‘You’re just trying to serve the song’: Get to know the backing band helping give life to the Ohio R&B Music Festival

LynMonty traced her obsession with music to childhood, recalling how she first taught herself to play on a junior drum set she received as a Christmas gift from her parents at age 8 and then almost immediately forced her way into the church band.

“My dad was a pastor at the church, and there was a drum set but no drummer, so I hopped in the car with my drumsticks, and my mom and dad were like, ‘Where are you going with those?’” said LynMonty, a multi-instrumentalist who plays drums, bass, keyboard, and saxophone. “And I was like, ‘I’m playing at church.’ … And I sat down with the choir to play, and I’ve been playing ever since.”

The musician is adopting a similarly gung-ho attitude in joining the three-piece backing band that will support the performers at the Ohio R&B Music Festival, which takes place at the Up Front Performance Space (503 S. Front St.) at 5 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 3. With minimal rehearsal time – LynMonty, who will play bass in the concert, met drummer Jesse Marquardt and keyboardist Stephen Ballard the day before we spoke in late September – the trio will step in and support eight singers, each of whom will play three to four songs, nearly all of them originals.

“I’ve just been preparing at home, listening to the tracks while driving, charting things out, because most of it is original music from these Ohio artists, so I haven’t heard it before,” said LynMonty, who received a Google Drive link with all of the songs from R&B Fest founder Qamil Wright in early September. “So, it’s been cool listening to all this new stuff. But also, with 20-plus songs, committing it to memory is a lot. … And I don’t want to mess up these indie artists’ songs. I have original music of my own, and hearing other people play it, it’s like, ‘Mm, that’s not how I recorded it’ And so, I’ve been really diligent about keeping notes for myself, making sure I get it all down.”

This has also required purchasing new gear, and specifically an MXR synth bass pedal, which LynMonty said is necessary to recreate the synthetic basslines present in tracks by a number of the performers, which this year includes Miiracle, Akoiya, Telly Loves, A Lust, Zyirra, D.O.T.Y., Zavion, and Kayla Renee. “I could just play the right notes on the bass, but to be sonically true to what they put out there, I’m trying to match the tones,” she said. “You’re trying to stay true to what’s there. It’s not about putting a ton of yourself in it. You’re just trying to serve the song.”

Thematically, LynMonty said a number of the songs are focused on concepts such as love, physical attraction, and romantic relationships, with a handful offering encouragement or envisioning a brighter future. It’s fitting then that many of the basslines adopt a repetitive pulse one might associate with a heartbeat. “Big, fat, round,” said LynMonty, who also played bass in an all-female R&B cover band shortly after moving to Columbus in 2015, “like when you hear a car driving by that has bass in the trunk.”

While many of the evening’s performers have never before shared a stage, LynMonty said the chemistry should benefit from a number of them having grown up in the Black church, whose music exists within the DNA of R&B, soul, jazz, and the blues, among other forms. “You’ve got your heavy driving basslines. You got your foot stomping and hand clapping. You also got your six-eight shuffle, and your call and response,” said LynMonty, whose congregation leaned heavily on songs by the likes of Andrae Crouch and Walter Hawkins. “And looking back on it now, those years were really crucial for me and really helped form the foundation of who I am, not just as a musician but as a person.”

This reality solidified for the musician during a solo concert at Natalie’s Grandview last year where she performed a number of the gospel songs she first encountered in her father’s church as a child. “And that night was also the 10-year anniversary of my dad’s death, and him being a preacher, me being a preacher’s kid, and how influential that music has been in my life, it was a full circle moment and a tribute to him,” she said. “And as I was preparing for the show, I realized no matter how far away I was in years or physical space, that music is home. And listening to them on repeat, getting ready for the show, it was like, yeah, that’s familiar. That’s never going anywhere.”c