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Jazz sinter's blues

After hearing her sing one song, a jazz saxophonist told Parris: "Honey, you're a jazz singer - you ain't no rock singer."

Just before 8 on a fall Friday night, the faithful gather outside Boston's Scullers Jazz Club in the Doubletree Guest Quarters hotel, overlooking the Charles River. The doors open, finally, and in they pour. Soon they crowd the tiny candlelit tables in the dark, wood-paneled room, creating an excited buzz of talk and laughter, waiting for something to happen.

There's a mellow warm-up interlude by pianist George Mesterhazy, bassist Peter Kontrimas, and drummer Matt Gordy, and then a tall blond force field in black pants and a flowing white blouse sweeps in to wild applause, grabs the microphone, and launches into an up-tempo version of Cole Porter's "I Concentrate on You."

Rebecca Parris, jazz singer, drives through a high-octane 90-minute set that includes the ballads "Early Autumn" and "Over the Rainbow," speedy versions of jazz standards like "Street of Dreams" and "Lullaby of Broadway," freewheeling scat singing, and two playful duet numbers ("Let's Get Away From It All" and "Desperado") with guest singer Mark Bellwood. It's a frisky performance with no bland patches, full of jokes and clowning with Bellwood, the band, and the audience. Parris takes a break, comes back for a 10 o'clock set, and does it all again. The response recalls the mood of Duke Ellington's shows, which he always ended with a much-reciprocated sentiment: "We love you madly."

These are the Parris faithful, and they do love her madly. They also love what she is: a straight-ahead jazz singer in the classic American style. Her models, she says, are "the Trinity": Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, and Carmen McRae. Her tenor voice is sleek and powerful, with a hint of butterscotch, and her scatting is lyrical, somehow, as her lyrics are scattish. She learned the hard way that even though she had the talent to be almost any kind of singer, she couldn't (and still can't) design herself to meet the fashion of the moment. After 10 years of trying to be what she wasn't, about 18 years ago she gave in to heart, mind, and passion. And that meant - mass market be damned - she had to be a jazzwoman. The Scullers gig has been an oft-repeated scene in regional jazz venues since Parris took the jazz road. Winner of 10 Boston Music Awards, with eight CDs (including the newest, My Foolish Heart, due out in January on the Koch Jazz label), she has gradually expanded her following in the Northeast, up and down the West Coast, and here and there elsewhere around the country.

The key word is "gradually." Some musicians, even in the jazz world, seem to explode out of nowhere - like the glamorous Canadian singer and pianist Diana Krall, who's been zipping around the country of late like a sleek express train, on a tour with Tony Bennett, appearing on the Today program and David Letterman. But Parris is more like The Little Engine That Could.

From her home base in Duxbury, where she lives with her daughter, Marla Kleman, and pianist Paul McWilliam, Parris keeps up a full schedule. Besides local appearances, since August she's had club and jazz festival dates in Colorado, Pennsylvania, California, and North and South Carolina. She also teaches master classes and vocal clinics to private students in every city she visits, as well as at home.

She's one of those artists who are not the talk of the town or TV, not on the cover of People, and surely not rolling in dough (she lives in a small house and drives a small car), yet are admired by their peers and the cognoscenti. Jazz singer Tierney Sutton, formerly of Boston and now based in Los Angeles, says Parris is the "inheritor of the tradition of the great jazz singers. The incredibly beautiful deep quality of her voice, her amazing sense of swing, her phenomenal in-tuneness, the passion that she brings to what she does."

"It's her articulation, intonation, her ability to improvise with her voice as an instrument," says Terence Love, a saxophone player who owns Steamer's Cafe, a Los Angeles-area jazz club where Parris appears often. "She has a flawless sense of time, great intonation, better musicianship than some of the top jazz singers," says pianist Mesterhazy. "The only ones who are her equal are the very great, like Sarah Vaughan and Carmen McRae, who really knew their music."

The jazz scene is a frenetic life for a woman with the personality to match. Rebecca Parris calls people "honey," laughs heartily and often, and exudes energy even when she's sitting. As soon as the Scullers show ended, she was surrounded by fans and friends and the party went on.

