Lorraine Feather: I Love You Guys (Interviews with Lorraine and Her Co-writers for Her Latest CD--Dave Grusin, Russell Ferrante, Eddie Arkin and Shelly Berg, Plus Her Recording Engineers--Geoff Gillette and Carlos Del Rosario)

Geoff Gillette, Lorraine Feather, Carlos Del Rosario

The great pianist and composer, Thelonious Monk, is credited with the remark that "writing about jazz is like dancing about architecture." But don't dash off and try to authenticate the quote. One, it'll just take you down a rabbit hole, and two, whether or not he ever actually uttered those words doesn't really matter. Because far too often, it's true.

It's true to the extent that the offending scribe is violating a fundamental law: either he doesn't know the subject well enough to write about it, or he doesn't know how to effectively express himself. Or both.

Obviously, the ideal writer on the subject of jazz, by virtue of understanding the music, would be a professional jazz musician. Similarly, based on an ability to express ideas, a professional writer would be the best person for the task. But these skill sets are very rarely found in the same person. Hence the uneasy marriage between writer and musician, and Monk's (or someone's) snarky comment on it. 

Jazz musicians have tended to stick to expressing their often complex musical ideas through their performances. But writers have quoted Shakespeare, tortured metaphors and squeezed the life out of countless adjectives and adverbs in their attempt to describe the blue notes, chord voicings, progressions, and swinging rhythmic patterns that characterize the music. Unfortunately, no matter how sincere their efforts, attempts to define or delimit jazz have always been reminiscent of the Indian parable about the blind men and the elephant. (Jazz is like an elephant's trunk ... or its tail ... or its ear.)  And being hard to define, the music is therefore hard to describe. You see the problem.

But it is a problem only because we enjoy talking about this music so much. And the reason we do, is simple. Music truly is a universal language, a polyglot, some form of which is spoken in every culture in the world. Listening to jazz, and talking or writing about it, are ways of learning how to speak the language more fluently, ways of more fully engaging our culture and the world around us. In his autobiography, Music Is My Mistress (Da Capo Press, 1976), Duke Ellington said it well: "What is music to you? What would you be without music? Music is everything. Nature is music (cicadas in the tropical night). The sea is music, the wind is music. The rain drumming on the roof and the storm raging in the sky are music. Music is the oldest entity. The scope of music is immense and infinite. It is the ‘esperanto’ of the world."

Thus the jazz journalist's paradox, wedged halfway between Monk's comment and Ellington's.

Attachments

As luck would have it, while in the midst of pondering these philosophically, morally confounding matters, the dark clouds parted for a moment and a grandly appropriate opportunity fell from the sky, a singular chance to connect readers directly with an important piece of music and many of its principal creators.

Lyricist and singer Lorraine Feather had released her CD, Attachments (Jazzed Media, 2013), after skillfully assembling many of the same stellar session players she has used for her two recent, Grammy-nominated CDs, Tales of the Unusual (Jazzed Media, 2012) and Ages (Jazzed Media, 2010)--i.e., guitarist Grant Geissman, bassist Michael Valerio, violinist Charles Bisharat, drummer/percussionists Michael Shapiro, Gregg Field and Tony Morales, plus a guest visit from saxophonist Bob Mintzer (on bass clarinet)--the sort of busy, in-demand musicians who require a fair bit of coordinating to gather together and get recorded in the same studio, at the same time.

More significantly, Feather had managed to reassemble the same cast of musical co-writers with whom she had collaborated on those two previous recordings, composers whose stylistic breadth and technical facility span an ever-widening musical spectrum: Russell Ferrante, the versatile keyboardist/arranger for the ambitiously metamorphosing band, Yellowjackets; Shelly Berg, monster stride pianist and Dean of Music at the University of Miami; and Eddie Arkin, veteran producer, guitarist and author of Jazz Masters Series: Creative Chord Substitution For Guitar (Alfred Music, 2004). Added to this bewitching mixture was J.S. Bach on one piece and Joey Calderazzo on another. But it was her new collaboration with the extraordinary Dave Grusin that caught my eye.

Grusin's addition to this gathering of composer/collaborators signaled a new direction for Feather, which, if you are familiar with Ages and Tales of the Unusual, and choose to view all three recordings as a suite, is almost de rigueur for the progression of the series--the recordings being like three chapters in a book, each startlingly different from the last, but thematically consistent with basic subtexts in the other recordings. Charles Bisharat's addition for Tales of the Unusual presaged the kismet of Grusin's arrival for Attachments.

When Lorraine Feather records a song, she chooses the company she keeps carefully. She needs to. As a lyricist, first and foremost, she writes the most profoundly thoughtful and emotional lyrics in contemporary jazz; as a supremely gifted vocalist, she therefore demands music that translates one of these poetic pieces into a form that is vocable and singable. While many others have sung her songs (Julie Andrews, Patti Austin, Diane Schuur, Cleo Laine, Janis Siegel), doing so requires a certain vocal dexterity and emotional bravery. And as her own principal artist, her sophisticated lines necessarily demand that she collaborate with composers and arrangers who possess the sensitivity to compose for this wordsmith's famous turn-on-a-dime diction and agile voice.

So when I discovered that, one for one, all these co-writers, including the somewhat elusive Grusin, were so enthused about the Attachments project that they wanted to talk about it, I knew I was onto something good and rare. When I discovered that her recording engineers (Geoff Gillette and Carlos Del Rosario), those unacknowledged legislators of the music world, were equally enthusiastic about discussing the technical aspects of this music, I leapt at the chance. It was apparent that the quality of the entire recording was what all these musical wizards were jazzed about.

Dave Grusin

Dave Grusin

Dave Grusin is one of those few fortunate jazz masters who have climbed to the top of the twin peaks of both critical and commercial success. In addition to co-founding GRP records in 1978 and producing some of the earliest digital jazz recordings, he has won 12 Grammys, plus an Academy Award in 1988 for the original score he composed for The Milagro Beanfield War. Hollywood discovered early on that he could write blockbuster movie scores--the kind that make good films great, and which are a genre of composing all of their own--and from that golden touch he's produced the scores for The Graduate, The Firm, The Fabulous Baker Boys, The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, Tootsie, Heaven Can Wait, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Three Days of the Condor, etc. It's a long list.

When I suggested to Grusin that Feather compared favorably to the great jazz lyricists and song stylists of the past, he responded by saying, "I think your assessment about Lorraine as a lyricist and jazz singer is right on. Besides having a tremendous grip on the craft, her ideas about subject matter for lyrics are so different from most songwriters’, it puts her in a category of her own, in terms of what she chooses to write about. Plus, she has the free-wheeling stylistic sense of letting the piece go where it needs to go ... maybe a little reminiscent of how Dave Frishberg or Blossom Dearie would allow things to just 'happen.'” 

While working together on an album project for singer Monica Mancini, Feather approached Grusin with the radical idea of writing lyrics to a piece he had composed for his outstanding soundtrack (all solo piano) of The Firm, ‘Memphis Stomp,’ a hyperkinetic, rumbling boogie full of slippery syncopation. As Feather recalled, "I was a little nervous about playing him my lyrics for ‘Memphis Stomp,'" because I wrote a whole counter-melody and a short vocalese section, and I was hoping it would seem musical to him."

It did. Grusin liked it quite a lot, in fact. "Working with her on Monica’s album was a delight, and when she suggested a lyric idea for 'Memphis Stomp,' as crazy as it sounded, I was into it," he said.  "The version we did for her Attachments project is basically the original piano part, with her special sense of where a vocal should lay in… and with her consistent sense of 'story.'  I’ve learned that every one of her works has that element. It was much fun re-visiting that piano part … in spite of actually needing to re-learn it!"

The other tune Grusin did with her for Attachments came from an idea he had one day as they were wrapping up a rehearsal for "Memphis Stomp." He began playing J. S. Bach's "Air on the G String," and asked Feather what she thought about the possibility of writing words to it. The devastating lyrics she wrote for the resulting song, "True," and her heart-rending delivery, would make Bach himself weep--for joy, with grief, or from profound awe at the human spirit, it's hard to say--and would certainly change the way he heard his own composition the next time he listened to it. As Grusin explained, "the Bach 'Air' is something I had done with Bobby McFerrin, who did it as a vocalese. I told Lorraine about it, and played her the beautiful Josh Bell recording. She went home and came back the next morning with this lyric--another example of the genius that inhabits this woman. [N.B., Feather demurs on this point, and says she hadn't quite finished it by morning.] We decided to add Charlie Bisharat’s violin to this version, even though Lorraine’s vocal is the original violin melody. I think the result is beautifully satisfying, without too much alteration of the intent of the original.

"The other songs on Attachments are all amazing examples of how she creates with incredibly talented writers … Russ Ferrante, Shelly Berg, and Eddie Arkin.  They all have a great sense of ‘song,’ and sensitivity to Lorraine’s stories.  My hope is to do more work with her, and continue to be amazed and inspired by her phenomenal abilities."

Shelly Berg

Shelly Berg

Shelly Berg is a musical and educational force of nature. As a pianist and arranger, he has worked with such a diversity of people that just fitting all their representative genres into a single sentence is difficult: Arturo Sandoval, George Benson, Natalie Cole, Chicago, Gloria Estefan, Bonnie Raitt, KISS, Nancy Wilson ... After eight years spent chairing the jazz studies department of the University of Southern California's Thornton School of Music, he moved cross-country in 2008 and became dean of the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami. His non-traditional teaching methods separate him from the dry, stultifying musician mills, because he thinks music students should spend more time practicing and playing, less time studying and thinking about it. He is a brilliantly impulsive composer, and plays stride piano like a white Art Tatum.

But because he and Feather live at opposite corners of the continental U.S. (she on an island north of Washington state's Olympic Peninsula, almost in Canada, he in Miami and a boat ride from Cuba) the question for curious minds is: how do you write songs together?

"It is a marvel to Lorraine and me that our songwriting process goes very fast.  We write two or three songs in one session of a few hours. I don't come in with musical ideas worked out in advance, because I don't want to become attached to an idea that doesn't resonate with Lorraine."

Feather commented similarly, that while working with Berg, he typically doesn't get involved in composing until "the end of the process, because I almost never see him. I always say this, but it blows my mind how close we are and how well and fast we work together, no matter how long it has been. As far as ‘The Veil’ goes, I had never intended to write the lyric, and when we were finally going to get together, toward the ending of the writing for the album, I had it in hand, so showed it to him and asked if he thought it could be a song. He said he thought so, but wasn't 100% sure. So ‘The Veil’ took a little longer. It had evolved in a way I hadn't heard yet, when we got to the session, and now it's one of my favorites of ours.”

