Jazz singer Suzi Stern has learned the great secret that transcends art -- that the voice from the heart is at the
center of all virtuosity
If you've ever stopped by the Driskill lounge on the weekend, you've probably heard Suzi Stern's supple voice. Here she
performs on a Saturday evening.
Brian K. Diggs AMERICAN-STATESMAN
More with Suzi Stern
A conversation with the singer about music, passion, craft and creativity
By Brad Buchholz
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, May 23, 2004
In the last hour before midnight, Suzi Stern -- the jazz singer, that lovely woman in the black evening dress -- is
falling . . . falling . . . falling into a mood of gentle melancholy. That's her at the microphone, standing beside
the grand piano in the lounge of Austin's grand Driskill Hotel. It's a Saturday. The room is full of people. The
perfect time for a sweet, sad song.
At the piano, George Oldziey plays the first plaintive notes of Hank Williams' country standard, "I'm So Lonesome I
Could Cry." As she feels the notes, Suzi cradles the microphone in both hands. She lets a curtain of blond hair fall
over her eye. And then she sings the opening lines, so slow and spare and true. . . .
"Hear the lonesome whippoorwill. He sounds to blue to fly. The midnight train is whining low. I'm so lonesome I could cry."
Suzi Stern pours her heart into the delicate rendition of the song. Yet it's clear that half the people here aren't
even listening. A rowdy wedding party has crashed the bar. People are laughing. People are shouting. On a sofa directly
in front of the piano, two middle-aged men are arguing politics.
"If JFK were alive today, he'd be a Republican," insists one of the guys, who's wearing a shirt with patterns that
suggest barbed wire. "I'm telling you, JFK would be as Republican as Ronald Reagan!"
In this moment, the Driskill lounge feels as serene as a convention floor. Yet Suzi Stern, who's been singing jazz in
Austin for more than 20 years, knows how to deal with that rare rough night. She makes no compromises. In fact, the
great truth in the room is the artist's compassion for the song, her conviction to cradle it with respect. Suzi does
not rush through the words or deliver them with sarcastic accents. Instead, she sings "I'm So Lonesome" with a
reflective poignance that matches the circumstance.
"The silence of a falling star lights up the purple sky, and as I wonder where you are I'm so lonesome I could cry."
Suzi plays the Driskill almost every weekend, and she's grateful for the job. But like so many other top-flight jazz
musicians in this city -- artists such as Alex Coke, Mitch Watkins and Tina Marsh -- Suzi knows the price one must
pay to play the music she loves. She certainly doesn't sing in Austin for the money or the prospect of fame; the jazz
scene here is just too small. Rather, the force that propels her is the inner voice that whispers, "This is what I live
to do."
Suzi Stern's story is a lot like this show at the Driskill. It's about growing older and wiser, developing the kind of
self-assurance that has allowed her to transcend all manner of noise and disinterest. It's about connecting most purely
to the love of what we do for a living -- and in the process, freeing ourselves to sing the song of life more truly than
ever before.
The quiet way
After so many nights in noisy rooms, Suzi has this year released the most exquisitely quiet album of her career:
"Lament," a collection of standards (and a few originals) conceived by Stern and Austin jazz pianist Terry
Bowness. Everything about this wistful CD is spare, simple, stripped down, straight to the essence of the songs.
""I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" is the first tune.
"The music on 'Lament' is the most under-singing I've ever done," says Stern, sipping tea in the sunny
kitchen of her West Austin duplex. "There's no scatting, no acrobatics. The idea of it was to touch the feeling
in the songs, to evoke a mood -- something melancholy, but hopeful, too -- from beginning to end."
Suzi Stern is an acrobatic singer; it has long been her signature. Since coming to music in her early 20s, she has
always admired instrumentalists, loved the sound of horns, wanted her voice to sound like a horn. And so it was
that young Suzi devoted herself to becoming an improvisational singer, a soloist adept at letting her voice skate
over the top of complex jazz syncopations. She'd sing words, sure. But her voice was its own instrument.
On "Lament," however, Suzi let go of all that daring, all that speed. After so many adventures in the
jazz rocket ship through the years, Suzi's journey on "Lament" is like a quiet walk through a glen. It
was no small challenge for her to step away from her strength -- knowing just how high she could soar, and yet
holding back the urge to do it.