In her Duxbury house, where the phone rings often and her rambunctious Maltese terriers Eubie and Louis sport about and bark nonstop, one gets a strong sense of her high-energy life. Even in private, her expansive voice and gestures give the impression of someone who's never far from the stage.

That life started in Newton, where Ruth Blair MacCloskey grew up the youngest of three daughters in a musical family. Her mother, Shirley MacCloskey, an organist and pianist, was deeply involved in church music. Her father, Ned MacCloskey, was a pianist and choir director who also taught English and speech at Boston University and French at the Boston Conservatory of Music. He also directed and acted in summer stock throughout the Northeast. Her father's brother Blair and his wife were voice coaches and therapists. Her aunt, Barbara McClosky (the brothers spelled the name differently), still runs the Boston-based McClosky Institute of Voice Therapy.

"At 14 months, I was singing on pitch in my crib, so I'm told," Parris says. "My mother said I would chase her around the house making up fugues: 'Praise, praise, praise the Lord!' " Her sisters, Susan and Robin, are a cellist and singer, respectively, though not as professionals. "We studied all sorts of instruments," Parris says. "Dad and me played cello together for years" - a favorite piece was Saint-Saens's The Swan. She also played piano, violin, flute, contrabass, timpani, and tuba.

After high school, she went for a time to the Boston Conservatory, where her father and uncle both taught, but found herself far ahead of her classmates. She left school after a few months and went to New York in 1969, a coloratura soprano dreaming of her name in lights on Broadway. She was 18.

"I wanted to be Mary Martin, Julie Andrews, a female Tommy Tune," she says. "But there was no more musical comedy: It was all rock 'n' roll musicals like Jesus Christ Superstar or Tommy. My aspirations were sunk.

"My last audition was for a Ford Motor Company production," she recalls. "It was rewritten musical comedy numbers on all the new Fords. There was one part open, for a tall blond soprano, which I was at the time. When a short, stubby brunet tenor got that gig because her father had money in the show, reality hit me in the face. I said, 'This business stinks. There's no room for me here.' "

She quit, came home, gave up dreams of a singing career, and got a job selling toys and cosmetics at Jordan Marsh, riding the Green Line every day from Newton. She sometimes hung out with friends at the 1776 Pub, a little place with live music on lower Boylston Street. "I would sing to the jukebox," she says, and friends would tell her, "You should go back to singing."

Then one night around 1971 at Bachelors Three, a club in Boston's Park Square, she and some friends were listening to a Top 40 trio when she was invited up to sing. One of her friends had secretly arranged it. She sang two songs, and later the bandleader came up to her and said, "We were auditioning here tonight, and the owner says we can have the job if we can get you."

Though she was underage, she was tall and looked older. She took the job, worked that summer, then got an offer to replace a singer in a band called Piccadilly Circus at the Playboy Club next door. The name Ruthie MacCloskey didn't seem right somehow for a singer, so she took her childhood nickname, Becky, and plucked a last name from the song "I Love Paris." "I was making $500, $600 a week," she says, "which was impressive at the time: more than my dad was making with his three jobs."

She spent almost a decade singing Top 40 hits with bands called Prides Crossing, Starshine, Boston to Parris, and Freestyle. She worked constantly and relentlessly while suffering through a couple of rancorous "codependent" love affairs. In the late 1970s, Freestyle turned to rock 'n' roll.

"I'd never done rock 'n' roll," she says, "never listened to it, because it was too aberrant for my brain. I force-fed myself for about six months and learned all those tunes." Eventually, overwork and emotional stress injured her voice. "I was working six nights a week and having a volatile relationship where I was screaming all the time, using the same pipes," she says. "I remember one night I had a fever of 102 and two notes to my name, and I was so exhausted the only thing I could do on my breaks was go in the back room and cry. When I was 24, I had 6 octaves to play with" - baritone through coloratura soprano - "which is unheard of for most human beings. After one of the bouts of laryngitis, I didn't get back a couple of octaves."

She says she might have had corrective surgery but could not afford to take the time off, and besides, "I was very reluctant to have anything sharp come near my throat. I had to accept that I had injured my voice. My mind said, 'OK, my voice has changed and I'll live with it.' Then I would go to some musical comedy, and a lyric soprano would sing in this pretty voice, and I would get very sad and upset, but I was always working, so I couldn't get sad very much. I continued as a tenor, which is fine - soprano is too shrill a voice for the jazz idiom anyway."

