Interview: Lorraine Feather

Lyricist and singer Lorraine Feather is the daughter of Leonard Feather, the jazz pianist, composer, producer, author and journalist who died in 1994. If not for Feather and other driven and talented communicators and promoters in the 1940s such as Norman Granz, Gene Norman, Symphony Sid Torin, Barry Ulanov, Fred Robins, photographers William P. Gottlieb and Herman Leonard, to name a few, post-war modern jazz may have come and gone without recognition. As I wrote in my 2012 book, Why Jazz Happened, the jazz journalists, promoters and radio announcers put bebop on the map by celebrating, promoting and popularizing artists and their music. The artists took it from there.

Lorraine is an artist in her own right. A three-time Grammy nominee, she has recorded 14 albums since 1978. Her vocal approach defies tradition, and her new album out today, My Own Particular Life, is no an exception. It's a tapestry of painful and joyous lifetime recollections layered together with exceptional music and arranging by her collaborators. She uses a sing-talk narrative style that has a Weillian storytelling feel. In this regard, the album sounds like a theatrical soundtrack, and in some ways it is. It's the story of Lorraine's trials and tribulations.

I caught up with her a bunch of weeks ago after listening to the album:

JazzWax: What is your full name?

Lorraine Feather: Billie Jane Lee Lorraine Feather. Lorraine became the name I used since it was easier to say and remember.

JW: Where did you live in Manhattan as a child? Who do you remember coming over to the house to visit your mom and dad?

LF: When I was born in 1948, we lived at One Sheridan Square, above Cafe Society Downtown. A year later we moved to 340 Riverside Drive, at 106th Street, now Duke Ellington Boulevard. Among my folks’ close friends was Dizzy Gillespie, whom I probably saw the most, and whose wife was also named Lorraine.

JW: Who else?

LF: Charlie Parker, who went to Jones Beach with us when I was little. He came to the hospital when my father and mother were hit by a car in 1949. My framed copy of my father's book, Inside Bebop, is signed “To Leonard, my best friend—Charlie Parker." And then there's the funeral photo, which you've probably seen, of Parker's casket being carried out of a church. My dad is a pallbearer. I remember wondering aloud, as a grown young woman, what it was like when Parker was first coming up. Did people accept him easily? “Lorraine," my dad said, “it was as if he'd arrived from another planet."

JW: Amazing. There must have been so many others.

LF: Dick Hyman, who decades later urged me to write lyrics for Fats Waller compositions and played on my New York City Drag album; Jean Bach, who went on to produce the A Great Day in Harlem documentary in her mid-70s; Virginia Wicks, who was Dizzy’s and Ella Fitzgerald’s publicist. I saw Duke Ellington from time to time. He gave my dad a job doing publicity for Mercer Records as he recuperated from being struck by a car. My dad couldn’t go running around to clubs for months. Duke’s sister Ruth lived down the street, and her son, Stevie, used to come over to have popcorn and watch TV. My mom and dad were very close to my godmother and namesake Billie Holiday. She made me baby booties and later wrote letters to them on toilet paper when she was in jail. I only remember meeting her at the apartment once. Billie, Bobby Short and Helen Merrill all sang in the living room when I was asleep in my bedroom. There were other people I knew mostly as voices on the phone. Willie “The Lion” Smith used to call fairly often, saying his whole name. When I was little, I thought he was a real lion. Andy Razaf, Fats Waller’s great lyricist, called often, too.

JW: Precious little is known about your mom. What was her full name and which bands did she sing in? Where did your parents meet?

LF: Her given name was Jane Berenice Larrabee. Her stage name was Jane Leslie. The bands I remember her mentioning were Vincent Lopez and Jimmy Dorsey. She never talked about her singing career, except to say she was always compelled to sing “Stardust.” Peggy Lee introduced my mother and father. He proposed on their first date. Red Norvo and Mildred Bailey stood up for them at their City Hall wedding.

JW: Were you close with your mom?