"I was very impatient, on my first CDs (such as 'Seven Stars,' in 1995) to let people know I had chops, that
there was control there, that I could do amazing things like doing all those notes like in the head of Jim Hall's
'Twos Blues,' " she says. "But over the last several years, I've been seeking something different. I
simply wanted to shade a blank canvas. I wanted to have a catharsis and touch people's hearts with the songs."
"Do you know the work of Helen Frankenthaler? (She's an American painter, an abstract expressionist whose work
has a very liquid and delicate quality to it.) Do you know how she puts colors on an unprimed canvas, and they just
bleed? The first time you see it, you think, 'Big deal. I could do that.' But then you realize that its simplicity,
the simplicity of its form, is what draws you into the canvas. And it keeps you looking at it."
Suzi is forever using the language of color and painting when talking about music, a reflection of a life lived in
the wide world of the arts. Born in Buffalo, N.Y., she grew up in a family of musicians and performers. As a child,
her first love was ballet. Suzi studied at both the American Ballet Theater and the Joffrey Ballet when she was young
-- and you can still see it when she performs, that impeccable posture that draws attention to her head and neck.
It was dance that first brought Suzi to Austin. In 1978, she became assistant director of Spectrum, an all-deaf dance
company founded by Yacov Sharir. Suzi had years ago learned American Sign Language skills from her brother (an
interpreter for the deaf ), so she was a natural to teach hearing-impaired dancers. At the same time, she was a member
of the Austin Ballet Theater. She danced regularly with the group during its long and funky run at the Armadillo World
Headquarters.
But by the early 1980s, Suzi gave up dance for music -- her life's journey altered upon hearing Passenger, a popular
Austin jazz band of the day that featured guitarist Mitch Watkins, bassist Roscoe Beck and saxophonist Paul Ostermayer.
Having already learned violin, cello, piano and flute as a child, Suzi began to study classical voice and jazz theory.
In time, she fronted bands that included her old Passenger friends.
"Suzi was very rare in that she thought like a musician, not a singer," recalls Ostermayer, who remains one
of her closest friends. "A lot of singers just don't get it (when it comes to jazz). They see themselves with a
spotlight on them, wanting people to adore them. It's not like they took piano lessons, studied improvisation, listened
to Miles and Coltrane.
"Suzi was the opposite of that. She really got it. And that's why the best players really wanted to work with her."
The jazz singer didn't just love improvisation; she loved the interplay of language and jazz as well. As a woman with
poetic flair, she began writing lyrics to her favorite jazz instrumentals -- winning the admiration of tenor saxophone
giant Joe Henderson, for one, with her lyrical adornments to his composition "Black Narcissus." Her lyrical
take on Miles Davis' "So What" worked with the theme of social consciousness; her words to J.J. Johnson's
"Lament" -- which she first recorded a decade ago -- allude to the sad beauty of an artist's life.
As a singer, Suzi was once classified as a light soprano; she's never had a "Wagnerian voice." But she's
always known how to play to her strengths: her phrasing, her vibrato, her sensitivity to the soul of jazz. During
the 1990s, she left Austin for a time to study in New York under Bobby McFerrin and collaborate with acclaimed
saxophonist Joshua Redmon and bassist Dave Friesen. Today, Suzi is regarded as one of the best voice instructors in
town, teaching 20 hours a week, tutoring young dreamers and mature vocalists. Singer-songwriter Darden Smith and blues
singer Angela Strehli are among her former students.
As a teacher, Suzi has long encouraged her students to sing from an authentic place, regardless of the cost. And as
she reached her 40s, Suzi longed to explore a direction in music that had less to do with razzle-dazzle, to take a
step back from straight-ahead jazz. That door opened three years ago, when she heard a 30-something pianist named
Terry Bowness play a show at the Elephant Room.
Bowness' technique is very textured and unrushed. She remembers liking the tender colors in his chords -- the very
colors he would eventually bring to their "Lament" album.
"It is as far away from bebop playing as you can get," she says. "But I knew as soon as I heard Terry
play that's the direction I wanted to go."
'I've Just Seen a Face'
During the recording of "Lament," Suzi Stern approached her young collaborator with the idea that they do a
treatment of "I've Just Seen a Face," the classic John Lennon-Paul McCartney song. Bowness' reaction was not
enthusiastic. "It was Suzi's idea all the way," he recalls. "And to be honest with you, I didn't think
it was a good one until we recorded it."
