Monday, February 21, 2022

This Beloved Houston Musician Recorded a Prince Tribute Album Before She Died — And It’s Finally Finished

An entire unreleased album of Prince covers by late great Houston jazz singer Kellye Gray drops tomorrow. Kellye did reach out to me when my book Freedom of Expression: Interviews With Women in Jazz came out, and man, do I regret missing the opportunity to interview her for that project. She's a hell of a singer with so many stories to tell. Big thank you to Lucy Anderson, Henry Darragh and David Craig for taking time to speak with me about Kellye and her artistry

Here is what I wrote about Kellye for Houston CityBook

IN 2018, WHEN Dallas-born, Houston-based jazz singer Kellye Gray went into the EAR Studio in Austin to record Purple Gray: A Prince Offering, an entire album of songs by Prince, she did not know it would be her last project. In early December of that year, shortly after tracking eight of Prince’s songs, Gray was diagnosed with breast cancer, and a few weeks later, she was gone.

For fans of Gray’s inimitable, no holds barred style of singing, the loss was devastating, and her swan song, Purple Gray was stuck in limbo. Until now.

Set for digital release on Feb. 22, which would have been Gray’s 68th birthday, Purple Gray will finally see the light of day, thanks to the efforts of Gray’s close friend and soulmate Lucy Anderson. In March 2019, after over a year of mourning, Anderson and audio engineer Erich Avinger got to work, using email correspondence between Gray and Avinger as a guide for mixing and mastering the album. Given the fact that for several years Anderson and Gray were inseparable, listening back to Gray’s deeply felt singing on such iconic Prince ballads as “The Beautiful Ones” and “Nothing Compares To U” wasn’t easy. “It was gut wrenching, actually,” says Anderson. “Finishing the album didn’t happen without a lot of tears and tissues.”

Born in Dallas in 1954, Gray came through a rough childhood, including a period of time during which she and her siblings lived in an orphanage after their parents divorced. She picked up the guitar in her teens, and later became a part of Houston’s improv comedy scene, where she shared the stage with Sam Kinison and Bill Hicks, and used her voice to create sound effects, similar in spirit to the scat vocals of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. Gray gradually built a reputation as a powerful singer and riveting live performer, whose diverse repertoire included jazz standards, Burt Bacharach ballads, gutbucket blues numbers and vintage country songs.


Meanwhile, Gray’s live performances and in-between song banter became the stuff of legend. Growing up gay in a less enlightened time in Texas, and dealing with the sexist, misogynistic behavior of male jazz musicians gave Gray a hard edge, though audiences both gay and straight simply saw her as strong woman who happened to be a superb musician. “She could really work an audience,” confirms Houston bassist David Craig, who played and toured with Gray for many years. “She could be scathing and just rip people up, but she could also be really sweet and engaging. And once she got the crowd in the palm of her hands, that was it.” Houston pianist and vocalist Henry Darragh met Gray at Cezanne in 2004, and quickly became a fan and a friend. “As a vocalist, Kellye was powerful and dynamic, and very adventurous,” says Darragh, whose original ballad “My Friend Kellye” pays tribute to Gray’s gentler side.

With songs ranging from Prince’s biggest hits (“Kiss”) and deep cuts (“All The Critics Love U In New York”), Purple Gray is a both celebration of Gray’s artistry, and a heartfelt tribute to another musical genius who left this world too soon. “Kellye was a visionary,” says Anderson. “Very tuned in and empathetic, with a contagious, childlike enthusiasm, which is why people loved her.”


Friday, February 18, 2022

Welcome!



Photo of Connie Crothers by Peter Gannushkin

After a few years of minimal activity, I am relaunching this blog to promote my book, Freedom of Expression: Interviews With Women in Jazz, and create an expansive platform for all of my music writing, which explores jazz, blues, rock, classical and contemporary classical music and the avant-garde. 

