By Jeff Kaliss
A successful career as a TV lyricist and a gig as drummer for a smooth jazz group were sensible reasons for Lorraine Feather and her husband Tony Morales, respectively, to stay rooted in Southern California. But when Morales made a career jump to production manager for Silicon Graphics, Feather was more than happy to relocate with him to a hillside in El Grenada, just north of Half Moon Bay.
A home with an aquatic view had been her dream ever since she'd been a child in the '50s,. living with her British-born father, legendary jazz critic Leonard Feather, and her mother, former big band singer Jane Feather, on Riverside Drive in Manhattan. The dream stayed after her parents brought her, at age 12, to inland Los Angeles County. And when the younger Feather found her current digs, she "couldn't believe how many places of beauty there are just ten minutes from my house.".
A couple of years after moving here in 1997, Feather made another discovery which led to a career change of her own. It came in the form of the infectious stride piano and riotous vocalizations of Fats Waller, the larger-than-life songwriter and performer who waxed a string of hits for Victor Records from the late '20s till his premature death in 1943. "My Dad was mostly into the era of bebop and beyond," says Feather, whose godmother was groundbreaking vocalist Billie Holiday, a family friend. Young Billie Jane Lee Lorraine Feather didn't get to hear a lot of what preceded bebop, including Waller's novelty numbers and good-natured ballads. "But after Dad passed away [in 1994], I would every now and then borrow cd reissues from Mom's collection, especially after I got my VW Beetle in '99 and had a cd changer" to accompany long road trips. "The slow songs were so sentimental and poignant and melodic," she realized, "and the rhythm songs were so jolly, so whimsical, that I got infatuated with Fats."
Taking a break from writing Emmy-nominated lyrics for others, Feather penned an homage to painter Paul CÃÂÃÂÃÂézanne, set to Waller's "Smashing Thirds" instrumental. "CÃÂÃÂÃÂézanne" found its way to Dick Hyman, one of the living masters of stride piano and a longtime collaborator of Woody Allen on movie music, and Hyman encouraged Feather to expand her efforts to an entire album of Waller-based creations. The result, New York City Drag, was released by Rhombus Records last July, featuring Feather singing her own lyrics accompanied by Hyman on most of the tracks and by the electronically revived Waller himself on "CÃÂÃÂÃÂézanne."
Now Feather, who worked as a singer-and-dancer decades ago in Jesus Christ Superstar and later appeared at jazz festivals in the group Full Swing, is having to reconfigure herself as a solo act, supporting sales of New York City Drag and other albums to come. After her first such gig, last month at Catalina's in Hollywood, she was praised by Don Heckman of the Los Angeles Times (her father's former employer) for her "astonishing vocal dexterity," while the Hollywood Reporter's Tony Gieske raved that her lyrical material "glitters and gleams and makes you think of Dorothy Parker or Nora Ephron." Feather's next showcase is Moose's in San Francisco's North Beach, where she'll be accompanied by local keyboard virtuoso Mike Lipskin and drummer Vince Lateano this Sunday.
Lipskin worked as a record producer for RCA in New York and once engaged Leonard Feather to write album liner notes. Since moving to San Francisco in 1978, Lipskin became the regularly scheduled keeper of the stride flame at the Washington Square Bar & Grill and more recently at Moose's. At RCA, he developed what he describes as "an ear for who has it and who doesn't," and he's decided that Lorraine Feather "has it, in terms of professionalism. And her intonation, which means singing on pitch, is tremendous, and it's hard to do that." Her respectful settings of stride material have particularly impressed Lipskin, who's been a Waller acolyte since he was three. "What's unique is that she took obscure piano solos, recorded during a period from 1927 to 1934, and created wonderful vocals to them that are not hokey at all but actually give them new depth... and at the same tempo."
Indeed, Feather's stream of speeding images and wacky references can be as pleasingly intoxicating as Waller's music, with a citric contemporary twist. "No time for explanations or one more German beer," she sings to an errant lover in the opening track on "New York City Drag," "Put down the chips and read my lips," she continues; "You're outa here." Elsewhere, at a more measured pace, her sassy-but-sweet tone empathetically evokes a lass left waiting for a man who may not show: "Will we soon kiss again or/Will I still be languishing here/Beside the garden gate/Dreaming of his tender words/Listening to these noisy birds."
Lyrics come to Feather while she's perched securely on the connubial loveseat in her living room, staring out over the deck, planting in her garden, or walking around El Grenada. "I always start fairly early in the day," she says, "and once I have a song going, I think of it all the time until it's over, sometimes on into my dreams."
But the process of actually promoting a finished album isn't quite so idyllic. "New York City Drag" found an early champion last summer in the city of the title, in the person of program director Gary Walker at jazz radio WBGO, and college stations nationwide followed suit. "But during that same time, Tower Records went belly-up pretty much, and Tower was the mainstay of independent record labels," Feather laments. "Then the Gavin charts discontinued their 'jazz' listings right when my album came out, even though it went up to number 12 on the 'college' chart. And then, and I hate to even bring this up as an inconvenience to me, we had this thing happen on September 11, and that was the week that my album was number one on the Amazon 'indie jazz' chart." Even if there had been an opportunity to tour behind the album, Feather didn't feel much like flying.
With input from high-tech hubby Tony, a fanciful website, www.lorrainefeather.com, has helped get the word out about the album, including a three-minute video about its creation. And other projects have kept Feather commuting in her Beetle back and forth to L.A. and have financed work on future recordings. She's written words for the closing ceremony of the Winter Olympics, which will pop up on Moose's tv monitors just after her Sunday afternoon gig there. And she contributed several songs to Disney's Jungle Book II, due in theaters next year.
On one of her Southland visits last month, she was invited to attend the memorial service for Peggy Lee, another of her namesakes. Lee and Feather's mother Jane, who passed away in 1999, had both been big band singers during World War II, and had roomed together in New York. "Peggy was from North Dakota, my Mom was from Minneapolis, they were both of Norwegian heritage and blondes," Feather points out. "And we stayed with her, my Mom and I, when we were first looking for houses in L.A., and she was Aunt Peggy to me for many years."
At the service, she says, "I sang 'I Love Being Here With You', which was Peggy's opening number, and then 'Circle In the Sky', leading into 'I'll Be Seeing You', which she used to do as her closer. I sort of choked up a couple of times, but I was able to do it."
As renowned as Leonard Feather was for his jazz scholarship and criticism, many fans don't know that he was also a fine songwriter and arranger. There's no doubt that he, Jane, and Aunt Peggy would all be beaming at how Lorraine Feather is showcasing her own multiple talents.
Note: this story originally appeared in a modified form in the February 22 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle.
