Word: jarreau
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Jarreau first showed signs of vocal prowess at age 4, performing a garden recital in Milwaukee, Wis., where his father was an ordained minister who welded auto frames for a living. As a boy, "young Alwin" (his parents addressed him by his given name) used to sit beside his mother as she played piano in church, and later sang in the choir. Jarreau was bright, and after high school opted to study psychology, earning a masters degree and landing work in San Francisco as a vocational rehabilitation counselor. One problem: "I was a horrible bureaucrat and organizer," says Jarreau...
...those who haven't heard them, Jarreau's swooping melody lines and improvisational growls, grunts and inflections can verge on startling. Perhaps more than any popular vocalist alive, he embodies the notion of the voice as a pure instrument. "When he gets into a flat-out jazz setting," says Heckman, "he lets it all hang out. And when he gets into one of his extended scat solos on something like Take Five, even the instrumentalists' mouths drop open...
...That very quality, though, has made it difficult for Jarreau to attain megastardom in an industry that relies on pigeonholing performers. He has had some mainstream success - you might remember the Top 40 hits Mornin' and Moonlighting (the theme from the 1980s TV series of the same name, starring Cybil Shepherd and Bruce Willis). He also performed on the 1985 USA for Africa charity recording We Are the World. But none of Jarreau's 20 albums or 23 singles have cracked the U.S. Top 10. "When people hear 'jazz singer,' they tend to approach with a little nervousness," he says...
...Jarreau is guilty of a degree of aloofness himself. He enjoys either silence or classical-music stations. He grumbles about the "flavor-of-the-month mentality" among music fans. And he shows his age - endearingly - by refusing to own an iPod. His strange argument, contradicted every time he draws up a set list comprising songs from different phases of his career, is that you must listen to songs in the context of the album they appear on. "Just to take bits and pieces of this and that I think is not as enriching an experience," he says. Jarreau is also...
...much as Jarreau relishes staying active, touring remains tough - so Asian fans ought to cherish the opportunities of the next fortnight. "The hardest things on vocal health are singing and traveling," he says. He treats his vocal chords to a regimen that begins six hours before a performance, doing push-ups, abdominal work and vocal exercises. "It's important for a singer to think of himself as an athlete," says Jarreau. Anything to keep the mutiny...