Details about and excerpts from the interviews in my book are here, and several articles I have written for Houston CityBookHoustoniaCulturemap HoustonAcoustic GuitarHouston PressSequenza 21 and Los Angeles Review of Books are available here

Thank you for visiting!

Sunday, January 6, 2019

18th Annual Trinity Jazz Festival: Celebrating Women in Jazz


18th Annual Trinity Jazz Festival
Sat, January 26, 2019
6:00 PM – 10:00 PM CST
Trinity Church
1015 Holman Street
Houston, Texas 77004

6:00 PM - CD Release Party with Interview by Chris Becker, author of Freedom of Expression: Interviews with Women in Jazz.

7:00 PM - 18th Annual Trinity Jazz Festival, celebrating Women in Jazz.

Opening Act: Houston Jewels of Jazz, featuring vocalists Yvonne Washington, Mickey Moseley and Ermelinda Cuellat, with Erin Wright- bass; Bob Henschen- piano.

Headliner: Pianist Helen Sung, debuting her first vocal CD, Sung With Words, and her New York quintet: Kendrick Scott - drums; David Wong- bass; Samuel Torres-percussion; John Ellis- saxophone; Christie Dashiel, vocals.

>> Tickets

Saturday, December 29, 2018

Helen Sung at the 2019 Trinity Jazz Festival


Looking ahead to January . . . as part of the 2019 Trinity Jazz Festival, I will be talking LIVE before a gathered audience to the festival's headliner, Houston-born pianist and composer Helen Sung. We'll discuss the genesis of her excellent new jazz and poetry album, Sung With Words, which includes Houston's own Kendrick Scott on the drums. More on this as the date approaches. (Helen Sung is one of the 37 musicians interviewed in my book Freedom of Expression: Interviews With Women in Jazz.)

Sat, January 26, 2019
6:00 PM – 10:00 PM CST
Trinity Church
1015 Holman Street
Houston, Texas 77004

6:00 PM - CD Release Party with Interview by Chris Becker, author of Freedom of Expression: Interviews with Women in Jazz.

7:00 PM - 18th Annual Trinity Jazz Festival, celebrating Women in Jazz.

Opening Act: Houston Jewels of Jazz, featuring vocalists Yvonne Washington, Mickey Moseley and Ermelinda Cuellat, with Erin Wright- bass; Bob Henschen- piano.

Headliner: Pianist Helen Sung, debuting her first vocal CD, Sung With Words, and her New York quintet: Kendrick Scott - drums; David Wong- bass; Samuel Torres-percussion; John Ellis- saxophone; Christie Dashiel, vocals.

Tuesday, July 17, 2018

Eleanora Fagen: b. April 7, 1915. d. July 17, 1959.


Eleanora Fagen. It's a name one might come across in the pages of a novel by Emily Brontë
or Charles Dickens. Born in 1915, Fagan would take the stage name Billie Holiday and change the course of American music.

Singer Dee Dee Bridgewater describes Holiday as ". . . a groundbreaking singer. Her style was extremely unique. Very avant-garde. She refused to go the way of other singers of her time. She was a vocalist who made it possible for singers like me to carve out a career for themselves." Frank Sinatra, who readily acknowledged Holiday's influence on his own singing, put it simply: "With few exceptions, every major pop singer in the U.S. during her generation has been touched in some way by her genius. It is Billie Holiday who was, and still remains, the greatest single influence on me." In addition to "standing up for her individuality" and making a career for herself against incredible odds, including segregation and racism, Holiday, in Bridgewater's words, "went down fighting." (Excerpted from Freedom of Expression: Interviews With Women in Jazz.)

Tuesday, February 27, 2018

Houston Singer Jacqui Sutton brings "Un-Cross Talk" to MATCH, March 16 and 17

Houston singer and bandleader Jacqui Sutton premieres her new project "Un-Cross Talk: Jazz and Blues Slip n' Slide Together Houston Style" at MATCH, March 16 and 17. "Un-Cross Talk" is described as "a semi-theatrical, multi-media immersive musical experience that seeks to make urban and rural America talk 'with' one another, instead of 'across' from each other; hence the title 'Un-Cross Talk.'" Sutton is one of the 37 musicians I interview in my book Freedom of Expression: Interviews With Women in Jazz. Here is the introduction to and an excerpt from that conversation.

