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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 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)