"With a girl like me, you know you won't get bored," sings KJ Denhert on the title track of her new CD, Girl Like Me. Those who have experienced KJ live would certainly agree. Her sense of joy onstage is infectious, bringing honesty and charisma to her talents as a songwriter, singer and guitarist. As an experienced bandleader who plays without a net, she always takes you on a fun ride. KJ has taken the rhythm, wit and passion of her performances, and wrapped them up in lush arrangements and sparkling production to create Girl Like Me.

KJ calls her music Urban Folk and Jazz, though it is rooted in Funk and R & B. "The jazz," she explains, "comes from people's perceptions of my guitar voicings and the structure of the tunes themselves…using extended solos and players working off of each other. Urban reflects my childhood, growing up in NYC, and folk, I really adored James Taylor, my first guitar influence." Her lyrics tread the familiar grounds of romance, hope and despair, but in unique ways, as in "Violet", "We wanted to be lovers like sunrise and the sea/we waded in like infants undressed but with dignity."

KJ and her band, The NY Unit, a group of musicians with rock-solid credentials, have a regular standing room only gig at The 55 Bar in NY's West Village. KJ has also performed in such legendary rooms as The Bitter End, The Bottom Line, Fez and The Living Room. She has opened for Roberta Flack, Kenny Rankin, Tuck & Patti, Phil Roy, GQ and Loudon Wainwright. She appeared at The Bottom Line's prestigious Nightbird series, and headlined for a 6-day stint at the Blue Note in Las Vegas. For seven years, she toured the US, Asia and Europe shredding it up as a lead electric guitarist in a period she describes as 'seven years in spandex'!

At the 2003 Falcon Ridge Folk Festival, audiences voted KJ into the top four of the Emerging Artist Showcase. The song "Violet", from Girl Like Me, has secured KJ a 2003 Independent Music Award and a 2004 Out Music Award nomination for singer/songwriter of the year. "Red July" from her 2001 Live CD was nominated for Just Plain Folks' best female singer-songwriter award. KJ is garnering staunch media support in print (New York Times and Westchester Weekly), radio (WFUV, WPKN, WMUA) and the internet (BestFemaleMusicians.com, Collected Sounds, Girl.com).

KJ lends her support to many charitable organizations, with a special interest in Women's health, AIDS and cancer research. She appears annually in the PNW Women's Resource Center Telethon and plays live "on-site" concerts for hospitalized HIV patients through LifeBeat, Inc. Her music appears on compilation CDs, including The Ovarian Cancer Research Fund Album and Brooklyn Above Ground, in support of World Hunger Year.

KJ resides in Westchester, NY and states her goals are simple. As an independent record label owner and founder of Mother Cyclone Records, she says, "I want to grow my label and just keep writing". In 2003 she walked away from a successful corporate career to launch Urban Folk and Jazz, with several new recording projects underway. She is motivated to provide her musicians a decent living that includes healthcare. She dedicates her life mostly to music and explains her passion, "I get to do what I really love. I've lived the truth of the slow build as a marketing strategy. I work hard to put out the best material I can, whether we're playing live or in the studio. It is a very exciting time for a Girl Like Me."

And even more:

Native New Yorker K.J. Denhert has not been an easy artist to pigeonhole. The far-reaching singer/songwriter is relevant to folk-rock and adult alternative, but she is equally relevant to neo-soul — and at times there are hints of jazz in her work. Denhert likes to describe her solo material as "urban folk-jazz," and while her folk-rock/R&B blend isn't straight-ahead jazz in the way that Abbey Lincoln and Carmen McRae are straight-ahead jazz, she does incorporate jazz elements when it's appropriate.

The singer/songwriter, who plays both acoustic and electric guitar, brings a variety of influences to the table — influences ranging from Chaka Khan and Roberta Flack to Joni Mitchell, Janis Ian, Simon & Garfunkel, and James Taylor. In fact, Denhert has been quoted as saying that her earliest influence was Taylor (who married '70s soft rock/adult contemporary star Carly Simon and shouldn't be confused with the James "J.T." Taylor who became Kool & the Gang's lead singer in the late '70s). The list of artists Denhert inspires comparisons to is long and diverse. The Indigo Girls, Shawn Colvin, Tracy Chapman, and Sarah McLachlan are valid comparisons, but so are neo-soul artists such as Jill Scott, Alicia Keys, Erykah Badu, Lauryn Hill, and Jaguar Wright. Denhert wouldn't be out of place on a Lilith Fair stage, nor she would be out of place in Vibe magazine.

While Denhert was born in New York City in the late '50s and grew up in the Bronx, her parents were immigrants who had moved to the Big Apple from the country of Grenada. By the age of ten, Denhert was studying the guitar and listening to a lot of folk-rock and singer/songwriters (especially Joni Mitchell, Simon & Garfunkel, and James Taylor). After reaching adulthood, she enrolled at Cornell University but ended up dropping out during her sophomore year and joined an all-female rock band called Fire. Denhert spent a total of six years with Fire; she joined in 1980 and stayed with the band until its breakup in 1986. After that, she took a non-musical temp job with the Dannon company (as in Dannon yogurt) and eventually became a business analyst for that outfit.

But Denhert never gave up music; when she was based in Cleveland, OH, and working for Dannon during the day, Denhert played guitar in a funk band on the side. After several years in Cleveland, Denhert moved back to the Big Apple in 1995 — and the mid- to late '90s found her performing as a solo artist on the Manhattan club scene (where she performed mostly original material but also included some covers here and there). Since the late '90s, Denhert (who was 44 in 2003 and now lives in suburban Westchester, NY) has put out several releases on her own label, Mother Cyclone Records, including the EP Looking Forward, Looking Back (her first solo effort) in 1999, Live in 2001, and Girl Like Me in early 2003.
by Alex Henderson