April 3, 2001 – Imagine, in your mind's ear, a jazz vocalist singing "Autumn Leaves" with a fugue at the beginning and another at the end.
Or go to the St. John School of the Arts on Thursday (or Tillett Gardens on St. Thomas on Friday) and maybe, just maybe, you'll hear Rebecca Parris do exactly that.
The "maybe" is because there's no guarantee that Parris will sing the song – after all, we're barely into spring – but when she does sing it, that's how she does it.
Parris, accompanied by Paul McWilliams on piano, is closing out the concert season for the two venues with an evening of jazz. And jazz, she points out, has borrowed a lot from classical music, as well as other genres. So has she.
In her formative years, Parris – then known as Ruth Blair MacCloskey – and her parents figured she had a future in opera. Her mother and father were professional musicians, as were an uncle and an aunt, and she began studying piano at the age of 3 and voice two years after that. And it seems she had a thing about fugues.
While she was a toddler, she told The Boston Globe Magazine, "My mother said I would chase her around the house making up fugues – 'Praise, praise, praise the Lord!'" As a child, she also learned to play the piano, cello, violin, flute, string bass, tuba and kettle drums. Gifted as a vocal student, she raced through her opera studies and in her teens became the youngest soloist ever with Boston's prestigious Handel and Haydn Society. She continued her studies at the Boston Conservatory, then took her coloratura soprano voice to New York in search of not an opening at the Met but Broadway's bright lights.
After reality set in – on a day when someone with better connections beat her out on a commercial casting call – she headed back to Boston and took a day job at a department store. Soon friends urged her to return to singing, though, and over the next decade she performed with several Top 40 bands. At the end of that period, when the band she was with switched to rock, "I force fed myself for about six months and learned all those tunes," she told the Globe Magazine. "When I was 24, I had six octaves to play with," she said of her voice. As a rock singer, "I was working six nights a week and having a volatile relationship where I was screaming all the time, using the same pipes."
Exhaustion and emotional stress brought on bouts of fever and laryngitis which ultimately cost her "a couple of octaves" from her upper range. In the end, it didn't matter, she reflected later: "I continued as a tenor, which is fine. Soprano is too shrill a voice for the jazz idiom, anyway."
Island connections
Parris knows the Virgin Islands, and many jazz fans in the islands know her. She played annual three-week gigs in the early 1990s at the Bluebeard's Castle piano lounge on St. Thomas (with McWilliams at the baby grand) and day-tripped to St. John during those visits. Before that, she saw at least the harbors of both islands aboard seven Floating Jazz Festival cruises aboard the Norway. And 'way back, when she took her first vacation as an adult, it was on St. Croix.
During one of the Norway cruises, a mutual friend introduced her to local musician Rusty Vellek and he invited her to a jazz beach party he put together at Secret Harbour for the cruise passengers. After that, "Rusty tried for a few years to find a way to get us down there," she recalls, referring to herself and McWilliams, her significant other for 17 years. Signing the pair was a no-brainer when he took over the Blackbeard's bookings.
"Audiences love them," Vellek says. "They were one of our most popular acts at Blackbeard's. Rebecca has a warm personality and she projects it well. She can make a whole audience feel like they're getting bear-hugged by a long lost friend or relative. Great voice too, with a lot of power, sensitivity and emotional depth. And they both have great ears, which makes it a real pleasure to play with them."
Vellek sat in with them frequently at Blackbeard's ("I got to do that with everybody – music director's privilege," he says) and took them to Limelight Monday at the old Barnacle Bill's on one of their nights off. Others who sat in at one time or another, he recalls, included Joe Ramsay, Freddie Rabuse ("occasionally doing some four-handed piano with Paul"), Rhett Simmonds and the late Eric Harrigan.
Parris and McWilliams met professionally first. "I was doing a TV show and needed a last-minute piano player," she relates. One thing led to another, and soon they were full-time partners in life as well as part-time collaborators in jazz. "We can pick and choose what we want to do together," Parris says. "We decided that emotionally it was much safer to come home from a gig and complain about the piano player or the singer – and not have it be him or be me."
Jazz accompaniment, she says, "is a matter of real simpatico listening. Some say you need to breathe with the singer. Improvising is something you can't work out ahead. The pianist is in an unselfish position, creating a backdrop for the story being told by the singer." Those who are good at it, she adds, have had a "lot of training, whether in the doing school or the studying school."
Classic comparisons
Classical music appeals to a small minority of the listening audience, Parris says, but it's still a larger share than jazz commands. "Jazz is 2 percent and I think classical is about 6," she says. "Most of the rest is country and pop."
One of the things that drove her away from classical music as an artist was its inflexibility. "Even conductors don't have very much leeway in how the music is played or sung," she notes. "There's very little room for self-interpretation or self-expression unless you're so, so subtle about it." On the other hand, she says with a chuckle, "With jazz, you can sing a sappy-sweet love song tongue-in-cheek. You can change the rhythm. What I love about jazz is that it's so creative, so spontaneous. No solo is the same twice."
As a consumer, however, she remains a classical music lover who enjoys going to the opera. "Tosca," "La Boheme," "Carmen" and "Die Fledermaus" are her favorites. At the Boston Conservatory, she studied for the roles of Michaela in "Carmen" and Mimi in "La Boheme."
Jazz-wise, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Carmen McRae, Billie Holliday and Jimmy Durante have been her greatest musical influences. Durante makes the list because "he could really sell a song, would never fail to bring a tear to your eye."
No matter what the trend may be, Parris doesn't see herself moving away from mainstream jazz. "I scat, I improvise, but the song is the most important piece of it," she says. "A lot of 'free jazz' I don't understand or ever intend to understand – people playing for themselves, not for their audience … A lot of people have forgotten they're not just artists, they're performing artists. Miles Davis might have turned his back on the audience, but he wore gold lamé when he did it. He was still in show business."
Parris and McWilliams are in the territory on a double mission this week. In addition to performing on St. Thomas and St. John, they, along with pianist/vocalist/instrumentalist Paul Broadnax, a longtime collaborator with Parris, are serving as judges of the 12th annual Arts Alive/Innovative Classical Music Competition. The young people who make the cut from the preliminary rounds Tuesday at Island Center on St. Croix and Wednesday at Tillett Gardens on St. Thomas will meet in the finals on Sunday at Island Center.
Parris says she and Broadn
ax "have worked together hundreds of times," sometimes with him on piano, sometimes duetting vocally. She doesn't straight-out say so but definitely suggests he will be invited to do so at her concerts. "He will more than likely join us at some point," she says. "We have nothing planned; we'll see how it goes." The same applies with regard to Vellek, she adds. That's what improvising is all about.
Concert information
Thursday, April 5, at 8 p.m. – St. John School of the Arts, Cruz Bay. Tickets $25 general admission, $15 for students. Advance sales are at Connections. If seats are still available, tickets will be sold at the door. Reservations are not accepted by telephone. For additional information, call 779-4322 or 776-6777.
Friday, April 6, at 8 p.m. – Tillett Gardens, St. Thomas. Tickets $25. Pre-performance dinner at Polli's Restaurant with concert seating at tables is an additional $30 plus bar service and gratuity. The restaurant bar will be open throughout the evening, with light menu service available to non-dinner patrons. Reservations, required for dinner and recommended for concert seating, may be made by telephoning 775-1929, faxing to 775-9482 or e-mailing to [email protected].