The road to Kennies Earl Kreative House — an all-purpose creative space for photography, music production, theater, and workshops on Shelton Avenue — started in Earl’s stepfather’s apartment about 15 years ago, when Earl, still in college, got a synthesizer and started to use it.
His stepfather, Earl recalled, “thought I was making too much noise.”
Instead of turning down the volume, Earl got a studio on Chapel Street.
But you could also say it started much earlier than that. Earl, now 36, grew up in Newhallville, East Rock, and the Hill.
Courtesy Kennies Earl
“Music has always been in my family,” he said.
He got his first keyboard at the age of 8 and started playing drums at 12. Before long he was playing drums in his church, Ebenezer Chapel, where he and Manny James were “pew babies,” Earl said. “He’s known me since I was a kid.”
He went to Career High and graduated in 2000. He then started going to Southern Connecticut State University but didn’t finish. “When I found out what I wanted to do, I lost interest,” he said.
What he wanted to do was music, photography. The arts. “I always had a bunch of ideas,” he said.
Brian Slattery Photo
When he was 21 he got a Roland Fantom, a synthesizer that let him dive deep into making the music he wanted. His first studio, after moving his gear out of his stepfather’s apartment, was in a third-floor space on Chapel Street above where Alisa’s House of Salsa used to be. He built what he needed for the space himself, using supplies he got from Home Depot. And figured out more how to use the electronic music setup he was making for himself.
“I don’t like not creating,” Earl said. “You don’t feel well mentally if you don’t do it.”
Through “word of mouth,” he said, people learned that he had a music studio and started asking him to help them make their music. They would pay him to do it, too. So he became a producer and engineer.
“That’s how I learned,” he said. “I never went to school for anything.”
He stayed at his space on Chapel Street for three years until the building changed hands. Then he moved to a space on State Street for another three years. But it still wasn’t quite right. “State Street was small and there were people moving around upstairs,” Earl said.
He moved out of that spot and for a short time worked out of a cousin’s basement. Then he learned about the building on Shelton Avenue in 2010. He “talked to the landlord, put a deposit down, and moved in.”
He started with one room, which he made into a music studio. But he was getting into photography as well. His interest had begun in 2008. He got a camera. He got some lighting equipment. “I didn’t know what I was doing. I just started fooling around with it.”
“I’ve just always known I could do it myself,” he said.
He got a few jobs as a wedding photographer and saw he could make money at that, too. Then he started “studying photography.” And before long, he started renting a second room at Shelton Avenue, right next the first one, which he turned into a photography studio. A third room followed, for meetings and workshops. And a fourth, which he turned into a small theater. He has so far done all the work himself, from building, furnishing, and lighting to painting. He based the color scheme — red, white, and black — on the look of the red pipes for the sprinklers against the white ceiling.
Kennies Earl Kreative House now has five to seven clients a week, whether for a photography shoot, a music recording session, a workshop for a community organization, a podcast, or events for the teens in the neighborhood. Earl makes money at it overall — especially from the photography, he said — and is working on getting the space to break even. He works now as a program specialist at ARC of Greater New Haven, in a day-service program with handicapped individuals. He lives right around the corner from the Kreative House, in Newhallville. He still plays drums in church, now at Beulah Heights First Pentecostal Church on Orchard Street.
“The rhythm reminds me of punk” sometimes, he said. “You need that stamina.”
And he has plans to make the space even more robust. “I’m kind of outgrowing this space a bit,” he said. He has thoughts of hiring a manager to handle bookings. Sometime in the future he might like to have a free-standing building of his own.
But Earl is also doing what he wants to be doing right now, creating and helping others create. “I’m always trying to encourage people to do what they do,” he said, whether he’s behind the mixing board or the lens, or just providing the space for things to happen. “They have my encouragement. What they do with it is up to them.”
Why does he do it? “To see the smile on people’s faces when they create,” he said, “whether I’m a part of it or not.”
For more information and bookings at Kennies Earl Kreative House, visit its website here.