Yolande: I'm nostalgic for my homeland
Sports Page 20 World renowned Sri Lankan jazz legend walks down memory lane
NEW YORK – Yolande Bavan, one of Sri Lanka’s renowned jazz vocalists and screen- andstage actress, recently re-enacted her entire professional life in a mini off- Broadway play – described as a “workshop presentation”— and appropriately titled “Have Sari. Will Travel”!
The narrative takes her-- beginning at age 16--to Australia, Japan, Britain, Canada and finally to the United States, where she achieved the rare distinction of being the first Sri Lankan to play lead roles at a venue which is the ultimate dream of all aspiring American artistes: the Great White Way called Broadway.
Described as a globe-trotting, barrier- breaking jazz singer, Yolande was a protégé of Billie Holiday, one of the legendary figures in the world of jazz, and either shared billing or rubbed shoulders with A- list celebrities, including Sammy Davis Jr., Sarah Vaughan, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald and Aretha Franklin.
Perhaps her biggest break came in 1962 when she was picked--on the recommendation of Sarah Vaughan--to join one of the most famous vocal jazz groups of that time: Lambert, Hendricks and Ross.
She replaced Annie Ross, and played in some of the major music halls and jazz festivals in the US, including the 1962 Newport Jazz Festival, which celebrated its 63rd anniversary this month. The group, later renamed Lambert, Hendricks and Bavan, won scores of awards in a single year, including the Grammy Award for Best Performance by a Vocal Group in 1962.
Described as “visually stunning on stage,” the group comprised a black American, a white American and an Asian woman in a sari— and may well have been a prime example of ethnic and gender diversity in today’s “politically correct” world.
In an interview with the Sunday Times last week, Yolande said the jazz trio was “the thing that put me on the World Stage BIG Time. We continued to win all the awards and I worked 340 days a year, flying all over the place. It also made New York my home.” www. sundaytimes. lk
She said a memorable meeting with Billie Holiday (“The Lady Sings the Blues”), and the subsequent friendship in the early 1950s, “was perhaps the greatest highlight for me as a person and a possible singer, since she coached me and took so much interest in me. She has deeply affected the way I sing.”
“I still remember what she once told me: “If I had a daughter, I would like her to be like you,” Billie Holiday told Yolande. “And that was one of the memorable moments of my life.”
Yolande’s theatrical track record has been remarkably superlative — as she zoomed across from 136 Greenlands Road in the then-sleepy neighborhood of Havelock Town to the neon lit theatres and playhouses on Broadway and off-Broadway.
She was at the Lincoln Center on Broadway in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” and she was one of the leads in Federico Garcia Lorcas’ “House of Bernarda Alba,” opposite Felicia Rashad.
The role of LUNA was written for her in Walt Disney’s “Snow White” at Radio city Music Hall. She was in Bombay Dreams at the Broadway Theatre, and played the lead in Truman Capote/Harold Arlen’s gorgeous musical “House of Flowers” at the off- Broadway playhouse, the Lucille Lortel Theater.
Marque z, a Spanishspeaking, internationally- known Colombian novelist and short- story writer, was actually allowed into the US just to see a matinee performance and met with the entire cast, who were mostly Latinos. As Yolande, would recount, Marquez thought she was Spanish and was totally surprised when she told him she wasn’t.
Marquez, who won the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature, was not allowed into the US, said Yolande, because he regularly played chess with Fidel Castro, a longtime political nemesis of successive US administrations, at the height of the Cold War.
Yolande’s talent has ranged from jazz and Shakespeare to rock musicals and Hollywood movies. “When I got the part of Lady Macbeth, you should have seen the animosity. There was no one in the production with a brown skin except me. I survived.”
The New York Times drama critic Clive Barnes wrote that Yolande “was an interestingly restrained Lady Macbeth, her envy and fury held down by a will that eventually breaks leading to madness and death.”
In England, she played before the Royal Court Theatre, the Old Vic and the Oxford Playhouse.
Off-stage, she has been one of the best Sri Lankan honorary envoys, promoting her home country in the US. And despite her lofty Western theatrical credentials, she still relishes her spicy rice-and-curry meal, and is a frequent visitor to virtually all the Sri Lankan restaurants in New York City.