As listeners to Jazz à la Mode know, Rene Marie is one of the most frequently heard singers in the show. I usually need to hear a vocalist in person before I decide yea or nay, but Rene won me over as soon as I heard her first nationally distributed album, How Can I Keep From Singing? And the deal was sealed when I saw her at the Jazz Standard following Sonny Rollins’s 80th birthday concert on September 10, 2010. Sonny’s milestone was grand and befitting of the Saxophone Colossus, from his glorious playing and a parade of surprise guests (Roy Haynes, Roy Hargrove, Christian McBride, Jim Hall, and Ornette Coleman) to the pre-concert buzz and post-concert hang outside the Beacon Theater. Sonny’s aura left a large gathering of jazz players and writers feeling blase about moving on to other acts in town that night; the projection was that all else would feel anti-climactic.
Rene Marie was another story. Notwithstanding a modest turnout for her late set, she galvanized the audience with her unique gifts as a full-throated singer whose personal narratives unfold within the whisper-to-shout dynamics of her loose-limbed trio. And when the trumpeter Etienne Charles joined her for a couple of tunes, their lively exchanges sounded as natural as a conversation between friends. But what I’ll never forgot about the show was the deft manner in which she managed to keep a boisterous bachelor party from overwhelming the room. Rene parried with these well-oiled twenty-somethings for the first half of her set, then when a bolder approach was required, she silenced the partiers seated at a long table perpendicular to center stage with her stunning medley of “Dixie” and “Strange Fruit.” This unlikely pairing of disparate themes– a Confederate anthem rooted in minstrelsy and the anti-lynching song brought to life by Billie Holiday– made for an outlandish moment on her 2001 album Vertigo, but hearing it at the Standard eight years ago gave renewed meaning to Valerie Wilmer’s jazz-inspired trope, “As serious as your life.”
As music careers go, Rene is a late vocation. She was 45 by the time she signed with MaxJazz Records and had only been performing professionally for three years, but there was nothing rhetorical about the title of her label debut. This woman was born to sing, and as her life’s story has unfolded in songs, interviews, and essays, she’s let us in on the real deal dues she’s paid in pursuit of her passion.
Rene laid it bare in the eulogy she wrote for Etta James in 2013 for JazzTimes. There she recalled that in 1996, she was at the home of friends who were eager for her to hear Etta’s recording of “Sunday Kind of Love.” In the moment in which Etta teased out the song’s opening line, “I…want…a…Sunday kind of love,” Rene experienced a revelation as profound as any she’d known in her preceding decades of religious devotion, marriage, and motherhood. As she elaborated, “Within two years of hearing this voice for the first time, I will have left my husband and my religion, quit my day job at the bank, recorded and produced my very first CD and signed to a boutique record label. But for now it is a late Sunday afternoon in 1996. My husband, Braxton, and I are in the home of friends, two ex-hippies with whom we’ve gone door-to-door today, proselytizing with our magazines, books and Bibles.
“Those opening lyrics to ‘Sunday Kind of Love’ puncture something inside me that comes spurting out with frightening force — an augury of things to come. My default personality at this time in my life is docile, compliant and deferential to Braxton’s opinions and preferences. It is considered improper within our fringe religious community for a woman to express her wants relating to pretty much anything. Asking is considered more apropos. Yet here Etta James is boldly and damn-near defiantly stating exactly what she wants — and how she wants it. And in the home of my fellow evangelists, no less! I stare at a spot on the floor about 20 feet in front of me, unable to look at anyone…Now I know what my grandmother meant when she used to say you can’t uncrack an egg. The curtain is rent and the damage is done. Etta James done set me free!”
In her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved, Toni Morrison wrote, “Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.” Given the fast pace at which Rene Marie claimed her “freed self,” one might underestimate Etta James’s impact on the Warrenton, Virginia, native. But the brave and beautiful body of music she’s created reflects what she calls a “life’s philosophy” exemplified by Etta’s artistry: “Songs…boldly presented yet nuanced.” You can hear these qualities all over her new Motema Records release, Sound of Red, which features the premieres of eleven original songs. It’s also evident in her recent appearance on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series. Click here for her three-song set including “Colorado River Song,” “This Is (Not) a Protest Song,” and “Sound of Red.” In between tunes, she talks about meeting her (new) husband Jesse while answering pledge-drive phones at Denver’s public radio station KUVO, and relates some of the personal travails of family members informing “This Is (Not) A Protest Song.” Rene’s made me rethink my frustration with the needy who increasingly populate our street corners and traffic intersections.
Speaking of Denver, in 2008, Rene was asked to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at a municipal event in the Colorado capitol. After being introduced as “Rene Martin,” she performed an acapella version of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” to the tune of the national anthem. “Lift Every Voice and Sing” was written in 1899 by lyricist James Weldon Johnson and composed by his brother John Rosamond Johnson, and quickly became enshrined as the Negro [African American] National Anthem. Bill O’Reilly of Fox News made a firestorm over Rene’s bold interpolation and sought to connect it with Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, but it didn’t take.
The following year, she wrote a column for JazzTimes about jazz as protest music and selected ten representative examples by Nina Simone, Abbey Lincoln, Charles Mingus, Andy Bey and others. Her introduction read, “The role of the jazz musician who composes and performs protest music is an important one. Doing so automatically give others the courage to compose, play and sing his or her own. It is, however, becoming more difficult to find jazz musicians in general and jazz vocalists in particular who boldly give voice to social ills through their music—an unusual and unfortunate turn of affairs…”
Rene continues to sing “Lift Every Voice” to the tune of the national anthem (the anthem’s melody is based on a work by the English composer John Stafford Smith), and here performs it in a medley with “America the Beautiful.”