Dena DeRose: No More Detours Ahead

A pianist by instinct, a jazz musician by choice and a singer by accident, Dena DeRose has emerged as one of the most captivating and distinctive new voices in mainstream jazz. Anyone who has not heard her music should not be misled by her status as a singer/pianist specializing in the Great American Songbook. DeRose is neither a Shirley Horn clone nor a Diana Krall wannabe. Although she admires a wide range of singers, including Horn ("definitely on the top of my list of favorite musicians"), she has created her own unique and fresh approach to singing and playing jazz.

DeRose's work is smart, swinging, honest and unpretentious. Unlike so many other jazz vocalists, she holds the ideals of musical invention and lyrical expression in almost perfect balance. "I feel lucky to have words and stories to tell along with music," she explains. "I try to shape the stories in a deeper way with colors of sound." DeRose believes that her dual role as a singer and a pianist allows her a greater range of musical expression. "A lot of people through the years have said I should sing more and play less, but I try to keep a good balance."

Both DeRose's singing and playing are the products of a disciplined musical mind. She has a light touch on the keyboard, and her solos are crisp, confident and imaginative. Her voice has a bright timbre with a slight, superbly controlled vibrato and a range of about two octaves. She makes canny use of time and tempo in shaping her performances and displays an absolute command of the beat.

DeRose has developed an unmannered approach to phrasing that treats lyrics like conversation set to music. Even at the fastest tempo, she never loses sight of the meaning of the words. Eschewing melodrama, she invests lyrics with the clear-eyed wisdom of somebody who has lived the emotions of the song and has survived to tell the tale. Her ballads tend to be more compassionate than confessional and more heartfelt than tragic. "I just try to bring my perspective, what I've learned in my life so far," she explains. "When I sing, I am completely in the story and telling it to the audience almost as if for the first time."

The frequency with which she achieves that illusion is astonishing given the familiarity of her repertoire, which consists largely, though not exclusively, of standards. DeRose's records serve as a wonderful riposte to those critics who say that the Great American Songbook has been played out. "If it's a good tune and you can relate to the story, then [the song] can change and evolve into something else. It's really about individual expression, and," she points out, "that's the freedom of jazz."

DeRose approaches the standard repertoire from a contemporary perspective. Consequently, she will, on occasion, alter a lyric, either by changing a word or shifting a pronoun, in order to reconcile the song with a more modern sensibility. "A few years ago," she explains, "Tony Bennett said in an interview that he can't sing a tune if he can't relate to the lyrics. I took that on as my motto. I don't do tunes that I can't completely relate to. There are a lot of tunes that have beautiful melodies and beautiful chord changes, but the English language changes over time. If a lyric uses words like 'fancy' that I would never say, then I can't sing it. Many standards are timeless, but there are some that are definitely period pieces."

The ability to balance musical innovation with lyric expression finds it greatest expression in DeRose's arranging. An inventive small group arranger, she combines an instrumentalist's expansive understanding of a tune's rhythmic and harmonic possibilities with an interpretive singer's precise focus on the meaning of a song. DeRose starts an arrangement by writing out the words to the song away from the music. "I read them over and over to see how I relate to the tune," she explains. She then fashions a musical setting that matches her understanding of the lyric. As a result, her arrangements lack the kind of stylistic crutches that make every song on a record sound exactly alike. DeRose makes excellent use of the instrumentalists and gives them a great deal of room to stretch out.

The strong instrumental presence on DeRose's recordings evidences her own background as a musician. In many ways, DeRose still thinks of herself primarily as a pianist, which is hardly surprising given that she has been playing piano for almost her entire life. Literally.

The Binghamton, New York native discovered music at the ripe old age of 2½ when her uncle gave her a toy chord organ. "I would come home from church and I just remember going right to [the organ] and playing. My mom could hear that it was the melodies from church that I was playing. Just sort of picking them out with one finger on the keyboard." She started piano lessons at age 3½, she was reading music before she started kindergarten, and by the age of 6 she could play "easy Mozart." Dena's passion for music was entirely self-motivated. "There was always a piano in the house, and I can remember always wanting to play. My mom never really had to tell me to practice. I just instinctively came in the house and went right for the piano."

Between the ages of 7 and 8, Dena began playing classical organ in addition to piano. At age 10, she added percussion to her repertoire. She continued to play marimbas, timpani and snare drums until college. DeRose notes that, "all that percussion in my younger years has had a profound effect on my sense of rhythm. When I do arrangements, I hear drums."