In 1979 she went with friends to Satch's restaurant in the Back Bay to hear jazz saxophonist Sonny Stanton. "Sonny said, 'Come sit in,' she recalls. "I sang 'Shadow of Your Smile.' Afterward Sonny said, 'Honey, you're a jazz singer - you ain't no rock singer.' I was still with the rock band and on the verge of leaving it, and he said, 'You sing this beautiful. Ain't nobody sings this stuff like you do.' "

Soon she quit the rock scene and joined a quasi-jazz group called Reminiscence, singing standards for the first time in years. "After doing these three-chord, four-word tunes for a year," she says, "suddenly I was singing songs with emotional content and whole thoughts and good poetry. My intelligence wasn't being insulted anymore. I didn't have to prance around in leotards and a kimono and a wild wig and 9 pounds of makeup. I could be a growing, evolving human being and share my experience through the music.

"I started sitting in places, then I had my first solo gig, and then my own night at Ryles and 1369 Club [jazz clubs in Cambridge] and started working with great musicians, began trying to get my face in the world as much as possible." She got married in 1980, "a rebound" that she knew was a mistake even as she walked down the aisle. After it ended five years later, she and Paul McWilliam became a couple and still are.

Since the early 1980s, it's been the jazz life all the way. That's what Parris wanted, but she soon learned it's a hard row to hoe, even if you don't ruin yourself with drink, drugs, and cigarettes, as so many jazz folk have.

Jazz will never again be the mass-market music it was in the 1930s and '40s, even the early '50s. Today it represents 2 or 3 percent of recorded music sold, even less than classical. Performance outlets are jazz festivals and scattered small clubs, few of which pay well.

Parris's heroines, Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald, had big hit songs with celebrated bands and they were all over the radio. But it's tough to become a star like Ella, Sarah, Carmen, or Billie Holiday in the age of highly managed, produced, and marketed entertainment bombshells like Britney Spears and Mariah Carey (www.mariahcarey.com even has a store - T-shirts were on sale recently). Some younger jazz artists have gained fame, but for every Wynton Marsalis or Diana Krall there are dozens of seasoned talents like Shirley Horn, Carol Sloane, Karrin Allyson, Mark Murphy, and Parris who keep plugging away without becoming household words.

"There's no sense wasting energy complaining about it," says jazz trumpeter Herb Pomeroy, 50 years in the business and retired after 40 years on the faculty of Berklee College of Music. "It's difficult for the very young: They're starry-eyed; they want to make it. As the decades pass and you see the reality of this business, you learn not to think about it so much."

"We're all pretty naive when we start out," Parris says. "I had always been part of a group before, and the group took care of business. When I became a soloist, I had to get my own face out there. I was out every night of the week until I had a bank of work so I could pay part of the rent. Maybe a wedding now and then. Then you have to learn about cover charges and seating capacity and how much the room has to gross to make a profit, then you can put a price on what you do. At Berklee and most universities, there are business courses to teach musicians how to take care of themselves. Tiny Tim made all that money in the '60s and died penniless because so many people took a piece of the pie."

At first, she says, "I was doing it all myself: every contract, hiring all the musicians, writing checks. My day would start at 7 a.m. and end at 4 a.m. It was unhealthy." Since then, she has had a succession of agents, but no one who she felt did an adequate job. Now she's on the hunt for a new agent. What is she looking for?

"An agent with clout. Clout means getting more work, representing me to the record companies, to the festivals, the better clubs, to the point where you can make a living rather than negotiate down to nothing. In the past, I would work Chicago and not make a dime: I'd pay my transportation and hotel and might break even, but nine times out of 10, I'd perform for a loss just for the benefit of going to a different area or possibly getting reviewed in the Chicago Tribune; or I'd go to LA and stay in people's homes instead of having a hotel room with my own bath and TV. There was constant reinvestment at a loss of energy and incentive and artistry."