Jacqui Sutton (Photo by Richard Tomcala)

When it comes to realizing one’s musical potential, a musician must cut his or her own path. The journey is never straightforward and certainly doesn’t unfold within the prescribed timeline of a four-year degree program. Interestingly, across all artistic disciplines, coming into one’s own is commonly described as “finding your own voice.”

The beginning of singer Jacqui Sutton’s musical journey can be traced back to the 1960s when she, along with her siblings and mother (“newly single, and pregnant with her sixth child”), relocated from Orlando, Florida, to Rochester, New York. At the end of the final decade of what author Isabel Wilkerson calls “America’s great migration,”65 over six million black citizens had relocated from the South to northern and western states. The 1969 Supreme Court decision Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education ruled “school districts must immediately terminate dual school systems based on race and operate only unitary school systems.”

Integration also found its way into popular music, in bands like Sly and the Family Stone, or the influence of the Beatles’ track “Eleanor Rigby” on Stevie Wonder’s “Village Ghetto Land” from his conceptual masterpiece Songs in the Key of Life. And like the Fab Four from Liverpool, Sutton explains that during this time, “I found myself drawn to experiences that were the opposite of my own.”67 You can hear what she’s talking about on her first album, Billie and Dolly, a tribute to two of her favorite singers and biggest influences, Billie Holiday and Dolly Parton. Her second album, Notes From the Frontier: A Musical Journey (That word again!), expands her repertoire to include Appalachian songs, classical composition, and jazz standards in inventive musical settings Sutton
describes as “a stylistic mash-up of jazz, bluegrass, and orchestral/chamber music.” Sutton’s singing is similarly multifaceted and sits comfortably in an ensemble that forgoes traditional jazz instrumentation to include banjo, cello, and hand percussion.

In addition to being just fun to listen to, Sutton’s conceptual approach to music making is part of a continuum of jazz as once described by the great Jelly Roll Morton as a music that uses ideas drawn from operas, symphonies, and overtures. Add Appalachian ballads, country music, and rural blues to that list and you get an idea of what Sutton and her band, the Frontier Jazz Orchestra, are able to pull off on record and in live performance. Finding one’s voice can mean finding the threads that tie together seemingly disparate influences in a way that transcends modern-day pastiche and resonates with a similarly diverse cross-section of listeners.

Here’s a quote from you I got from your biography. I’m taking it out of context. “In many ways, I feel grateful that I’ve discovered my voice now rather than when I was in my 20s. All those years languishing in oblivion forced me to respond to music in a more mature way.” Can you talk to me a little more about discovering your voice now as opposed to when you were in your 20s or right out of high school?

While I was going through it, I was incredibly frustrated. I didn’t think I would ever be a singer or put something together like the Frontier Jazz Orchestra. With the exception of studying flute as a kid—I had a very short career on the flute in elementary school—I didn’t study music. I didn’t study in high school, I didn’t study in college. I didn’t really start to study until I was like 23 or 24.

I have a low speaking voice. I auditioned for this vocal jazz ensemble called Jazz Mouth and I got in; I don’t know how! I still to this day don’t know how Molly Holm cast me in that jazz ensemble. But she said, “Okay, now you gotta study!” So I did, but I kept getting miscast as an alto, because of my speaking voice and because I didn’t know any better. I was always trying to sing as an alto, and doing that gave me a lot of bad habits. So after about 10 years of studying, I moved to New York in my mid-30s and found a voice teacher who said, “You are a soprano. Now we don’t know what kind of soprano. Yet. But you’re a soprano.” [laughs] So I had to retrain.

