Lorraine Feather
Website
March 2002

New York City Drag
Rhombus Records
2002

Related Article
Lorraine Feather: The Wordman's Daughter

By Jeff Kaliss

AAJ: Is there anything at all strange or demanding about now scooting along a second career path, because you've had plenty of time as an employed individual, but billing yourself as a singer is, I would imagine, a whole new ballgame.

Lorraine Feather: I have been a singer/lyricist for a long time, because I did several albums with my group and performed at a lot of festivals and clubs during the '80s, so it's not like I just began doing this. But I did that album that has "Five" on it, "The Body Remembers" album, it was released in '97. I decided when the group broke up I was working as a lyricist for a while, and I really like working as a lyricist, both for other people's albums and for projects where they hire me, like animation. I had this realization that I really did want to do something of my own. So I started putting together whatever struck my fancy, which in this case was that album. A lot of people really like it. . but it was a very between-the-cracks kind of project.

AAJ: How do you mean?

LF: It was not considered to be a jazz album, it was much too electronic for jazz radio and it was much too offbeat for stations like The Wave and the smooth jazz format.

AAJ: Although, in a sense, it touched all of that.

LF: There's a college station, we have it set on our wake-up radio, and it plays very eclectic stuff, they have no boundaries at all. If I had a following already built up, like Lori Anderson, it would be different, but there was just no place for it on any of the radio formats I know.

AAJ: Did you think at all, while you were putting it together, about where it would fit?

LF: Not really {laughs}. I just did it.

AAJ: So in a way it was a vanity project.

LF: I suppose . It was just something that expressed my own personality and was a change of pace from writing for other people. . you can write about something that would be completely inappropriate.

AAJ: Maybe we should go back for the history, before you got to that point. Were you, like my daughter Natalie, picking out original stuff on the piano when you were a little kid?

LF: No. I didn't get into music till much later. I was a writer as a little kid. .I don't know if Natalie writes poems, but I wrote poems and stories. And then I was at a fairly late age, like 12, I started taking dance class, and for the first time I came out of my shell.

AAJ: You'd told me you didn't foist yourself on the world.

LF: . I was a very sort of nerdy quiet little child, though I always had a sarcastic thing when I was old enough to do that.

AAJ: Which means you were bright. .

LF: I was bright, but a bad student. That was in New York City, going to an Episcopalian school. Then we moved out to LA when I was 12.

AAJ: Why did your Dad and Mom make that move?

LF: Primarily, I think because they thought it would be a better environment for me, but also, he [Leonard Feather, her jazz critic father] started working for the LA Times. . In my teens I really got into dancing, and it changed me forever, changed my body, changed my attitude about myself. And then I started doing plays in high school, and later went to LA City College, did the drama major thing, and I just loved it, so I decided I was going to go back to New York and become an actress. .

AAJ: To what degree did you get to connect as a child with what your Dad was doing? Did he have a habit of taking you places?

LF: He sometimes took me to places, and certain jazz people were friends of ours. I don't remember, but they say I went to Jones Beach with Charlie Parker when I was a little girl. And Dizzy Gillespie and his wife were very good friends of my parents. Benny Carter was my Dad's best friend, so when I was a teen in California I saw him a lot. They used to take me to the Monterey Jazz Festival. Miles Davis would whisper things in my ear that I couldn't quite understand and my parents would yank me away.

AAJ: Did you have a particular attitude about jazz when you were a kid?

LF: I didn't really think about it, it was so much a part of my life that I just accepted it. The first music I really remember hearing was Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, my Mom and I used to sing along to it. I really loved that music. Then when I was a teen I became rebellious and would only listen to Motown.

AAJ: How long did your Mom [Jane Feather] continue to sing [after her '40s big band days]?

LF: I never even heard her [Mom] sing. She stopped practically as soon as she met my Dad. She wasn't very ambitious. I think she had a lovely voice, but she was shy, and I think it was more a way to get out of Minneapolis and get into the big world than it was a career path. I never felt that she was resentful or unfulfilled about her singing career, I don't think she cared.

