Jazz singers not afraid to court controversy
René Marie, Paula West and Tessa Souter bring potent songs to clubs
For jazz vocalist René Marie, recent headlines come freighted with a potent dose of déjà vu.
Years before quarterback Colin Kaepernick became a national lightning rod for taking a knee during the national anthem, Marie set off a firestorm by turning a performance of “The StarSpangled Banner” into a personal statement about African-American identity.
Asked to open Denver’s State of the City address in 2008, she instead delivered her striking national anthem mashup, replacing Francis Scott Key’s poem with the lyrics to “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” a song often referred to as the “Black American national anthem.”
Intended more as a statement of pride than protest, the performance was denounced by politicians and ignited a brief but intense debate over the nature of patriotism. Looking back, Barack Obama’s momentum-gathering campaign for the Democratic nomination “had something to do with this bubbling up inside of me,” says Marie, who performs at Yoshi’s in Oakland Tuesday, Bach Dancing & Dynamite Society at the Douglas Beach House in Half Moon Bay Nov. 12 and Cafe Stritch in San Jose Nov. 14.
She handled the controversy with grace. When people called her listed phone number to leave a scathing message, Marie often would answer the phone and engage
her critics in conversation. But she made her most eloquent response to the kerfuffle with her 2011 album “The Voice of My Beautiful Country” (Motéma Music), a powerful program of folk, pop, jazz and patriotic songs. “When you’re going through a painful thing, make some art,” Marie says.
A late-blooming artist who recorded her debut album at 42, Marie has nurtured a fearless bandstand ethos. She’s blossomed as a songwriter whose music explores touchy topics, political and personal, with some of the most erotic material this side of Prince.
As an improviser, she treasures the frisson of seat-of-the-pants invention, and her band Experiment in Truth reflects her insistence
on taking on-stage musical risks. After nearly two decades together, her rhythm section tandem of bassist Elias Bailey and drummer Quentin Baxter can follow her anywhere, while pianist John Chin, who joined the band in early 2015, has thrived in the hothouse environment.
“The thing that I look for is for the musicians to be truthful with who they are, adding that same vulnerability when we come together,” Marie says. “Is this person just trying to sound hip and play chord progressions? Or are they digging deep? For me that’s the creative process.”
Marie is hardly the only jazz singer navigating the difficult terrain of our increasingly polarized politics.
Paula West has embodied the Bay Area’s love affair with the American Songbook for some two decades, while steadily expanding her book to include material by more contemporary songwriters.
Outspoken offstage in her opposition to the current occupant of the White House, she made a point of including John Lennon’s scathing “Gimme Some Truth” at her July run at Feinstein’s, and she is scheduled to deliver an entire concert devoted to protest music, “Great American Politic,” at SFJazz on April 20.
“I just can’t sit by and not say anything about what’s happening in our country,” says West, who also will perform several songs by Bob Dylan and John Lennon
with violinist Mads Tolling and the Mads Men at Yoshi’s on Nov. 12. “Patriotism doesn’t mean you can’t have your grievances, or that you love your country any less. But I try to approach it with a little humor too. On my last show, we followed ‘Gimme Some Truth’ with ‘Put on a Happy Face.’ You have to have a sense of humor or we’re going to slit our wrists.”
No jazz singer is exploring the confluence of the personal and political with more probing intelligence than Tessa Souter, who will perform Nov. 30 at SFJazz’s Joe Henderson Lab and Dec. 4 at Kuumbwa Jazz Center with guitarist Hristo Vitchev, bassist Dan Robbins and drummer Lorca Hart. She’s celebrating the
impending release of her album “Picture in Black and White,” which centers on her discovery that her biological father was Afro-Caribbean.
Born in London, Souter moved to San Francisco in the 1990s and helped launch the Writers Grotto while working as a freelance journalist. Pursuing her budding passion for jazz, she relocated to New York City, where she’s established herself as an uncommonly insightful song stylist with a keen ear for unusual material. She’s also earned respect for adding her original lyrics to existing material, though the centerpiece of her new album, McCoy Tyner’s “Ancestors,” features a lyric by former Bay Area jazz singer Vicki Burns.
“I love Vicki’s line ‘voices that whisper and sigh in the wind/they’re waiting for you to remember,’ ” Souter says. “I didn’t even know my father was black. I had to go back and find out what that means.”