On the other hand, she says, "Because Gregg Field will be the drummer when Shelly and I do a group piece, I think of something that would be great to hear Gregg play, ‘I Love You Guys’ being a classic example, a fast swing with a lot of fills. Shelly practically wrote it before I'd finished reading him the words."

Berg says, "She often has rhythms in mind, and so I ask her to speak the lyrics to me using the rhythms she imagines. Sometimes we talk further at that point, but usually I dive into a chord progression or intro figure that expresses the vibe of the song. As musical form emerges, Lorraine will sometimes alter a lyric so it can fit into the form we are constructing.  I think our songs have gotten more complex over the years, and are now becoming like miniature musical 'plays'."  

"I Love You Guys," a song he and Feather collaborated on for the Attachments CD, is just such a musical play. In fact, it is almost a play within a play, a heart-on-the-sleeve valentine and sweetly sardonic commentary on Life As A Musician In Our Times. The arrangement's musical twists and turns mirror Feather's lyrical layering of sarcastic tweaks, puns, inside musician jokes and gig cosmology, played at a breakneck pace maintained by an all-time killer rhythm section of Michael Valerio on bass, Gregg Field on drums, plus the ever-ebullient rolling thunder and lightning of Shelly Berg.

In commenting to Berg about the recording, I told him that after it opens with his totally out-of-the-box piano intro, "Gregg Field's drums and Michael Valerio's bass fly along comically, like one of those Keystone Cops car chases where the drivers are skidding around the corners and narrowly missing the pedestrians, while the escaping pianist knocks over a fruit stand and scatters a flock of freaked-out pigeons."

His response was, "I love your description of this song!  Right from the beginning I had an idea, which Lorraine loved, and so we wrote to that concept.  So often, musicians are overqualified, in terms of technique and sophistication, for the music they are playing.  They play 'casual  gigs' with watered-down standard songs, all the while chomping at the bit to bust out with their real chops. We decided to highlight that tension between the gig and the truer aspirations of the musicians. So we began the recording with the 'out of place' piano solo that would be either taboo, or pushing the envelope on most gigs. Throughout the song we return to a riff in the rhythm section that would be from a stock arrangement of a swing era song, and that riff is symbolic of the guys paying their dues on the bandstand.  The tempo is another key element.  On most gigs, this tempo wouldn't be used, because it can't be danced to.  But jazz musicians love to be 'on the edge,' and we wanted to convey that feeling.  I couldn't have had more fun with a song, and my tongue is still implanted in my cheek."

Commenting on the maturing and transformation he has seen in Feather, with whom he has been composing for several years, he said, "I think Lorraine's recordings have become even more personal to her.  Even though almost none of her songs are autobiographical, they speak to the journey of her life.  There seems to be more at stake each time we write together, in terms of the significance of what she wants to say.  It is a real honor to be her collaborator.

"Lorraine has had two Grammy-nominated CDs in a row. This is no accident.  She is one of the most profound and compelling musical storytellers of our time. I hope the elusive Grammy win occurs with this album. Attachments may be her most brilliant recording yet, although I say that each time!  As my life gets more complex, I have less time to work with her, so my role diminishes.  This may be fortunate for her, because the songs she is writing with Eddie Arkin, Russ Ferrante, and Dave Grusin are amazing."

Eddie Arkin

Eddie Arkin

Eddie Arkin is Lorraine Feather's oldest friend and songwriting partner. A composer, guitarist, producer and arranger who has worked with a gamut of people that includes Stanley Clarke, Diane Schuur, Nnenna Freelon, Lee Ritenour, Barry Manilow, Nancy Wilson and David Benoit, he has been Feather's simpatico first-call collaborator since the beginning of her songwriting career.

One of Feather's songs can involve an interconnected series of lyrical adventures. Commenting on what this involves, she said: "Eddie is great for a writing process that has a long trajectory and a lot of sections.  'Attachments' was on the complicated side to write--it evolved slowly from just a 'list' song about someone's various lovers, to the other attachments in a person's life, and then at the end, what I had first conceived as someone talking to himself or herself, turned into an intimate conversation over drinks, and you realize that one has been saying these things to another. I came up with my talking lines at the end, "I don't know where you're going with this and I don't want to talk about it," after the song was pretty much done, ran the idea by Eddie and he liked it. If I have several ideas for a word or phrase, he will always tell me right away which of them he would choose. He's especially discerning that way. I'm also more likely to bring him a lyric I'm unsure of, because if he doesn't think it would make a good song, he'll say so immediately."

Feather often begins writing a song by having her husband, drummer Tony Morales, work out a groove and record it. As a lyricist, her writing is so poetically conceived, with such precision meter and rhyming, that she can use what Morales records for her to build the lyrical architecture of the song. "On the Attachments album, he did this on four songs," Feather told me. "How it works is that either I ask Tony if he could play something in a certain vein, like a slow shuffle featuring the toms, as if I were singing 'Why Don't You Do Right?'--I requested this recently--or a samba or rhumba or whatever, or I hear him playing something and get excited about it and ask if he'd please record it. He'll loop it for a few minutes, and I'll listen to that when I'm writing the lyrics."

When I asked Arkin how he utilizes these rhythm patterns that Morales records, he said, "I’ll start by saying Tony is a terrific drummer. What he develops are usually 2- or 4-bar loops that Lorraine writes her lyrics to. This affects the composition in two ways. The most obvious is that these grooves define and lock in the tempo. Secondly, depending on the style of these loops, whether they’re Latin, jazz, hip-hop, swing, etc., they will help define how the arrangement will unfold as Lorraine and I work on the song.

"As our writing process begins, we almost always get together in person and Lorraine will often speak the lyric in rhythmic phrases, showing me how she hears the lyric against the groove. This is often our jumping-off point, and we usually play around with the rhythm as I come up with melodic ideas. What we always work out on our own, independent of these grooves, is the length of the musical phrases and the differing rhythmic patterns within these phrases.

"Interestingly, for all the sophistication in both the music and lyrics of Lorraine’s and my songs together, the actual compositions, almost all the time, follow quite traditional songwriting forms. For example, “Attachments” is written in an “AABAC” form. The verses are twelve bars long--very traditional, though not a blues--and the B and C sections are both eight bars long, again very traditional. So, we expand these traditions by playing with the rhythmic phrasing of the lyrics, and using sophisticated chordal harmony."

One of Feather's hallmarks is a unique ability to fearlessly attack the diction of a lyric. Slow, medium, fast or crazy fast, she can sing all the words and hit all the notes in her vocal range. I asked Arkin how this, a skill few singers possess, affects the way he composes.

He said, "As we jazz musicians like to say, Lorraine has “big ears” [referring to the aural attribute rather than the physical attribute]. So this is an area where our collaborations can really take off. Along with her razor sharp diction, Lorraine also possesses the ability to hit intervals that are outside the normal diatonic or blues scale style of songwriting.  Thus, we’re free to come up with melodies that are quite chromatic in nature, plus she’s really comfortable singing the upper extensions of chords. And with the versatility of her voice, I can write a melody in her lower register and all of a sudden jump as much as an octave, and continue in her upper register with a smoothness as if she were singing one continuous line. These elements allow us to create very dramatic colors and constantly changing emotions.  At the same time, she sings with a softness that pulls the listener into her story. Her voice is especially well suited to the depth and personal characteristics of her lyrics."

"Hearing Things" is a quintessential Feather tune with the kind of lyrics few other songwriters would write, even if they could, and fewer yet would ever have the composure to sing convincingly. A song about that emotional echo chamber in which one wants so much to simply engage with another human being--but can't quite--it lights a candle in that dark place where one is unable to easily distinguish between what is plausible and what is possible, what is imagined or what is desired. The emotional miasm is an uncomfortable place, but as the song ends it turns a completely unexpected corner as Feather's voice is overdubbed in an eerie, Felliniesque chorus that hovers and floats instead of fading, until it ends neatly and logically, like an exhalation. It is musical terra incognita, and similar to other compositions on this recording like "A Little Like This" or "The Veil," Feather's lyrics seem to have gone deeper and become more emotionally complex than ever before.

I asked Arkin, whose long collaboration with Feather has seen many changes of direction, if the experience of writing with her has changed.

"As with any close relationship, be it a spouse, friend or collaborator, we all hold out a fervent hope that as our hierarchy of needs change, we can all grow and change together in some parallel way.  Lorraine and I have been quite lucky in this matter. We’ve been writing together for close to 30 years, going back to the first major recording of one of our songs, “Big Fun” by Barry Manilow, for his album Swing Street and the subsequent CBS television special, Big Fun On Swing Street. In those days, the music came first and then the lyrics, often [with each of us] working our part out on our own. We continued writing all through the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, at which time I became quite busy as a TV composer, so songwriting took a backseat for me for the next ten years.

"As Lorraine began to write her own albums featuring herself as an artist, our method of working changed.  She came up with the lyrics first and we started to sit in the same room, working out these tunes together, at least until we had a substantial part of the song written.  Then I would develop the arrangement more until the next time we got together. I think sitting in the same room and hashing these ideas out can only occur with two people who’ve worked together for many years and have established a vulnerable and trusting relationship.

"I like to think of our collaborative efforts as growing deeper with each new project. However, I’ve always felt that our writing over the years has been quite emotional.  What I love about it, and feel is quite unique about Lorraine’s lyric writing, is that it covers the whole landscape of the human condition. Besides the humor, wit, literary and poetic intelligence, Lorraine’s lyrics are at the same time full of longing, yearning, comfort, acceptance, sensuality, and even fear. So I like to think of our songs as an ongoing development of our talent and skills that is hopefully growing deeper with each new project.

"As for the song 'Hearing Things', it’s written in 6/4 time but does not have a waltz feel. The rhythm, as I learned later, is a Peruvian style called a Lando. The accent is on beat 1 and 5, so it has the feel of 1234, 12. I feel the music and the lyric of this piece create a very mysterious, almost existential mood. Lorraine and I decided to have a chorale at the end of the song, where the rhythmic feel becomes more waltz-like. Notice how beautifully Lorraine’s overdubs blend on the different lines in the mostly 2-part but sometimes 3-part harmony."

When asked if he saw any other differences between Feather's work on Attachments and her last recording, Tales of the Unusual, Arkin said, "I only see small differences between the two projects. Mainly from a music and lyrics standpoint, there seems to be more of a spatial aspect to Attachments. There’s more instrumental 'blowing' or improvisation in this album, and I feel the compositions contain more of what I would call positive and negative space, meaning more spread out. I feel this album really breathes and the listener has more room to experience the project as a whole. Also I believe the subject matter is more universal, [something] most people can identify with.”

I asked Arkin if he ever employed a device that I sometimes use myself when writing: which is, reading lines I have written out loud to myself, in order to hear the sound of the words as opposed to the meanings of those same words, in order to make adjustments when sounds or cadences could be at odds with the sentence's meaning, potentially causing confusion for the reader. In my case it would result in changing the vocabulary or grammar to suit the communication; in his case, it would mean adjusting the composition to suit Feather's lyrics.