AAJ: Did she offer you any reminiscences, or any advice about singing as a career?

LF: Not really. My parents were very supportive of me, they said I had to go to college for at least one year. . When I moved back to New York they were a bit freaked. They just hadn't expected me to leave so soon, and here I was, 18 years old, waitressing at the Village Gate and going out with musicians. .

AAJ: Destiny calls!

LF: That's right! I told somebody the other day, I'm like Young Frankenstein: you try to do something else, and somehow it's always pulling you in. And then I started singing, because I was out of work so much as an actress, and I was a terrible waitress, I was fired once or twice.

AAJ: How much acting did you do?

LF: I did very little acting professionally; I was a singer/dancer/chorus person professionally. I was in a musical revue about ghetto youth . . . and from then on, because I could dance and sing a little bit, I would get these chorus jobs occasionally, like on the road. My biggest gig was "Jesus Christ Superstar."

AAJ: When was that?

LF: I don't know if I want to tell my age in the article, although I usually tell it proudly; I'm 53 now, and it was when I was 25. I did the concert tour for eight months, and I did the Broadway show the last year of its run. I was in the chorus and I was an understudy for one of the three women who came down and sang "Jesus Christ Superstar". And at a certain point I started singing just to make extra money, because a boyfriend of mine had heard me practicing, and he said, you got a certain something going on. He got me an audition with this big band jazz rock group, called Farmer Brown, that played at the Village Gate, and I got the gig. I wasn't very good at all, but it led me into this new phase. . and I started singing in Top 40 bands.

AAJ: What kinds of venues?

LF: Clubs in the Bronx, where I'd do six sets a night, the Jersey Shore, very hard work. And then a boyfriend of mine, who was also an arranger, put together a show for me, and I started doing cabaret gigs and such, but still in those days I kind of sucked. I was very nervous on stage, which I'm not at all now. The idea of standing up in front of people and being me was completely foreign to me. Then I moved back out to LA. About 20 years ago.

AAJ: Why did you move back to California?

LF: There wasn't a whole lot of work in New York for me, and my boyfriend had always wanted to move out to LA, but he knew I hated it. One day I said, "If I'm going to do this singing thing, maybe I should move out to LA."

AAJ: Wouldn't you have wanted to be near your parents?

LF: My parents wanted me to move back. Being my Dad's daughter got me a little bit of name recognition, like; I worked at the Parisian Room and Dante's, and I did an album for Concord Jazz. . I hate that album. .

AAJ: It's something you want to leave behind you.

LF: Yeah, I was very inexperienced in the studio. I continued to do odd jobs, and then someone told me about this audition for this group Swing, which Richard Perry was putting together. . Is this too much information, am I talking too much?

AAJ: It is not. It is my job to winnow out. You are being exemplary at being complete.

LF: Okay. . I got that gig, and that was my first actual record deal where I did vocals I liked. It was called Swing, and then the name was changed to Full Swing. It was a big band album on Richard Perry's Planet label. . We did some festivals, Playboy, Monterey, went to Japan, went to Brazil, which is where I met [husband] Tony [Morales], David Benoit booked Tony to do that gig [as drummer]. We became friends on that trip and started dating when we got back. That was my first experience of performing on stage and having a good time and seeing the audience get off. So I decided I really wanted to make the group happen. So I slogged through that, through the '80s.

AAJ: Did your Dad have input to any of this?

LF: Sometimes. He always had opinions.

AAJ: I'd like to know what he thought of what you were doing.

LF: He was very proud of me. If he could be, he was at every gig I ever did. He was very proud that I was writing.[Leonard Feather died in 1994.] I started writing lyrics for some of the group's big band tunes. . one by Horace Henderson. . It was briefly in a movie called "Swing Shift". . Almost immediately I knew that that was my big talent.

