EXPERIMENT IN TRUTH
Rene Marie Requires No Airbrushing
This jazz singer keeps it raw on her latest album.
By Jon Solomon - Westword, Denver
Published: August 9, 2007
For her latest album, Experiment in Truth, jazz singer Rene Marie and her band set up shop in an auditorium at the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Gathered in a circle on the stage, they recorded 23 songs in two days. "If one person hits a wrong note, just like a concert, keep going. Don't stop," she recalls of the sessions. "That was the feeling I wanted. I didn't want it to be airbrushed. That's not real music to me. It's like when you're first intimate with somebody, and the clothes have covered up this and covered up that. And then you disrobe and you're like, 'OK, here it all is.' We wanted this honest sound to come through. Because when you are making love, if all you're concerned about a sound you're making or this facial expression, how can you really benefit from what's going on, or what's supposed to be going on? So that's how we approach our music, and how we approached the recording."
To that end, Experiment in Truth feels like live recording without an audience. It's a superb collection of Marie originals, including a re-worked version of "Vertigo," an ode to Nina Simone and "This is (Not) a Protest Song," a song about homelessness, which was inspired by her brother, who is a homeless painter. The album also features a few covers, including a solemn interpretation of Bob Seger's "Turn the Page," which she recorded first thing in the morning on the second day of recording. Marie did four takes of the song, but decided to go with the first one, where her voice was a bit hoarse. "I thought, this how you feel if you've been on the road day after day," she explains.
Jazz singer quits label and scores
By Norman Provizer - August 10, 2007
From 2000 through 2004, singer Rene Marie released four CDs on the MaxJazz label, earning a top slot on the list of up-and-coming jazz vocalists. But for her new recording, the singer, who now lives in Denver, decided to go independent and issue Experiment in Truth on her own.
The impressive results of that effort are on display at Dazzle, 930 Lincoln St., tonight and Saturday when Marie performs with her working group of pianist Kevin Bales, bassist Rodney Jordan and drummer Quentin Baxter.
"Being on a label," the singer notes, "is kind of like being married to the wrong person. You are led to believe that you will have a lot of freedom, but you don't have that at all. So I wanted to see what it was like to be a singer and to make all the decisions."
As an example, for years the singer has performed a tribute to Nina Simone called O Nina, yet she could never convince the label to include it on a CD. That song closes the new disc in stellar fashion. There may be a sane reason why a label chose not to record this tune, but I sure can't think of it. It's a knockout.
Though Marie has performed on occasion in Denver with talented area-based players, this is the first time she has had the opportunity to sing with her own band. That's an exciting prospect for her. As she points out, "There are certain songs that developed their sound within the context of the group."
Marie's Truth covers a number of musical bases, from the whimsical to the saucy and on to the profound. This strong outing is available on renemarie.com. This evening, she sings at 7 and 9 p.m. ($20, 303-839-5100). She does the same Saturday as a benefit for the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless ($30). On that front, the new disc contains the striking This Is (not) a Protest Song that was originally issued as a single, with all proceeds going to groups involved with the homeless.
Rene Marie, King Center, Denver, 4-13-07
By Geoff Anderson, Tuesday evening jazz host on KUVO from 7 to 9 PM (listen for the Anderson Vinyl Vault at 8:30 Tuesdays)
Vocalist Rene Marie is yet another great jazz artist living in the Denver area, having moved here in 2004 from Atlanta. In fact, with Rene Marie and Dianne Reeves both now living in Denver, we arguably have the two best female jazz vocalists on the planet’s surface. I guess there’s not a formal competition for this sort of thing, but it makes life great for concert goers like me. Last night’s show at the King Center concert hall demonstrated why Marie is in the upper tier of jazz vocalists (in my book at least). She not only displayed her considerable vocal chops, but also showed her inventive side as well as performing four of her own songs.
