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Diane Schuur Some Other Time CCD-30614 (USA - Concord Music Group)
UPC: 8-88072-30614-1
HUCD3138 (International - Heads Up International)
UPC: 0-53361-31302-9
Release Date:
February 26, 2008
VOCALIST/PIANIST DIANE SCHUUR CELEBRATES THE JAZZ OF HER PARENTS’
GENERATION
Some Other Time Spotlights The Music of Schuur’s Formative Years
Vocalist and pianist Diane Schuur grew up at the intersection
of two distinct worlds of music. On one hand, the radio of
her youth telegraphed the sounds of Motown, the Beatles and
other powerful forces of the ‘60s. On the other, her
parents’ home in Auburn, Washington, was filled with
the likes of Dinah Washington, Nat King Cole and other luminaries
of mid-20th century jazz.
Out of this melting pot, Schuur developed a hybrid style that
merges the best elements of the jazz and pop traditions. Since
her recording career began in the early 1980s, she has scored
two Grammy Awards and three additional Grammy nominations,
and has performed and collaborated with artists as diverse
as B.B. King, Ray Charles, Stan Getz and many more.
On February 26, 2008, Schuur returns to her jazz roots –
the music of her parents’ generation, which includes
some of the earliest and most enduring music in her creative
consciousness – with the worldwide release of Some
Other Time – CCD-30614 (Concord Music Group, Domestic)
/ HUCD3138 (Heads Up International, Int’l).
VOCALIST/PIANIST
DIANE SCHUUR CELEBRATES THE JAZZ OF HER PARENTS’ GENERATION
Some Other Time Spotlights The Music of Schuur’s
Formative Years
Vocalist and pianist Diane Schuur grew up at the intersection
of two distinct worlds of music. On one hand, the radio of her
youth telegraphed the sounds of Motown, the Beatles and other
powerful forces of the ‘60s. On the other, her parents’
home in Auburn, Washington, was filled with the likes of Dinah
Washington, Nat King Cole and other luminaries of mid-20th century
jazz.
Out of this melting pot, Schuur developed a hybrid style that
merges the best elements of the jazz and pop traditions. Since
her recording career began in the early 1980s, she has scored
two Grammy Awards and three additional Grammy nominations, and
has performed and collaborated with artists as diverse as B.B.
King, Ray Charles, Stan Getz and many more.
On February 26, 2008, Schuur returns to her jazz roots –
the music of her parents’ generation, which includes some
of the earliest and most enduring music in her creative consciousness
– with the worldwide release of Some Other Time
– CCD-30614 (Concord Music Group, Domestic) / HUCD3138
(Heads Up International, Int’l).
“This recording is a celebration of the fortieth anniversary
of my mother’s death,” says Schuur, whose mother
died at age 31 in January 1967, when the aspiring young vocalist
and musician was only 13 years old. “This is a celebration
of the music she introduced to me when I was growing up. After
enough time goes by, everything your parents ever told you,
everything they ever tried to teach you, starts to make sense.
You find out how they grew up and how they looked at the world
in the context of their generation and their times.”
The album kicks off with “Nice Work If You Can Get It,”
a classic by one of the most influential songwriting teams of
the last century, George and Ira Gershwin. Beginning here and
for most of the set, pianist/arranger Randy Porter and guitarist
Dan Balmer set up a rich harmonic platform for Schuur’s
playful vocals.
While the material itself may be from another era, Some
Other Time as a whole is anything but a retro-flavored
nostalgia trip. “Randy and I spent many hours going through
the songs,” says Schuur. “His basic arrangements
were really brilliant, but I’m glad I was able to add
some things. I wanted to make things as different as possible.
A lot of the songs came together right in the studio. It was
a very spontaneous, very intuitive process.”
Also from the Gershwin canon is “I’ve Got Beginner’s
Luck,” which follows an elastic time signature crafted
by the rhythm section of bassist Scott Steed and drummer Reggie
Jackson. For all of the song’s complexities, Schuur’s
equally pliable vocals have no trouble keeping up. Similarly,
Schuur’s rendition of Irving Berlin’s “Blue
Skies” a few tracks later is everything the title implies
– wide-open, airy and full of possibility – with
Schuur taking an intepretive and playful approach with the vocal
line. She takes a similar tack with “My Favorite Things,”
the whimsical Rodgers and Hammerstein classic from The Sound
of Music, one of Schuur’s favorite movies from her
childhood.
While Porter handles the lion share of the piano work on Some
Other Time, Schuur steps up to the keys for two tracks,
“It’s Magic” and “The Good Life,”
and proves that her instrumental chops are just as formidable
as her vocal abilities. “I love ‘It’s Magic,’
because Dinah Washington did it so beautifully on a 1959 album
called What a Difference a Day Makes,” she says.
The closing tracks have a poignant magic all their own. “September
in the Rain” is taken from a 1964 recording made by a
10-year-old Schuur and her parents at a Holiday Inn in Tacoma,
Washington. Filled with the same gusto that would later define
Schuur’s vocal style as an adult, this reel-to-reel recording
was later transferred to an audiocassette in the 1980s and finally
to digital for this project by engineer Bill Smith.