AAJ: How did it feel, to be writing? Was it discovery to find your writing coming out as lyrics? L:It was, but it was no natural for me, whereas singing has always been a lot of work for me. My singing, compared to 20 years ago, is so much better now, but my writing, although it's better as well, was good right from the beginning. . Although some of the things I did for Full Swing I rerecorded for the album I just gave you a [advance] copy of. ["Caf‚ Society," due out this summer].

AAJ: An inevitable, prying question, a dumb question, is, to what degree are your lyrics autobiographical?

LF: Not as much as people assume. .That's one of the biggest misconceptions about lyrics. I just make stuff up. There's a little of me in every song. .

AAJ: One thing I find wonderful about many of your lyrics is the subtlety and detail.

LF: Well, thank you.

AAJ: In something like "Girl On the Side," it's very atmospheric, almost novelistic, and I think that's extremely refreshing. You'll find that practically nowhere in jazz lyrics.

LF: I guess you're right. Of course, one of the great songwriters of all time was Joni Mitchell. Johnny Mercer was like that, too. .

AAJ: You have a testimonial from him?

LF: Johnny Mercer??

AAJ: No, I mean Johnny Mandel. Damn, I'm always doing that. It's important what other songwriters say about you?

LF: It's always meaningful from someone you respect. And it means a lot to me when the musicians have a good time at the session, 'cause I grew up with musicians.

AAJ: Have you had feedback about the content of your lyrics?

LF: People write to me. And there was a table of people at my show at Catalina's [in January of this year], and they said they felt the lyrics were very Girl Power-oriented. [she laughs] There are certain lines that seem to stay with people and have been quoted in more than one review: "You don't get into makeup/For less than 20 G's". Did I send you my Jazz Times and Downbeat reviews? A friend of mine, Jean Bach [director of "A Great Day in Harlem"], came to see me in New York and scolded me and said, "You should have lyrics [to hand out] at every performance you do," and I've obeyed her. Of course, I've put them on my website [http://www.lorrainefeather.com]

AAJ: Can you stand outside yourself and say what kind of job you do delivering your own lyrics? L:I write them for my own strengths and weaknesses. I don't have a really powerful voice, but it's agile. . I write things that let me skip over my break, I don't write in the range where my voice begins to change, though it's much smoother now than it was a few years ago.

AAJ: The humor in the lyrics is one of your trademarks. Did you get that from your Dad?

LF: My mother, too. My mother [who died in '99] had a very whimsical, sometimes dark sense of humor. She was proud of me as well. I wrote the first tune on this Fats Waller album on a whim, because I wasn't working.

AAJ: But you have had the occasional singing gig.

LF: I sang with the two women from Manhattan Transfer as a girl trio on a song for the movie "Dick Tracy", a Stephen Sondheim song called "Back In Business." . That's when I was back in LA.

AAJ: Did your Dad play you any Fats Waller?

LF: My folks were mostly into the era of bebop and beyond, so I didn't hear a lot of that stuff. But after my Dad passed away, in '94, I would every now and then borrow cd reissues from my Mom's collection, especially after I got my [VW] Beetle in '99 and had a cd changer, I just put some in it and listened to them and gave them back to her, 'cause I got infatuated with Fats.

AAJ: You mean, 'infatsuated'.

LF: That's a pun my Dad would like.

AAJ: What was it about Fats, 'cause you'd heard thousands of songs by then. L:It was because the slow songs were so sentimental and so poignant and melodic, and the rhythm songs were so jolly, so whimsical, they really appealed to me.

AAJ: It seems it's the jolly side which is associated in most people's minds with Fats Waller. It's one virtue of your album, partly because you picked some lesser known songs, that you're showing different parts of Fats. Your "Girl On the Side" stuff is heart-grabbing.

LF: Very heart-grabbing. And I knew so little about him that I didn't even know which tunes were better, except that I'd heard "Viper's Drag" before. . It was news to me that "Fractious Fingering" was well known and "Gladyse" was not.

AAJ: You had advisors in the two keyboardists on the album [Dick Hyman and Mike Lang], on what you should include on the album.