Like any serious jazz singer, she peppers her set with jazz standards and puts her own stamp on them. For example, she took the closer, God Bless the Child at about double or triple time for a completely different take on that tune. Surrey With the Fringe on Top started with a spacey instrumental introduction before breaking into the clip clop accompaniment. Her original tunes covered a continent’s worth of ground from the whimsical Colorado River Song to the comedic, double entendre blues of Rim Shot to the poignancy of Wishes to her railing against homelessness in This is (Not) a Protest Song.
Marie likes to experiment; and she conducted many of those experiments on her band of top notch players. On Colorado River Song she broke into a whistling improvisation, then took the mic around to each musician to let him whistle while he worked. The problem came when coronetist Ron Miles begged off because he couldn’t whistle; I guess there’s a reason he carries that horn around. Old Devil Moon was a duet with Marie and drummer Paul Romaine in which the two musicians bandied back and forth, then played together, over, around, under and through each other. I Remember Clifford was another duet, this one with Ron Miles and again was an intimate interplay between two crack musicians.
Many artists have their CDs for sale at their concerts. Marie had one for sale last night too, but it was a single of her recent recording, This is (Not) a Protest Song, about homelessness. She says that she is donating 100% of the proceeds from sales of the CDs to homeless shelters and other programs to help the homeless. Obviously she’s not just in this for fame and fortune, and that’s nice to see. You can buy the CD or download it from her website at www.renemarie.com.
Rene Marie has four CDs out on the Max Jazz label and recently recorded another for release sometime later this year. She hasn’t received the attention of a Dianne Reeves, but it took Reeves many years and several albums before she rang up her string of Grammys for best female vocal album. The music business is tough, but if she sticks with it, Rene Marie should be able to garner the wider recognition she deserves.
Set List
Surrey with the Fringe on Top
Colorado River Song
Skylark
Rim Shot
Wishes
Old Devil Moon
I Remember Clifford
This is (Not) a Protest Song
God Bless the Child
The Band
Rene Marie, vocals
Paul Romaine, drums
Ken Walker, bass
Jeff Jenkins, piano
Ron Miles, coronet
Rene Marie follows her own path
By Bret Saunders
Article Last Updated: 02/10/2007 01:52:42 AM MST
There's a new edition of the Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings, and this eighth time around it checks in at more than 1,500 pages. Co-authors Richard Cook and Brian Morton again have demonstrated that they've transcended the need for sleep or food. How else could they listen to and astutely evaluate so much music?
Cook and Morton rate discs on a scale of one to four stars, and in some special cases add a crown to assert a record's exemplary status. There are some obvious choices for the crown - John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" and Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" among them. Included in this pantheon is a disc from a low-profile Denver singer and songwriter, Rene Marie.
Recorded in 2001, "Vertigo" (MaxJazz) is "simply sensational," according to the Penguin Guide authors. "The most compelling singer's record outside of Kurt Elling in recent times," they gush. When I spoke with Marie, who will perform Feb. 24 at Dazzle, she hadn't heard of the book or the high esteem in which its writers hold her. She was delighted.
"That was the second CD I did for MaxJazz," Marie said. (She since has left the label.) "I was so frustrated with the first one, I decided I was going to break all of the rules with my next CD. I took 'Dixie' and 'Strange Fruit' and made a medley out of that. And for 'Vertigo' (the Marie-penned title song) I got a lot of negative comments from other vocalists about its aggressive tone. That made me feel good."
That might seem an odd thing for a performer to say, but after conversing with Marie, it makes perfect sense. She's her own singer, owing very little to other contemporary vocalists. She's happy that her song should belong to her.
A decade-old professional career has already revealed Marie as a stylist with equal amounts of technical capability and life experience. Her story of deciding to become a professional singer at the age of 40 after raising a family, along with her determination and independence, is far more intriguing than the now-standard "American Idol"-esque grab for glory. Marie has figured out a way to turn her story into her music; at the same time she has that rare gift of taking a standard and finding something subtle you hadn't heard before.
Marie might not yet be a jazz star on a national scale, but she does receive a fair amount of attention from respected critics and institutions. In January she headlined a week at the Lincoln Center's Dizzy's Club Coca- Cola in New York, one of the choicest gigs in jazz.