Immediately following “September in the Rain” is
an exchange between Schuur and her mother from that same period
in the mid-‘60s. Schuur’s mother asks if Diane knows
“Danny Boy,” and Diane responds with the promise
that she’ll record the song just for her. What follows
is a heart-stopping rendition of the classic Irish tune that
transcends the mortal plane and makes good on a devoted daughter’s
promise more than forty years after it was made.
Long regarded – and sometimes criticized – as an
artist who has walked a tightrope between jazz and pop, Schuur
sees Some Other Time as an unwavering statement about
her commitment to the jazz tradition and its influence on her
artistic sensibilities. “This album really is about coming
back to the basics of my jazz roots,” she says. “Not
that I really completely left them, but there were a few detours
along the way.”
But there’s another connection, something much deeper
and more personal, that Schuur makes with Some Other Time:
“I would like to think that I’m reaching out to
Mama,” she says, “just to tell her that I love her
and that I appreciate the fact that she worked so hard in the
short time that she lived. And I’m grateful that she was
able to instill in me a love of music. Mama gave me that, and
it follows me everywhere.”
Vocalist/pianist Diane Schuur is as eclectic
as she is brilliant. A longtime disciple of Dinah Washington
and other legendary jazz singers of the ‘40s and ‘50s,
Schuur has built a stellar career by embracing not only the
jazz of her parents’ generation, but also the pop music
of her own youth during the late 1950s and ‘60s. In a
recording career that spans nearly three decades – and
includes two Grammy Awards and three Grammy nominations –
Schuur’s music has explored nearly every corner of the
20th century American musical landscape. Born in Tacoma, Washington,
in December 1953, Schuur was blind from birth. She grew up in
nearby Auburn, Washington, where her father was a police captain.
Nicknamed Deedles at a young age, Schuur discovered the world
of jazz via her father, a piano player, and her mother, who
kept a formidable collection of Duke Ellington and Dinah Washington
records in the house.
She was still a toddler when she learned to sing the Dinah Washington
signature song, “What a Difference a Day Makes.”
Armed with the rare gift of perfect pitch, Schuur taught herself
piano by ear and developed a rich, resonant vocal style early
on, as evidenced in a recording of her first public performance
at a Holiday Inn in Tacoma when she was ten years old. She received
formal piano training at the Washington State School for the
Blind, which she attended until age 11. By her early teens,
she had amassed her own collection of Washington’s records
and looked to the legendary vocalist as her primary inspiration.
Schuur made her first record in 1971, a country single entitled
“Dear Mommy and Daddy,” produced by Jimmy Wakely.
After high school, she focused on jazz and gigged around the
northwest. In 1975, an informal audition with trumpeter Doc
Severinson (then the leader of the Tonight Show band)
led to a gig with Tonight Show drummer Ed Shaughnessy’s
group at the Monterey Jazz Festival. She sang a gospel suite
with Shaughnessy’s band in front of a festival audience
that included jazz tenor saxophonist Stan Getz, who in turn
invited her to participate in a talent showcase at the White
House. A subsequent return performance at the White House led
to a record deal with GRP, which released Schuur’s debut
album, Deedles, in 1984.
Over the next 13 years, Schuur recorded 11 albums on GRP, including
two Grammy winners: Timeless (1986) and Diane Schuur
and the Count Basie Orchestra (1987). The recording with
the Basie Orchestra spent 33 consecutive weeks at No. 1 on the
Billboard jazz charts. In 1991, Pure Schuur
made the number-one slot on the Contemporary Jazz charts, and
Heart To Heart – a 1994 collaborative recording
with B.B. King – entered the Billboard charts at No. 1.
After one album on Atlantic records in 1999 – Music
is My Life, produced by Ahmet Ertegun – Schuur joined
the Concord label with the 2000 release of Friends For Schuur.
The move to Concord marked the beginning of a series of highly
successful collaborative projects: Swingin’ For Schuur
(2001), a set of finely crafted duets with trumpeter Maynard
Ferguson; Midnight (2003), Schuur’s unique interpretations
of thirteen songs (mostly new material) written or co-written
by Barry Manilow; and Schuur Fire (2005), a decidedly
Latin-flavored album featuring the Caribbean Jazz Project.
Some Other Time, Schuur’s February 2008 Concord
release, is a recording of songs by jazz artists whom she first
discovered via her parents during her childhood and adolescent
years. The album features songs by George and Ira Gershwin,
Irving Berlin, Sammy Cahn, Rogers and Hammerstein and more.
The set also includes a surprisingly mature-sounding rendition
of “September in the Rain,” recorded at the Holiday
Inn in Tacoma in 1964 when Schuur was only ten years old.
Some Other Time is, among other things, Schuur’s
celebration of the music of her parents’ generation, and
a tribute to her late mother on the fortieth anniversary of
her death at the young age of 31. “This is a celebration
of the music she introduced to me when I was growing up,”
says Schuur. “After enough time goes by, everything your
parents ever told you, everything they ever tried to teach you,
starts to make sense. You find out how they grew up and how
they looked at the world in the context of their generation
and their times.”
Long regarded – and sometimes criticized – as an
artist who has walked a tightrope between jazz and pop, Schuur
sees Some Other Time as an unwavering statement about
her commitment to the jazz tradition and its influence on her
artistic sensibilities. “This album really is about coming
back to the basics of my jazz roots,” she says. “Not
that I really completely left them, but there were a few detours
along the way.”
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