She got her first taste of jazz in the 8th grade when she joined the junior high stage band, which played charts from Swing Era big bands. "I was floored. These kids were already playing jazz and taking solos." DeRose's bandmates included two future jazz musicians—trumpeter Tony Kadleck and trombonist Steve Davis. "They picked me to play piano because I could read the charts. I didn't know what the hell I was doing, but at least I could clunk down the chord."

As she began to explore jazz with a private teacher, DeRose ran up against the shortcomings of her classical training. "It was so hard for me to not think of reading notes. I could read anything, but when I had to go in my head and think dominant or major, I just could not get it. I would leave lessons in tears and my teacher just didn't know what to do. He just threw his hands up."

DeRose put her interest in jazz aside. She went to college to study classical piano, but after three years she left to tour with a pop band. That experience eventually led her back to jazz. "One night," DeRose recalls, "someone came up and said, 'You know, you guys don't play these tunes like the record.' I said, 'That's it!' I gave my notice and two weeks later I was home [in Binghamton]." Determined to master the idiom, DeRose called her old jazz piano teacher. "I said, 'I'm going to get this, damn it, because I love the music.'"

DeRose immersed herself in jazz. She listened to Red Garland, Billie Holiday, Erroll Garner, Art Tatum and Ahmad Jamal. However, she cites the early Miles Davis recordings as her biggest influence. "I could sit and listen to that 24 hours a day, and I almost did. It was recorded so well that you could hear all the nuances." She began transcribing solos by pianists Wynton Kelly and Bobby Timmons to better study their technique

DeRose practiced constantly and worked every restaurant and cocktail hour she could book all the while trying to build her craft to the point where she could move to New York City. Around this time she noticed a pain in her right hand. DeRose ignored the warning signs and continued to push herself. The pain worsened until her hand became almost useless. The doctors diagnosed her condition as carpal tunnel syndrome. They operated, but the procedure did nothing to relieve the pain.

At age 22, DeRose found herself faced with the strong likelihood that she would never play the piano again. "I had always thought that [playing piano] was what I was going to do all my life." However, she could not even hold a pencil in her right hand much less play a chord. She watched nearly 19 years of studying and playing slip away. "I went through a lot of denial," she recalls. "I went way down in the depths. I didn't want to think about it. It was such a horrible time in my life."

Salvation finally came from an unlikely source. "My piano teacher had a trio playing in town. A bunch of us would go there to hang out. One night someone told me to get up and sing. So I did." DeRose's singing experience had been limited to some occasional back up vocals during her days in a pop band. She remembers her impromptu rendition of "Love is Here to Stay" fondly. "I was reading [the song] on stage with the microphone in one hand and the vocal Real Book in the other." The audience, to her surprise, demanded an encore. However, what shocked DeRose even more was how much she enjoyed singing. "It was an outlet, I think, and a way to express the musical ideas I had bottled up inside me."

DeRose threw herself into singing with the same dedication and intensity that had marked her piano playing. "The minute I realized I liked to sing I started studying with a woman who only taught technique." Her long experience as an instrumentalist provided DeRose with a different perspective on singing. "I think playing piano gave me a good ear and helped me to focus on the melody more. Also, knowing that if we do 'Love Is Here to Stay' in the key of C, I knew what the starting note was. I knew it was a G. I think some singers don't think of things like that. They often just pick a note out of thin air and put it in their voice and they don't really think about the actual note. When I was singing I was actually at times seeing the keyboard."

If the music came easily, the words proved to be a different matter. "It was hard for me to remember lyrics. It took a little while for me to realize that I'm a singer telling stories and I need to focus more on that. And when I did, that is when the lyric sheets went away."

DeRose spent the next 18 months working exclusively as a vocalist. However, she still felt the loss of not being able to play piano. She consulted a specialist in New York City who diagnosed the pain in her right hand as arthritis. He recommended a complicated operation involving the fusion of the joint in the index finger. Her desire to play again overwhelmed her fear of the difficult procedure. "After the operation, my fingers were just bones, absolutely no muscle there."

Her doctor said the best therapy would be to start playing again so DeRose found a solo gig at a little, poorly lit Italian restaurant. "I plunked my right hand down on chords, put my left hand down on some bass notes and just sang." She continued to play and sing for six months building up the strength in her right hand and paying off her substantial medical bills.

In 1991, DeRose moved to New York City and very quickly found work. "I was playing every night," she recalls. "I felt very lucky to come to New York and find regular gigs." DeRose spent the next several years working constantly, meeting musicians and honing her craft.