LF: Mostly Dick Hyman. He sent me all kinds of tapes. . He introduced me to "The Minor Drag," . . and I was so excited, I just wanted to scream, I loved it so much, I thought it was just the most infectious thing I'd ever heard.

AAJ: How quickly after you've heard a songs do the words start putting themselves together? L:I might think of one little couplet, like the "Bingo" and "Ringo" lines [in her "Too Good Lookin'".] At some point I sit down at the couch with my notebook and I actually sing. . I'll eventually go to the computer and put it in and print it out. When I have the basic song, I drive around singing it and the singability factor comes in. Certain things which just evolve. Things which sing well are almost inevitably better lyrics anyway.

AAJ: Did you do most of the writing up here in El Granada?

LF: All up here.

AAJ: Where do you put yourself, at what time of day?

LF: I always start fairly early in the day, and once I have a song going I think of it all the time until it's over, like even sometimes in my dreams.

AAJ: What part of the house do you work in, usually?

LF: I usually lie in the loveseat in the living room and stare out over the deck. I just love the whole process of writing. . I'll go out in the garden and think about it while I'm planting, or while walking around El Granada.

AAJ: Is there something about that setting which helps to make it work?

LF: The fact that you're sort of on the edge of the world. And at night it's like you're on the prow of a ship, you hear the ocean. It's a very trippy place. I love the way it smells. I've walked up Montara Mountain [bordering El Granada] and dedicated one of my new songs, "The Green Flash," to it. I love Montara Mountain, just north of me. . When I first moved here, I couldn't believe how many places of beauty there were just ten minutes from my house. It's getting a bit crowded on the coast side, but there are places where you can walk that are unspoiled, and it's just breathtaking.

AAJ: When did you arrive here?

LF: Almost exactly five years ago. Tony [her husband] at the time was the drummer for a very successful jazz group called The Rippingtons, a smooth jazz group, was about to go out on the road, and he'd started doing some Web stuff and got an offer from Silicon Graphics. He decided he wanted to change careers. And for the first year he commuted to an apartment in Santa Clara. And then after it seemed like this was really going to be happening, we looked for a house up here. But it's funny, because the one who's really nuts about this is me. I love 55 degree weather. I love the smell of it, and being able to hear the foghorns. Ever since I was a kid and had a view of the Hudson River from our apartment in New York, my dream has been to live somewhere with a view of water, and it finally happened.

AAJ: Is Tony doing anything musical at this point?

LF: He's setting up his studio. Tony's very talented as a concept guy. We had a remodel done to our house. . He has electronic drums. He gets offers to play, but most of the time it's too much preparation and too much hassle to do just one gig . . He's what's called the production manager for the Web team at SGI, and he has meetings and off-sites and one-on-ones and all this corporate stuff, he gets a million e-mails a day. He's finding his way back to music again, too.

AAJ: How does he feel about recent musical developments with you? L:. He's very supportive of me. It's hard for him sometimes because of the animals; we have three [cats and dogs].

AAJ: What was the release date of "New York City Drag"?

LF: It was July 17, 2001.

AAJ: How many times have you gigged behind it?

LF: I've only done the one gig [in Los Angeles] since the album was released. I hadn't thought it through. I have performed a couple of gigs with Dick [Hyman], right before the album came out, and will again this summer. . Dick is not really available to just fly around accompanying me. And I couldn't really find anyone in LA to do the gig with me. . Finally I hooked up with this guy Shelly Berg , who's the head of the jazz department at USC. He's not a stride player, but he's just a masochist, I guess, and he wanted to work it up. . I had the best time doing it. Mike [Lipskin] has performed with Dick, and he was the perfect guy to do it in San Francisco. . There were places where my record was real popular on the radio. . It's just a big hassle beyond what I thought. Also a lot of weird things happened when the album came out. It got a lot of radio play, but during this time Tower Records went belly-up, pretty much, and Tower has for a long time been the mainstay of the indie label. Rhombus [which released "New York City Drag"] was all set up to promote the album to Tower, and Tower was sinking and not really ordering stuff. Then, at the exact same time, the Gavin chart, which was the main airplay chart for jazz, discontinued "jazz" right as my album came out, though it went up to number 12 on the College chart, which was a surprise. And then, and I hate to even bring this up as an inconvenience to me, we had this thing happen in September [on the 11th]. That was funny, too; that was the week that my album was number one on the Amazon indie jazz chart. It was just a very, very weird time, and at that point I decided I didn't want to fly for a while anyway. It's been very peculiar.

