The Jazz Singer
By JOSEPH NOCERA
Photography by JEFF JACOBSON

"She is an artist preserving a great American tradition more for it's own sake than for her own glory or profit."

It's ten p.m. on a rainy Friday night at Aldo's, a Hartford restaurant that doubles as a weekend jazz bar, and where, oh, where is Rebecca Parris? She was due here an hour ago. The three local musicians hired as her accompanists have just completed the first set without her. Management is frowning. the customers, about half of whom havecome to hear Parris sing (the rest have come for Aldo's other entertainment, picking up members of the opposite sex), are beginning to get restless. Just as a few people give up and head for the door, in she strides, a blur of frazzled motion and manic talk, her raincoat flapping behind her like a regal cape. She is impossible to miss in any case, this tall, big boned woman, herblond hair swept dramatically over her right ear, her demeanor suggesting that she expects to be at the center of things. It is the demeanor of a singer who knows she can sing. In her wake trails her entire entourage: a friend carrying a handful of albums. Parris hopes to sell a few records between sets.

She is late because she got lost coming up here from Newport, where she gave a concert in the late afternoon. She has not yet had dinner. By all rights, she ought to be tired, and perhaps a little annoyed at being booked to play two gigs nearly a hundred miles apart in one day. But if that is how she feels, it doesn't show. "Here's the singer!" says someone loudly. Parris looks around, grinning. "Here's the singer, finally!" she counters, staggering toward the front of the room in mock exhaustion. People clap. They laugh. Parris laughs too. she hasn't sung a note, and she has already won over her audience. She seems, in fact, genuinely happy to be here, happy for the chance to sing the great jazz standards in a glorified pickup bar in Hartford for the princely sum of two hundred dollars. Her plain and guileless enthusiasm - an enthusiasm that gives her amagnetic presence even when she's not on stage - is one of the reasons she has become so treasured among us who have "discovered" her in New England jazz clubs such asAldo's, or the glitzy Regatta Bar in Cambridge, or at such unlikely spots as the Carriage Stall in Stratham, New Hampshire, or Chan's in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. Rebecca Parris is New England's jazz singer. Which means, given the nature of such distinctions, she is New England's secret, too.

At a small Newport radio station, Rebecca tries to drum up interest in her appearance that night.

Later in the day, her performance at this unlikely venue will net the singer two hundred dollars.

Of course, there's another reason why she is so treasured: she can sing. Oh, how she can sing! You cannot listen to Parris for more than a few moments without being startled by her talent - startled by the range and subtlety and power of her voice. "I hear a little Carmen McRae when I listen to Rebecca," says Ron DellaChiesa, the jazz disk jockey at WGBH in Boston. "And a little Sara Vaughan. I think she's on that level. Like all the great jazz vocalists, she uses her voice like an instrument." Parris is thirty-five years old, and she has that rare and wonderful ability to make songs that were written before she was born sound fresh and new. She interprets songs as much as she sings them, in a way that singers used to do but don't much any longer. "Her phrasing is what is most extraordinary", says DellaChiesa. "She never sings a song the same way twice in a row."

Private parties fill in the gaps between club dates; here, Rebecca prepares to sing at a gathering in Groton, Massachusetts.

The fact is, Parris is a practitioner - a guardian, one might say - of an art form that is becoming scarce; an artist preserving a great American tradition more for its own sake than for her own glory or profit. In some ways, she is a singer out of another time. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say she is a singer of songs that were written in another time but remain, in the right hands - in her hands - timeless. songs by George Gershwin, by Cole Porter, by Johnny Mercer, by Duke Ellington. It is distinctly possible that, had she chosen another path, she wouldn't have to peddle albums between sets - that singing more voguish music might have made her more famous, of wealthy, or both. she seems unfazed by the thought. "At some point," she says, flashing that disarming smile, "you have to sing lyrics that mean something". Singing is the only thing Rebecca Parris has ever done, and it seems not too much to say now that it is what she was born to do. She was raised in Newton, Massachusetts, the daughter of a classical pianist and a show-tune pianist, the niece of a voice instructor who was her first teacher. Her father, the show pianist, played the Massachusetts summer circuit, and was soon taking his precocious daughter with him. By the time she was six, she was singing in some of the shows. At ten, she was soloing. And ateighteen, she had left for New York to make a name for herself. "It was a nasty town, and I wasn't a nasty enough kid." is how she remembers it. Back in Boston, she fell in love with a rock musician and was soon fronting his band, working six nights a week, grinding out Top 40 covers. A pattern was established. for most of the next ten years, men would come and go, bands would come and go, but Parris could usually be found in a naugahyde lounge somewhere in New England, trying to give Barry Manilow a depth he doesn't have. "It was emotionally taxing and intellectually boring," she says now. "I mean, how many ways can you say, `Baby, baby, baby, I love you'?"

