J.S. Ondara at 7th Street Entry, Minneapolis (29 March 2019)

Tour Dates

To the average life-long American, these are strange times. To an immigrant journeying to the “land of opportunity” for the American Dream, these are even stranger times–

And that partial outside-looking-in viewpoint is the basis of Minneapolis-based (by way of Nairobi, Kenya) folk singer-songwriter J.S. Ondara’s debut full-length Tales of America (Verve Forecast Records), playing a long-sold-out show at the 7^th Street Entry as he returned to his adopted hometown, for his first proper local headlining gig.

The evening opened with a forty minute set from Stratford, ONT blues folk singer/songwriter Cat Clyde, in support of debut full-length Ivory Castenets and more recent singles, ‘Anymore’ and ‘All the Black’.

The self-taught musician held the attentive audience enraptured as she revealed “I’m about to tell you something… but don’t spread it around – you’re the best audience so far”. Taking classic song structures and applying her own more modern spin on them, the Canadian artist came off as humble, talented, and very musically honest.

With an old-style mic adorned with the new album’s title and three other mics surrounding him, J.S. Ondara took to the stage solo in the suit and brown hat from his album’s cover, for a surprisingly long 105min headlining set featuring the entire album played and peppered with several stories along the way.

Ondara came to the country from his native Kenya in 2013 after discovering his love of folk music and being astonished to find that ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ was not a Guns n’ Roses original, but rather from a Midwest troubadour named Bob Dylan. When his green card was granted and he needed a specific destination, he looked again to his folk influence and picked Minneapolis (where an aunt had also recently settled), and soon began learning guitar and playing shows as Jay Smart.

Years of gigging in the region’s coffeehouse circuit and open mic nights (similar in training to Suzanne Vega and Tracy Chapman) and uploading his music, it caught the eye and ear of Mike (Candy Butchers) Viola who signed and produced the musician on the legendary Verve label. In addition to early Freewheelin’-era Dylan, Ondara counts Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks and Jeff Buckley as his main influences.

“I was just fooling around for a bit” Ondara said, opening with a loose version of ‘American Dream’ with its lyric, “Well the gold and the silver you’re searching is hidden out there underground “, “…but it’s my hometown, I can do that”, he added. 

Ondara’s songs are in the true folk tradition- often sad, a reflection of the times, and sparse like an open field, delivered with a lilting British-African accented voice, often lifting to falsetto.

He’s already envisioned a music video for his song, ‘Give Me a Moment’, about being distracted by technology despite the beauty around us, and proceeded to describe the shot-by-shot breakdown. 

Looking out, Ondara mentioned how he could see everyone clearly in the small venue, comparing it to the regular social gatherings at his grandmother’s house (“except everyone here is white”, to laughter).

After playing ‘Lebanon’, Ondara confessed he had to explain the lyric “I shan’t be like Canada” writing it at a time when he never dreamed of traveling there to play, and ‘Turkish Bandana’ was sung acapella, a throwback to his early method of songwriting in Kenya, when he couldn’t afford a guitar but was still determined to set his writings and poetry to music.

Seeing Seattle singer-songwriter Noah Gundersen at the Cedar as his first concert helped re-kindle his musical dream, writing ‘Master O’Connor’ soon after, and on his own ‘God Bless America’ he asks, “Will you let me in, or are you at capacity”, something many immigrants are still asking currently.

“It’s quite a rich time to be a folksinger, there’s so much content…” Ondara commented, “…every tweet is a bloody folk song” before going into ‘Days of Insanity. The main set would end with a song a young Ondara would dance to at age seven, not really understanding the theme or lyrics, turning ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ inside out and apart, into a cover version unlike any other.

Rapt attention (the most compelled I’ve seen an Entry audience in some time) gave way to loud applause, goading Ondara back for an encore that was supposed to be a single song (“I only have one album out, guys”, he joked). 

Caving into crowd requests, he began with ‘Mother Christmas’ an older song about being homesick and missing his mother over the holiday, then finished fittingly with ‘Saying Goodbye’ in which he conducted the audience to sing the song’s chorus first as a whisper, rising to as loud as possible.

In these days of border closings, travel bans, and forced detentions, the American Dream still lives, through the eyes of a singer-songwriter like J.S. Ondara who creatively reminds us this country exists only as the aggregated result of the immigrants that the great majority of us, or our ancestors, are.

(click on any photo below to enlarge and see full image)