LF: I loved my mom, who was a sweet, tenderhearted and generous person. But things were difficult between us for many years. She was horrified and upset when I moved back to New York on my own. She was an alcoholic and was in rehab several times to no avail. Things were somewhat better when I returned to California, and both my parents were crazy about my husband Tony Morales. Mom had a whimsical, weird sense of humor and there were times when we had a lot of fun.

JW: Did she sing around the house?

LF: My mother was shy and never sang around the house, except occasionally under her breath in the kitchen. Once I heard her singing softly as she washed the dishes. She was imitating Billie Holiday singing “Your Mother’s Son-in-Law.” I could tell she had a keen ear. She had her own musical favorites, among them Ernie Andrews and Art Pepper. Our family stayed with Peggy when we were looking for a house in Southern California. She was Aunt Peggy to me and would give me glamorous Christmas gifts. We sometimes saw each other on holidays, but my mom accepted the fact that Peggy lived in a different world. She was a star.

JW: After your family moved to L.A. when you were 12, where did you live? Was that period exciting in L.A.?

LF: We lived on Wrightwood Drive, in Studio City. Dad was really into it and was often in our swimming pool. Many of their friends had moved to California, like George Shearing and Benny Carter. I know many people who think of L.A. as Shangri-La, but it never spoke to me.

JW: Really? Why not?

LF: I was most unhappy with that move. I had spent my childhood gazing at the Hudson River out the window in our living room on Riverside Drive. I'd listen to the wheeze of buses while falling asleep and walk to the market with my mom with people all around. Studio City seemed so isolated. Tears sometimes streamed from my eyes on smoggy days. It was so freaking hot all the time.

JW: Did you enjoy school out there?

LF: The girls in junior high wore frosted lipstick and carried pastel purses. I was seen as something of a dork, also young for my grade, since I had skipped first grade. I already knew how to read. At 18, I moved back to New York. I had this fantasy of being a theater actress. I also wanted to avoid having to learn to drive in L.A. Finally, at age 30, I received my driver’s license. In New York, I wound up waitressing extensively, with occasional showbiz gigs, including Jesus Christ, Superstar.

JW: Was your dad accessible to you or preoccupied with his career?

LF: He was very accessible. My parents were out at clubs at night, but during the day he was often around, typing on his old manual typewriter in bed or organizing questionnaires from musicians for his Encyclopedia of Jazz, all spread out on our huge dining room table. I asked my mom what he did, as we were supposed to do a talk about it at school. She said, “He’s a jazz writer.” My little friends didn’t get what that meant, and I didn’t understand it either. In truth, he was as much a songwriter as anything else.

JW: Was he funny?

LF: My dad was funny in a low-key way. He specialized in groan-worthy puns, but he had a wry take on things generally. Once in L.A., when I told him “I think I’ll walk down the hill to the drugstore,” he asked, “When will you know?”

JW: Was he supportive?

LF: When I started writing lyrics in my late 20s, my father gave me an ASCAP form and told me to fill it out. We went to an ASCAP meeting together and I met all the legendary songwriters, including David Raksin, who wrote Laura, and Alan and Marilyn Bergman. My father would suggest Ellington or Strayhorn tunes he thought I should lyricize, like On a Turquoise Cloud. The first time I did a club date with all my own lyrics, people were coming up to him at the break and saying, “Oh Leonard, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.” He was over the moon. He didn’t respond to some of my early attempts at pop-jazz, but for the most part, he was just thrilled that I wound up being a lyricist.

JW: Did you feel close to him?

LF: I was closest to my father during the last years of his life because of our songwriting bond. We took a trip together to Perugia, Italy, for the Umbria Jazz Festival in 1994—the year of the Northridge earthquake, in which my parents’ townhouse was half-destroyed. He became very ill on our trip and died six weeks after we returned to L.A. He was in the intensive-care unit at Encino-Tarzana Hospital when he roused himself to ask if I’d sent my Ellington lyricizations to singer Cleo Laine, who was doing an album with Mercer Ellington. So touching and so typical.

JW: How did your mother take this?

LF: My mother had a heart attack while my father was in the hospital. They were both there for a few weeks, but she recovered. Benny Carter brought his saxophone to the hospital and played by my dad’s deathbed.