"I do a similar thing to you, although my version is I sing the lines to myself. It seems the choices I make as I’m composing happen on a subliminal level, somewhat outside my conscious awareness and thought process. If a melody works for me, it’s usually because it feels right emotionally and seems to feel in sync with the lyrics.  Some songs kind of compose themselves, while others need rewriting or revisiting. Sometimes a change in a song will reveal itself after a writing session, in sort of a visceral way, kind of like having a splinter in your finger that will irritate you until you take care of it. Changes in the writing process can take place by the piano, but often come to me while I’m doing something completely unrelated, like taking a shower or driving my car. Lorraine and I discuss the lyric before I start writing the melody, so we’re usually in sync as to what the meaning of the song is about."

One of the outstanding songs on Attachments is the tune "159," a quirky, rhythmically catchy song about a family sitting around their kitchen table while the drummer son lays down the groove to "The Clapping Song" with his metronome set to 159.  The tune opens with bassist Michael Valerio doing some fetching Slam Stewart-style scatting along with his swinging bass melody that bumps right into the groove, which Feather says her husband Tony recorded to assist her in writing the song's lyrics. It's a tune destined to be one of those Lorraine Feather instant radio classics, so I asked Arkin how the lightning-in-a-bottle composition had evolved.

"Lorraine wrote the lyric and Tony sent the groove, which he called a 'jump swing.'  With this tune, I came up with a couple of 4-bar progressions before we got together, ones that might work as a basis for building the song.  When we met, Lorraine immediately picked the progression you hear in the finished tune.  My idea, musically, was to pick something that was hypnotic or trance-like, that had a certain subtle smoothness and an ostinato-montuno repeated bass line. The melody came very quickly on this particular song.

"While working on '159' I happened to go to a jazz club to see pianist Mike Lang play. Mike Valerio was playing with him, and much to my surprise, he was featured singing--very well--on one of his original tunes.  I told Lorraine about his excellent singing, and we both thought it would be cool to have him open '159' playing a bass solo and scatting.

What I love about this track is that it grooves like crazy, and yet never gets above mezzo forte, so Lorraine [was able to] sort of glide above the track, using the lyrics much like an added percussion instrument to punctuate the rhythm. "

The arranger's palette grew rapidly on this and her previous CD, when Feather added Bisharat and his imaginative violin work. But her regular troupe are increasingly willing to try anything, as demonstrated by Valerio's scatting or Grant Geissman's magician's sense of guitar swing, or the drummers' various approaches to exactly how to "fill" a request (e.g., from Shelly Berg to Gregg Field, to "Throw another bucket of fish on" a wild section of "I Love You Guys"). I wanted to know from Arkin how the recording was influenced by writing with these personnel in mind.                          

"I find Lorraine's CD to be a virtual treasure chest of talent. There can be no better example of the phrase 'the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.' On my compositions, the band consisted of Russell Ferrante on piano, Grant Geissman, guitar, Charlie Bisharat, violin, Mike Valerio, bass, and Mike Shapiro on drums. It's very rare indeed to find a group of musicians so accomplished that they can play anything you put in front of them, no matter how technically sophisticated, and at the same time introduce ideas and embellishments to these charts that go far beyond the written page.  Simply put, their mastery and creativity blow me away." 

Russell Ferrante

Russell Ferrante

Producer, arranger and multi-keyboardist Russell Ferrante is the last remaining original member of Yellowjackets, the legendary fusion (and beyond) band formed in 1978 that, among other things, was one of the seminal 1980s aggregations to keep the flame alive along with groups like Weather Report, Chick Corea's Elektric Band and the Rippingtons, but which unlike those bands, keeps the flame alive still. The band's tastefully adventurous work is largely due to Ferrante's guidance and vision as a composer. In addition to his work with Yellowjackets, he has also written and produced records for a wide range of artists, including Al Jarreau, Bobby McFerrin, Michael Franks, Diane Reeves and Sadao Watanabe.

Of the co-writers Lorraine Feather works with, Ferrante is perhaps the most stylistically eclectic and likeliest to compose something not immediately recognizable as his. His broad mastery of harmony and orchestrational theory result in a fountain of compositional ideas that might bear a strong resemblance to Rachmaninoff at one moment, Zawinul the next, Debussy the next, and still remain uniquely his. Watching his instructional videos, you get the feeling that you are listening to a musical scientist, a particularly analytical intellectual who lives and breathes harmony, rhythm, melody, and especially compositional narrative. Then there is his staggering pianistic technique. He can play anything that he writes.  

And he loves writing with Lorraine Feather: "I'm a huge fan of Lorraine's lyric writing and singing. After working together for the past twenty years or so, I think I've come to better understand her unique musical world. It encompasses early American musical genres from blues, stride, and swing to the present day. Her lyrics often suggest a mash-up of all those eras! I, too, share a love for all those musical styles. Each style has its own melodic, harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary. I think all of Lorraine's collaborators have to speak those various musical languages in order to support her lyrics in the most authentic way. 

"The songs we've written together have been constructed different ways. Early on, Lorraine would send me a lyric and I'd write the music I thought best supported her lyric. Songs like "The Girl With the Lazy Eye" were written this way. More recently, we've been brainstorming together at my house, with both of us throwing ideas back and forth. Once we settle on the direction for the song, I'll work on it on my own and send MP3s for her input and direction.

"I guess in the simplest terms, you're always trying to find a balance of heart and head. One studies music to gain a working vocabulary, but then one has to move into the realm of the heart, to grasp the emotional center of a lyric and find the best possible way to serve it."

Feather's Attachments CD opens with a captivatingly earthy tune with a 19th Century American folk song vibe. Even for one of their collaborations, it is very unusual. Feather had said " 'A Little Like This' is in 7, so I knew Russ would come up with something tasty and hypnotic for the accompaniment, and I thought he'd like the rhythm I had in mind for the vocal. What he does rhythmically with Yellowjackets is so sophisticated, but it never sounds contrived. I admire his deep knowledge of time, though I would not attempt anything as complex as the tunes he does with his group. We have adapted classical pieces that I knew he'd sound beautiful on. There's something soul-satisfying about exploring the hybrid world of jazz and classical music with Russ."

So I asked Ferrante how he frequently manages to compose in an utterly different style, as he did on "A Little Like This," while still keeping what he is writing tethered to her lyrics.

"That song was indeed a bit of a departure for us. Lorraine's husband, Tony, had created a drum loop that was the starting point for the rhythm of the song. I tried to create something that had a more open feeling, almost a modal feeling. Again, all of Lorraine's collaborators have diverse musical tastes, from folk music to orchestral music. It's fun and challenging to step into those different music worlds. In a way, it's like an actor playing a different role than the one most associated with him.”

On Feather's previous CD, Tales of the Unusual violinist Charles Bisharat was brought into her heady mix of session players and created such an impact that he was issued a permanent RSVP. His playing on Attachments on "Anna Lee" or "A Little Like This" is so much a part of the arrangement that it's hard to imagine it being any other way. One of the most obvious uses of Bisharat's colorations is as a second voice paired with Feather's, so I asked Ferrante how writing for Lorraine's voice worked in relationship to writing for Bisharat's violin or another instrument.

"We always give Charlie lots of free reign in the arrangements. He's more like a horn player in a jazz band, with lots of space to create his own parts. I do write a few specific things for him that are part of the arrangement, the same way you would write for any second voice, employing harmonies and counter melodies to help move the arrangement along. 

"A voice has a more limited range than most other instruments, so one needs to keep things in a certain area to best take advantage of each singer's unique vocal qualities. Lorraine has a very solid understanding of her voice. If we write anything that is in an awkward range for her, she'll let us know!"

The arrangement Ferrante wrote for "Smitten With You," with the lyrics that fellow dog-lover Feather wrote for her rescue mutt, Sterling, modulates deceptively from an odd little Prokofiev-sounding march time, to a kind of balladic middle and back to the march, then out with a full, almost big-band sound with Valerio's bass, Bisharat's violin and Bob Mintzer's bass clarinet. It is such a melodically incongruous composition (for Feather) that I asked him how the arrangement evolved.

"That was one of those instances where, together, Lorraine and I landed on the initial feeling for the song. The beginning chords just kind of spilled out. After that it wasn't as easy. I encountered several "Not A Through Street" signs before hitting upon a treatment for the middle section. Once that was in place, the ending evolved naturally from the beginning with a slight tweak of the harmony and rhythm."

Carlos Del Rosario

Carlos Del Rosario is a singer, producer and engineer who has been recording Lorraine Feather's vocals for over fifteen years. Such stellar engineering captures as Feather's Ages and Tales of the Unusual speak volumes for what he does, in addition to the work he has done with Denise Donatelli, Stephen Bishop, Arturo Sandoval, Yo-Yo Ma, and Judy Wexler.

I mentioned to Del Rosario that on 2012's Tales of the Unusual plus on her new Attachments CD, her voice sounds fuller and clearer, and the overall sound of the individual musicians' performances, separately and collectively, sound bigger, the aural space greatly expanded, and asked him if he was doing something different with the file compression or if there was anything else different in the way he was recording her.

"I've recorded her from her very first solo album using the same microphone, a Neumann Tube U-67 and the preamp. I think the difference you're hearing is really Lorraine. The growth she's made in the last few years in her expression is just amazing.

"Geoff [Gillette] is solely responsible for the recording of the band and I'm responsible for recording and editing of all of her vocals. And we mix together. Yes, you're right about the compression. We've been using less and less of it.  And we are very conscious of the aural space that you talk about, which gives each instrument the dynamic range without trampling the other musicians, as you say.

I asked him if Feather's lyrics--which are so dynamically maneuverable, from very soft or even whispered, to quick staccato attacks, hairpin turns and octave leaps--involve anything special while mixing one of her vocals, or if the lyrical content influenced the way he recorded it.

"No, the lyrical content doesn't really influence the way I record her, although at the editing stage I may take a syllable or two and EQ them differently or compress just those syllables alone to make them come out."

Del Rosario has recently done beautiful multi-tracked vocals on a couple of Feather's tunes, like "Hearing Things" on Attachments, even recording Michael Valerio doing some sweet scatting, as mentioned earlier, so I asked him about these new directions.

"Geoff [Gillette] recorded Mike's scatting live as he played the bass. Yes, we are proud of the way it came out. I don't know if I'm supposed to divulge this to anyone yet, but I just recorded a multi-tracked vocal that's a lot more extensive than she's ever done before, on a piece that's written and arranged by Eddie Arkin for the next album. This is something you should look forward to!" [The album, slated to be finished over the course of 2013, is entitled Flirting With Disaster.]