AAJ: But isn't it pretty much a rule of the game that if you want to sell albums, you'll have to perform?

LF: I find if I'm interested in something, I go online and buy it. So things have changed.

AAJ: The Internet has had its effect.

LF: It's had a good effect on people who do things that others might enjoy but don't have a big promotion. . Quite a few people have bought the album. I don't know whether performing at Catalina's in LA, where quite a bit of my fan base is, would make more people buy the album than just hearing it on KLON [the Long Beach-based jazz station] would, but for sure I would think twice about doing a project again that involves a style of music that virtually nobody can play. {laughs}

AAJ: What about the new album? Will that be easier to gig behind?

LF: Oh, yah. The new album is with original songs written with all living writers except for Duke Ellington and one Charlie Barnett tune. About half of it is songs that were recorded before, either by my group or by jazz artists like Cleo Laine, Kenny Rankin, Janis Siegel, things that I've written over the years which are in the "old standard" vein. Not a lot of fast patter music like some of the songs on the Fats Waller album, except for "Rockin' In Rhythm." So it's a collection of tunes that were written mostly with composers I really like, like Eddie Arkin. . The album is all acoustic. . Originally I planned it to be an album of ballads, but my friends thought it was missing what I do well, which is swing and the whimsy factor. .

AAJ: The Funny Girl.

LF: Well, I'd call it more whimsical than funny, but still it has a bit of that trippy sound. . . The last session I did, I had a rhythm section of Don Grusin, Brian Bromberg and Harvey Mason, and then I also had horns, basically the Jerry Hay horn section, a guy named Bill Elliott, who has a big band in LA, did a couple of arrangements for me, and the Johnny Mandel tune has Dori Caymmi on it. .

AAJ: Did these people already know you, or have an opportunity to hear the Fats album?

LF: Some of them knew of me, and all of them did me favors, in one way or another. With musicians there's the kind of thing where one involved with the album will say, "Believe me, you'll like it," to another musician who might be hard to get ahold of.

AAJ: But it sounds like, though I have no doubt the new album will be good, that it will make it tougher to pigeonhole you, because the first album was very different from the Fats album and the third one will be different still.

LF: It is different, and it is hard to pigeonhole me. The thing was that tough about "The Body Remembers" album was that it was electronic, I did a lot of layered vocals, and jazz radio just simply will not abide that kind of thing. . it's repugnant to them.

AAJ: Part of what impresses everyone is your ability to work with rapid lyrics. It speaks to one of the virtues of your voice, your intonation.

LF: That's one of the things that came from my upbringing, which I didn't realize, is that it did train my ear to a certain extent, just hearing those things, although I can't do what Jon Hendricks does. Jon Hendricks can actually "do" a bass solo, that guy is just phenomenal. But I do have a good ear.

AAJ: And what did that have to do with your childhood?

LF: The fact that I tried to sing along with Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, hearing their records at home.

AAJ: There's also a quality to your voice, a very nice combination of sassy and sweet.

LF: Well, I do like singing a ballad, noone likes singing the old standards more than I do, and as you'll hear on the new album, when I do write ballads, I like to do it with composers that really touch me, so the chordal and melodic music they come up with makes me feel something before I've written the lyrics.

AAJ: How did you feel onstage at Catalina's? Was it a new feeling at all?

LF: It was very great, the best feeling I've ever had. {laughs} I could hear myself really well, the band was great, I was performing my own music, the room was full.

