It was a rough summer. In fact, truth be told, it’s been a damn rough year and a half. I’m trying to get through a divorce and all the financial chaos that comes with it, I’m licking my wounds after a badly broken heart, I’ve been looking (unsuccessfully) for a straight job for 18 months and I’m seriously low on bread. To top off the sad tale: I’m stumbling around trying to figure out how to parent this mystifying creature that is my teenager son, (not to mention his 11 year-old brother) and my much beloved dog and running companion is dying from cancer. In the big world of human hardship, I know that none of this is unique. In fact as far as human misery goes, my pain is relatively benign. I’m not in some Third World country, clutching my starving children to my breast and waving flies away from their faces, while political rebels burn down my village. All the same, my particular scene feels pretty dark and lonely. A lot is happening at once, and I’m only one woman. Thusly, when the landscape is bleak, and it’s everything she can do to drag her heart through another day, a woman will latch on to whatever comfort she can, no matter how seemingly small. Here is where Ms. Carmen McRae walked in.
It was never a matter of not liking Carmen McRae for me. That was never the situation at all. Carmen was always OK to me, and I even had one or two of her CD’s in my collection. It was just that other singers, like Anita O’Day and Sarah Vaughan for example, resonated with me more. There was something accessible that drew me to them and held me there. I think a lot of it had to do with scat. Carmen just wasn’t much on my radar until this summer. My birthday, which was in June, was a particularly low day for me. Birthdays lend themselves to reflection, and everything I looked at hurt, especially the fact that my baby wasn’t with me anymore. Man blues on your birthday particularly suck. Anyway, I was hanging out with my teacher and good friend, who I might mention is the baddest of the bad- ass jazz vocalists around. She and I sat on her couch and she made me a couple of CD’s with all kinds of hip music on them, including several Carmen McRae tunes. I went home, loaded the tunes into my i-Pod and put on my headphones for the next 3 or 4 months. The music she gave me that day……more specifically the Carmen McRae songs she gave me that day……became the soundtrack for my broken heart and long, lonesome summer. I was particularly drawn to the Live at Ratso’s recordings from 1976. Precisely because these were live recordings, I was able to fully realize the core essence of Carmen McRae and to really understand her gift for laying it all out and making an authentic connection with the people she was singing to. The intimacy between Carmen and her audience was palpable to me. 20 something years after these recordings, I listened, mesmerized and comforted. Some of the tunes- Would You Believe, A Letter for Anna Lee, Tain’t Nobody’s Business and Lost up in Loving You gave me the sense that my pain wasn’t unique and that the heavy boulders I’ve been carrying have been carried by eons of women before me. It felt like an old broad who had seen it all was reaching through time to speak to me. It might have well have been Ratso’s in 2008. The sense of connection was that profound. Even though Carmen is long gone, she hangs out with me every day like a knowing sister or a laid back guardian angel.
Summer has rolled into autumn now. The trees are turning. Their leaves are popping in bold and vibrant colors. The wheel has made another revolution through time. Pain takes many shapes and forms, and its intensity ebbs and flows. There is no linear path to healing really. Circumstances change or don’t. Life continues either way. But singing offers refuge and release. If I can embody the rhythm, swing hard and lean into the scat, then I am truly happy. But I’ve found more. It’s about crawling inside of the music and singing with heart, honesty and courage. I don’t mean belting out a tune with a sentimental, self-help kind of approach that makes people uncomfortable. Instead, it’s more like pulling up a seat, exhaling and sharing the experience as I see it. Some things about the human heart and condition are timeless and because of that, there is something immensely healing in the simple act of testimony. It's not about being good or bad but about being true. It’s about telling the story, just like Carmen did.
