Jen Hajj in Concert
The Bridger Folk Music Society presents a concert with singer and songwriter Jen Hajj on Saturday June 18, 2011, at 7:30 pm at Crumb Brothers Bakery, 291 South 300 West in Logan. Tickets are $13 and are available by calling (435) 757-3468, or take your chances at the door. Seating is very limited, so advance purchase is recommended. The concert is sponsored by Import Auto and Utah Public Radio.
Sometimes sweet. Sometimes sexy. Always engaging. Jen Hajj has a voice you will not forget, and a smile warm enough to heat a two bedroom home. You might know her from local bluegrass jams, open mics, or from a folk music camp. Or you might know her as “Lil’ Ginny,” the host of KRCL 90.9 fm’s Bluegrass Express. Maybe you have seen her as the “singing hawk lady” from HawkWatch International. She wears many faces. But that’s just Jen.
Jen spent her childhood in Tempe, Arizona, taking piano lessons, chasing lizards, and singing in church and school choirs. She made an early connection with composition as a child, noticing that music notation wasn’t just for interpreting what other people created, but it could be used to express her own musical ideas. She took her first composition, “Mazurka,” to her piano teacher, who patiently played through the poorly notated piece, and gently introduced music theory into Jen’s instruction. This is where her songwriting began. She moved to Utah in the mid-1980’s where her musical career began to take shape, singing with various choirs (school, professional and semi-professional groups) and moving her way into the church music scene.
While working with various churches, she rediscovered her desire to write her own music. She entered music school and studied vocal performance and composition. Jen was excited to gain theoretical knowledge and improved with the required daily keyboarding practice, but the daily choral and vocal practice left her hoarse and breathless. She visited a doctor who diagnosed her with asthma. She stayed in music school for two miserable years. It took some soul searching to realize that she did not want to be an opera singer, a performing pianist, or a church choir conductor. She made the difficult decision to quit choral conducting and dropped out of opera school. Her health improved immediately, and the asthma has not returned since. To pay the bills, she took a job at a local zoo and learned to handle animals. This “day job” has developed alongside her musical career, and now she manages education programs at HawkWatch International, an organization dedicated to preserving birds of prey and their habitats.
Strangely enough, the birds helped her find music again. On one of her many bird program tours, she composed a silly ditty to help children remember the adaptations of birds of prey, and then another, and then another. Pretty soon, she had a suite of 10 songs about raptor ecology, but no ability to perform them. She learned to play the ukulele, and then the guitar, and wrote more songs to support her now-growing musical habit. Jen’s debut album, Eye of the Storm, was released in 2011.
For Jen, being a part of the folk music scene is like coming home. She hopes that when you hear her sing, that you feel it too.
For more information, go to www.bridgerfolk.org or www.jenhajj.com