LATE-BLOOMING VOICE
Singer Kate McGarry coming to town
When Kate McGarry was a child, her home resonated with the sounds of her mother, father and nine other siblings singing.
“I always remember my mom singing, when she was cleaning up or cooking or doing anything,” she recalls.
“We all just naturally would sing together too. It became at different points, especially during really hard times, something that we turned to that kept us together as a family and helped us always feel open to each other and close to each other.”
No wonder that McGarry, a 53-year-old who lives in Durham, North Carolina, became a Grammy-nominated jazz vocalist.
A singer’s singer and as keen to cover Joni Mitchell, Peter Gabriel or Irving Berlin, McGarry has been praised by her peer, Grammy winner and frequent nominee Kurt Elling, as “always rapturous,” with a “unique musical gift... to broadcast emotional transparency with undeniable and artless force.”
Despite the centrality of singing in her early life, she did not bolt to early success. “I had to have a lot of life experiences. My voice was going to catch up very slowly to everything else.
“I’m just a late bloomer,” she continues. “Just like ( jazz vocalist) Sheila Jordan is continuing in her 80s to travel and sing for people. That’s my hope. That people will call me and ask me to come sing for them. Whether it’s for thousands of a couple or for a couple hundred people or 50 people.”
On Friday, McGarry and guitarist Keith Ganz, who is also her husband, will play the 46-seat GigSpace Performance Studio on Gladstone Avenue.
The cosy show will be on the same scale as the experiences that entranced McGarry when she was growing up in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and hearing music outside her home.
Her mother, she says, would regularly take her to a favourite Irish pub to listen to music. “Seeing live performers that early, seeing people tell these really deep stories, it had a big influence on me.”
Folk singing remains a big part of McGarry’s art. But jazz made its impression when she was in high school, thanks to music teachers and friends who exposed her to albums by Tony Bennett, Billie Holiday and Al Jarreau and by the pianists Bill Evans and Keith Jarrett.
At the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in the early 1980s, McGarry got her degree in Afro-American music and jazz. Horace Clarence Boyer, a scholar in African-American gospel music, took McGarry under his wing, and helped with her insecurities as an Irish-American girl from Cape Cod, trying to sing jazz.
“I didn’t feel like I necessarily had a right to sing that music. He was never confused about that. He reassured me just by his love for me and his way of teaching me.”
With sessions of deep listening, Boyer connected McGarry to the minutiae of great jazz singing and the culture that it came from.
“It’s an oral tradition. That’s the part that I feel needs to be reclaimed in the education system now,” says McGarry, who teaches at the Manhattan School of Music and will give a masterclass at GigSpace on Saturday morning.
“Yes, you want facility, you want skill, you want fluidity. The instrument has to get developed. But it’s got to be rooted... Its roots are in sacred black music in the churches.”
After she graduated, McGarry craved new surroundings. For a year, she lived in a meditation ashram in Boston. Then, feeling that she was ready “to expand, and also to start anew,” she moved to Los Angeles.
She performed at the famed Monterey Jazz Festival — but it was not her big break. Instead, the experience made her put singing on hold.
“It was rough,” she recalls. “It wasn’t like I flopped on my face ... ( but) I was just so green and scared. I wasn’t really ready.”
For three years, she was a specialeducation teacher in gang-plagued Compton.
“God, that was rough! I was working with autistic kids, and I didn’t have any training. It’s just they didn’t have enough people. I had an emergency credential. You could get it for a couple of years and do the work. I was exhausted.
Later, she made her first record, Easy To Love, in 1992 in Los Angeles. She says now that it reflects more of her influences than her present, signature vocal style.
She eventually left Los Angeles, and lived in another ashram, in upstate New York, during the late 1990s. “I stopped performing and was just focusing on my work there, and service and trying to unravel and look at the spiritual aspect of myself.”
Luckily for jazz, she moved to New York, after resolving to sing again. “Some part of me thought that it was selfish, that it was egotistical or whatever. Finally I got that worked out.”
She made friends and high-powered allies in New York. During the 2000s, her star rose with several recordings that led to her Grammynominated 2009 album If Less Is More ... Nothing Is Everything.
After her stops and starts, she was grateful for that recognition. “There was definitely this feeling, for just like a day or two, of peace, that I hadn’t really experienced before,” she says.
But McGarry says she’s not making music for the accolades or fame or the chance to play for large crowds, although she has played for thousands at European jazz festivals.
“I guess there’s a trust in a greater purpose for whatever my path is with music. Maybe I don’t have a message for a huge audience. Maybe my message is for a small audience. Maybe it’s not going to be helpful for a big stadium.”
Her last record, the 2014 release Genevieve & Ferdinand, was a duo disc with her husband recorded in front of a small audience.
The couple met more than a decade or so earlier, on a gig. “We weren’t thinking of each other in romantic terms... but we definitely had a strong connection musically,” McGarry says.
A year later, after both had ended relationships, they did another gig. Soon after, their love blossomed.
“He came over for dinner and to play music,” she says. “And there was this snowstorm. Everything about it felt very epic, you know?
“A week later, we were like, ‘Oh, this is a real thing.’ Within that very short time we knew we wanted to get married and we had found our soulmates.” They wed six months later.
The couple left New York almost seven years ago, after McGarry had an epiphany while driving into the city to teach. “I pulled over to the side of the road. It hit me like a ton of bricks,” McGarry recalls. “I’m done living here. It felt like the city was too fast. The energy that had fed me for so long now felt like it was draining me.
“I called Keith, and he just started weeping over the phone because he had wanted to move for a long time and had thought, ‘ I’m never going to get her to leave the city.’”
They moved to Durham, not far from where Ganz grew up. “We were looking for a place that was simple, and a lot less expensive, and that was warmer, where people grew their own food and where there was arts and culture,” McGarry says.
Leaving New York, where McGarry’s singing had at last taken off, has not hindered her career. “From the time I moved, I have never been busier musically,” she says. Soon after relocating, she landed monthlong tours in Brazil, Romania and China.
But McGarry has seen very little of Canada, and is looking forward to first visits to Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal this week. “I feel like Canadian people... It always seems to me like, wow, they’re humanitarian and spiritual,” she says. “It seems more normal for people to be that way up there than it does in America.”
Durham is very progressive, she says, although “even 30 miles outside of here you’ll see Confederate flags.
“It’s getting scary, I’m telling you. We really are going to think about if we’re going to stay here if things go south, you know.”
Wouldn’t it make sense then if the much-travelled singer were to move to Canada?
“There you go!” she says. “The winter might be the hardest obstacle.”