[Dixielandjazz] Catherine Russell interviewed - San Francisco Chronicle, August 6, 2014

[Robert Ringwald]

Catherine Russell Describes Finding Her Voice in Bay Area
by Andrew Gilbert
San Francisco Chronicle, August 6, 2014
For more than two decades, Catherine Russell thrived in the proverbial zone 20 feet
from stars like David Bowie, Paul Simon, Levon Helm, Rosanne Cash and Steely Dan.
But unlike so many of her soulful sisters featured in last year's Academy Award-winning
documentary about backup singers, Russell made the leap into the limelight.
Since the release of her 2006 debut album, "Cat," she's become one of jazz's most
celebrated vocalists, an incandescent performer who can make a century-old blues
song as fresh and bracing as tomorrow's bad news.
What she shares with the generation of singers who transported the power and glory
of the African American church into pop and rock 'n' roll is the crucible of gospel
music. But few people know that Russell found her voice in the Bay Area, where she
arrived by herself as a thrill-seeking 15-year-old in 1972.
She was studying at the College of Alameda a few years later when she joined gospel
music innovator Daryl Coley's New Generation Singers and experienced an epiphany
that continues to shape her approach to singing. Russell returns to the Bay Area
this weekend for a performance Saturday at Yoshi's San Francisco and a Sunday afternoon
set at the San Jose Jazz Summer Fest.
Russell didn't grow up singing in a gospel choir, so when Coley tapped her to sing
lead on "Jesus Christ Is the Way," a song indelibly associated with Tramaine Hawkins,
she felt more than trepidation.
"I was shaking through the whole tune," she recalls. "And then I just left my body.
That was a whole new physical experience of singing. I didn't know how I was going
to get there, but I wanted to find something between that and Etta James."
Before long she was back in New York City, and eventually her twisting musical path
brought her back home to jazz. The daughter of Panamanian-born pianist-composer Luis
Russell, who collaborated with Louis Armstrong throughout the 1930s, she grew up
watching her mother, Julliard-trained bassist-vocalist Carline Ray, play in recording
studios, theaters and jazz clubs. Ray passed away last year at 88, just three months
after the release of her first album, "Vocal Sides," which Russell lovingly produced.
Meanwhile, Russell just keeps getting better. Her latest album, "Bring It Back,"
displays her latest discoveries as a dogged song sleuth with a vast and varied book
of salty blues, swooning ballads, pre-World War II pop tunes and vintage R&B.
"We'll be doing most of the new album, but I like to gather material from the different
shows I do, like a recent production where I was called on to do the Louis Armstrong/Ella
Fitzgerald songbook and my guitarist Matt Munisteri did an arrangement of one of
those," Russell says. "I'm always listening to Louis Armstrong and picking up different
things from him."
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-Bob Ringwald K6YBV
www.ringwald.com
916/ 806-9551

“Don't worry about avoiding temptation. As you grow older, it will avoid you.”
- Winston Churchill