Always lurking in the background, was the music she cared about. On her nights off, she made a point of going to listen to whoever was in town, eventually finding places where she could sit in, like the now-defunct Satch's, in Boston. One night at the club, after Rebecca had sung a few songs, a saxophonist named Sonny Stanton looked at her and said, "You ain't no rock and roll singer. You're a jazz singer." Which, in her heart, she knew. She quit the rock and roll life one night in Burlington, Vermont, after a fight with the other members of the hard-rock band she had joined. She sang a year with a four member vocal group that did jazz standards - a year in which she rediscovered the joys of "real music," as well as the challenges. "My first practice," she says, "they pulled out a chart of `Ain't Misbehavin', that was twenty-seven pages long. I was bowled over. I had been on cruising speed for so long I had practically forgotten how to read music." Soon it was time to go out on her own, to lead her own band and to play music the way she wanted to play it. Since then, she has cut four records, each one better than the last, and has surrounded herself with some of the most talented musicians in the region.

The last act in a day that began in Duxbury, included an afternoon gig in Newport, and ends with three sets in Hartford.

Her current musical director, for instance, a New Bedford man named John Harrison, is one of New England's finest unknown pianists. (Rebecca herself lives in Duxbury, Massachusetts.) She is doing well enough now that she can pay Harrison, and the other three members of her regular band, a salary. But life still has its share of two-hundred-dollar gigs in places like Aldo's. Given her talent, perhaps more than its share.

And so to Aldo's on that rainy Friday night. She greets the musicians, giving the bass player, an old friend named Nat Reeves, a big hug. Someone at the bar - another old friend - sends a little gift over to the table, a bonsai plant. She seeks out the friend to thank him. The manager of the club interrupts to ask when she might be able to start singing. "As soon as I get a set together," she replies. Then she comes back to her table and gets down to work.

While the others at her booth are eating. Rebecca pulls out a large folder filled with music charts and starts leafing through it. "Let's start with forty-eight," she says quickly. Forty-eight turns out to be the Gershwin staple "But Not for Me."B-twenty-seven." she says. B-twenty-seven is "When Sunny Gets Blue," by Marvin Fisher and Jack Segal. "Forty-nine and fifty-four." ("The Best is Yet to Come" and "Them There Eyes") "Twenty-nine" ("Autumn Leaves") "B-thirty-seven" ("Desafinado.") "Fifty-three and two" ("Stolen Moments" and "Don't Blame Me.") She tunes in for a moment to a Sara Vaughn album playing over Aldo's sound system, "I love this album," she says.

Satisfied with her choices for the set, she calls together the three musicians and hands them their copies of the charts. "Sometimes when you do a gig like this, with someone you haven't practiced with or played with in a long time, it can be a nightmare," says Reeves. "But Rebecca is such a pro that she makes it work." The four of them - all pros - huddle together like a little football team. Parris, the quarterback, goes over each of the charts, giving out quick shorthand instructions on how the songs should be played. It takes all of five minutes. Everyone nods.

At 2 a.m., she's finally through; now, the three-hour drive home.

And then it's ten-thirty, and Rebecca Parris is sitting in front of the musicians, microphone in hand. Her foot is tapping to the beat. A spotlight is shining down on her. She is singing "But Not for Me," and when, in the first few bars, she shades a note in an original way, some of the people in the audience look up suddenly, as if to say, "Who did that?" By the time she begins to improvise a chorus of "When Sunny Gets Blue", - there is for a few moments at least - a strange silence in this normally chatty bar. A few dozen more New Englanders have just discovered Rebecca Parris.   By JOSEPH NOCERA Photography by JEFF JACOBSON

Last Revision Date: 3/30/01
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Copyright (C) 2001, Rebecca Parris