AAJ: Do you have any idea how you look as a performer?

LF: How I look generally, or how I looked at that moment?

AAJ: Part of what many women in jazz have dealt with is the image of the "girl singer." Anything new for you inhabiting that image, and how does it make you feel?

LF: Well, I discovered when I worked with Full Swing that I really like the whole trip of putting on makeup and getting all dressed up in high heels and a skirt. So it's not like I'm the introvert writer person who loathes getting up in that kind of drag. . I often will buy something for the event, even if it's just earrings, just to mark the occasion. And then as it happened we should talk about this, too right before I left [for LA], Peggy [Lee] died. And as I was driving down, I got a call from her daughter Nicki [Lee Foster], and she asked if I would sing at the memorial service. She'd gotten my album and had become a big fan, though I've known her, obviously, my whole life [their mothers were friends]. She asked how I'd feel about singing "I'll Be Seeing You," you know that was Peggy's closing. I said I think I can, but if I break down Tony asked, "Do you want to take that chance in front of a whole bunch of people?," and I said, "Yah, I really do." Then her pianist, Emilio Pilani , had worked with me as well, and I ended up coming over and doing two tunes, and Quincy Jones's daughter Jolie Jones did "Angels On Your Pillow."

AAJ: Where and when was this?

LF: This was at the Riviera Country Club, yesterday. I practiced "I Love Being Here With You," which was her opening, and then "Circle In the Sky" which she and Emilio wrote, which she used to do as her closing, leading into "I'll Be Seeing You." And it was very hard, because about the first 15 times I practiced it I would just break down into racking sobs, the transition was so heartrending. But I was able to do it. I kept my eyes closed.. I was taking it line by line. I sort of choked up a couple of times.

AAJ: Nicki's Mom and your Mom were roommates at one point.

LF: I have a really darling picture of the two of them, there was this magazine in the '40s called Click, and they did this pictorial about two young gal singers in New York, sharing expenses during Wartime. And it was so cute. All these pictures, very staged, like doing bicycle exercises wearing shorts.

AAJ: And you got to know Peggy when you were growing up.

LF: Yah. We stayed with her, my Mom and I, when we were first looking for houses in LA, and she was "Aunt Peggy" to me for many years. . She and my Mom were a lot alike, they looked alike, Peggy was from North Dakota, my Mom was from Minneapolis, they were both of Norwegian heritage and blondes. . They had a friendship all their lives.

AAJ: When did you first meet [San Francisco stride pianist] Mike Lipskin? L:. I only met him for the first time at Moose's [where she and Lipskin later did her Bay Area debut, with drummer Vince Lateano]. I went in to hear him play.

AAJ: You know that he remembers meeting you before that? He says your Dad introduced him to you a while ago, and he thought you were very attractive. L News to me. {laughs} There's actually going to be a drummer and no bass player [at Moose's], which is something Mike said Fats used to do occasionally. .We're gonna rehearse a couple of times right before the gig.

AAJ: And what you'll do will be from the Fats album?

LF: I'll undoubtedly do every single tune {laughs}.

AAJ: You know, Vince, the drummer, played at Louise and my wedding.

LF: He must be good, then. [Lateano also anchors Jazz at Pearl's, a few blocks from Moose's.]

AAJ: Have you hung out at Moose's?

LF: We had dinner there [at Moose's] once. We don't go up to San Francisco all that often.

AAJ: You and I actually first got together right after you moved here, when you hadn't yet been to the Bach Dancing & Dynamite [jazz and classical venue] down the hill. We went there.

LF: I walk down there all the time.

