CARMEN LUNDY FINDS VALUE IN THE ANCESTORS

As seen in LA Jazz Scene

By Dee Dee McNeil
October 1, 2022

Carmen Lundy is one of those productive people who is highly creative, gifted and artistic. Born November 1st in Miami, Florida, it didn’t take little Carmen long to discover music tantalized her ears. From day one, there was music in their house and she had a song in her heart. At Age four, her tiny fingers plucked out melodies on the household upright piano. Carmen’s mother was also full of song and a role model as the lead singer in a gospel group called “The Apostolic Singers.” Her auntie, Emma Teresa Miller, was a pianist for that gospel group, and she inspired Carmen to love the instrument. In fact, Carmen has always found value in lessons from the ancestors.

“My mother is the oldest of fifteen children and I am the oldest of seven siblings. When she wasn’t doing the eight-hour job-thing, my mother would do housekeeping on the side. The lady that she did that for was a classical piano player. That lady offered me piano lessons without having to pay for them. Mrs. Leslie Bloss was my first piano teacher. She also was Curtis’s first teacher,” Carmen referred to her famous brother, jazz bassist Curtis Lundy.

“I took lessons from Mrs. Bloss until I was about eight or nine; maybe ‘til the age of ten. From age twelve to about fourteen I studied piano with Mr. Poznanski. But pianist, Emma Miller, my mother’s sister, was throwing down the gospel stuff from the time I was four or five. That’s probably where I picked up playing piano, from watching her. I never studied with her. I was just amazed at her facility. You know, people always ask me who are your influences? And I have to say, a lot of them are people the world doesn’t know. They were the ones who showed me the music informally. My grandfather played guitar. My grandmother played the organ. An in-law named Joe Louis was somewhere in between B.B. King and George Benson. He had a mellow sound, but he could also ‘rip” on guitar. He would electrify the whole room. We were church going folks, and music was the salvation and expression that got us through another day,” Carmen told me about her musically inspired, youthful years.

After graduating from the University of Miami and moving from Miami to New York City, for nearly eighteen years Carmen Lundy acted as a clinician at the Betty Carter Jazz Ahead Program. Betty Carter brought her Jazz Ahead program to the Kennedy Center in 1998. It has helped launch the careers of several of today’s stars, including Cyrus Chestnut, Kendrick Scott, Jason Moran, Jazzmeia Horn, Nate Smith, Arco Iris Sandoval, and Matthew Whitaker, among others.1 I asked Carmen Lundy about that exciting time in her life.

“Well, you know Curtis, my brother, gave that program the name Jazz Ahead while he was working with Betty Carter. She started the program at Brooklyn Academy of Music, up the street from where she lived. Dr. Billy Taylor became the Artistic Advisor of Jazz at the Kennedy Center and this was around the mid to late nineties. So, Dr. Taylor invited Betty Carter to bring her Jazz Ahead Program into the Kennedy Center in April of 1998.2 Betty Carter passed away in September of 1998. She had just gotten her foot in the door of the Kennedy Center, and she was gone. So, my brother, Curtis Lundy, came in and became the helm of Jazz Ahead that year. Curtis recommended me, because I think it made sense that there should be a female representation, since Betty had started it, and it just so happened that I was also a jazz vocalist.”

Of course, it also helped that Carmen Lundy had graduated from the University of Miami where she received her B.M. degree in studio music and jazz. She started out as an opera major but changed direction and became the first jazz vocal major at the University of Miami. Ms. Lundy had also been performing since her college days, first in Miami and then at jazz hot spots all over New York City. She reads music and is accomplished in composing and arranging. Not to mention, at the time of her appointment, she had record releases to her credit. Carmen’s credentials made her the perfect fit as faculty for Betty Carter’s program.

“Dr. Taylor was smart. He knew that the Kennedy Center people needed that credential like he had, so he invited Dr. Nathan Davis from the University of Pittsburgh to oversee the Jazz Ahead Program, along with me, Curtis Fuller and George Cables who were all part of the faculty. Then, the question became, where are we going to get these kids from? Where will we get these musicians? Betty Carter was handpicking everybody, so what do we do? We started a submissions program. Everybody was submitting from all over the world, and they were sending their cassettes with their bios and all that good stuff. We would sit there with boxes of cassettes delivered to our front door. We would have to listen to hours upon hours of submissions. In fact, that’s how I met pianist, Julius Rodriguez who’s on my CD and trumpeter Giveton Gelin and Matthew Whitaker on organ and keyboards,” Carmen credited some of the young musicians from the Jazz Ahead program as being part of her new album. Speaking of her new release, Lundy has composed and arranged all the material on her latest album, “Fade to Black.” She opens with “Shine A Light,” dedicated to the first responders and hospital workers who showed their selfless bravery during a time of the COVID worldwide health crisis. Her opening melody is catchy and has a few challenging intervals thrown-in for good measure. Melodically, these unexpected intervals do indeed shine a light on Ms. Lundy’s composing skills and vocal range. Carmen Lundy has a comfortable way of mixing straight ahead and contemporary jazz. This first song is one of my favorites. “So Amazing” is very contemporary and Lundy’s voice uses its full range to sing her message with joy and competence. “Daughter of the Universe,” has a blues groove and a strong bass line delivered by Curtis Lundy on the introduction. The bass line captures my interest immediately. Inside the song, Kenny Davis plays bass. I enjoy the way Carmen doubles her vocals in specifics places and celebrates her alto voice range. This song and the one that follows, “Ain’t I Human” were inspired by Harriet Tubman’s famous “Ain’t I A Woman” speech that reflected Tubman’s struggle for freedom and equality, not only as an African American, but as a woman in a man-controlled world. The tune “Reverence” is another one of my favorites and is a referendum on privacy. Lundy’s lyrics float like colorful, revolutionary flags above chords that set a groove pattern beneath the flapping cloth of truth. This is music with a message and Carmen Lundy is a woman with a purpose and a strong creative opinion.