She has produced four of her eight CDs at her own expense. "My first record, A Passionate Fling, cost me $13,000," she says. "My mother invested, my cousins; my songwriting partner took his inheritance and put it into it. It was the most expensive business card ever made. It still takes me $4,000 to put a record together before production and takes a long time to get that money together."

She produced and paid for her January 2001 release, My Foolish Heart, and has leased the rights to distribute it to Koch Jazz. She doesn't own the rights to three of her previous CDs and is determined never to make that mistake again. "Selling the rights to your art is like selling your hand," she says.

What about television? "TV is a hard outlet," Parris says grimly. "Do I look emaciated to you? Do I look 25? I would have to have the Gloria Vanderbilt facelift. Television is a drag; video is a drag."

She puts her finger on a cruel truth of show business, especially for a woman. "It's a totally youth-driven industry," says Jim Gavin, a jazz writer for The Village Voice. "A young, fresh-faced kid in great clothes who looks wonderful is more promotable than a woman of 40 or 50. Rebecca is not a sex kitten, but she is very sensual, and she knows that. Another singer who knew it was Sylvia Syms, a veteran cabaret singer who was a friend and favorite of Frank Sinatra. Her love songs were sensual and flirtatious and sexy. She called herself a 'short, dumpy Jewish broad from Brooklyn,' but when she sang, she transcended that and brought you into the room with her."

Parris says she's been pushed at times to package herself better. "The most recent idea was that I should go to a designer and get a 'look' all my own - clothing and hair," she says, loading the word "look" with sarcasm. "I said, 'I have a way all my own; I don't need a look.' My understanding of this business is you market your core assets, and mine are my communicating ability and teaching ability and my attitude. My honesty and workhorseability is there, too. I am my art form. If I had an extra $2,500, I'd invest it in arrangements or transportation, not clothing. I'm still shopping at Marshalls and T. J. Maxx. I show up with a lot of individuality, even if I'm not wearing a $400 skirt."

The jazz life is mostly passion, hope, and hard work, and Rebecca Parris seems built for it. Neither glum nor whiny, she meets reality with gumption, high style, and white-hot energy. She's a performer and a trouper. "I'd love to have strings," she says, "I'd love to travel with a trio. But my situation is, I leave on a plane and land in Indiana, shake hands with the rhythm section, have an hour or less to go over my show and have it be letter-perfect. That, my dear, takes talent."

It also takes stubborn faith, which is what jazz lives on. A core of artists, fans, writers, club owners, and even a few record executives remain loyal, even if the odds look slim.

Koch Jazz, a small division of Koch International, a large distributor of recorded music, is run by Donald Elfman. He signed Parris's new CD because he heard it and loved it. "It's a small label with aspirations to do something larger," Elfman says of Koch Jazz. "It's a tough sell, as it is for any music that doesn't pander to crass commercial tastes. Some say, 'Why spend any more on records that may sell less than a thousand copies?' But the alternative is to give up, and I'm not ready to do that."

"I built a jazz club from the start," says Terence Love of Steamer's in California, "not a food place with music added. We have no cover except Friday and Saturday, and then it's $5. With big names I charge $12. I've made it accessible for young people, a hangout, a scene. After six years I'm just now breaking even." Boston's Regattabar, managed by Fenton Hollander, has built a jazz audience over 15 years with a small amount of advertising and large amounts of direct mail and pursuit of fans by word of mouth and customer polling. "We amassed our own Rebecca Parris mailing list, which became very important," says Hollander. "We know who Rebecca's fans are. If they move, we find out where they went. We ask people who come in, 'How did you hear about this show?' We found out it's 60 percent from the mailing list."

As long as she can make a living with her music, Rebecca Parris will keep at it: "I tell students, unless you cannot picture yourself doing anything else, music is not the field for you. Save music for love and fun." Parris loves her music, and she has had fun and means to have more. She has met, and in some cases sung with, the legendary names in jazz: Joe Williams, Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae, and the Count Basie, Woody Herman, and Buddy Rich orchestras.

"People know I'm having fun," she says. "It's evident on my bandstand. They're invited to the party. They're listened to, paid attention to. Jazz musicians have done a lot to turn people away from the music; it becomes very self-satisfying for some of them. You have to come from a place that involves an audience and makes them enjoy it with you. My audience is incredibly important to me. They are all there is."