Another Song About Parris by Nina J. Hodgson

"Unfortunately sometimes the word Jazz in front of the word "singer" is suicide in this world, and people starting out have to know that. They really deserve to know how dirty the business is, they deserve to know how unfair it is, and they deserve to know what their chances are.
" Rebecca Parris, singer, mentor, and confidante to aspiring Jazz vocalists, believes in honesty. "I tell my students, If you can see yourself doing something different than this in ten years, then don't start into it. Do that thing now and save singing for fun so you don't lose your love of the music. But if you can't see yourself doing anything differently a decade from now, then go for it and be prepared for all the pitfalls and all the dirt and all the hardness and all the poverty and all the struggle and all the expenses you will incur."

Straightforward advice from the front lines of the Jazz business by a voice that lit up Monterey in September of 1995. If you caught Rebecca's set on the Main Stage or if you sat in on her seminar in Dizzy's Den, you are probably wondering just where this passionate yet down-to-earth lady comes from. Her career began early with tutelage from her uncle (JFK's voice coach) and her singer, actor, and English professor father, and she started with classical, not Jazz. "I was a little freak 'cause I had this adult voice, and I was singing oratorio when I was eight or nine years old." Actually, her musical career started even earlier, at the age of six, when she and her father performed Broadway musicals in summer stock along the East Coast. The imprint of this background in drama is still strong. "I like to think of each song as its own movie," she says.

Rebecca sees her transition from theater to Jazz singing as a natural progression. After studying at Boston Conservatory of Music, she made the obligatory pilgrimage to New York, became badly disillusioned, returned to Boston, and went into retail. Then, just like in the movies, her big break came when she wasn't even looking. "I would spend my evenings hanging out with friends at bars and singing to the jukebox or joking around, and one of my friends conned me into sitting in. We're having a couple of drinks at the bar, and the band announced me without me knowing it, and I had to get up and sing and not make a fool of myself. So I got up to sing a few tunes, and they wouldn't let me off, and at the end of the evening, they came over and said, 'We were just auditioning for this gig, and the guy says we can have it if we can get you.'" So long, retail.

Gigs with a succession of bands followed, including one with a rock band. One day a horn player offered some sage advice: "You're no rock singer. You're a Jazz singer." She took this observation to heart and never looked back. Spend a minute with Rebecca and you instantly know that she is a born teacher; her summer sessions at Jazz Camp in California and the seminar at Monterey are already famous. She sees herself as a coach, not a technique teacher. Rather than drill students in the ABCs of proper voice production, she prefers to find out what's individual about each student and custom tailor the instructions. Take her philosophy of scat for example.

"You find a syllable that rolls off the tongue for yourself. It could be Js for somebody, or even the Ls. People can pick their own syllable. I think it's more important for them to pick a comfortable syllable. "My students accuse me of being a shrink," she continues. They get very surprised when they're not coming in and singing scales or just working on song after song after song. The thing that makes singing an art is the knowledge of what you have inside of you to express and then the ability to express it. I always tell my students: you don't pick songs; songs pick you. There's a reason behind your learning this tune. Let's look into this and see where it goes. Let's see what body part it attaches itself to. What's the feeling around it? Find the memory and really relate to the lyric so when you're singing it, it's as if you're writing it spontaneously."

Rebecca practices what she teaches. The earthy sophistication of her style is the product of a dramatic, lyric-sensitive approach combined with straight-ahead Jazz mechanics. And her scat is smooth like pâté de foie gras. She feels that it is essential to hear chord changes and to "know what notes are available to re-create a new melody-or create a new melody over chord changes. Basically, that's what I'm doing. I'm creating a new melody, a mood." She sees herself on a par with the instrumentalists in the group. "Singers are apart from musicians most of the time-or they're made to feel that way-and I think that it's mostly the singer's fault because they don't pay attention to the same things that an instrumentalist would pay attention to: Jazz scales, chord changes, and different variations of chord changes, and being able to hear the differences in the flow of the chord change."

But it's the pure emotion of her singing that gets you every time. That's the way she plans it. "It's a mission for me to let an audience know that they're not alone. There is a piece of them that thinks that they're the only ones that are going through this crisis and they don't really get that misery loves company and that there are a lot of us that are going through this or have gone through this and survived. So doing that is a great music communication that literally can help them out of a hole. I want people to get the feelings. I want them to remember their emotions. I want them to remember and feel again and revive their senses." by Nina J. Hodgson (C) 1996 "Jazz Now Magazine and "Jazz Now Interactive"

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