It’s a familiar story: an artist unappreciated in his or her homeland finally finds success in Paris. Even if clichéd, it’s sometimes true. Ask soul/jazz vocalist and pianist Sean Haefeli, an Indianapolis native and then-Chicago resident who popped over to France for six months last year.
“It’s just so much easier for music or art that’s not mainstream to get on the radar,” he says of France, where he scored interviews with glossy R&B magazines and prominent gigs before receptive audiences. “I was played on a radio station in Paris — and it would be like me being played on a Clear Channel station here, which is absolutely not going to happen. And that makes all the difference in the world.”
But Haefeli has more in mind for his career and art than radio airplay. He’s back in the States to study jazz piano at Indiana University, Bloomington. When reached by phone last week, he said that he was just trying to settle in, situating himself in an academic situation after performing professionally as far afield as Korea and Japan.
“It was one of the crazier decisions a lot of people thought I could have been making, including me at the time,” Haefeli says of his decision to head back to school. Having never completed a degree in music (he has a BA in literature from Depaul), he hopes that his studies will give him the tools to realize any musical ideas he might have in the future.
Haefeli has taken a roundabout route towards pursuing his passions. “The two things I’ve done the longest and am strongest at are martial arts and music, both of which I started when I was seven years old,” he says. Haefeli’s biological father — Carl Haefeli, a trumpeter with local ‘70s-era funk group Ebony Rhythm Band — may have bequeathed him a musical legacy, but was killed in an unsolved homicide in 1978 before his son was old enough to remember him.
But his mom was also enthusiastic about music, and Haefeli got started early, beginning with classical piano. He didn’t begin singing seriously until he was sophomore in high school, then studied opera for a year as college freshman before switching his major to literature. Haefeli’s academic pursuits dovetailed with his interest in the Chicago spoken word scene, with which he became involved as fan and then performer.
Haefeli says he’ll continue to work on his own material while in school, playing shows domestically between classes, overseas when on break. His two albums — 2004’s Natural Hunger LP and 2006’s Sound Strategy EP — bring together his interests in spoken word, jazz, soul and hip-hop. The songs onSound Strategy follow a consistent template, beginning with an unrhymed spoken-word opening theme (with a cadence that’s more hip-hop than Gil-Scott Heron), then segueing into a lengthy improvised jazz section that shows off the chops of Haefeli and his collaborators.
The album’s closer, “Balance,” brings together those long-held interests in martial arts and music. The zen-like teachings of martial arts — from which, like music, he took a break before resuming studies at age 20 — inform the song’s message about living a well-balanced life. Haefeli says of the song: “You try to find some equilibrium, so whatever obstacle you encounter can be handled in the right sort of way. It’s had a lot of resonance as I’ve been travelling around.”
–Scott Shoger, NUVO