JW: For your new album, you say you wrote lyrics for songs based on “the trajectory of your life." In this sense, the album is autobiographical. Why did you think it was time to take stock?

LF: I started taking stock with my Ages album, in 2010, which was also when I began my collaborations with living writers in earnest—Russell Ferrante, Shelly Berg and Eddie Arkin. Attachments in 2013 was about the emotional connections in my life, including an eight-minute piece written with Shelly about my mother.

JW: What about your new album, My Own Particular Life?

LF: I started writing it after I Ianded in Rochester, N.Y., ending one chapter in my life and beginning another. The title song is the first lyric I wrote for Eddie Arkin and me to work on. I wanted it to be kind of smart-ass and groovacious. I had recently made some bad mistakes and didn’t want to sink into despair. I was still riding the adrenaline high of moving. I heard this drumline groove in 6/4 in my head that I thought was exciting. Eddie and I took it from there. Later, of course, a lot of other emotions crept into the songs.

JW: Do you feel unfulfilled?

LF: No, not at all. My creative life is fulfilling, though not easy, and the best part of it only started a dozen years ago. I have a small circle of unbelievable friends and colleagues now. I’m miserable sometimes, of course.

JW: Which song on your new album was the most emotionally difficult to write and why?

LF: Music from the Ceiling, about my ex-husband, jazz drummer Tony Morales. We lived together after the divorce for a time. Then we both moved back to L.A. from Orcas Island in Washington State and stayed close. Not long after, he started forgetting the names of things. It took years for him to be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in his mid-60s. I went to L.A. in the fall of 2019 to write and to see Tony. Not long before, he had been found wandering on the freeway.

JW: How was he?

LF: I had dinner with Tony, his brother, Joey, and Joey’s girlfriend, Emily. Tony was uncommunicative, but at one point he looked up at a speaker overhead and asked why music was coming from the ceiling. I burst into tears. I felt so helpless. In the parking lot afterward, he told me he thought I was beautiful and hoped he would see me again. He had no idea who I was. He is such a good guy and it rips me apart.

JW: Music From the Ceiling must have been hard.

LF: It is the only song on the album that was written music-first. I had been trying to write a lyric about Tony for months, and it was hard. I felt so raw about it and couldn’t seem to make it simple enough. But when I heard the guitar Eddie (above) played with a Big Sky reverb pedal in his home studio and had my last meeting with Tony, the song fell into place.

JW: In Sweet Little Creature, you write about a traumatic event. What happened?

LF: It was a relationship that ended painfully and, honestly, it's too difficult for me to talk about.

JW: I hear both disappointment and optimism in your lyrics and voice, as if you are coming face to face with the totality of life’s randomness—its good breaks and bad. True?

LF: I wouldn’t say I’m resigned to how life played out. I do believe in karma, and try to be more responsible and honest as time goes by. And I hold to the belief that at any moment, something glorious can happen, whether it’s a major work breakthrough, a great love, or just a scrumptious meal. Given what we have all gone through since early last year and continue to go through, I feel privileged to be alive, full of energy and engaged in life. I’m also grateful that I have a roof over my head.

JW: How do you hear the album?

LF: As a self-reflecting statement of who I am at this point in my life—as a human being and as a lyricist-singer. The 2½-year experience of co-producing the album with Eddie, writing it with him, Russ, Shelly and Dave, and recording it from our different locales with our stellar musicians and engineers, was in some respects more intense than doing it the traditional way.

JW: How so?

LF: There’s a nice little studio minutes from my apartment where I recorded all the lead and background vocals, and a studio in L.A. called the Hideaway that was command central. We got into this routine of shuttling the tracks from person to person, doing rough mixes as each musician was added—Mike Shapiro in Manila, Russ and most of the others in L.A., Dave Grusin in Santa Fe, the Shelly Berg Trio in Miami.

JW: So it was rewarding, despite the pandemic?

LF: Being able to create something as a team, mostly with musical friends I’ve known for so long was exhilarating. When we handed it off to Don Murray to mix, he said he was flabbergasted that almost all of it was recorded from remote locations because everyone sounded so connected. It was a close bond, even with the separation.