Kevin Braheny Fortune is a true Renaissance Man. He is a multi-instrumentalist – saxes, flutes, clarinets, oboe, guitar, bass, keyboards, synthesizers, and percussion. He has been a session musician and recording engineer for over 30 years working with many greats including Miles Davis. He’s been involved in leading-edge electronics, prototyping and building his own synthesizers and other electronic goodies, and contributing to the building of at least seven studios in L.A. and the Bay Area. And at the same time he has had a parallel career in the healing arts as a bodyworker, a Tantra teacher, author, and counselor working with healing sexual energy not only with abuse survivors but with those wishing to learn and expand their horizons. He is also a gifted intuitive who channels the Grand Spirit, Dr. Peebles.

Early History

Born Kevin Braheny in 1952, the youngest of four children, he was influenced by the music his much older brothers would play constantly: Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Ray Charles, Elvis, Cozy Cole, etc. After his older sister came home to labor over her piano lesson, the 4-year-old Kevin would sit down and play her lesson correctly from memory. Thus entered classical music. At 7, Kevin began formal training on piano and when he discovered jazz, took up the alto saxophone at 11. Always improvising and extrapolating the music he was playing, he began writing music. “I always heard music in my head from my earliest memory. I used to love the music of Latin High Mass in a large church, and I think it contributed to my appreciation and involvement in space music.”

He formed bands in high school and attended VanderCook College of Music in Chicago as a woodwind major. During that time, he played baritone sax, soprano sax, and flute in jazz and big bands, as well as gigging in R&B, funk & rock bands on sax, keyboards, and guitar. He also began writing piano pieces in the ‘60’s that would later fall into the category known as “Ambient Music”, a term Brian Eno coined that enabled many of his contemporaries to make their music known.

Electronic Music

In 1972, he bought his first synthesizer, an EML 101. In 1975, he moved to Los Angeles and immediately began composing music for soundtracks and commercials. In that same year, he met Malcolm Cecil, the synthesizer wizard, who co-produced Stevie Wonder's first synthesizer efforts. Braheny became his assistant and member of Tonto’s Expanding Head Band and worked with Cecil for a year and a half until Serge Tcherepnin, a well-known electronic music composer and synthesizer inventor, hired him to help him prototype and manufacture the Serge Modular Music System. During the four years that Braheny worked with Tcherepnin, he built his own instrument, "The Mighty Serge," a unique, versatile, and compact (15 panel) modular analog synthesizer.

While he worked with Tcherepnin, he also created music and performed regularly at Continuum Studio, a progressive movement and healing center founded by Emilie Conrad, which afforded him an ongoing opportunity to explore the tremendous potential of the instrument. He created a vast repertoire of ambient music; rhythmic and arhythmic, uniquely textural compositions in real-time over which he improvised sax and flute solos. In 1981, with his friend Gary Chang, he built one of the first studios to utilize a computer music instrument (Fairlight CMI) and 24-track synchronized to video. In 1984, he met synth designer Nyle Steiner and prototyped the EWI (electronic wind instrument) which is now manufactured by Akai Instruments. The EWI in the hands of this synthesizer master represents a unique balance between technology and Braheny's lyrical woodwind style. With his friend Prof. Keith O. Johnson, he has also designed and built a binaural recording system that reproduces sound in glorious 3-dimensional sound. This system can be heard on Secret Rooms his fourth release on Hearts of Space Records.

Kevin is a Space Music pioneer whose music is heard on hundreds of radio, Internet, and television programs world-wide, and has added his musical genius to hundreds of recordings. He was also the first artist signed to the Hearts of Space record label.

Life Changes

Through the late ‘80’s and early ‘90’s he was co-chief engineer at Crystal Studios and had built his own composer’s studio and post production room housed in the facility. His musical career as a public personality took an abrupt turn when he contracted a long-term life-changing illness in 1992/93. He was recording an album called Passion’s Dance when illness forced him to stop. “I had to look at my life differently. I had loved living in L.A. but when I became ill I realized that it was not the place for me to heal. While standing on the roof of my studio hosing it down so that the burning embers from the fires of the L.A. riots wouldn’t burn my studio down, I took that as an omen.”

He moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, put everything in storage and began the healing process. During the ‘90’s he recorded two albums with Tim Clark, Rain and The Spell.

“It was a gift to record those albums in collaboration with Tim as I never knew if I was going to have energy to even move from day to day and working with another gave me just enough extra energy to continue to feel inspired and that carried me through. I enjoyed doing those albums with Tim.”

Throughout his healing process, he recorded hundreds of improvisations on a variety of instruments. He also turned his focus to the teaching of Tantra and to teaching Tantra teachers as well as building a private practice in the Bay Area, which he still maintains. In 1998, Spirit, through his channeling, gave him the new name of Fortune. He includes the name Braheny so that his music fans will be able to find his wonderful music. Concurrently in the mid to late ‘90’s, Kevin was chief-engineer at Sound Transform Systems, the company that continues to produce Serge Synthesizers. In 2002, he moved to the Sierra Nevada Mountains of Northern California where he has lots of fresh air, and of course, has built a recording studio. With his health much improved, Kevin is turning his prolific creative expression toward making his music available once again: the music of Soul Healing.

Why The Name Change?

Is Kevin Fortune really Kevin Braheny? Or is it the other way around? It’s time to tell the story. I was born Kevin Braheny into a loving but strict Irish-Catholic family in 1952. Read more...

 

 

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