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Karrin's Got the Blues
(Continued)

Speaking of feeling tired and life on the road, Karrin logs a lot of miles on the road and a lot of performances, as even a casual perusal of her schedule at her website, www.karrin.com, will show. One of the more interesting gigs I saw listed there was on the QEII, and I can't help wondering what it's like to travel on a big ship like that and perform along the way. "Rocky!!" exclaims Karrin. "Last year it was very rocky, they hadn't seen that, or at least the QEII hadn't seen that kind of weather in a long time. We were going from NY to Southampton England and just happened to run into three or four days of pretty inclement weather. So that's a challenge, but it's a good escape, I enjoy it. This time we're going to Bermuda…" there is a long pause. "During hurricane season. So, nice knowing you." Still, it must be nice to go to work in the same place for a few nights in a row. "That's cool. As I mentioned, Seattle's Jazz Alley, we were there for six nights and that's good. I've done six nights for two weeks—that's a hard one for a singer, and I used to do six nights a week all the time, four hours a night, but I'm getting to the point where that's, I don't feel, necessary any more. For anybody's sanity, and your instrument, too."

Regardless of the pop tunes, the Brazilian and French numbers, and other styles, Karrin is still very much rooted in jazz, and strongly influenced by the bebop tradition. I ask if she considers bop to have been a high water mark in jazz. Her answer speaks volumes: "Wow, it certainly is something to aspire to. I love bebop, and it's honest, it's challenging, and it's also soulful in its own way, and a whole different kind of harmonic sense…We include a couple of bebop tunes, at least, in a set." With so much ground to cover, those set lists can get pretty long. "The other night we came away from the set and it'd been almost two hours for the second set and my guys were mad at me, but I didn't even notice, so now as a joke my guitarist gave me an alarm clock with huge digital numbers to put on the bandstand. I was thinking the other day that it might be cool to have a week or two in one spot and every night have it be a different thing so you don't feel like you're jumping all over the place…we're not a wedding band!"

I ask Allyson about her influences, both vocalists and instrumenalists. "Elis Regina, Jobim of course, I like some of the French music that we've done. I don't want to sound like a French cabaret artist, but I certainly like the language and I love to experiment with that. I love Nancy King, a great singer from Portland, she's wonderful. I love Mark Murphy, Jon Hendricks, Johnny Hartman, Louis Armstrong, Nat Cole, all kinds of instrumentalists too. Monk, Bill Evans, a lot of horn players, and then of course the usual women singer suspects: Ella Fitzgerald, Carmen McRae, Billie Holiday. I like Sheila Jordan's work. June Christy. I can't say that I've listened to a lot of those white, big band girl singers in my life, although I get compared to them a lot because I'm white, I guess. But I didn't listen to them very much, yet now that I've discovered them later I like them very much. I don't know that I was influenced by them…" Due to her extensive performing schedule, Karrin hasn't had a lot of opportunity to listen to a great deal of new jazz recordings in the past few months, but she and her band did take in a performance by Jeff "Tain" Watts and his group at the Jazz Alley the night before her engagement began. "That's a very modern instrumental approach that I dig, and it makes me feel very inspired."

She recommends that aspiring singers and musicians get out and hear as much live music as they possibly can. "It's an important way of developing your style because your ears are, I think, as important as your instrument." What other advice does she offer? "Get some piano skills. And find your own voice, but don't be so conscious about it, just learn what you can, be open to different folks and styles; or just concentrate on one. I mean, everybody's got their own way of doing it. Just be honest about your approach, try and find a natural thing for you and not somebody else's approach." Those words pretty much sum up Karrin Allyson's career to date. While there have been many female jazz singers to come down the pike in the last ten years or so, not many have the range in terms of material or emotional depth that she displays. Not relying on overblown arrangements to make her statement for her, she instead gets inside the song and offers an interpretation of it just as Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, or Miles Davis might do. She is a jazz musician whose instrument happens to be her voice, not a singer who happens to be playing with jazz musicians. She's experienced the highs and the lows of life as a musician, and she loves it all, the performing and the traveling. "I enjoy the adventure of these different experiences. That's part of this life. When you're listening to a singer or musician I kind of want them to have lived a little and had an experience to give me an experience. And we're doing that."