Karrin Allyson :Karrin's Got the Blues

KARRIN'S GOT THE BLUES
by Marshall Bowden

Download In Blue & Karrin's other albums at Emusic!!

Karrin Allyson is on a roll. Her last recording, Ballads: Remembering John Coltrane landed her a Grammy nomination, and her latest release In Blue debuted at #2 on the Billboard Jazz Charts. While these two releases have brought her wider recognition, Allyson's career has been on a steady upward arc since her first recording, 1992's I Didn't Know About You won her acclaim in the annual Downbeat Reader's Poll, landing her name alongside those of Ella Fitzgerald and Shirley Horn.

What's set Karrin apart from the pack of female jazz singers from the outset is her ability to perform all of the facets of the modern jazz and vocal repertoire with equal ability. She showed right away that she could handle the standards and the Great American Songbook numbers like "Nature Boy", "'S Wonderful" and "It Might As Well Be Spring." Yet she also tackled interesting fare like "Chopin Prelude Op. 28 No. 4/Insensitive" and "It Could Happen to You/Fried Bananas." She demonstrated that she could cover the classic bebop tunes—"Donna Lee", "Joy Spring", "How High the Moon/Ornithology"—and in the process revealed a talent for scat and vocalese that didn't rely on clichés or on trying to sound like a horn. "I don't think about it that much, but I know that's correct, that I don't try to sound like any kind of horn" she confirms during our phone interview conducted between performance stops in Seattle and San Francisco. "I mostly think, when I'm improvising, of making up another melody. I think trying to sound like a horn, for me, draws more attention to that person rather than making the music happen. And vocalese, I just try, especially when we're doing a lot of stuff together—like my guitarist and I do a lot of bebop lines toether, or "Naima" or something—just to blend in, being another horn player, yet it's my voice, it's not trying to sound like anything else."

Karrin also showed that she could sing in a variety of languages (French, Spanish, and Portuguese) as well as displaying a talent for the French cabaret songs and Brazilian bossa numbers that make up the recording From Paris to Rio. Her performances of songs like "Corcovado" and " O Barquinho" display a relaxed, native sense of rhythm that is often missing from other American interpreters' versions. "I love Brazilian music" she says point blank. "In fact, when people ask me my influences I always regret not saying some of those things, Elis Regina is one of my favorites and so many other newer Brazilian singers, and the groove is so intoxicating. Danny Embrey, my guitarist, used to play with Sergio Mendes and he turned me on to a log to Brazilian stuff, and his feel for that, I find it very authentic. We try when we do Brazilian material to make it as authentic as we can as Americans, and yeah, I love that music very much."

Allyson grew up in Omaha, NE and the San Francicsco Bay area before attending college at the University of Nebraska, where she was a classical piano major. "My mom was a musician, so she taught us piano as young girls, my two sisters and I. She also was a teacher, and she was involved in the church 'cause my father was a minister, and so when she would direct kids' choirs she said she could always count on me to open my mouth and produce a sound. And so, I enjoyed singing all those years but I never really took it seriously until, I guess college, really, or maybe right before college. But I dabbled with singer/songwriter sutff like, you know, buying sheet music for songs that I liked by Carly Simon, Joni Mitchell or something like that. And that's when I started the process of singing I guess, instead of just playing." She says that she discovered jazz in college when some fellow students played jazz recordings. "One in particular I remember is Nancy Wilson & Cannonball Adderley…I loved that music and started to experiment with those songs." The Allyson household was obviously full of interesting sounds, with her mother playing jazz records and her father listening to "Simon & Garfunkel and things like that." It seems to have given Karrin an incredibly open set of ears and the ability to hear a good song regardless of its genre. Like Cassandra Wilson and some of the other newer jazz singers out there, Karrin doesn't limit herself to the great American Songbook, tackling tunes written in the last 50 years with as much seriousness and enthusiasm as anything in her repertoire. On In Blue she tackles the music of Oscar Brown, Jr. ("Long As You're Living" and "Hum Drum Blues"), Mose Allison ("Everybody's Cryin' Mercy"), Bobby Troup ("The Meaning of the Blues"), Joni Mitchell ("Blue Motel Room") and "Love Me Like a Man", which was recorded by Bonnie Raitt.

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