By Don Bradley
Kelsey Miles has heard it ever since she picked up a guitar: chemistry and the blues don’t mix.
Respectfully, she disagrees. And she’s a chemistry professor so she knows a little something about mixing things together.
On Sunday at the Knuckleheads jam, she added a third element to this chemical compound. Rain. The stage was covered, across the way the crowd was covered and in between it rained.
Light rain. Rhythm rain. Perfect.
And when Miles got called to the stage, the crowd got their phones ready. Some had seen her before. They knew that when this Avila University chemistry teacher takes off her lab coat she must throw it forty yards away.
“It’s raining and I’m feeling gloomy,” she greets them.
She lets loose with Bonnie Raitt’s “Love Me Like a Man.”
In cowboy boots. And a harmonica.
And that’s how this self-described “chemistry nerd” gets what she calls her “balance.”
Backed by the band Levee Town, she comes out on the stage far enough late in the song that she throws her head back and wails the song’s despair into the falling rain.
I come home sad and lonely
Feel like I wanna cry
I want a man to hold me
Not some fool to ask me why
She holds this crowd like a classroom leading up to finals. Until they clap and cheer. In between songs she talks to them like she’s on their back porch.
When she finished her set, Rick Holt, who watched from the upper deck, turned to whoever was close, smiled and shook his head. He’s a member of the Kansas City Blues Society and catches Miles anytime he can.
“Deep soul like Etta James,” he said. “I think she could be a star. Her tip bucket fills up- that tells you something. These people out here, they love her. She gives them their music.”
And that’s the answer to what she’s heard for years, even from family: “She has a PHD in organic chemistry and she’s playing blues music for a hundred bucks a show and living in a friend’s basement_ what is she doing?”
She smiles at the question and comes clean.
“I was drawn to organic chemistry my whole life…I was little, a total chemistry nerd,” she said. “Organic chemistry is about the truth of nature and everything about it makes sense.”
Undergrad, masters, PHD. She worked on a team that did research for the Air Force involving nanoparticles.
Then came that night in Madison, Wisc., when she got up and sang karaoke. When she finished, someone handed her a guitar and told her she should learn to play.
The nerd blinked.
She was 25 and had never done anything musical. Hadn’t done anything for a while that didn’t require a lab coat and goggles.
But she figured out the strings on a guitar were like chemical elements. Mix them together in certain order and proper amounts and they make music. Simple enough.
She learned something else. For all her academic heights, she didn’t see the closest thing to her. Her life was out of balance. An abusive relationship also played in.
In a song she would write later called “Save My Soul,” she sings, “Six strings make me feel at home.”
She got good enough in Madison to start doing open mics and jams. Then she got better, kicked chemistry to the curb and hit the road as a traveling musician/songwriter, making a couple of stops in Kansas City.
But balance being what it is, and life being hard on the road, she eventually swung back to chemistry and teaching. Remembering Kansas City’s music venues like Knuckleheads and B.B.’s Lawnside, she took a job teaching at Avila University.
Anybody passing her office in the science building a day last week would have heard her break into John Prine’s “Angel From Montgomery.”
She got out her phone and showed 1,948 little tidbits of melody or lyric that comes to her …whenever, wherever. Each one has the potential, maybe, for a song.
“My songs are in the present,” said Miles, whose new album is called “I Am.”
T.J. Mikkelson, an Avila senior, knew Miles only as the chemistry professor. Then he went to one of her shows.
“I had no idea she was able to play music that way,” he said. “She was my mentor for my senior project. I was blown away.”
A couple of weeks ago, Miles put on a free concert at Goppert Theatre on the Avila campus. Max Alexander, a chemist who worked with Miles on the Air Force research, flew in from Ohio for the show. He knew her only as a chemist and a friend.
“She didn’t play any music when we worked together,” he said. “Great chemist, great in the lab. I mean she was always a sparkly sort, but when I saw her out of that stage, she was amazing. I had never seen that part of her.”
When she finished her set at Knuckleheads, she came off the stage to congrats from the crowd and other musicians before settling in a seat inside.
She had just given the audience what they came to hear, but she talks about what they gave her.
Balance.
“I was given a certain gift,” she said. “For some reason, I can do chemistry, always could. Then I figured out I can pick up a guitar and make music.
“And right now, I know that I’m in balance.”
Final question: of all the music genres, why the blues?
“Raw and pure,” she said. “Makes people know they’re not alone.”
Raw and pure. Yes, that would appeal to a chemist.
Discover more from Martin City Telegraph
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.