Local Spins first wrote about the West Michigan world music trio in 2022. Now, Local Spins Rewind revisits and updates that Artist Spotlight as the band prepares to play SpeakEZ’s Local Spins Wednesdays series.
Thriving Off of Crowd Energy: Whorled plays Grand Rapids’ SpeakEZ Lounge tonight. (Photo/Holly Holtzclaw)
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Let’s just say Whorled has experienced a whirlwind rise since 2022.
“Our past two years have been explosive,” said fiddler Keala Venema, the youngest member of the virtuosic, world music trio Whorled. “We were so lucky that people were willing to take a chance on us, because we don’t really suit any typical function of a band. We’re mostly an instrumental band with no way to categorize our genre.”
Indeed, Venema has encapsulated the trio’s approach as melding multiple genres, “because we all have different experiences and we’re all open to different things, as opposed to a straight-up bluegrass band or Irish band. I feel like the flexibility in our genre is what makes us pretty special and makes me excited to play with Whorled.”
Even before releasing its first studio album in 2023, the multi-generational, multi-instrumental group featuring Keala (Ke) Venema, Belmont guitarist and didgeridoo player Thom Jayne, 63, and Venema’s mother and accordionist, Mariko, 46, had won two band battles and turned heads everywhere they performed.
The Band: From left, Ke Venema, Mariko Venema and Thom Jayne, (Courtesy Photo)
Their musical approach covers a dizzying gamut of styles, from the Celtic influences where Jayne first met the Venemas during an Irish trad session hosted by Randy McLemore to bluegrass, classical music, African and Mediterranean stylings, and traditional Japanese strains.
Venema — who also is a member of the jazz fusion band Candid Antics — said the trio has been thrilled to perform at high-profile festivals such as 2023’s Earthwork Harvest Gathering and 2024’s Blissfest and Wheatland Music Festival. Tonight, at Grand Rapids’ SpeakEZ Lounge, the trio makes its Local Spins Wednesdays concert series debut, with the show starting at 7:30 p.m. Details here.
“We’re all here for good music and the energy from the crowd shows. We thrive off of that,” Venema said. “We also love how many collaborative shows we did in the last two years. We loved working with (Kalamazoo world music artist) Samuel Nalangira, (Ann Arbor jazz manouche band) Djangophonique, (classical duo) Folias, who are all master at genres we only get to briefly graze in our sets.”
Indeed, with the trio eyeing a new album with all original music, tonight’s SpeakEZ show will feature the debut of a Jayne original. “I feel especially that our Celtic music has really grown a lot since that genre was the genre that drew us all together. We keep searching for ways to make our live show engaging by incorporating more vocals, more instruments, and we hope that our live experience is still maintaining that core idea of giving you a road trip for your ears.”
For a 2022 edition of Local Spins on WYCE, the trio debuted songs that eventually appeared on their debut studio album – “Wind Over the Field” and “Seven.” View a video of a live performance of “Seven” at the 2024 Wheatland Music Festival here, and scroll down to listen to the tracks and the full radio show.
VIDEO: Whorled, “Seven” (at Wheatland Music Festival)
MUSICAL ROOTS IN JAPAN, AFRICA, EUROPE, UNITED STATES AND MORE
Jayne, a self-professed “tumbleweed,” lived in six different places in Europe and the United States by the time he was 20, and also spent seven years in Africa, but “kept coming back to Michigan.”
His early love of 1970s bands such as Jethro Tull and Led Zeppelin was supplemented by world music textures and rhythms of all kinds inspired by his transatlantic travels.
A classically trained pianist, Mariko was born and raised in Osaka, Japan, moving to the United States in 2000. Eager to participate in area jam sessions, she first took up the melodica before turning to accordion in 2018.
Ke also began her musical instruction on piano, but her interest in playing the violin was piqued during Irish trad sessions. “I knew that was my main instrument,” she recalls.
“From there, I got into the bluegrass scene a little, found Michigan Academy of Folk Music and met Nate Roberts, my main instructor for everything music theory. That kindled my interest for jazz, and now I’m working toward gypsy jazz violin,” Ke Venema said in 2022. She now teaches at the Michigan Academy of Folk Music and has sat in with artists such as Hawks and Owls, Austin Benzing, Ben Traverse and others.
The combination of the three instrumentalists’ diverse backgrounds creates a singular experience.
Winning Performance: Whorled during The Stray’s 2022 Battle of the Bands. (Photo/Anna Sink)
“It has been a real pleasure to play with people who can cross over seamlessly between a rootsy-bluesy feel to classical, Celtic, bluegrass and other genres,” says Jayne, former frontman for Thom Jayne & The Nomads.
“It’s a good musical chemistry full of surprises. When we get together, we ad lib all the time and when we hit on something that we like – such as blending Grieg’s ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ into a rendition of Gershwin’s ‘Summertime,’ that is the elixir that makes playing in this group so fun.”
Jayne says the name Whorled is fitting because the musicians are “swirling together musical tradition in creative ways.”
Get more information on their website at whorledband.com.
The June 17, 2022 edition of Local Spins on WYCE – which showcases regional music at 11 a.m. Fridays on WYCE (88.1 FM) and online at wyce.org – also spotlighted tracks by Aspen Jacobsen, May Erlewine, West Bound Situation and Earth Radio (the musicians’ picks by Whorled), Silent Spirit, FlyLiteGemini, Michigander (with Manchester Orchestra), Neal Francis, The Hacky Turtles and The Fever Haze. Check out the radio show podcast here.
PODCAST: Local Spins on WYCE (6/17/22)
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