Once likened to Billie Holiday, this US artist brings ‘a woman’s touch’ to hit songs by music legend Ray Charles, writes Larry Schwartz.
Madeleine Peyroux prides herself on being “a woman who is self-aware and outspoken” in a male-dominated music industry.
The New York-based jazz singer, who will make her first Port Fairy Folk Festival appearance in March and perform at venues including the Melbourne Recital Centre, says some of the best-known torch songs are written and arranged by men.
“When you hear a woman singing these songs, you might not get a woman’s sensibility because everybody else involved in that project is not a woman,” she says.
Not that she is about to limit herself to songs written or produced by women. “I would certainly find myself with a very, very limited place in terms of what is known,” she says.
The issue “is being able to see a woman as somebody who is at the heart and soul of the material”.
Australian audiences will hear songs from her latest album, The Blue Room, in which she revisits a pioneering 1960s country record by R&B great Ray Charles with a few more contemporary covers.
Charles, who melded gospel and blues, had further challenged genre typecasting when he covered country favourites on his lush, string-laden 1962 Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music and a second volume soon afterwards.
Peyroux sings songs from Charles’ record such as Don Gibson’s I Can’ Stop Loving You, Born to Lose by Frankie Brown and husband-and-wife Boudleaux and Felice Bryant’s Bye Bye Love as well as songs by Randy Newman and Warren Zevon.
She sings the lyrics, she says, from “a woman’s point of view”. The challenge is to sing “in a way that is not innocent about taking responsibility, about having all the same problems and . . . pities that men would like to have”.
The homage to Charles, who died in 2004, was the idea of producer Larry Klein. They had discussed working with Vince Mendoza, who conducts and arranges strings on several Blue Room tracks.
“Ray Charles was a great influence on me even though I haven’t made that obvious until now,” Peyroux says. “I think that he represented great American music for most of my childhood. He sang songs in such an iconic way.”
She once opened for Charles at the North Sea Jazz Festival in Holland. “It was exciting. I had my little dressing room right next to him. I was too timid to go back and meet him.”
She was born in Georgia, in the American south, but moved to Hollywood and New York as a child when her father, a drama teacher who was “a bit too radical for a university institution”, went in search of acting work.
Her father had a “terrible alcoholic problem … Music was the only creative activity that my father didn’t oversee in the house,” she says. “He couldn’t play an instrument; he couldn’t sing. My mother had a baritone ukulele and I had a child’s. We would sit and play together and everybody else was nice and quiet during that time.
“It is the classic idea of soothing the savage beast, you know? Now all I do is figure out if I can soothe my own savage beast, inside my own head.”
Peyroux went to live in Paris with her mother in her early teens and a few years later was touring Europe with the Lost Wandering Blues and Jazz Band, performing songs by Fats Waller, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and others. “I just had to be broken in somehow or other and was with very warm family and friends in that situation. I learnt a lot about music from them as well and showmanship.”
She was compared to Holiday for her acclaimed debut album in 1996.
Peyroux will tour Australia with a New York concertmaster and mostly play with local string quartets. When last in Australia a few years ago, she performed with singers Diana Krall and Melody Gardot.
“Diana Krall was touring with local orchestras in every town and it was so fabulous and exciting. I thought I might be able to do something like that on tour with strings.”
The Age, 18-Nov-2013
Larry Schwartz Writer 