The group of musicians Lorraine has been bringing together for her last three albums have started to sound very coordinated, like a real working band, so I asked him how that has influenced the experience of recording them.

"You're right again. When she settled down with these guys, her music became emotionally thicker and juicier. And that's definitely reflected in the whole production. Each one of these guys has such a special connection and understanding with her music, it shows so blatantly in their performances individually and collectively. I don't record them myself, but I have a hell of a lot of fun mixing.

"I've seen her evolve constantly and consistently as a writer and vocalist. When we first met, I was a recording artist for Dave Grusin's GRP label under the name of "Yutaka". I contacted her because I wanted her to write some lyrics to my song. We hit it off right away, and from then on she's been coming to my studio for the recording. As a musician, I find her evolving astounding in her ideas, her literary abilities, her vocal performances and of course that Lorraine Featherism that you find in all of her compositions. She's a true one of a kind. I am so fortunate to get to be a part of this team."

Geoff Gillette

Geoff Gillette has been recording music since the mid-1970s, capturing for eternity a Who's Who list that includes B.B. King, Dori Caymmi, Jon Hendricks, Yo-Yo Ma, Sergio Mendes, T-Bone Burnett and Flora Purim. Like Rudy Van Gelder and the other great ones, he is the music world's version of the gentle family doctor who is a master of the recording arts and sciences, empirical and hard-nosed in doing what is needed to breathe life. In person, Gillette is the warmest, kindest sort of gentleman, but as an engineer, he is a nuts-and-bolts technician all the way. Since Edison got his patent, there has never been anything natural about a sound recording, except in the end result. When I compared Gillette's recordings favorably to Van Gelder's, he did just what he should have: he ignored the compliment, and explained how it is that he (and Carlos Del Rosario) recorded Lorraine Feather in such a way that listening to her CD feels like sitting in the room with her and her band:

"There are a lot of elements adding up to why her records sound the way they do, starting with the writers and the musicians she's assembled.  Lorraine has created a great team that has been fairly consistent over the years, the newest great addition being Dave Grusin on the Attachments album.

  
"The recording process is usually done at Entourage Studio in North Hollywood, where I have recorded probably close to fifty records over the years.  I know the room well.  It's a great-sounding wood room with a vintage Neve console to record through. Recording through this particular piece of analog equipment makes a big difference.  Then, of course, it's a matter of putting the right microphones in the right places.  Lorraine's vocals are always recorded using a beautiful, restored Neumann U67 tube microphone. 

"What is interesting about the way Lorraine makes records is that she'll do two or three songs at a time, and then several months go by before the next session, while she's working on the next songs.  We hardly notice that we've done a whole record, when one day, Lorraine announces that the recording is done and it's time to mix. 

"The good thing about the way we mix is that we take our time, and are continuously revisiting each mix, listening on many different systems and making notes and adjustments as we go.  There are four of us doing the reviewing: Eddie Arkin, Carlos, myself, and of course, Lorraine.  There's a lot of attention to detail, especially making sure we hear and understand all of Lorraine's wonderful lyrics.  We call this part of the process 'nit-picking,' and we have some special techniques in balancing Lorraine's vocals with the band. This multiple scrutinization adds up to a refinement that ends up with everyone happy.  What's great is that Lorraine always goes the full nine yards in allowing this to happen.  Mixing by committee seems to work very well.

"Also, for the last two records, the mixes have been put through a Neve summing device which puts digital mixes back through analog, giving it an even bigger, warmer sound.
The final step is a good mastering with Bernie Grundman and voila, there you have it.

"One of my favorite things in life is making a Lorraine Feather record. I can't wait till we start the next one..."

Photo credits

Geoff Gillette, Lorraine Feather, Carlos Del Rosario: Eddie Arkin

Dave Grusin: Andy Ihnatko

Shelly Berg: Jim Wadsworth Productions

Eddie Arkin: Timothy Teague

Russell Ferrante: Mitch Haupers

The Girl With the Lazy Eye: the Lorraine Feather Interview of July 12, 2010

On July 12, 2010, I published the following interview with lyricist/singer Lorraine Feather on All About Jazz.  Although it has proven to be very popular with AAJ readers, I’ve not posted it here until now.  It contains a great deal of interview material and could have contained quite a lot more. Her story is a fascinating one, and it isn’t over yet by a long shot—since this interview she has released two more CDs, Tales of the Unusual (Jazzed Media, 2012) and Attachments (Jazzed Media, 2013) both essential listening.

Lorraine has said that this interview you are about to read is the most comprehensive article ever written about her. The conversation continued with another interview recently, after her release of Attachments, which you can read here:

The Attachments interview

The July, 12, 2010 interview:

While writing the tune "Scrabble" for her recently released CD Ages (Jazzed Media, 2010), lyricist and singer Lorraine Feather's songwriting partner, Dick Hyman, had an unusual request that bordered on a dare: could she work the name of the venerable pianist/composer's family friend Dushka into the lyrics? After all, the middle section of his stride composition "Barrel of Keys," the musical basis for what was becoming "Scrabble," was called "The Dushka Stomp."

"Figuring out how to work the name in took me longer than the entire rest of the song, but I'm glad I was able to," commented Feather.  Soon after a critic's recent admiring mention of it, an obviously pleased Hyman showed the review to the now-bedridden Dushka and proudly played her the new song. The karmic wheel that had gone around was swinging around again.

In the hands of this black belt word nerd, a fictionalized Dushka becomes the mischievous landlady to a squabbling Scrabble player and her boyfriend while Stravinsky's darkly comic ballet is playing in the background:

Though his body isn't awfully sturdy,

And his manner is incredibly nerdy,

Conversation often overly wordy,

He's a heck of a brain.

Monday night we played our landlady Dushka,

While we listened to the score of Petrouchka;

Dushka put a double "o" in "babushka."

You could see his pain.

It was just a joke that sank like lead!

She's been known to mess with his head.

Lorraine Feather clearly understands Shakespeare's somewhat snide commentary that all the world's a stage, and the men and women--including herself--its players. She engages the lyricist's craft as an activity integral to the living of life. It is not a case of life imitating or being imitated by art, because art is itself a vitally important and indistinguishable part of it. Throughout the new compositions on Ages it is obvious that, despite her developed abilities as an observer, she is on some level involved in her characters' lives, delighting in their triumphs and feeling the sting of their losses. As they shuffle on and off this treacherous coil, their tumultuous exits and entrances, their loves, their treasons, their rambunctious joys and cherished dreams are seen through the lens of her uniquely empathic perspective on this, her most emotional, sardonic, hilariously poignant and piquant work to date.

As she did with her last CD, Language (Jazzed Media, 2008), she wrote these new pieces with contemporary composers. The lyrics are evocative and deeply imbued with her edgy trademarks: the self-referential humor, the smart-alecky jibes and the acute social commentary are all there, razor-sharp. Her rich contralto's bell-like tone, especially in the higher range, manages to drive the music with a whirlwind intensity, while her dulcet murmurs and sly intonations cut through the noise overload of modern life.

Among contemporaries, her poet's precision of language is on a level not heard since pop lyricists like Joni Mitchell, or Randy Newman, and among jazz lyricists, Bob Dorough or Dave Frishberg. Her sensitivity to the subtleties of syntax, plus the exactness of her meter and rhyming, are unparalleled.

"Although I'm best known (though not, like, across the whole planet or anything) for my new lyrics to old music, I don't think it's an accident that my current and last CD, which were written all with the living, have been the most successful, or as [pianist/composer] is fond of saying of his releases, 'went Wood!' My relationships with my composer friends have grown stronger over the years, and the co-writing felt especially organic on this album. They all have a deep appreciation for lyrics and a vast musical vocabulary. The give-and-take was so gratifying. I especially love the way a song may start out to be one thing and turn into another."

And once again, Feather gathered the cream of the crop of L.A. and N.Y. session players for her recording. "The musicians all did more blowing on this album, which was something I wanted because they're so incredible, as well as being cool people I love being around."

"The Girl with the Lazy Eye" is a song on Ages that tells the story of an apparently introverted, socially inept young girl whose underachievement and awkwardness are of great concern to her teachers at school. Her lack of friends (Feather's wry lyric says: "She had a close friend one semester./ Ana's now back in Paraguay.") and her high IQ but mediocre grades, her notebooks of morbid poetry, all are embodied symbolically in her "lazy eye," a minor neuromuscular anomaly which can result in somewhat poorer vision in the eye when looking straight ahead. To accommodate it she quite often follows the eye's natural strength, and literally looks at her environment out of the corner of her eye. Feather uses this lyrically as a metaphor for not only all the mostly-misplaced concerns about the schoolgirl, but for the fact that she sees the world from a different angle and may perceive things more clearly than many of the other people in her life.

Feather's eye doctor has said her own lazy eye is "not that lazy," but she says her mother "used to say 'Turn your head straight!' when I watched TV because she was afraid I wasn't strengthening the muscles by compensating when I angled my head . . . I do have a habit of turning to the left when I look at things."

All the better to see you with. Previously, on Language, she turned her perspicacious gaze on the means by which we all communicate. On Ages she has taken on the even weightier subject of mortality, her own and ours. The subtexts of aging, its harsh and humorous incongruities, and the flimsiness of the concept of time itself, course quietly just below the surface of these sparkling lyrics like a powerful underground river. "The years from 50 to 60 had been the most interesting of my life. I had released five albums and performed a lot. I thought it was a good time to do an album focusing on different stages of life as I had known it up to age 60."

But aside from the brief, oblique glance at her early life afforded by "The Girl with the Lazy Eye," there is scant mention on the recording of her earliest days growing up in New York. This and the other slightly autobiographical references scattered here and there are difficult to detect because fact, fiction and synthesized yarns are woven into the fabric of her work so seamlessly.

However, her first dozen formative years become increasingly important for the insights they provide into how this girl trained her lazy eye, for what they show about the development of an artist who climbs on and off the merry-go-round of life as observer and observed so readily.

The very first records I really got into were by Lambert, Hendricks & Ross [Dave Lambert, Jon Hendricks and Annie Ross, the premier vocal group of the 1950s]. My mother and I used to try and sing along, which was pretty much impossible but lots of fun." Although it may not have been all that

impossible. Her mother Jane, earlier in her own life, had been a professional big band singer, though she never felt the driving ambition to make it her life's work.

Her father Leonard Feather, on the other hand, left his home in England at age 20 with precisely that level of ambition and purpose. In 1935 he came to America in pursuit of jazz's burgeoning art form and found it in Harlem, there flourishing as a record producer and composer while establishing himself in the pages of Metronome, Esquire and Down Beat as the first serious writer/critic the music ever had. On one of his first trips to Los Angeles, he was introduced at a dinner with singer Peggy Lee to her best friend, Jane Leslie Larabee, and proposed to her the very next day, resulting in a marriage that lasted the rest of his life.