What brought her to Denver?
"I was trying to pull away from people who were trying to get me to go in a direction I didn't want to go," she said. "When you're being interviewed, you've got to say provocative things, and that's not the way I do things.
"I wanted to move to a place that I felt nobody knew me and I didn't know anybody. I had sung in Westcliffe (at the Jazz in the Sangres summer festival) and I loved Colorado. I just happened to meet someone with some property for rent here. It just kind of fell in my lap."
Since moving to Denver from Atlanta two years ago, Marie has discovered a lot to enjoy in the local jazz community.
She hasn't released new music since 2004's emotive and fine "Serene Renegade," but Marie plans to come out with new music soon. The working title is "Experiment in Truth." "The guys I play with on a regular basis, they say, "Your songs are the truth!"
Marie seems determined to break from the classification "jazz" singer. Last year she ended her contract with her booking agent. "I'm not rudderless," she said. "I've simply found another way of navigating the waters."
Rene Marie does things her way
By Ralph Berrier Jr.
Photo: Jimmy Katz Roanoke - 2006
Taste of the Blue Ridge Blues & Jazz Festival
Rene Marie became an international star and one of the most celebrated vocalists in contemporary jazz by doing things her own way. One night in Chicago, though, she might've jazzed things up a little too much.
Marie, who was known as Rene Stevens Croan for most of the time she called Roanoke home, was touring in the wake of her "Serene Renegade" CD, a challenging, ambitious project that confounded some longtime fans with its personal subject matter and defiantly nonjazz arrangements. While on tour in 2005, she sang many of her original compositions from that CD, which prompted the owner of a prominent Chicago jazz club to chastise her while she was signing CDs between sets during one of her appearances at his club.
"Nobody wants to hear your originals," the club owner told her. "Sing the standards the way they ought to be sung."
Marie's reaction? Forceful yet graceful and sophisticated, just like her silky voice.
"I came back the next night and did all originals," she said by phone from her new home in Broomfield, Colo. "I really appreciated him telling me exactly how he felt. So many people will just talk behind your back. I appreciated hearing what he thought."
She even wrote a song for the guy, "This is for Joe."
In short, she stood her ground and plotted her own course, the same thing she's been doing since a fateful night 10 years ago in Roanoke when she got up the nerve to bring her own pianist to Montano’s and ask the featured band if she could sing during their break. Then began the fairy-tale ride that led to gigs around Roanoke, then her deal with the Maxjazz record label, then worldwide touring, critical acclaim and winning awards against such jazz greats as Kurt Elling and Cassandra Wilson. The fairy tale has featured a few rough chapters. Her first marriage ended as her career began to take flight. Her forays into original material alienated a few longtime fans, while earning mostly positive critical reviews.
She remains unbowed and undeterred. Now married and settled into her new life in Colorado, Marie will take the stage in her hometown as one of the headliners for Saturday's SunTrust Taste of the Blue Ridge Blues and Jazz Festival. Even though she plans to sing many songs from "Serene Renegade," just as she did when she last sang here at Jefferson Center in 2004, she'll ladle out a few old favorites and some new ones from her upcoming album, “Experiment In Truth”.
"For some people, it's like going to a restaurant and not knowing anything on the menu," she said of the reaction she sometimes gets for original songs. "Sometimes you just want the french fries and the macaroni and cheese. There’ll be a few fries and mac and cheese on our musical menu." Even if she's singing musical comfort food, she goes by her own recipe. Nobody spices up an old standard like Rene Marie, whichis why she has been one of the most intriguing figures in jazz for the past decade. Every lounge singer this side ofthe mountains sings "Summertime," but Marie's version subverts the standard melody and turns it into a modal workout. No one ever thought to combine the Southern anthem "Dixie" with the civil rights protest song "Strange Fruit," but Marie did.
"It's not everyone's cup of tea," she laughingly admits, "but it’s my way of expressing myself musically…and it keeps the musicians interested."