AAJ: "New York City Drag" also shows off the breadth of your lyric writing. Sometimes it's first person, sometimes you're an omniscient narrator, different perspectives. L:That's the thing about writing for yourself, is you really don't have to conform to the rules. Writing for other people, especially for animation I did a thing for Disney this past year, conceived as direct- to- video, "Jungle Book II", but it's actually going to be a theatrical release now. A year from now. . I love writing for animation, because it's very theatrical and you get to be funny, but there are a lot of people on the scene, and it's a really hat trick, because you want to be very imaginative, but at the same time, you have to follow their guidelines as to what you can and cannot say. With my own stuff, I do like to write some things first-person, others looking through the peephole at somebody else's world. The song just tells you what to do. .

AAJ: What else do you have ahead of you?

LF: I'm writing 30 seconds for the Winter Olympics. . a verse section to a tune that doesn't usually have one, in the closing ceremonies. And I have various things pending in my lyricist's world, but I don't like to say till I know for sure. I do have another album I'm working on. . Ellington and Strayhorn tunes.

AAJ: It really is going to be interesting to see the image you establish of yourself in the world of jazz, partly because what you've done is so wonderful and widespread.

LF: I don't think I really want people to pin a tag on me. . I certainly feel comfortable, as an artist, singing and writing for myself in the world of what I would call jazz per se. It's conceivable one or two tunes might get played on smooth jazz stations, but that's not the kind of album I would make for myself at this point, because lyrically it's too restrictive, though they do play some Steely Dan on those stations.

AAJ: That reminds me of the comment you got from Walter Becker.

LF: I got a plug on the Steely Dan website. . Walter Becker was going to produce the electronic album. . but it fell through. But we've kept in occasional contact, and he's a supporter of mine. Going back to what you said about my not being able to be pinned down, . I think the fact that I'm a writer is my main distinguishing factor. I'm not saying no other singers in jazz write, but I think I do it more extensively than most. I feel that's the thing I was put on the Earth to do, and I'd do it always, even if I stopped singing. . I do have my own take on things which distinguishes me. J; What about selling albums?

LF: It's hard to get your record in stores. . .it's very frustrating.

AAJ: Despite your income from writing lyrics, you would like to be better known as a recording artist.

LF: Yes, of course. . [The new album] is more, in a jazz sense, commercial than the Fats one, in that there are a lot of tunes on it that are less "novelty".

AAJ: How much will performing behind albums be a part of your life?

LF: I have gigs coming up. Dick wanted to know if I wanted to do this 92nd Street Y Jazz In July thing [in New York City] with him. Also some jazz parties. And the Fats Waller thing is almost like this one-woman show trip where I could just do it in perpetuity over the years, where it isn't only tied to the album.

AAJ: It's like a revue.

LF: Yes. But also I want to perform more. . I like the fact that something happens that you don't expect. A certain something catches fire. I like talking to the audience. I like getting into the drama of the song.

AAJ: And you have yet another medium of expression, which is your website. Has Tony helped with that?

LF: I'd be lost without [Tony] and our friend Sarah Bolles, who did the graphics. for our redesign of the site [http://www.lorrainefeather.com]. .

AAJ: It's a great site. What's upcoming with it?

LF: I'd like to do a video for my new album where I lipsync. I like having the site, because it's sort of a portal. I just can't tell you how many people come there and write me via the site, people who hear me on the radio, old friends from school, fans of other artists I've written songs for.

AAJ: Do you have any indication it's helped sell albums?

LF: It definitely helps.

AAJ: You'd told me you also got help from someone at WBGO [New York area jazz radio].

LF: Gary Walker, the program director. I was told he was very picky. I could see he had a sardonic edge when I first met him and did my first interview, when the album came out. . I did a thing with Ed Berger from the Institute of Jazz Studies and Gary Walker and he said "I just love the way you sing," and that was a coup. . They're a hard nut to crack. I've gotten a lot of good vibes from program directors, who say, "Please let us know what you'll be doing next." And that's quite a bit of work, because if you're doing an album a year, no matter what else you're doing, you're always doing it, writing the tunes, recording it, mixing it. That's why it's appealing doing a concept album with one person's album, because it's automatically consistent, and you can just go in and pick and choose. I wouldn't do that always. But it's also a way of referencing and acknowledging the past.