Leonard Feather brought this same impetuous ardor to his work in the music world, and as a writer his liner notes, published essays and reviews numbered in the thousands. He was the first (and for a good while, virtually the only) reporter on the beat at the dawn of the Jazz Age, with the result that hundreds of musicians and other music business people knew him as a friend. He had opinions which he expressed freely. Not everyone shared them, of course, but friends or foes, everyone in New York knew him.

"It took me some years to shake off the LF's daughter thing. Not that I wasn't terribly proud of my dad, but every interview started 'So tell me some anecdotes about growing up around all of those jazz greats!' and some people still refer to me that way. At this point I don't really mind.

"Being my father's daughter brought me a certain kind of attention that was good in some ways, bad in others, and early on I was not ready for it, frankly. Some people worshiped him, others hated him. One famous jazz singer used to call and read my dad the riot act if he wrote a review of the singer's performance that was full of lavish praise and had one little caveat, like 'The medley before the intermission was not my cup of tea.'

"The flip side of people being worshipful of my dad was encountering those he had wounded, who would take me to task for things he had said. I felt bad about it, but of course we were two different people.

"It was his combination of brains, talent and emotion that worked so well together, and the fact that he came from across the pond caused him to appreciate American jazz in a particular way, also made him more painfully aware of American racism. When we moved to Los Angeles, at one point a famous musician friend was house-hunting nearby and a neighbor and local builder went from door to door telling everyone that Leonard Feather was "trying to get a nigger into the neighborhood." I was as proud of my dad's position at the NAACP as of anything. The bottom line for me is that he was a wonderful father. The fact that he and my mom brought me up in a world full of glorious musicians and fascinating artists was a gift I didn't fully appreciate until much later.

"Because Billie Holiday was my godmother and my first name is Billie, naturally when I began working as a singer and doing interviews, I was asked if I had any great anecdotes. I have one strong memory of coming home from grade school and meeting her. She was glamorous, queenly, wearing a lovely suit and a chic hat. She seemed very kind. My father and mother were crazy about her, and she about them. She knitted me baby booties. She wrote them letters from prison, once on toilet paper, my dad told me. The day she died, I went into my parents' bedroom and found him looking at the lurid headlines and crying. My favorite picture of Billie is one of her on skis in Switzerland. When my father first met her he tried to convince her to accept one of the offers she had to perform in Europe, but she was dubious. Years later, he did arrange a tour for her and she was a great success.

"To me, jazz is the music of the holidays, a homey sound. I had no thought of being a singer until I was in my late 20s and had been struggling miserably as an aspiring actress for years, tired of waitressing at restaurants of every ethnicity in New York. That music obviously permeated my soul, though. Jon Hendricks and Annie Ross were friends of my folks and I saw them at social functions as well as concerts. Jon was an ebullient personality and always told me we were Virgo soul mates. Annie was wry, sophisticated, down to earth. She came to see me perform with Full Swing [a vocal trio organized by producer Richard Perry with Feather, Steve March and Charlotte Crossley] in Santa Monica, California some 25 years ago. I had started writing a lot of material for the group. I hadn't run into her since I'd grown up, and after the show she came up to me and said, 'Those lyrics. My dear.' One of those nuggets of encouragement that you hold onto.

"The Ellingtons and my parents were close. Duke hired my father for Mercer Records when I was a year old and my parents had gotten badly injured in a freak automobile accident involving a driverless car that hit them while they were walking across the street. Later, Duke's sister Ruth lived down the street from us and her son Stevie and I hung out together, went to the amusement park, made popcorn and watched TV at the apartment on Riverside Drive.

"Dizzy Gillespie and his wife [dancer Lorraine Willis] were also close friends of my folks, often at their apartment for cocktail parties, hanging out with them at clubs or festivals. Lorraine once gave me a beautiful ballerina pin with rubies on her skirt and a pearl in her upraised hands. I lost it somewhere along the way, in my frequent changes of apartment in Manhattan. Dizzy was a real character, hilarious.

"There were many musicians I only met in passing at festivals, or when my dad was interviewing them. After we moved to L.A. my parents took me to the Monterey and Playboy festivals, and we would see their musician friends. I remember when I was in my early teens, my parents introducing me to Miles Davis = 6144}} backstage. He was an intense presence. He pulled me aside and whispered in my ear, but his voice was so raspy that I couldn't make out what he was saying.

"My father was rather low-tech and would tape over a few of the million commercial cassettes he'd been sent, to re-use for interviews. When he died I gave all of those to the Lionel Hampton School of Jazz at the University of Idaho. I was there performing with Shelly Berg at the festival one year and saw a display case with some of my dad's memorabilia. There was a commercial cassette of John Denver--his name was crossed out and my dad had written, in red grease pencil, the name of that day's interviewee: Miles Davis.

"When we were moving from New York to Los Angeles [in 1960] my mother and I stayed at Peggy's for a time, my mom checking out the housing situation." Singer Peggy Lee and Jane Feather had known each other since the two of them shared expenses and roomed together in the early days of WWII--Lee was from North Dakota and had sung with Benny Goodman, while Jane was from Minnesota and sang in Manhattan clubs like The Famous Door.

"Peggy had two Pekingese named Little One and Little Two, and a white rug that was like their fur. Her Christmas tree was white too. A highlight of that trip was Frank Sinatra saying 'Happy New Year, baby,' when I passed him in the living room at Peggy's New Year's Eve party. She always gave me grown-up, glamorous gifts ... once, a beaded purse. She was 'Aunt Peg' to me. She and my mom lived such different lives, but we got together on holidays throughout the years."

To the Manner Born

Once the Feathers had settled in Los Angeles, they enrolled young Lorraine in school, and a little later, in a jazz dance class, which led to a 15-year infatuation with terpsichore.

"I started taking jazz dance when I was 12. It was my mother's idea. I had no friends and I think she assumed it would be some kind of social event. It wasn't, but it completely changed me, because I was a very dorky child who couldn't stand up on skates or anything. Even though I didn't have great talent as a dancer, it helped me to kind of get outside of my own head, become active, much more fit, more confident. I learned what it was to work really hard, and mostly for art alone. Most of the dancers who were deeply serious, and did have serious talent, took class all day long, all week long, when they weren't auditioning. It's a more punishing career than acting, even, because even if you become successful the performing years are short for most. When I studied jazz dancing, often with just a conga player playing, I started to feel the groove! My first teacher was the late Carlton Johnson, who was also a Motown fanatic. Sometimes I'd play the 45 of 'Nowhere to Run,' by Martha and the Vandellas, for an hour straight in my room. My parents were tolerant.

"In ninth grade, I went to a Catholic girls' school for a year--my best friend was going there--before switching to the freewheeling world of Hollywood High. During the year at Corvallis I stepped in for an ill classmate who had been cast in the lead role for the school's production of Euripides' Electra. I only got the call because I'm good at memorizing, but was officially bitten by the acting bug by show time. I started thinking about going back to New York on my own to act, and after a couple of years at LA City College in the theatre department, got a partial scholarship to the Circle in the Square school and returned to Manhattan at 18.

"As far as music goes, I can't honestly pinpoint when I drifted back into jazz. I started to appreciate [Miles Davis'] Sketches of Spain (Columbia, 1960) and [Dizzy Gillespie's] Gillespiana (Verve, 1961) when they had been out for a while and I was in my mid-teens, and continued to play them and certain other key albums when I moved back to New York on my own and everyone my age was into Big Brother and the Holding Company. I also got my first waitressing job at the Village Gate then, so I heard artists like Nina Simone downstairs, and pianists like Mose Allison, Bill Evans, Toshiko Akiyoshi and Horace Silver upstairs where I worked. The music was familiar and friendly to me because I'd grown up with it... not that you'd call Nina Simone 'friendly,' but she was riveting onstage. My musical tastes were growing more eclectic. I didn't get the Beatles at first, but started to come on board with Revolver (Capitol, 1967), then one night after my shift at the Gate I heard the Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Capitol, 1968) album, which blew my mind along with millions of other minds that year."

But Feather had returned to New York to pursue stage acting, not dance.

"When I studied acting at the H.B. Studio in New York, I found that I did have something of a gift for it. I learned what it was like to be 'in the zone,' when something else takes over. It's not dissimilar to performing a song. I also read many plays, and getting to know some of the great playwrights that way was exciting, the beauty of their words.

"I used to practice singing a song or two for theatre chorus auditions in New York. My then-boyfriend, who was a musician, told me that he thought I had a certain je ne sais quoi

and ought to think about being a singer. I auditioned for a group called Farmer Brown, a jazz/rock band that had a gig at the Village Gate. Later I did club gigs in the Bronx, the Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania. It took me quite a while to get good, to feel comfortable singing on stage--and later still, to get comfortable in the studio. In those days, the main thing I had to offer was my ability to learn countless Top 40 songs in record time."

One of her early singing/acting jobs was fortuitous and kept her rent paid for some time.

" . . I was in [Jesus Christ] Superstar on the road, then a year on Broadway till it closed--running around in the two-piece loincloth, waving the palm frond, making like a leper... For one scene, there were headdresses so heavy that you had to hold your head super-straight for fear your neck would snap if you tilted it too far. We got hazard pay because the stage opened and closed. There were three women who came down in a giant butterfly to sing 'Jesus Christ, Superstar' at the end of the show, and if any of the three were out sick, I got to be one of them. Those were wild days and it was terrific to be employed, plus New York State was giving out a lot of unemployment benefit extensions in those days, so the show supported me for years."

Looking for ways to make grocery money during these lean times, she began landing singing gigs here and there, like with pop singer Petula Clark.

"The Petula gig was only for a couple of weeks but. . . it was glamorous and fun. The other two singers and I were given cool outfits, there was a great orchestra, I was excited to be in Vegas and making money. Petula was sweet. The other singers were Margaret Dorn, a very talented singer who still lives in New York, and my later-to-be-best-girlfriend Linda Lawley, who is no longer with us. I wrote the lyrics for "Two Desperate Women" [on the Ages

CD] about her, again with some exaggerations and fiction thrown in. The only scary thing about the Petula gig was that there was some misconception about my sight-reading, which borders on the nonexistent. I got by, lagging a microsecond behind the other two.

"I also toured with Grand Funk Railroad. Shortly after I met Tony [drummer Tony Morales, Feather's husband since 1983] he came across a picture of me in a rock magazine called Circus, dancing behind GFR in a leotard, net pantyhose and a multicolored Afro wig. But I had gone to New York to act and I was only hired as a singer/dancer, when I worked at all."

These hungry years in New York are the subject of one of the hardest swinging tunes on Ages, "Old at 18/Dog Bowl," written with Eddie Arkin and inspired by her years as a struggling actress. Opening with a groove that her husband Tony began playing one day on a metal dog bowl, the cold predawn atmosphere in an actress' small Manhattan walk-up is captured in all its chilly pathos and wistful glory.