Hers will be the most-awaited performance of the day, and one of her last for a while, it seems. Lately, her muse has taken her on a different creative path, which includes more writing, composing and even some acting. She's writing a one-woman stage show that already sounds controversial, merely judging by its working title: "The Slut Energy Theory."RENE MARIE - Serene Renegade (MaxJazz)
Review by Christopher Loudon
"Red! Leather! Spiked! High! Heels!" So begins the aptly titled Serene Renegade, the high-struttin', kickass, all-the-things-she-is latest from MaxJazz magician Rene Marie. This album righteously confirms the dynamic Virginia-born stylist's place alongside Cassandra Wilson, Dianne Reeves and Patricia Barber at the forefront of contemporary female vocalists. "Red Shoes," a sexy, sassy nod to Rene's sister, Lynn, is just one of nine Marie originals that sate this magnificent exercise in musical eclecticism. Her bracingly triumphant "The South Is Mine," a fiery, soul-stirring statement of personal emancipation that can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" and Nina Simone's "Four Women," follows. Then there's the exquisite "Wishes," a reverent, Joni Mitchell-esque treatise on turning desire into action.
"Pause" brilliantly underscores the persistent ache of extricating one’s self from a painful relationship, while "Many Years Ago" and "Little Girl" provide radically different perspectives on the joys and woes of growing up. Rounding out Marie’s glowing celebration of family, friends and finding one’s way are the prayerlike "Ode to a Flower," a softly spirited homage to her mother Daisy, and the effervescent "Rufast Daliarg," written, she explains in the liner notes, in motherly appreciation of her sons, Desmond and Michael. Oh, and as if so gorgeously multi-shaded a lily as Serene Renegade need gilding, Marie also delivers a shimmering "Hard Day’s Night" dripping with temptation, and a gloriously pouty "Lover Man Oh Where Can You Be" of bonfire heat. Stunning. Simply, utterly, stunning.
Rene Marie review: Former Richmonder combines tradition, unconventionalism
By Matt Mathis, Richmond Times-Dispatch
October 24, 2005
I love Rene Marie. There, I confess it, and now it is out there for the world to know.
More than likely, I would garner some pretty nasty hate mail from the attendees of her Saturday performance at the University of Richmond if I didn't confess.
But now that I think about it, why wouldn't anyone love Rene? She is everything a jazz vocalist should be. She's passionate, soulful, obedient to the rhythm, true to tone and looks great in a black dress. The evening began with the former Richmonder coming to the stage alone to offer an a cappella rendition of "When You're Smiling."
The lack of musical accompaniment provided more freedom with timing, allowing her to bring more attention to the lyrics. The song came off more as a polite plea to society than anything else. It was, however highly effective, as several audience members sat beaming back at her with large grins.
If you have never had the opportunity to see a performance by the self-taught singer, it is best described as an experience in unconventional traditionalism. Marie is from the same mold as other great jazz vocalists such as Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday. But at the same time, she is vastly different in her approach to the genre as well as the performance patterns set by these legends.
She can stand at the microphone and deliver a standard with the best of them, but more than likely she won't. Ten measures in a lovely ballad shift into a high energy jam session with Marie escaping the circle of the spotlight to dance next to the drummer.
She confessed that her unorthodox style has gotten her in trouble."I had a club manager say that my original compositions turned his stomach and my movements were disturbing," she told the more than 200 in attendance.
The singer has responded to the club owner by composing a song titled "This is For Joe," which expresses her opposition to any suggestion that she should strictly imitate other jazz singers.
Like her predecessors, Marie does align herself with talented musicians, including Kevin Bales on piano, Rodney Jordan on bass and Quentin Baxter on drums.
The group performed an energetic set that included a bass and vocal duet of Bob Seger's "Turn the Page" as well as the debut of an original composition about homelessness, "This Is (Not) a Protest Song." Both selections showed Marie's love and appreciation for the nuances of country music. Her silky tenor transitioned effortlessly from Manhattan nightclub to West Virginia roadhouse. It was absolutely beautiful.
Clearly, the best thing about Rene Marie leaving Richmond is her willingness to return and dazzle us anew.
