Too Smooth for Notes) that played every Thursday, helping Lansing's 621 club get established.
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