RENE MARIE’S EXPERIMENT IN TRUTH QUARTET
Jim Crow was no match for Catwoman.
Growing up under Virginia’s racial caste system in the mid- 1960s, Rene Marie found that the most transgressive show on television was the campy Bam! Pow! “Batman” featuring the purring Eartha Kitt as the Caped Crusader’s nemesis.
“To go from segregation to seeing this black woman on TV playing a villain ordering her white minions around, it just completely blew my mind,” says Marie, 59, the celebrated, lateblooming jazz singer who opens a four- night run at SFJazz’s Joe Henderson Lab on Thursday and plays Kuumbwa on Monday.
“Up until then, the only other black women I’d seen on TV were Leslie Uggams and Diahann Carroll, and Eartha Kitt was nothing like them,” Marie says. “They couldn’t begin to approximate her sensuality.”
Since releasing her first album at the age of 42, Marie has been one of jazz’s most dynamic and exciting vocalists. Entirely self- taught, she developed a sound that owes little to any of her predecessors, while her repertoire brims with well- crafted original songs.
She had never considered doing a tribute album until she happened to catch a performance by Kitt shortly before the entertainer’s death at the age of 81 in December 2008. Suddenly. her memories of Catwoman came flooding back, and she connected Kitt to that seductive siren of defiance who jolted her childhood consciousness.
“When I saw her on stage When & where: 7 and 8: 30 p. m. Thursday through Saturday, 5: 30 and 7 p. m. Sunday, at SFJazz, 201 Franklin St., San Francisco, $ 35, 866- 920- 5299, www. sfjazz. org; 7 p. m. Monday at Kuumbwa Jazz Center, 320 Cedar St., Santa Cruz, $ 25-$ 30, 831- 4275100, www. kuumbwajazz. org decades later, I was drooling like everyone else in the room,” Kitt recalls. “Only then did I make the connection. I knew I didn’t want to try to imitate her. But I did want to give a sense of the playfully sensual and sexual, tongue- in- cheek nature of her songs.”
The resulting album, 2013’ s “I Wanna Be Evil: With Love to Eartha Kitt” ( Motema), is a real departure from what East Bay trumpeter Ian Carey once denounced as jazz’s “tribute industrial complex.” Exploring songs rarely if ever sung by other jazz musicians, Marie brilliantly reclaims the memory of a singular and fearless artist who created one of the most arresting personas in American music.
When Kitt replaced Julie Newmar as Catwoman for the third and final season of “Batman” in 1967, she was already a major star with numerous hit recordings, including “Santa Baby,” “I Want to Be Evil” and “Let’s Do It.” Born into dire poverty, Kitt joined Katherine Dunham’s pioneering modern dance company in 1942, and when she left in 1948, it was to pursue a solo career as a singer in Europe.
By the early 1950s, Kitt
MARIE,