Kenny Vance

Singer, songwriter, and producer Kenny Vance had a long and varied career in music that began in the late 1950s and was still going strong in the early years of the 21st century. The core of his interest in music was vocal harmony, from the doo wop groups with which he started out to his long tenure as a member of Jay and the Americans in the 1960s. From the 1970s on, he used his musical knowledge in a series of films while also releasing the occasional solo album. In the 1990s, he returned to his original love by forming his own neo-doo wop group, Kenny Vance & the Planotones. Throughout his career, he served as a mentor to a generation of younger musicians that included Walter Becker and Donald Fagen of Steely Dan, Peter Himmelman, and others. Vance grew up in Belle Harbor, in the New York City borough of Queens, where he developed an interest in rock ‘n' roll as a teenager. By the age of 15, he was traveling into Manhattan to hang around the Brill Building, New York's center for pop songwriting. He formed his first vocal group, the Harbor lites, with school friends. Initially a sextet, the group was down to the trio of Vance, Sandy Yaguda, and Sydell Sherman by the time it recorded two singles for Ivy Records in 1959. After those records failed to score, the Harbor lites broke up, and Vance and Yaguda formed another group with John Traynor and Howie Kane that auditioned for songwriter/producers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. Leiber and Stoller had a production deal with United Artists Records and therefore signed the group to the label. The producers' initial idea was to give the group a comic name and call them Binky Jones and the Americans. The singers rejected that, but compromised on Jay and the Americans, with lead singer Traynor adopting the name Jay. Jay and...