Love Comes & Goes

For a good time, call on Rebecca Parris. That's been a motto of Boston area clubs ever since this magnificent,
home-grown gal gave up top-forty, cabaret, operetta, pop, rock, musical comedy and nearly every
other vocal form known to man to concentrate on her first love - jazz.
And, as converts do, she embraced jazz in an overwhelming bearhug, and has done the same to listeners ever since.
Parris, surely Boston's most popular woman jazz vocalist, entertains (capital "E") regularly in local haunts,
but she is really in demand when there is something to celebrate: annual sellout Christmas parties at
Cambridge's Regattabar, Scullers Jazz Club's Anniversary One party as Boston's only full-time jazz room.
(Her New Year's Eves are booked beyond the millennium.)
The reason for her popularity is simple: when Parris sings, it is an occasion.
She'll one-line from the bandstand with breezy
irreverence -till the cows go home. She whips her audience into a frenzy of appreciation
and her sidemen into a fury of creativity. She
dresses with pizzazz: black lace shawl over black dress, wild blonde ringlets, dangly gold earrings.
A heart of mischievous humor beats beneath the décolletage.
She carries her imposing frame as she carries her commanding contralto-with dignity and poise, abandon and
excitement. Best of all, she sings with power, conviction, originality, total believability. She is that rare bird: the true jazz singer with
the soul of an entertainer. (And then again, it's not so simple: I can be sure that with any live set of hers,
I will laugh, cry, and get those shivers of delicious and yearned-for recognition of truth down my spine. Parris enhances lyrics through passion and wisdom.) Rebecca and her guys-pianist John Harrison, bassist Peter Kontrimas, reed-maven and Kurzweil-cruiser Mike Monaghan, with a battery of drummers-
go at it hammer and tongs on this, Parris' first essentially self-produced recording.
One of Parris' disarming strengths is fine pacing-not just tempos, but emotions-and it tells here.
She'll mix in a Carroll Coates waltz (an unfoggy, highly atmospheric London By Night or his ebullient
One for Monterey) with swing tunes of perfect ease and joy (Fascination' Rhythm).
And she'll whisk a set from hilarity (No One Ever Tells You is a strong medicine) to heady breathing in a twinkling.
she navigates ever-dangerous back-to-back ballads with an affecting You Are There (calling to mind an idol, Irene Kral,
with whom she shares the focused intensity of an engraver) and Coates' So I Love You
(with on-a-dime-time and blues inflection recalling Carmen McRae). Parris' affinity for samba flourishes
like its global explosion; here she fairly bubbles through a bright, limber Street of Dreams,
and her own saucy When Monday Rolls Around. So far Parris has been widening her circle
of impassioned devotees from New England to Chicago, San Francisco, L.A.,
New York, Key West, Pittsburgh. With this album, somebody's gonna book her in Brazil.

-Fred Bouchard

Rebecca Parris - vocals
Michael Monaghan - reeds, flute
........................... & Kurzweil 1000
John Harrison III - keyboards
Peter Kontrimas - bass
Grover Mooney - drums
Martin Richards - drums

If you would like to order this CD via snail mail,
please enclose a check for $17 for each CD,
which includes shipping and handling,
along with your name, address, telephone number
and the name of the CD you want and mail to :
Shira Records
PO Box 1085
Duxbury, MA 02331

Home

Album
Index

Back

Next

E-Mail