Word: jazz
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...Sayer's jazz drummer father, Gerry, and Betty, her frazzled mother, are bottle buddies who happen to have three small children. When her parents split, Sayer's freewheeling childhood descends into a grim saga: she moves from suburb to suburb, school to school, always at the mercy of Betty's genius for sabotaging her own security and picking up the wrong bloke at the pub. Amid this culture of poverty, mental illness, domestic violence, alcoholism and fear, Sayer blossoms. She finds ways to escape the misery, if only in bursts, through poetry, martial arts and music. Friends drop...
...intervening 15 years have been riddled with delays and detours, but Peyroux, 31, has made it. With two successful CDs behind her--the more recent of which, last year's Careless Love (Rounder), continues to sell nicely--she ranks as one of the bright talents of the jazz world. Instead of on sidewalks, she performs in festivals, auditoriums and clubs, backed by a polished combo. She still snaps her fingers (when she isn't strumming her guitar), but now plenty of listeners are snapping and tapping along with...
...knack of languorously lagging behind the beat, bending her notes into microtones of aching and yearning. But the style, the subtle phrasing, seems natural to Peyroux--lived, not learned. Besides, it isn't Holiday's stylistic flourishes that interest her primarily. Holiday exemplified a line of female blues and jazz singers who "presented the women's side of things, the underdog point of view," says Peyroux. "It was a new form of women's self-expression...
...Peyroux's singing, what's old is new again. Born in Athens, Ga., she has a gut feeling for "the good old reminiscence of Southern music"--country and bluegrass, the blues, early jazz. In her albums and live shows, she includes tunes once owned by figures like Bessie Smith, Hank Williams and of course Holiday. At the same time, she features the work of such contemporaries as Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, not to mention her originals. What is the common element in all these songs, other than the musical alchemy by which she makes them her own? "I could...
...thing Peyroux decided was that, for her, singing was "empowering" and "uplifting." A couple of years ago, she began easing back into the business. And now? In back-to-back performances at the San Francisco Jazz Festival recently, and with a long string of U.S. bookings ahead of her, there was no mistaking her conviction as she swung through an old Holiday number: "In a happy setting/ We're getting/ Some fun out of life." And that's a true story. --By Christopher Porterfield