Freda Payne brings Ella Fitzgerald tribute to Bay Area
Singer will be joined by guest vocalist Kenny Washington
Freda Payne, still known for her soulful 1970 megahit “Band of Gold,” didn't start out as a R&B singer.
“I wanted to have a reputation of being accepted as a jazz singer,” says the vocalist, on the phone from Southern California to promote her upcoming gig in Marin.
She got her wish. She brings “A Tribute to Ella Fitzgerald,” with guest vocalist Kenny Washington, pianist Tammy Hall, drummer Leon Joyce Jr. and bassist Gary Brown to San Rafael's Showcase Theatre on Friday.
Payne has been performing Fitzgerald's songs for years, in cabaret settings and onstage since 2004 in “Ella: The First Lady of Song,” a show written by Lee Summers and conceived for her by the late actor-dancer-producer Maurice Hines.
“I love them both,” she says, noting that while the singing is always easy, there's more complexities— learning lines, dealing with more people—with the theatrical production.
In May and June, she'll reprise her “First Lady” role at Michigan's Meadow Brook Theatre, not far from where she grew up in Detroit, singing all kinds of music.
“I knew lots of songs,” she says. “I started learning because I studied. I had piano
lessons from the time I was 6. Then, when I was old enough go downtown to buy a piano exercise book, of course, they had other music books there, too. They had Gershwin books, and, you know, Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers books and all those.”
At 16, she appeared on Ted Mack's “The Original Amateur Hour” singing the Cole Porter tune “From This Moment On.” And for years, she performed routinely with Don Large's Make Way for Youth Chorus, which appeared on a nationally syndicated radio show out of Detroit.
At age 11 or 12, perhaps not yet decided on a career
in music, she was listening to jazz and big band singers like Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Eydie Gormé, June Christy and Julie London.
As a teen, she was courted by Motown. She says, “I was Berry Gordy's first female protégé.” But she never signed with the label because her strict mother didn't care for Gordy's business proposals: “She felt he was a little bit too greedy.”
After moving to New York at 18, and singing in clubs and hot spots like the Plaza Hotel and Miami Beach's luxury hotels, she noticed the success of Diana Ross and Dionne Warwick:
“I saw how big their careers were becoming and I said, `You know what, I need a hit.'”
It came not longer after her acquaintance Tamiko Jones called her at her Central Park West apartment to tell her that their mutual friend Brian Holland, a former classmate, was in town.
Brian, his older brother Eddie Holland and Lamont Dozier, of course, were prolific Motown songwriters in conflict with the label and starting up their own, Invictus. They presented her with “Band of Gold,” an instantly recognizable tune that soon topped the charts.
Payne calls the often-covered
song (one of Invictus' biggest hits, and one she has recorded many times), “a double-edged sword blessing.”
She says, “I started out basically as a jazz, kind of middle-of-the-road-type singer, you know, sophisticated. But `Band of Gold' changed that, and most people to this very day, they think I'm an R&B-soul singer. OK, I do that, but I that's not all I do. I do a lot of other things.”
In the early 1980s, she even hosted a short-lived TV show called “Today's Black Woman.”
Through the decades, she has recorded 21 albums of varying genres; toured in
musical theater productions (“Sophisticated Ladies,” “Ain't Misbehavin',” “Blues in the Night,” `Jelly's Last Jam”); and appeared in movies (“Ragdoll,” “The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps”).
In 2021, she released her memoir, “Band of Gold.” The project, delayed by the pandemic, includes her recollections of encounters with titans from Duke Ellington, Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra to Sammy Davis Jr., Pearl Bailey, Omar Sharif and Quincy Jones.
And this year, she released a smooth jazz single, “Just to Be With You.”
She has survived the ups and downs, and there have been many of both, of a show biz career, she says, “by the grace of God.” Pointing to wisdom gleaned from a deodorant commercial, she says, “You know, you just keep on going. And never let them see you sweat.”
Though she does anticipate a time when she'll retire, she's pleased that Washington, the Bay Area's premier jazz singer according to many, will join her onstage in Marin.
And, thinking about Hines, her late friend and associate, she has yet another goal to which she looks forward: It's the possibility of taking “Ella: The First Lady of Song” to Broadway.