Lundy’s latest recording is her sixteenth album release. She admits, getting record deals has been an up-hill struggle. Carmen Lundy shared her personal determination to succeed in the music business.

“It was 1978 when I moved to New York City. All the guys I went to University of Miami with were finishing school and moving to NYC. So, I did the same thing. But my goal was to make records. The first year I got there, I sang every weekend in NY for fifty dollars a night at a club called Jazz Mania. It was a loft thing and a gig for everybody. I met Kenny Barron there, Walter Bishop Jr., and an endless list of players. Day after day, I went to every major record company that was making jazz records. I submitted to every, last one of them and every one of them turned me down. As a matter of fact, the third demo tape I submitted to Columbia Records turned out to be my first record. They gave me a licensing deal. But they originally turned down the same record that they could have put out and helped me to establish myself in the 80’s.”

Carmen explained, “What happened was, Father Peter O’Brien was managing Mary Lou Williams for most of her career. Mary Lou Williams passed in 1981. I saw Mary Lou perform in summer of 1979 and in 1980. Father O’Brien read a Village Voice cover article about me in 1983 and he contacted me. He was doing a concert to honor Mary Lou Williams with Jon Faddis participating and he asked me to sing some of her music. After that, he took a shine to me and became my manager. So, Father O’Brien handled the whole thing with Columbia. He was the one who was smart enough to know what to do when they passed on me as an artist. He was the one who contacted Herb Wong at Black Hawk and that’s how I got that ‘Good Morning Kiss’ record released, through Father O’Brien. It was a distribution deal and stayed on the Billboard chart for weeks.”

With the guidance of Father Peter O’Brien, Carmen Lundy’s career blossomed.

“In part of Mary Lou’s Will, she requested that the legacy of her music be passed on to children. Father O’Brien asked me to teach Mary Lou’s Mass to young people. He was then the Chaplain at Fordham University. I went into the Parochial school in Harlem and hand-picked the voices to teach them Mary Lou’s Mass. I also worked with the Harlem Boys Choir and the New York Boys Choir. I acted as the soloist for anything that required a soloist in Mary Lou’s Mass, and I performed Mary Lou’s Mass for a good twelve to fifteen years. When Father O’Brien hooked up with Geri Allen, then Geri and I started doing the mass together. Before Geri, Marian McPartland was at the piano chair when we did it at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., with David Baker conducting. Mary Lou wrote two pieces based on Martin Luther King speeches. One of them is called, I have a Dream, which we all know. The other one she wrote is called ‘Tell Them Not to Talk Too Long.’ Those two, Father O’Brien commissioned me to write the chorale arrangements. I did, and we performed them in Los Angeles with the Master Chorale.

I asked Carmen Lundy what made her leave New York and relocate to Los Angeles.

“I moved to Los Angeles in the early nineties. I was burned out. The Crack thing, that epidemic, had decimated the New York Community. My manager at the time booked me on the Duke Ellington Broadway “Sophisticated Ladies” show that was Phyllis Hyman’s role. They had a National company and they had a European company. I ended up doing the European tour. That was a great way to know and live Duke Ellington’s music. The first run was twenty-nine shows without a day off. I had a six-month contract. I did make a record for a label called Arabasque. It was an independent label. When the record came out, it was around the same time I had moved to Los Angeles.”

“I came out to L.A. to visit my friends who had made their big hit in Ain’t Misbehavin’ with Nell Carter, Ken Page, Amelia McQueen, Andre DeShields, Charlayne Woodard, all the cast from Ain’t Misbehavin’. They were all coming back and forth, trying to get into film and TV out here. A lot of them did well with film and television. While visiting, I got sent on an audition by my agent in New York for a TV show and I got the part. They gave me a car, they gave me an apartment and a nice piece of change. So, I said, oh – L.A. isn’t so bad after all. Twenty-something years later, I’m still here.”

Although the television pilot Carmen shot never materialized, she settled into West Coast living and has continued to be productive as both a singer, actress and a visual artist. She also produces short films and in September she debuted her film, “Nothing But the Blood – The True Story of the Apostolic Singers of Miami,” at the Regal Theater in downtown Los Angeles. It’s a story of her Miami musical family.

As a visual artist, she has painted and designed several of her album covers, including this recent “Fade to Black” release. Her extraordinary art and multi-media sculptures will be featured as part of the upcoming “Shifting the Narrative: Jazz and Gender Justice” exhibit, opening at Detroit’s Carr Center on October 14, 2022. You can check out an eye-opening gallery of her visual art at her website: www.carmenlundy.com.

As our conversation wound down, Carmen Lundy offered these thoughtful words of wisdom.

“The beautiful thing is the value of a mentor. Having Betty Carter as a mentor, ok?! My mother as a mentor! Once you get here, it’s the result of your standing on somebody’s shoulders. Generations that are moving forward must regard and respect their ancestors for giving them everything that they can. It benefits us and enriches us. I just have to say, the value of what we do is on the shoulders of those who have walked this walk and carved this path for us.”

True to her own counsel, Carmen Lundy is doing the work, creating the art and offering opportunity to youthful talent by example, by teaching, by employing and by believing, as ‘the ancestors’ did, in the evolution and support of our blossoming, new generations.