Spotlight: Gretchen Parlato
N.E.R.D. centered synesthesia in this year's pop musical conscious but Gretchen Parlato featured the sensory experience in a buoyant lyric she penned to legendary jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter's "Juju" in 2005. Included on her essential debut, and written at film scorer and jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard's behest, it reflected the concentrated wisdom Parlato brings to musicking.
Long enamored with the sounds of Brazil and, in recent years, transplanted listeners to West Africa with frequent collaborator Blue Note guitarist Lionel Loueke, her influences range from folk to New Wave to R&B to the jazz vocalists Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Nancy Wilson. In fact, her pared down cover of the Michael Jackson hit, "I Can't Help It", is a case study in genre transcendence and interpretative brilliance.
I spoke to the 32 year-old jazz singer back in the winter, a few weeks after photographing her trio at a quaint West Village date. In the two seasons since, she has toured Australia, opened for Bobby McFerrin at Carnegie Hall, recorded and performed with Esperanza Spalding, the young jazz bassist with both Bill Cosby and Questlove's imprimaturs, taken a brief medical hiatus, recovered and scored a record deal with ObliqSound.
To my delight, she is back at the mic and tonight begins a two night stint at lower Manhattan's Jazz Gallery to be followed by a flurry of dates, concentrated here in the New York area, the Southern California native's home since the summer of 2003. So what better time to share edited excerpts of our conversation, which surveyed her early augties tenure at the Thelonious Monk Institute, her pop, Brazilian and African influences and her thoughts on the future of jazz.
VIBE: I loved the lyric that you wrote for "Juju/Footprints." I was wondering if you could speak to your creative process in writing that lyric and if you were at all intimidated by the task?
Parlato: To be honest, yes. When it first was assigned to me, it was actually an assignment of Terence Blanchard. This came about when I was in the Thelonious Monk Institute and Terence Blanchard is the Artistic Director. As a band, we were going to perform a Wayne Shorter composition and someone in the band said, "Let's play "Juju," that would be fun." Then Terence said, "OK Gretchen, why don't you write some lyrics."
Luckily though, Wayne Shorter had been scheduled to work with us for three days in the Institute so I was able to gather a lot of knowledge and ideas and inspiration from that time. When I sat down to write these lyrics, they just spilled out and I used different ideas that he had discussed. Like the first part, "When the wind blows sounds of yellow all around," was relating to how he talked about that term synesthesia. Somebody would play a chord in the band and he'd say, "Oh, that's yellow," or "That's orange." He would associate certain colors to different moods. I was thinking, I think I do that all the time without realizing it, I think we all do, so I wanted to use that idea in the lyrics.
[Wayne Shorter] talked about many things in that time, not just about music. But one thing that he mentioned was that he said, "You know, people spend a lot of time searching for gold, digging for gold but there is a lot that you can do with silver and more you can do with tin." I liked that idea and then in the last line of the song I just made a reference to "Footprints," which is one of his main compositions so I said "his footprints will lead us to find our own voices in our own time" [on] how his inspiration leads us to figure out who we are as artists and people and in our own time.
Can you speak to your engagement of world music, for lack of a better word?
I come from a musical family. Everyone is a musician or an artist of some kind in my family. All of this started from home being exposed to different kinds of music from all over the world, even when I was younger. Especially with vocalists, there are so many interesting ways that vocalists have used their voice all around the world, different techniques and different methods of learning, that it's just really fascinating to me.
I used to sing a lot more Brazilian music but now I throw it in. I made more of conscious choice to sing more in English and write more lyrics that I was really connected to and to make what I do much more personal in approach. You relate to music in a certain way when it's your own language. I'll save the other things for icing on the cake.
How did you meet Lionel Loueke and how did you start working together?
We met when we both auditioned for the Thelonious Monk Institute. Luckily, we both were selected to be in the ensemble so from there we just spent almost every day together in the ensemble playing music and getting to know each other. We just developed this tight chemistry and rapport but it wasn't until the ensemble was finished that we decided to start playing as a duo. It was right when we were finished that we thought we should go into the studio and record some songs just to document them and something happened. We both happened to be moving to New York and that's when it began to develop. We would have shows together and we would play together all the time. He says I'm his musical twin sister, which is funny because we look completely opposite. [It's great] when you find somebody like that, somebody that completes your sentences musically, or someone that complements you, can be so opposite, but complements you in a way that no one else can.
Your version of "I Can't Help It" is incredible and I know you also covered Bjork on your debut, how did you come to those songs?
I think what happens is there are so many different styles of music that I am inspired by so there is a part of me that wants to incorporate those different genres into what I do. With the Stevie Wonder song--which I didn't even know he wrote until I looked it up on the chart, we all know it as a Michael Jackson song--I just thought I could do this. But obviously I'm not Michael Jackson, I'm not Stevie Wonder, it's not going to sound like either of them but maybe there is a way that I can do this song, take it apart and piece it back together in my own way. That's been my goal with anything is to really just make it my own, kind of deconstruct it and then reconstruct it into my own arrangement, my own song, my own voice.
With Bjork, that song I've always loved, "Come to Me." The lyric is very nurturing. It was just thinking of a way to do that song that pays tribute to what the original artist did but then definitely turning it into something that is only possible to do if you are singing from your own honest open place. I think I'll always do that. I'll always try to find some pop songs that I love and try to think of a way to do them that puts my stamp on it.
I'm wondering what your thoughts are on the relationship between jazz and other genres, mainly pop?
It just seems like nowadays jazz is such a vast category of music. It makes it really possible for a lot of artists to incorporate all other kinds of music that they've grown up with. This is what I do and I know that so many artists, especially of my generation or a little bit older and a little bit younger, do because we're all this MTV generation. There are so many kinds of styles that we all listen to and that we're all influenced by. And that's really how jazz can move forward, to take with it this other kind of music. That's the key to keeping it forward-moving and fresh and creating something that we don't even know how to categorize yet.
Gretchen Parlato performs at the Jazz Gallery in New York City tonight and tomorrow at 9 pm and 10:30 pm.. For more dates, check her MySpace page.
Photo Details: Gretchen Parlato at the Neighborhood Church of Greenwich Village, 11.09.07 (J. Burrell)
Tags: Gretchen Parlato, Jazz
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