While I was singing, I was also an actor. I did classical theater, I did Shakespeare, and I did a lot of musical theater and experimental theater. Once I discovered acting, I said, “You know, acting is so much more rewarding and I’m frustrated with singing.” So I dropped singing and did acting for many years. It wasn’t until I moved to New York in the mid to late 90s that I took up voice again. And that was when I discovered I was a soprano.

After I moved here to Houston, I met my voice teacher, Cynthia Clayton. Cynthia sings with the Houston Grand Opera and she teaches as well. She’s a professor of vocal performance at the University of Houston. She got my voice to open up more. It wasn’t until I started studying with Cynthia that I enjoyed singing. Before then it was all terror. Something drove me to do it, but it was always terrifying, so I never had any confidence.

While studying with Cynthia, I released my first CD, Billie and Dolly.

So finding a teacher who understood your voice and how you should sing, did that coincide with you beginning to explore repertoire that includes both Billie Holiday and Dolly Parton? And did singing that material help you with the process of finding your voice?

That’s a good question. I think it was all kind of happening at the same time. I had been listening to jazz and bluegrass since I was in my early 20s. Both of the sounds had always been in my head. I think a lot of frustration I felt was because I didn’t want to be pigeonholed into either. Each style seemed to have a specific vocal approach that I was not sure how to handle. So I didn’t really pursue it.

I will tell you that the songs I selected for Billie and Dolly were all songs I always liked personally. From Dolly Parton’s “Endless Stream of Tears” to Billie Holiday’s “God Bless the Child” to “A Sleepin’ Bee.” “A Sleepin’ Bee” is a song that my teacher in New York tortured me with! I loved it so much but I didn’t have the chops to sing it. And when I finally got the chops to sing it, I said, “I want to do this song!” And it actually fit! It fit as a Frontier Jazz song. So my repertoire includes songs that I’ve been singing forever but had just been technically trying to master. Others are songs that I just emotionally connected with.

Is there a bridge, some commonalities between jazz and bluegrass that you use in your singing?

Absolutely. It is so integral to who I am. I mean, Frontier Jazz is saying “you all think you’re so different, but you have a voice together.”

First of all, they’re both uniquely American art forms. There is precedent for the two forms making out! [laughs] Making out musically! They’ve been on parallel tracks in my head for so long that I did not ever want to separate them. But I can tell you that people get very confused when I say I’m blending jazz and bluegrass together. One reviewer said (and I’m paraphrasing), “It’s curious on paper, but it makes total sense once you hear it.” And I think that’s what’s been part of the trajectory is getting people to understand that these two musical forms have a lot in common.

Jacqui Sutton and the Frontier Jazz Orchestra present "Un-Cross Talk" March 16-17 at MATCH, 3400 Main Street. 713-521-4533. matchouston.org

Sunday, January 14, 2018

A Brief HERstory of Jazz: The Singers at The Jung Center of Houston, March 28, 7:30 p.m.

Tianna Hall (Photo by Pin Lim)

On Wednesday, March 28 at 7:30 p.m. at The Jung Center of Houston, I will present a lecture with live music by jazz singer Tianna Hall. The lecture, titled A Brief HERstory of Jazz: The Singers. Here is the description of the event from The Jung Center of Houston website:

From Bessie Smith, to Billie Holiday, to Dee Dee Bridgewater, jazz singers have not only shaped the development of the music, but provided a “voice” for the expression of profound joy, righteous anger, and deep sorrow. In this dynamic lecture by writer and composer Chris Becker, with live music performed by Houston jazz singer Tianna Hall, we will consider what defines “jazz” singing, and explore the history and recorded legacy of several iconic female vocalists, including Holiday, one of the most influential singers of the 20th century, who made a career for herself against incredible odds, and Ella Fitzgerald, who singer Jane Monheit describes as “one of the true originators of the art form.”

This presentation is designed for both casual and seasoned jazz fans.

The cost is $20 / $15 for Jung Center members. You can register in advance by phone (713- 524-8253) or online.