Are you familiar with the Beatles' version? Think of it as Paul McCartney's "singin' in the rain" tune --
"I've just seen a face. I can't forget the time or place where we just met." -- recorded at a brisk,
youthful tempo, giddy with sudden infatuation. "She's just the girl for me, and I want all the world to see we've
met!"
In her treatment, Suzi dares to bring some melancholy colors to a song millions of Americans grew up with --
slowing its tempo, letting it wear some years, imbuing it with both wonder and fear, presenting it in the voice
of a woman who has known love and been hurt in love. Paul? He's just seen a face. Meanwhile, Suzi is slowly
falling . . . falling . . . falling in every nuance of the word. "Falling. Yes, I am falling. And he keeps
calling me back again."
"I've Just Seen a Face" is triumphant, delicate as the mist on a gray day, a testament to the courage of
the singer and the maturity of the woman who offers it. It does not hurt to know that Suzi is a single mother who
has been married and divorced twice yet still holds true to the idea of enduring love. She brings to the song, and
the entire album, a rumination of this very condition: knowing loss, feeling hope, forever taking that chance on love.
"As you mature, as you grow older, I think you have a deeper capacity to understand what falling in love really
means. It's enormous, it's wonderful. And it's loaded," says Suzi, venturing into that landscape where one's
life and art are one. "I know you're probably hearing a little disappointment in that song, along with the fear,
that comes with maturity, even as our capacity to love remains the same.
"There's a wonderful part of me now that realizes you have to be alone with yourself -- you have to be OK with
that -- before anything is going to happen that's going to be lasting, authentic and right. I know this intellectually
and in my heart. I know it spiritually. At the same time, I have moments where I say, 'I'm tired of being alone. I
want to walk through all of this amazing adventure with someone.' I'm still a romantic."
There's a line in "I've Just Seen a Face" that's hard to hear in a pure way as McCartney sings it; the words
are striking, but they flow against the happy current of the Beatles' melody: "I have never known the likes of this.
I've been alone. And I have missed things and kept out of sight." Suzi sings the passage quietly, unrushed, as if
she's revealing a painful secret to the starry night.
"The understatement you're hearing in Suzi's music comes from a place of knowledge and wisdom . . . a kind of soul
experience," says Ostermayer, who played no part in the recording of "Lament" but loves the album. "
You know, it's so easy to laud youth culture, to deify youth. Our pop culture is all razzle and dazzle. Lost in all the
noise, sometimes, is the understanding that something deeper and more substantial comes from experience.
"I think it's hard for artists who recognize this to make their way in this culture. The reward you gain from it is
strictly your own."
Falling
In the lounge of the Driskill Hotel, Suzi Stern finishes her final set of the evening with tenderness, covering
"Someone to Watch Over Me." It's well past midnight now, but there's still a rumble in the room from the wedding
party. Suzi hasn't heard a noisier night at the Driskill all year. Oblivious to the music, a customer on his way to the
bathroom almost bowls over her in the middle of the song.
Only now does the singer allow herself a laugh in the middle of the performance. Suzi sits at the edge of the piano bench,
smiles, and rests her head against the piano as Oldziey plays the final notes of the night. For a moment, the din subsides
-- and there is warm applause.
"Say," says a tipsy man who's been sitting on a stool beside the piano all night. "Aren't you gonna sing that
whippoorwill song?"
"Oh no, I did it already," she says tenderly, respectfully, touching him on the arm. "I'm sorry you missed it.
I sang it for you."
Suzi packs up her music. She takes a moment to hug some loyal jazz fans who have stopped to say thank you. Inspired by her
unwavering devotion to song, the newspaper guy sitting in the lounge offers to carry a bag full of sheet music as she walks
to her car. They pass through the Driskill lobby, crossing a path of paper flower petals, remnants from the wedding reception.
The singer's mood is light, upbeat. She makes happy conversation with the doorman. There's a cool mist in the air. One would
never guess it has been a difficult night.
How do yo do it? How do you stay so strong without letting all that noise and dismissal break your heart? Doesn't it hurt?
"Nah, I'm older now. And I've been performing a long time," she says. "It's a nice place to be in this
life, not feeling the need to prove so much -- to move beyond the fear of what other people might think. It took me
years . . . But I'm a lot more comfortable with who I am now."
Suzi Stern knows there will be other nights, better nights -- and in all of them, her voice will sing true. She steps
alone into the night. A gentle rain is falling . . . falling . . . falling all around her on Brazos Street.
bbuchholz@statesman.com; 912-2967
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