Right on Time

WHEN IT RAINS: Eight years after the original offer, Jenny Avila finally joined Hot Soup. She's also got a new solo CD, Naked in the Rain.
Photo By: Steve Parker

Jennie Avila's tall tale of cold floods and Hot Soup.

by Mary Armstrong

Generally speaking, Jennie Avila has had good timing. But not today. It's Feb. 25, the second day of Folk Alliance, and the exhibit hall has just opened in Montreal's Palais des Congrés. The crowd is a bit light yet. The Philly singer-songwriter-percussionist is standing alone at the booth she shares with one of her many performing configurations, the trio Hot Soup. She is looking tired but glad to be there. The prospective music enthusiasts, however, are nowhere to be found. At least not yet.

On the table is the usual assortment of press kit items: CDs and tear sheets ready to be given away to festival management, disc jockeys, writers or anyone who might have an interest in Hot Soup or the individual artists under its umbrella. Her self-released CD, Naked in the Rain, isn't quite ready. The trio (Avila plus Sue Trainor and Christina Muir) is presently handling its own booking. The hope is that among the talent buyers and musician colleagues — Avila calls the annual International Folk Alliance Conference a "family reunion" — there might be an agent of mercy to relieve some of the cold-call strain. It's early in the day, though, and it seems folks either stayed up late for showcases or are at panels. The hall is unnaturally quiet.

People with the luxury of time arrived a day or two early. Hot Soup's various commitments meant 12 hours on the road for the two Maryland-based members, with a stop in Lumberville, Pa., north of Philly, to pick up Avila. After that it's the drive up north with fingers crossed, hoping the deep snows of two days prior — heavy enough to block the train tracks — would not return. Hot Soup caught some luck and found themselves off-loading at the Hyatt, the conference's central hotel, at the end of the day.

What brings a Philly folkie all the way to Montreal in February? "I've been going to NERFA [Northeast Regional Folk Alliance] since it started, it seems," says Avila. And this, the international version of that conference, was a good bet for her for many years — she came away from Boston in '94 and D.C. in '96 with gig offers. "But I didn't want to go on the road as a solo. Amy Torchia and I had just stopped playing together after the D.C. conference. I wasn't ready to take it on. I had a full-time day job.

"Sue and Christina saw me at the D.C. [International] conference, they wanted me to audition then." Again, the security of a day job made Avila regretfully decline their offer to join the Maryland-based group.

Then last spring, eight years after the original proposal and just as that day job laid her off, Avila got an e-mail from Trainor renewing the offer to audition for Hot Soup.

Why not?

"I went down for a tryout and it was magical. They picked one of my songs with just voice and percussion. I play guitar but percussion is my main forte. Now Hot Soup gets these great textural three-part harmonies. We do comic things where I'm singing down the scale and I run out of notes and Sue takes over for me."

Hot Soup's knack for timing isn't limited to their music. About the same time she agreed to join Hot Soup, Avila was recording Naked in the Rain, and decided she needed a new clay drum. "So I called [Stephen Wright] in Hagerstown, Md., picked it up from him, then on to the Hot Soup audition in Columbia [Md.]," she recalls. "Stephen and I had clicked so I stopped by again the next day on my way home. I got a drum, a group and a boyfriend all in one fell swoop."

That lucky trip also spawned her newest performing option, Aca-Perco, her drums-and-voices duo with Wright.

That primal sound is also how Avila starts Naked in the Rain, just her voice confident but wistful, urging "Come Home Soon." All the songs on the new CD are Avila originals. All look at tough relationships and strong women. "Love Love the Chase" features a bluesy growl from Avila advising, "Don't get caught!" and local guitar wizard Rolly Brown on lead. Brown is featured again on a slow, cowboy-swingy number, "Oblivious Moon." Other local luminaries like Full Frontal Folk, who harmonize on the title song, join Jay Ansill on mandolin and Larry Cohen on bass. The production preserves an open, uncluttered sound.

Avila is launching Naked in the Rain in her old hangout, Havana in New Hope. The party is scheduled as a benefit for A Woman's Place shelter in Doylestown, Avila's hometown. Her early years there were filled with music.

"I took piano lessons in fifth and sixth grade; my parents insisted I should do two years. I wrote a little tune, no words and my piano teacher commented, "We don't usually put this chord in with those.' I was upset and quite turned off." Avila recalls that her mother intended to be a pianist before she took up nursing. "I went to sleep each night hearing my mom play those swing standards. My dad was a Bach vocalist, sang in choirs. He would just burst into songs. He would make up songs to tease my little brothers on long car rides. That's my beginning as a songwriter, lots of teasing and humor."

All through school, though, Avila's focus was on visual arts. It was an earlier chance meeting with singer-songwriter Juan Avila that revived the performer in her and led her back to music. The two got married, then separated and she ended up back in Bucks County, not far from Havana, and oh-so-close to the picturesque Delaware.

Remember all that flooding last month? "I had been sick all week. I had cancelled a school gig that Friday morning 'cause I was too dizzy too drive. That afternoon the police came by to tell us we had 12 hours before we'd be flooded. I called a friend; we carried instruments, CDs, photos and artwork upstairs to a friend's apartment." Avila reflects, "It's amazing, you make these instantaneous decisions about what you need to save, things you otherwise agonize over. We did that for a couple of hours. When I went to sleep, it hadn't started raining yet. By the morning it was coming down, so I threw books on the couch, but the water ruined all that."

"The water didn't crest until Monday morning. The roads got flooded. We couldn't get back in for a week. It was a mess, wall-to-wall mud, no electricity or water, just drag stuff into the yard. I lost everything from the waist down." Yet, the ever-resilient Avila says that it become obvious that either she or Wright was going to have to move at some point, so what the heck, "I have a storage space in Hagerstown, and a beautiful man."

Naked in the Rain CD release party, Thu., May 26, 7:30-10 p.m., $10, Havana, 105 S. Main St., New Hope, 215-862-5501, www.havananewhope.com.