DeRose self-financed her first record in 1996, which was then picked up by a tiny label. "They said they were going to distribute it," she recalls, "buy they didn't really have any distribution." The CD languished in obscurity until DeRose's encounter with Marc Edelman of Sharp Nine Records, an independent jazz record label.

Several musicians had mentioned DeRose to Edelman. Curious, he attended one of her gigs and was deeply impressed by what he heard. "He came up to the stand on a break," DeRose remembers, "and said 'I want to record you.' I wasn't sure how to take it at first, but he was really serious."

Edelman decided to repackage and distribute DeRose's first CD. Sharp Nine released Introducing Dena DeRose in 1998. The positive response convinced Edelman to take DeRose back into the recording studio. The label released the melancholy Another World in 1999 and the ebullient I Can See Clearly Now in 2000. Each album's distinct musical identity was, according to DeRose, "a reflection of what was going on in my life at the time."

Introducing Dena DeRose finds the singer using her formidable command of time to rethink some of the true warhorses of the Great American Songbook. The sly "How Long Has This Been Going On?" and the swaggering "Blue Skies" are irresistible. She swings hard on "Time After Time" and "Every Time We Say Goodbye" and performs "How Deep is the Ocean?" with a subtle 6/8 Afro Cuban rhythm.

Another World is a beautifully paced, atmospheric album that intersperses two original tunes and two instrumentals amid six perfectly realized standards. The CD features several exceptional arrangements by DeRose and Steve Davis including a remarkable rethinking of "In the Wee Small Hours."

However, the recently released I Can See Clearly Now is DeRose's finest work yet. Her takes on "Detour Ahead" and the title tune are unlike any previous versions. She renders the standard "If I Should Lose You" and the gorgeous Edith Piaf tune "If You Love Me" in exquisite detail. She tears through "Day In, Day Out," "I've Never Been In Love Before," and "The Touch of Your Lips" playing with the beat even as she drives home the meaning of every line. The CD also features several examples of DeRose improvising scat lines in unison with her piano.

All of her albums feature a basic jazz trio augmented by horns and percussion, and they all benefit greatly from the quality of the musicians. The horn players have included Steve Wilson, Ingrid Jensen, Joel Frahm, Jim Rotondi and her childhood friend Steve Davis. Her latest CD also features Joe Locke on vibes. "I think the people I've chosen to play with extend or add to the music," DeRose observes.

Although her records are meticulously planned, DeRose tries to make sure that the actual recording process remains spontaneous and creative. All three of her albums were recorded live in the studio without overdubbing. "I hardly ever do more than two takes," explains DeRose. "I don't believe in it."

DeRose gives a great deal of credit for the success of her albums to Marc Edelman and Sharp Nine Records. "They have been completely supportive from the beginning. Marc continues to tell me time and time again to keep [making music] the way I want to. He's really into building careers, and, in this day and age, it's really hard to find people like that."

Although she has been writing tunes for years, DeRose's three albums contain only four of her original songs. In fact, until recently she had never played a performance where she featured only her own original music. "I got done with the gig and I felt like a musician, not a working musician, but like a real artist." However, songwriting may be the one area where DeRose's interest in singing works against her. "I'm not a real fan of my lyrics," she observes wryly. However, she would love to record an instrumental album of her tunes. "I don't know if it will be sooner or later, but I'm definitely going to do that."

Already this year DeRose has played the Blue Note in New York and taped an appearance on Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz. She plans to play more large jazz festivals in the United States and try to break into the jazz markets in Europe, Japan and Canada. "That's what I think is missing these days. Touring. Rock and roll made it harder for jazz musicians to keep a steady band together and tour." DeRose believes the Internet can play an important role in expanding the jazz audience. "I get e-mails from people in India, Thailand and Malaysia saying they discovered my music through my website. I think the Internet has opened things up for artists who don't have large record labels behind them." Of course, she notes that ultimately, "You have to get people off their butts and out there listening to live music."

DeRose is optimistic about her future. "Every record that goes by there are more people that we reach. That's a great feeling." DeRose seems focused on her long-term career rather than short-term success. She dismisses any suggestion that she could position herself to reach the wider non-jazz audience by reducing the amount of her playing. "I just want to be able to keep recording and keep evolving as a musician," she explains. "I want [an audience] that keeps an open mind." After a pause she adds, "not that I do anything really way out, but," she laughs, "you never know what the future will bring."

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