FREEDOM SONGS: Two Long Beach musicians begin residency at Suzy’s in Hermosa Beach
The Kang Trio — (from right to left) Matthew Proffitt, Esther Kang, Trevor Erickson and special guest Shy But Flyy — at Dipiazza Bar in Long Beach last month. Photo by Lindsey Ingram
Two strong singers front the Cold Shoulders and The Kang Trio, who bring a taste of the Long Beach indie music scene to Hermosa Beach on Monday nights once a month
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She was a little girl who didn’t say much but had a big voice just waiting to leap out. All it took was a song.
Shy always sang to herself. Blues, in particular, came naturally. She was born in San Antonio, Texas, and her father, an Alabama man, always had blues on the turntable, often Muddy Waters. Her mother leaned towards jazz — Billie Holiday and John Coltrane — and so music of the most soulful sort always wafted through the household.
The family came to California when Shy was still a little girl. One day at Dana Middle School in San Pedro, some friends who’d overheard her singing to herself convinced Shy to perform in a talent show. Once onstage, something happened. Her voice was wild, almost feral, and it leapt out of her and rose above the whole room. The girl who barely said boo was suddenly transfixing all her classmates.
“I felt so free,” she said.
A boy gave her a name that would stick.
Shy But Flyy and her band The Cold Shoulders. Courtesy of The Cold Shoulders
“Oh you are shy but fly,” he said.
“That’s how I got the name,” she recalled. “I’d only say ‘hi’ and ‘bye’ but I get on stage and I turn into this other person.”
Now she is known as Shy But Flyy and she’s emerging as the young queen of the blues in a town with a long history of blues, Long Beach.
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Esther Kang was 6 years old and she really hated her piano teacher.
In Korea, nearly every child was forced to learn piano. For Esther, it took the music out of music. Her teacher seemed so cold and cruel that not a speck of freedom was contained in the notes Esther learned. She remembers only one time leaving her lesson not in tears. “I thought, ‘Wow, this is a good day,” she said. “I’m not crying.’”
She was 13 years old living in Fullerton with her grandparents when she saw something on MTV that absolutely captivated her: a girl with a guitar. It was Michelle Branch, who had a big hit at the time, but in a way, to Esther, it didn’t matter who it was: it was a girl with a guitar and she seemed really free.
After some lobbying, her grandparents took her to Costco, and Esther came home with an acoustic guitar. They found a man to give her some lessons.
One day, his mind drifted into the blues and he taught her Eric Clapton’s lament for his dead son, “Tears In Heaven.” Everything changed. Esther had found music with feeling.
Next, she had her heart set on going electric. A friend helped — in the age before GoFundMe or Kickstarter, he did it the old-fashioned way: he coerced kids at their junior high school to give up their lunch money for Esther’s guitar fund. She soon found herself alone in her bedroom with a brand new Mexican Stratocaster.
And that’s when Esther discovered freedom in music. She’d beeline home from school and set up shop, learning blues licks online, her left hand working the fretboard for hours and hours, losing herself inside music.
“I was obsessed,” she said.
She started writing and recording songs. One song called “Shooting Star” went slightly viral among her friends at school. Esther became known as the “Shooting Star” girl.
She wouldn’t know it until much later, but she’d found her calling.
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A strong, clear human voice raised in song is one of the earth’s most unique and beautiful elements. Thus musicians tend to surround a singer the way moons orbit a planet.
When Shy But Flyy arrived on the Long Beach music scene, players flocked. She sang at cafes and open mics and sometimes sat in with blues and jazz bands. She was swathed in mystery; nobody knew much about her except she was a singer, and they wanted to be part of her song.
Bass player Fernando Gallegos and drummer Matt Williams arrived by her side as a rhythm section. Then Shy remembered a somewhat strange incident from six months earlier. She’d met a guitar player named Keethri when she was doing a gig. He came up to her afterwards and spoke urgently in her ear. “If you ever make a band and sing blues,” he said. “Call me.”
As happens when the stars are aligned, Shy went out for tacos with some friends one night and mentioned she needed a band name. Her friend pulled a list of band names out his pocket. One of the names was “The Cold Shoulders.”
“Can I have that one?” Shy asked. “I’ll buy you a taco.”
And so The Cold Shoulders was born. The band has been together a year, playing signature gigs at the Long Beach Blues Festival and the downtown hotspot Harvelle’s and other venues in the city’s burgeoning music scene. They currently have an album underway and are writing originals, but The Cold Shoulders signature song goes back to Shy’s very beginning as a singer — “Rock Me, Baby,” a Muddy Waters classic that through her voice acquires a new and raucous life. Her voice is big, her spirit unhinged, and her soul totally unfettered.
Esther’s path to Long Beach was circuitous.
Family expectations forestalled direct pursuit of music. She attended USC and studied journalism, and straight out of college was hired as a reporter for the Easy Reader.
Though she excelled as a newspaper writer, music started to take center stage in her life. She found a home for her music two blocks from where she lived in Hermosa Beach, at Suzy’s Bar & Grill, where owners Sal and DK have long been strong supporters of young musical talent. She started out at open mic nights and eventually booked gigs. Sal once asked her to bring her guitar in, and then a week later gave it back to her with a professionally installed pickup mic.
“They opened doors for me,” she said. “They believed in me.”
She eventually decided to pursue music full-time. She moved to Long Beach and began playing out, discovering a world of like-minded musical souls.
“You think you have it figured out, then you open up another door with a whole other collection of talented people,” she said. “It’s so ripe for collaboration. Multidisciplinarian artists and calligraphers and musicians, and everyone is super stoked to be here.”
In particular, she met a guitar player named Gino Martez and a multi-instrumentalist named Matthew Proffitt, and they formed a band called King Kang. It’s not music that falls easily into genre description — psychedelic groove is how the band describes itself, but it’s also tribal, blues, rock and moonlit storytelling.
“Esther is a beautiful writer, and when she stopped writing to pursue music I felt like we were losing one of the tribe,” said Rachel Reeves, an author and Esther’s former newspaper colleague. “But I’d go watch her gigs and I’d feel her passion and I’d realize she was made for music. I realized she was doing the same thing she’d always done: she was telling stories and making people feel.”
Now Esther comes full circle. She’s begun a residency at Suzy’s every first Monday of the month with The Kang Trio, a newly established acoustic outfit featuring Trevor Erickson (another Long Beach-based musician, who is also drummer in band called Race Card) on cajon, and Proffitt on trombone (formerly part of the band Red River and currently also performing with the mystic vaudevillian troupe Sex Money Power).
The trio has the feel of something new under the sun. It’s groove, it’s folk, a beautiful voice backed by the earth-underfoot beat of a cajon and the skyward buoyancy of a trombone.
“The three of us are involved in a lot of things individually,” Esther said. “Our residency at Suzy’s brings us together once a month to vibe on each other. It’s always a great time.”
The Cold Shoulders and The Kang Trio play the first Monday of every month at Suzy’s Bar & Grill, 1141 Aviation Blvd, Hermosa Beach, from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. For more information, visit TheColdShoulders.com or facebook.com/kingkangmusic. ER