The Lyricist

"I had written a few lyrics in my late 20s, but the first serious writing I did was when I got hired for the vocal trio Full Swing. It was me, Steve March [Mel Tormé 's son] and Charlotte Crossley [Motormouth Mabel in the recent Broadway production of Hairspray].  Richard Perry was the producer and it was his concept.

The first recording the group did was called Swing (1982) for Perry's record label, Planet Records, then later reissued as The Good Times Are Back. "Richard wanted us to record a song that was an instrumental written by composer/tenor saxophonist Tommy Newsom. He was thinking of calling in a lyricist to work on it and I nominated myself. I wrote the lyrics to Tommy's swing tune... the rhythms were a bit complicated... and sang them in one of our meetings. Richard didn't like them at all. He told me what the song should be about, the vibe it should create. I rewrote the lyrics and he accepted them. My version was called 'The Trocadero Ballroom.' I wound up doing lyrics for several songs for the album, including Horace Henderson's 'Big John's Special,' which I called 'Big Bucks'--it was in the movie Swing Shift with Goldie Hawn, briefly--and Charlie Barnet's 'The Right Idea.'

"What was significant about that experience for me was that writing words to fast, tricky music with a lot of syncopations came to me more easily than anything else I had ever tried to do. I find fault with some of the writing I did back then--for one thing, I believe in the perfect rhyme now for that kind of song--but it came so naturally, and I didn't discover it till I was in my early 30s. It was also my first experience flinging myself into creating words for a song and having to get it approved, getting shot down and doing it all over again. I've done a lot of lyrics for animation, much of it with Mark Watters, and a lot of rewriting. Sometimes you do take it personally, but experience teaches you there's always another idea."

Full Swing meant performing work, including tours of Japan and Brazil, a TV special with Barry Manilow, and appearances at the Monterey and Playboy Jazz Festivals, along with two more albums: In Full Swing (Cypress,1987) and End of the Sky (Cypress,1989)--unfortunately, now out of print.

Though not Full Swing's creator, as the only original member from beginning to end, Feather was the de facto curator for a band that a employed an impressive array of musical talent, including Grant Geissman, Russ Freeman, David Benoit, producers Morgan Ames and Tony Morales and recordist Geoff Gillette, her engineer to this day. Many talented male singers were employed after March exited the band to pursue a solo career-- Bruce Scott, Arnold McCuller, Augie Johnson, Tim Stone. And after Crossley had left, Angel Rogers took her place.

"So that group went on in different forms for eight years and did two more albums. I wrote lyrics for a lot of material the group sang and recorded, including two Ellington pieces. My parents loved bebop... I appreciated it but it was and is kind of over my head. Lyrically speaking, I gravitated more toward pre-bop when it came to tackling existing material. I liked music you could dance to."

The Collaborationist

First and foremost Lorraine Feather is a lyricist, a writer. She is also a gifted singer who has continued to develop her considerable natural skills over the years.

But as a lyricist and singer who relies on musical composers, she has had to master a third and very difficult skill, which, because it is so all-encompassing, is quite invisible: she is one of the music world's most accomplished practitioners of the delicate act of collaboration. Her embrace of this fine art is key to understanding the artist. Even the most educated of listeners is only vaguely cognizant that it is Ira Gershwin = 13364}}'s words they are hearing in their head when they hum "I've Got Rhythm," or Oscar Hammerstein's when they hum "The Sound of Music." But because collaborations are team efforts, it is the team ("Rodgers-and-Hammerstein" is spoken these days as a single word) that gets the spotlight. Unless, as was the case with the great Johnny Mercer, and is the case with Lorraine Feather, the lyricist is also the singer.

The Body Remembers (Bean Bag, 1997) is a solo album that was a collaboration with several composers, principally Feather's husband, drummer/producer Tony Morales. "[It] was essentially conceived in Tony's studio in our first, wee home in La Crescenta [California] on our old 4-track machine. It's dated now because of all the electronics, but it was a blast to do. 'Five' was based on a weird sliding thing Tony's old BassMan bass machine started doing when the batteries were wearing out. He made it into a groove. I don't overdub my own voice anymore because it's not often appropriate on an acoustic jazz recording, but I did it a lot on that CD and I love doing it. Janis Siegel later sang 'Indigo Sky,' which Eddie Arkin and I wrote for TBR, with Bruce Lofgren. Joe Curiale and Yutaka Yokokura wrote the beautiful music for 'Bleecker Street,' dedicated to my friend Cliff, who had died of AIDS. Terry Sampson, Tony and I wrote 'Where Are My Keys,' which I recorded later for Language, and is one of the most played tunes of mine on radio.

"I also worked with Don Grusin for the first time on that CD. Besides being a fantastic player and writer, he gave me a lot of good musician's advice that helped me as a singer. 'Touchy' was written with John Capek, who had hits with Rod Stewart, Toto and Heart ... we later wrote a song called 'Why Did She Come In with You?' that Patti Austin recorded ... it was a strange tune with a kind of yuppie rap section that included the word 'quesadillas.'

"In 1999, five years after my dad passed away, I was going through some CDs with my mom and borrowed Fats Waller's Turn on the Heat (Bluebird/RCA, 1991). I hadn't heard much of his music growing up. I became smitten with it. I wrote lyrics to a Fats piece for fun, recorded it with the original piano and live musicians. I sent it to Dick Hyman because I thought he might get a kick out of it. He called me and suggested I do a whole Fats album. 'It's like Lambert, Hendricks and Ross but with much older music!' he said. 'I'll help you decide on the material and I'll play on it.' A few days after he called, my mother had a stroke. She died within a couple of weeks. Dick told me that he thought it would be good for me to keep working through that sad time, and it was. I could never have done the album without him, musically or otherwise.

During the writing period, Mike Lang worked with me in L.A. As well as being a fine, fine player, he knows a lot about jazz history and helped me expand my knowledge of the Fats repertoire-- did hip arrangements of 'Blue Black Bottom' ("Too Good Lookin"), 'Viper's Drag' ("Timeless Rag") and 'Numb Fumblin' ("In Living Black and White").

"I remember, vividly, the first time Dick Hyman played Fats Waller's 'The Minor Drag' for me, in David Abell's piano store. I thought it was the most entertaining piece of music I'd ever heard." So inspired was she, that it became "You're Outa Here," the opening track on New York City Drag (Rhombus, 2001), her CD of Waller pieces for which she daringly wrote the classic tunes' first-ever lyrics. As it turned out, this collaborative album with Hyman and Mike Lang (and Waller) was a watershed moment in her career.

Finding Her Artistic Voice

With Café Society (Sanctuary, 2003) Lorraine Feather strikes just the right nostalgic note for the listener, providing a wistful introduction (or re-introduction, as the case may be) to the world of 1945 Greenwich Village, where the basement at 1 Sheridan Square housed the historically famous nightclub Café Society Downtown and the top floor was the apartment home of her newlywed parents. She creates a rare kind of intimacy for her listener that is only possible because of its authenticity. Her lovingly written musical paeans and revivifying lyrical treatments of a pair of tunes written by Duke Ellington, and one each by Johnny Mandel and Charlie Barnet, are seamlessly enveloped in a world few besides Feather would have had the life experience needed to imagine it. Her collaborations with contemporaries like Eddie Arkin, Don Grusin, and Russell Ferrante are all in the spirit of that hard-swinging and first-ever racially integrated club where blacks and whites sat side-by-side not only on the bandstand, but at the tables in the audience as well. After the club opened in 1939, such luminaries as Lester Young, Ella Fitzgerald, Art Tatum and Billie Holiday  had performed there.

"Café Society . . . was mostly all-original. Some of the highlights were working with Russ for the first time on the title track, doing my own version of Eddie's and my song 'Big Fun,' that Barry Manilow had recorded on the Swing Street (BMG, 1987) album Eddie worked with him on; my own version of 'Jungle Rhythm' from The Jungle Book 2. Paul Grabowsky and I wrote two of the songs for that film with him in Australia and me in Half Moon Bay, CA, never having met--for me, one of the first clues that the world had completely changed thanks to the Internet. The singers on that album, Shelby Flint, Carmen Twillie, Michael Mishaw, Randy Crenshaw and Morgan Ames, who arranged the vocals, were divine."

A year later Feather went all-in once more with an entire album of lyrical treatments to Duke Ellington tunes (save one nugget written by her father and recorded by Duke) entitled Such Sweet Thunder (Sanctuary, 2004).

"I love Ellington's music, Strayhorn's. Many of my favorite pieces were written in the 30s. I had done three Ellington pieces for Café Society and met Bill Elliott, who is a stellar big band arranger. I decided to do a whole Ellington album with Bill arranging and it was a thrill from beginning to end, except for the legal hassles. Doing these adaptations of old tunes is a real can of worms, or slippery slope, or Pandora's Box, I'm not sure which to choose... but it's fraught with peril. You have to show the publishers what you're doing before they agree, and by that time you've already invested time and money. At the last minute, one of the publishers for three pieces I wanted to use, decided not to give the okay because Norah Jones, an artist on their label, was doing an Ellington adaptation of her own. Of course, no one had forced me to take the chance! The musicians were wonderful though, and there was so much music to listen to and consider. Ken Dryden sent me some fascinating Ellington compositions I had never heard. It was a real adventure as well as an honor.

"I do feel I have a deeper appreciation of these composers' work, having delved into it as I did. It was good for me as a singer and lyricist, good for my ears to learn the music more intimately, and good for my soul to have the privilege of connecting with what these compositions had to say, and keep saying, as they are performed all over the world every day. I took the liberty of writing whatever came naturally to me without regard for period. Once when I was performing 'You're Outa Here' in New York, a musician pulled me aside after a run-through to hip me to the fact that there were no 501 jeans during Fats Waller's lifetime."

Significantly, somewhat ironically perhaps, her collaborationist's efforts with these composer's ghosts and their classic recordings were helping her to find her own artistic voice.

Vocalese, the painstaking musical prestidigitation done by writing lyrics to already-penned instrumental melodies or complete compositions, was back.  Sometimes maligned by hair-shirted jazz police, this "simple" art form has been responsible for some of the most popular music of all time: Lambert, Hendricks & Ross was the biggest jazz vocal group of the 1960s, and Manhattan Transfer was the hottest thing in pop vocals in the late 1970s/early 1980s. This time, at the dawn of the new millennium, it was carefully crafted lyrics written with practically a historian's sensibility and depth of understanding, first for the breakneck up-tempo compositions of Fats Waller, and then for the sophisticated stylings of Duke Ellington, performed with Lorraine Feather's bright, agile instrument in the place of the group dynamic of LH&R's improvisations and scatting, or MT's close harmonies.

