By Anne Trautner
When Scott Corbin was a freshman at Big Foot High School 15 years ago, he performed in the school’s talent show.
He was supposed to play as part of a rock band, but the other freshmen band members backed out at the last minute. Corbin, who had played his guitar the year before in the Woods School talent show, decided to go on stage by himself.
“When I started, I basically put my head down and started playing. I played for like seven minutes. When I finished, there was this moment where it was totally silent, and I didn’t know if it was horrible or good. And then I got a standing ovation. That was a really pivotal moment for me,” Corbin said.
Today, Corbin, 29, is a fulltime musician with the pop music group Casely and the Jank, and people from all over the world are listening to his music.
The early years
Corbin moved with his family to Lake Geneva when he was young. He attended Eastview Elementary School and Denison Middle School in Lake Geneva. He went to Woods School for eighth grade before his family moved to Fontana.
Corbin attended Big Foot High School for his freshman and sophomore years. From there, Corbin and his family moved to Florida, where he went on to attend college.
Corbin’s father, Jeff Corbin de Bachemin, was a musician who worked as a sales executive for Gibson Guitar Company, so Corbin grew up with guitars all around him.
When he was a baby, Corbin crawled over guitar cases that littered his home. When he was 11, Corbin’s father taught him how to play guitar.
“Guitars were always in the house, so I didn’t think much of it. But when I was 11, for some reason I decided to open a case, and it was like a light switch. My whole life changed,” Corbin said.
When Corbin was 18, he lived in a fraternity and attended classes at the University of Central Florida. He spent much of his time playing guitar in his room.
“All kinds of people would stop by because I was always playing the guitar, and they would bring friends,” Corbin said.
Those friends connected Corbin with some professional musicians in the area. One thing led to another, and Corbin found himself working in a private recording studio owned by Eric Schilling, a Grammy-Award winning engineer who has worked with Shakira, Julio Iglesias and Gloria Estefan.
By the time he was 19, Corbin was flying to recording gigs in New York and Los Angeles. He also began working for Lou Pearlman of Trans Continental Records.
“I would do recording work as a guitar player for that kind of pop music coming out of Orlando at the time. And so that is how I actually got my start,” Corbin said. “I just got real fortunate and everything from there was networking.”
Corbin graduated in 2006 from UCF with a degree in economics, but has continued working as a musician ever since.
Corbin, who now lives in Chicago, still considers the Geneva Lake area his home.
“It is my home community,” Corbin said. “It has always been a goal of mine to share my music, specifically with the Lake Geneva community.”
Casely and the Jank
Corbin met musician Jean-Carlos Casely about 18 months ago through mutual friends, and the two started working together.
During rehearsal one day, as they were working to develop their own style of music, their bass player, David Jeff, said, “That sounds jank.”
“We ended up using the word to describe what we were working on,” Casely said. “It really evolved into something bigger in the community. It is a subgenre of pop music because our goal is to really share this with everybody.”
Corbin, the group’s guitarist, and Casely, the singer and producer, work tirelessly around the clock in an effort to contribute something unique to the music community, Corbin said. Their guitar-driven music blends elements of classical, dance, reggae and pop styles.
“When it comes to our style of music, we are making it because we feel it is something for the upcoming generation, those who grew up the iPods and those who grew up with technology all around them,” Corbin said. “Historically speaking, this is a really special time. We wanted to embrace that fully, so all of our platforms have been digital.”
To reach the iPod generation, Casely and the Jank create a mobile app. Last month the group released its first video, “Hail Sparta,” which celebrates the music of the past century.
“One of the things that I noticed that makes me feel really, really good about all the hard work we put in is we have a really wide range of people listening to our music,” Corbin said.
Music professionals are tuning into the music, and 13-year-olds in France have Corbin’s tunes on their iPods and phones, Corbin said.
“To be able to have the younger crowd have the same sentiments about our music as somebody who is a seasoned music professional who understands the music in an analytical sense, that has made me feel really amazing. I feel like all the hard work we are doing is really paying off,” Corbin said.
International language
People from at least 24 countries have been purchasing and downloading Casely and the Jank tunes.
The group’s fans live in China, New Zealand, Brazil, France, Egypt, Morocco, Spain, Italy, Russia and Ukraine, as well as the United States, Canada and Mexico.
“What was really super interesting for us is we got feedback in all these different languages. We put them through the Google translator online, and they’d say pretty much consistently the same thing. They kept saying the music was very visual or very cinematic, in the sense that they would always picture something when they hear the song,” Corbin said.
Casely and the Jank’s music contains an aspect of storytelling, with Casely speaking some of the lyrics and singing others. Most of the words are in English, although some excerpts are in French and Hebrew.
Some people have commented online that they are using the music to learn English as a second language, Corbin said.
“We thought that was something that was really positive and great that they would consider it in that manner,” Corbin said. “This is something that we can share with people around the world as we can help them with language and it helps us learn about their culture. That is wonderful communication, wonderful conversation, so to speak.”
Musical exercise
Ever since he played on Big Foot High School’s soccer team, exercise has been an important part of Corbin’s life. Since keeping fit is important to Casely as well, the two decided to gear their music toward working out.
Both musicians practice yoga to stay in shape, so they created a mobile app to help others practice yoga.
“We wanted to share a couple things from our personal lives,” Corbin said. “We didn’t want to step outside into too many things, but we did pick yoga because that is something that both Casely and I have done for years.”
The app, which is free to download, offers yoga music and videos, as well as instructional guides about how to practice yoga.
“We wanted to help anybody that might be getting into yoga like ourselves and maybe doesn’t know too much about it, doesn’t exactly have the confidence yet to go into a studio and know exactly what to do,” Corbin said.
The response has been overwhelming, with some people in China using it for their own home yoga practice, Corbin said.
This month, Casely and the Jank released “Life is a Cycle,” a song for the bicycling community. The song is aimed at helping those who are serious bicyclers, as well as those who ride for leisure.
“It is very important to us to be pro-health. We wanted to create something for that community and something for everyone overall to raise awareness,” Corbin said.
The upbeat song is meant to motivate people as they train, Corbin said.
“The song is actually a manifesto comprised of several mantras that have to do with cycling and with the mentality of it. It is about the challenge of cycling and how that relates to life, how the same challenges people face in fitness are mirrored in their personal lives. It is about how they overcome those challenges, how they face them and deal with them,” Corbin said.