New York City Drag elicited rave reviews. Zan Stewart of Down Beat wrote: "Employing Fats Waller's attractive and still meaningful '30s music, the gleaming-voiced, fluid and articulate Feather concocts a variety of mostly contemporary scenarios--many humorous, some disquieting...emotive whammy...glowingly tributes Waller and his ilk;" while Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times wrote: "Her new twinning of words and music based on chop-busting, improvised choruses do not simply recall previously heard melodies and riffs; the words, in Lorraine's supple and engaging voice, bring a new luster and excitement."

Of Such Sweet Thunder, Nat Hentoff, the esteemed old professor of jazz himself, wrote: "At this point I have to say, and I never had the temerity to say this to Duke, that in a number of others' attempts to put lyrics to Duke's music, they missed his swift and amused sense, for example, of the unintended consequences of desire. Lorraine has that perception in the stories that are her lyrics. I wish she had been around as a lyricist when Duke was. I think they could have collaborated."

Because as much as Lorraine Feather and her lineage could be loftily viewed as the embodiment of the Jazz Age, she is far more than a time-traveler or historical reference point. All good writers live in their constructed worlds long enough to write about them. Like a successful student in the Flemish School of painters during the European renaissance, she had studied the masters to the point where her own mastery was becoming an extension of theirs--but the more she was drawn to working with them, the greater the urge became to collaborate with the talented contemporary composers she had come to know, and do entirely original work.

"On Dooji Wooji (Sanctuary, 2005) I discovered that I was suddenly allowed to use the three other Ellington pieces I had worked on. I'd become smitten with the 'small big band' sound he popularized in the early 1930s and much of the album goes for that vibe. That CD included Eddie's and my song 'I Know the Way to Brooklyn,' which Janis Siegel sings on the road ... in fact we sang it together at Jazz Alley in Seattle when the Transfer were there--also 'Remembering to Breathe,' a song I wrote with Bill Elliott right before he moved east to teach at Berklee. As with 'The Girl with the Lazy Eye,' the music was written to my lyrics before the get-together, and when I heard him play it I teared up. I think Bill was a little taken aback, but it really touched me. I had started to work with Shelly Berg on the previous album and he wrote two tunes with Eddie and me on this one, 'Once Bitten' and 'Cicada Time,' the latter in honor of the mysterious insect's reappearance that year after 17 years underground.

"With Language I went with all-original songs, music by my living collaborators. I was able to have three kick-ass vocalists guest: Tierney Sutton, Janis Siegel, Cheryl Bentyne. I had sung with Janis and Cheryl before on the Dick Tracy soundtrack, but never with Tierney, and they were all a delight to work with. I'd heard the Hornheads track 'Can't Quite Put My Finger On It' driving to a sound check in Plano, TX and looked up Michael B. Nelson to ask if I could adapt it. Gary Grant put together one of his killer horn sections for that song, 'Waiting Tables.' I wanted to do acoustic versions of 'Very Unbecoming' and 'Where Are My Keys?' and Shelly arranged them. For some reason I thought the talking sections might put people off, I guess because you don't hear a lot of that on jazz recordings, but no one ever mentioned it. Eddie's and my 'Making It Up as We Go Along' was supposed to be on Café Society, but that was when I thought that album would be all ballads. . . the concept turned out to be too lugubrious and I replaced several ballads with up tunes, but I always wanted to have that song on a CD.  Mike Lang plays so beautifully on the track. Shelly and I wrote 'Traffic and Weather' and 'We Appreciate Your Patience' in record time, at this house in LA. And Russ and I did the song that made me laugh the most when we were working on it, 'Hit the Ground Runnin.'"

Making herself and other people laugh, as it turns out, is something Feather does too easily. No songwriter wants to be known for writing humorous tunes any more than an actor wants to be remembered as a comedian. Who wants to be remembered as a novelty act, the Spike Jones of the new millennium, or a cult favorite in France who never wins the big awards?

But one of the aspects of finding one's own artistic voice is discovering talents or predilections one has not suspected. Almost effortlessly, it would seem, Feather's lyrics can produce everything from ironic smiles, embarrassed chortles or little snickers all the way up to loud, satisfying, gasping-for-air guffaws.

Nowhere is this more in evidence than in the videos she has produced, mostly with her own camerawork and editing, sometimes in collaboration with her husband Tony. With the exception of the video she did to accompany her heart-rending "Remembering to Breathe," the song whose lyrics she wrote as advice to a fictional, aspiring young ballet dancer, her videos produce such mirth that they can be revisted as often as one needs to laugh. While last year's hilarious award-winning short film You're Outa Here will not be available until animator George Griffin has completed work on compiling a DVD of his work, "The Making of New York City Drag," "Rockin' in Rhythm," and "The 101" are available on her website: http://lorrainefeather.com/videos

Lorraine Feather got a bit of a late start answering her true calling. Not that she hadn't worked hard at it, but like many creative people, she was a proverbial jack-of-all-trades who discovered as she went along that she could work competently in a number of artistic fields, and have fun trying them all. By the time she realized what her mad passion was, her raison d'être

, she had already had a career as a dancer and singer, though not on the level she would have wanted. In her new tune "Two Desperate Women in Their Late 30's," she describes in some autobiographical detail what she and her fellow singer, Linda Lawley, were both experiencing.

One day we would again have it made,

Sip fine wine on the mountain,

Tally up our successes,

Dressed in hand-beaded dresses.

But for now we'd swill hard lemonade

By the fiberglass fountain,

Each ignoring the oncoming train

That was otherwise known

As Our Fortieth Birthdays,

To be desperately feared.

Ever closer it neared.

Told uniquely as a song sung about, or perhaps to her friend who has now passed, her typically ironic brand of self-aware, self-deprecating humor allows her to recount the bittersweet story of all the painful pitfalls in their ambitious scrambling in the music world, battling failures real and imagined, bucking up against cultural and professional ageism all the way.

Maybe in some corner of her mind she had known that her rose could well bloom late, but it would indeed bloom, as indicated in the lyrics of an early effort like "Cézanne" on 2001's New York City Drag:

The mountain,

A thousand tries and countin.'

You drew and you drew--

It always eluded you

(Now and then you would paint your wife).

You had no betters,

And in your letters,

Wrote you finally had sight of

The light of your promised land,

On the other side of sixty.

The lyrics she wrote for "Cézanne," like many of the songs she has written throughout her career, address the hard issues that an artist faces in being an artist: artistic drive, which is never easy to describe in everyday terms; personal esteem, the kind one accords to oneself; the ability to believe in one's own vision; and the courage to keep on living and aging in a world obsessed with youth. Like a few other songs she had written, she might well have included it on Ages.

But Ages is a complete, self-contained work. In many ways it is a culmination of Feather's broodings and earlier studies, a direct confrontation of what is likely the most frightening aspect of being human. That someday one will not be here again in this life is the most chilling thing of all. Feather does not spend undue time on Ages in the depths of the metaphysics of life and death, but she does indeed tackle it on her soaringly beautiful "Perugia," a song she wrote for her father Leonard. The man who had looked up at his daughter Lorraine as he lay dying was known to jazz readers and historians as the chronicler of the Jazz Age, but he was simply her loving father, the man who had held her in his arms in her infancy. There is nothing complicated about the emotions of the piece, with lyrics written for Russell Ferrante's haunting interpretation of Felix Mendelssohn's "Venetianisches Gondellied."

I told you what was fading fast,

Was not, and had never been, you.

You met my gaze, and smiled at last,

Because you adored me,

Because you believed it was true.

Perhaps even more than one's own death, the idea that one might never again see a loved one is the most excruciating pain of all. Feather's emotional bravery in writing and performing this intensely personal song, accompanied by Ferrante's sensitive playing, can be a breathtaking catharsis for anyone who has ever lost a parent.

"This album has the most ballads of any I've done. Radio tends to play the more jokey tunes, which I understand because most of the femme jazz singers do not do that and it mixes things up programming-wise.

"People often assume that every lyric is autobiographical. Almost all of my songs are a mixture of things that happened to me, things that happened to friends of mine, stories I've heard or read, and simple flights of fancy or gross exaggeration. It does please me when someone gets what I was going for in a song, especially when it's not spelled out. I've written some sarcastic lyrics over the years, a couple that never saw the light of day and rightly so. I don't mind being bitchy now and then but there's too much seething hostility in the world."

And the multilayered aspects of the lyrics which sometimes reverberate and resonate like lines from Emily Dickinson?

"I don't set out to accomplish it, but discover things as I go along. I came across Béla Fleck's 'Circus of Regrets' and fell in love with it. In the case of that song, I found a title I liked ['Peculiar Universe'], that felt right with the first line, and it seemed to unwind from there.

"I wrote two verses of lyrics, recorded over the original in Tony's and my little home studio, and sent it to Béla and he approved. When I asked Russ to arrange it he told me he had to stop the recording a few times to determine what time signature it was in--I see three of them on his chart--as I sang along I had no idea and still can't tell. He also asked me what on earth possessed me to think of putting words to such a piece! He liked the concept though. I asked if he would write some kind of intro. With a great musician/arranger you can make a request that vague and then when you get to the session it's a swell surprise. I thought what he did with Warren Luening's trumpet was so evocative.

"I saw a kind of montage when I was writing the words, beginning in a surreal version of New York and ending in a suburban backyard. The song is about losing love, and it could be about being left by someone generally, but the 'Phones ring, words fall, eyes fill' line is about the phone call telling you that someone has died. That's what I was thinking of anyway. I read a short story once that I was thinking about toward the end of the song. It was about somebody in a deep state of grief who suddenly, for no particular reason, feels released from it for a moment and has the sensation of swimming in space with the moon and stars. I don't know what the story was called and I may be remembering it wrong! Béla writes about space and planets a lot... 'Mars needs Women' [for example]... but 'Circus of Regrets' was dedicated to Bozo the Clown. I didn't know that till later, but it just goes to show you.

"Eddie Arkin and I have written together for over two decades and are very close friends, like, the kind of friend you would call if you were lost in a bad part of town, or if you were having a shop-gasmic experience at Costco. Aside from the depth of his musical knowledge, Eddie is the most flexible collaborator ever. If necessary he'll fully rewrite something three times and each version exceeds the last. Usually I bring lyrics to him and he sits and noodles at the piano or guitar and works through the song, but this last year we've done a lot by phone, meaning periodically we'll hang up and he'll send me an mp3. He gets very excited when he likes something and it's always a treat. Once when I was recording a song of Russell's and mine called 'On the Esplanade' and Eddie was in the control booth hearing the lyrics for the first time, he opened the door after a take and called in to me with wry delight, 'Inky sky! Barnacled pilings!' He's an excellent guitarist and wrote a well-known guitar book [Creative Chord Substitution for Jazz Guitar

(Warner Bros. Publications)]. He and Grant [Geissman] used to be in a band together.

"I met Shelly [Berg] when I was looking for someone to play the stride music for the Fats album at a Catalina's gig. Stride is very hard to learn, and who the hell has the time? Somebody suggested Shelly, who was head of the jazz department at USC at the time, and he signed on. The gig was in two weeks, Don Heckman was reviewing for the LA Times, and Shelly nailed it. As a composer, he has a terrific knack for creating jazz tunes that are both interesting and catchy, and writes freakishly fast. It's harder to get together now because we moved as far apart as two people could and still be in the contiguous U.S. [Washington State and Florida], so we wrote the Ages songs whenever we performed on the road. He came up with the music for 'I Always Had a Thing for You' in a half hour at a sound check in Cleveland.

"My relationship with Russell [Ferrante] has progressed more slowly. He's away a lot with Yellowjackets. We have never worked together live, but we struck up a writing collaboration during the Café Society album--he wrote the music for the title tune--and worked together closely on Language and Ages. He was a huge part of this album, both his extraordinary playing, the way he arranged 'Perugia' and 'Peculiar Universe,' and his composing of course. As I said on the song comments on my site, my favorite writing experience with Russ doing this last project was the way I gave him my concept for 'The Girl with the Lazy Eye' and he wrote something entirely different in the middle of the night before we were to get together, music that sounded a hundred years old. He's a beautiful soul as well as being ridiculously talented.

"One thing I love about all these guys I have a working chemistry with, is that they're so droll."

What about the individual musicians who perform on Ages?

"Michael Valerio is a treasure. I met him years ago when the late, dear and great Dave Carpenter was unavailable for a session. Mike contributed so many ideas during the Ages sessions.  For example, he played a harmony on the opening figure of 'How Did We End Up Here?' that was not planned, and when the arrangement called for him to drop out at the end of 'Two Desperate Women' he started whacking the bass as another percussion part.

"I don't remember the first time I worked with Gregg Field but as with all the guys it kind of feels like forever. Gregg specializes in the ultra-tasty swing grooves. He's producer-ly at the session and really listens, and he's great at picking up on little nuances in the singer's phrasing. He's married to Monica Mancini and knows how to accompany a singer. He was with Frank Sinatra for some years. You can tell.

"Mike Shapiro, the other Ages drummer, is known for the Brazilian thing, works or has worked with Lani Hall and Herb Alpert, with Sergio [Mendes], Dori Caymmi ... but he does a lot more than that. He also listens closely and is highly inventive. The entire ending of 'Old at 18/Dog Bowl' was left loose, and what they came up with on the first take was perfect. Mike is devoted to the music, cares a lot, and grooves like nobody's business.

"I've known Grant Geissman for a long, long, time, over a quarter-century. He's one of those people who keeps expanding as he gets older, as evidenced by his CD Cool Man Cool (Open All Nite/Futurism Records, 2009). He's done a lot of studio work but Grant is a serious jazz player, as all the world knows, and you can always depend on him to be right in the pocket, solo creatively, everything you could want from a guitarist.

"Warren Luening is what you might call an unsung hero on trumpet, but he is 'sung,' meaning a lot of people know how great he is. I had never met him before the date. Eddie recommended him and I was so glad he could do it. He seems to play so effortlessly but with such chops. Bob Leatherbarrow is somebody I've known for decades, he's terrific on both drums and vibes. He and my husband Tony played together with Peggy Lee.

"And as far as Tony goes, he helped a lot this time out on many of the tunes, either laying down a groove for songwriting purposes or actually playing--trash can and dog bowl! He plays these funky little patterns on various objects... when Sterling and Brava hear the dog bowl groove they know it's dinnertime."

The Lyricist's Craft

When Lorraine Feather has written lyrics for a Fats Waller or Duke Ellington tune, the musical foundation was there for her, a structure on which to build. But when she writes the lyrics first, then hands the piece over to a musical collaborator, the lyrics are the rhythmic foundation. Does she hear music when she writes the lyrics? Is there a metrical or harmonic structure that is a kind of rudimentary composition?

"That's a good question. I don't remember having been asked it before, or quite that way. In the case of an up-tempo tune I usually have either a template, something I listen to or think of when writing the lyrics, or just a rhythm. With 'A Lot to Remember' it was Charlie Christian's 'Waiting for Benny,' but as Eddie and I worked through it, the character changed a lot from the vibe of the Christian tune. The talking thing at the beginning just came to me off the top of my head. With 'How Did We End Up Here?' it was a rumba groove my husband Tony recorded at home, but in the studio, it seemed to want to go a different way and that's part of the fun of making an album. Gregg Field once helped me out by recording a dozen grooves."

And when she first gives a set of lyrics to Russell Ferrante or Eddie Arkin or Shelly Berg, how would that conversation go? Each is already aware of her vocal range, what she is comfortable with and what she likes. How much "instruction" does she give them?

"We work through it in person for the most part. If something is going to an awkward place for me vocally I let them know and they finesse the melody one way or the other. It's pretty organic."

But her composer/collaborators must at some point move beyond parameters and just compose music. One of the most memorable melodies on Ages was written in the middle of the night, with no input at all from Feather, by a jet-lagged Russell Ferrante. The composition, which is reminiscent of Scott Joplin or James P. Johnson, took Feather by surprise. What does she tell a collaborator in advance, and what doesn't she tell him?

"I might tell them how I envision the track starting or ask what they think of such-and-such idea or mood. If a verse seems too long or short or a line does, I adapt. A song takes on a life of its own. That experience with Russ was kind of an eye-opener. It made me realize that sometimes I should just shut up."

Who are some of the lyricists who have inspired her along the way?

"Stephen Sondheim is literally without peer and always inspiring. Johnny Mercer, of course. There are certain songs by certain writers that I think of all the time, particular lines in them especially. Joni Mitchell in 'Down to You': 'Old friends seem indifferent/You must have brought that on'; Suzanne Vega's 'Ironbound/Fancy Poultry': 'Backs are cheap and wings are nearly free.' Prince has written some killer lines that I thought were so funny in a camp way."

What about Feather's own lyrics? She is quite candid about her opinions of her music, and freely critiques it for anyone who can take it. What does she truly like of her own work?

" 'Antarctica' from Such Sweet Thunder. I really was pleased with [the line] 'I cried all night/That's half a year.' 'We Appreciate Your Patience,' which I wrote with Shelly Berg, for Language; 'How Did We End Up Here?' and 'The Girl with the Lazy Eye' from Ages, with Eddie Arkin and Russell Ferrante, respectively.

"I can't divorce the lyrics from the music, and there are some songs that I feel are most wedded to the music my co-writers created. Or there might be some odd line or phrase that was fun to sing and took more practice than usual, like 'Connecticut prep school' [from the song, 'Scrabble']."

'I Always Had a Thing for You' is a simple tune that is a paean to emotional honesty. What about the emotional release a writer feels from successful lyrical expression?

"It's very satisfying, sometimes upsetting along the way of course. There are some songs I couldn't sing through without crying the first dozen or so times, or I'd have to dig my fingernails into my hand in the studio. I also enjoy cracking myself up, or my co-writers.

"I definitely feel most balanced when I've been writing, whether the song is about me strictly speaking, or not."

How Did We End Up Here?

A few years ago Lorraine Feather, her husband Tony and their dogs Sterling and Brava moved from the San Francisco Bay area to the San Juan Islands, there to float in the idyllic Strait of Juan de Fuca between Washington State's Olympic Peninsula and Vancouver Island. The answer to the question she poses in her tune "How Did We End Up Here?" sounds rhetorical if the best you've ever seen is Martha's Vineyard or Long Island, but when you've seen these islands, the answer is easy: "How Could You Live Anywhere Else?" It is one of the most beautiful places in North America.

Don't tell anybody.

True, there are no Jewish delicatessens, no nightclubs, not even cab service. Having no garbage disposal or trash pickup is a bitch ("We go to the Solid Waste Disposal place twice a month to throw our trash bags into the communal reeking pile," she says). On the other hand, there's the panoramic view of the Pacific Ocean and the deer who show up for a breakfast graze on your lawn in the mornings.

To make a record date in L.A., you have to be willing to endure a full day of traveling, including a slow ferry ride or lurching flight on a puddle-jumper to SEA/TAC. And once in the Big Orange, you have to listen tolerantly to the incredulous taunts of people who can't believe you don't even have pizza delivery.

But life is sometimes better seen from an acute angle.

Are Feather's intellectual approach and precision of language a barrier to her as a recording artist? Is the problem that there is a small audience, or is it, as with much of jazz, just a matter of getting record companies to give it enough exposure through aggressive marketing?

"There is a small audience all right. It's difficult for a singer-songwriter in jazz, too, unless you have that aggressive marketing behind you, but I love doing it and I don't care. In my case, my albums have also been a calling card for me as a writer and led to my being hired as a lyricist on different occasions. And hey, you never know when a song will be licensed for something. Hmm, I wonder if a studio ever made that movie of the book Word Freak (Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players)

. . .?"

Selected Discography

Lorraine Feather, Attachments (Jazzed Media, 2013)

Lorraine Feather, Tales of the Unusual (Jazzed Media, 2012)

Lorraine Feather, Fourteen (Relarion Records, 2012)

Lorraine Feather, Ages (Jazzed Media, 2010)

Real Divas, Café Society (Factor, 2010)

Lorraine Feather, Language (Jazzed Media, 2008)

Lorraine Feather, Dooji Wooji (Sanctuary, 2005)

Ernie Watts, Spirit Song (Flying Dolphin, 2005)

Lorraine Feather, Such Sweet Thunder (Sanctuary, 2004)

Original Soundtrack, The Princess Dairies 2: Royal Engagement (Walt Disney, 2004)

Carmen Bradford, Home with You (Azica, 2004)

Lorraine Feather, Café Society (Sanctuary, 2003)

Original Soundtrack, The Jungle Book 2 (Walt Disney, 2003)

Lorraine Feather, New York City Drag (Rhombus, 2001)

Lorraine Feather, The Body Remembers (Bean Bag, 1997)

Jesseye Norman, Brava, Jessye! (Philips, 1996)

Cleo Laine, Solitude (RCA, 1995)

Phyllis Hyman, I Refuse to Be Lonely (BMG, 1995)

Eric Marienthal, Street Dance (GRP, 1994)

Michael Feinstein, Forever (Elektra, 1993)

Better Midler, For the Boys (Atlantic, 1991)

Patti Austin, Love Is Gonna Getcha (Verve, 1990)

Carl Anderson, Pieces of a Heart (Verve, 1990)

Djavan, Puzzle of Hearts (CBS, 1989)

Barry Manilow, Swing Street (BMG, 1987)

Grand Funk Railroad, Caught in the Act (Capitol, 1975)