Jazz Great Carmen Lundy reflects on her Miami roots

South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Bob Weinberg: April 13, 2008

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/entertainment/music/concerts/sfl-mucarmenlundysbapr13,0,3125533.story

By Bob Weinberg | Special Correspondent

April 13, 2008

“My sister, I remember her/Wearing pigtails, running through the sun in our back yard.” Miami-born jazz vocalist and composer Carmen Lundy vividly calls up a childhood reminiscence on the title track to her recent recording, Come Home. “The look in her eyes looking up at me/I remember those days of innocence/I remember those days today.”

It was an alarming phone call that conjured those images for Lundy, the oldest of seven children; apparently, doctors had found something suspicious in her sister’s lungs. The singer’s natural inclination was to jet to her sibling’s side, but the geographical logistics of touring would not allow it.

“It was physically impossible for me to go to Miami,” Lundy, 53, explains by phone from Washington, D.C., where she was participating in educational workshops and concerts for the Jazz Ahead program at Kennedy Center. “I had this sense of ‘That’s where I’m supposed to be,’ the urgency to try to be wherever she is, but I couldn’t go. So [writing the song] was like a way for me to deal with what was going on in my mind and my emotions.”

Memories came pouring out of Lundy like Polaroids tumbling out of a shoe box when she sat down with friend and collaborator Deborah Ash. Within an hour, she says, they had the lyric. “And she started with the very first words I told her,” Lundy relates, “‘my sister.'”

Gospel beginnings with Mom

Family has long exerted a gravitational tug on Lundy — her sister, by the way, is now “totally fine” — even as her lush, cool vocals and determinedly original compositions have taken her all over the world. (And occasionally back home; she’ll return to South Florida for a concert Friday at the Miniaci Center in Davie.)

As a little girl, she hungrily devoured the sounds of her mother’s gospel group, The Apostolic Singers. An aunt accompanied the singers on piano and Hammond organ; sometimes a blues guitarist would sit in. The group’s extended, spirit-infused improvisations had an electrifying effect on listeners, and young Carmen was hooked. Watching the group’s rehearsals, she observed how the singers worked out harmonies and how they were transported to “a whole new dimension” when they performed.

Following her mother’s example, Lundy joined choral programs in junior high and high school. She says she truly flowered under the tutelage of Miami Killian’s chorale director Ann Duncan, whom she calls “the first and most profound influence outside of my family.”

Lundy’s musical career began at age 13. Her duo, Steph and Tret, was hired to sing at high school proms throughout Miami and even recorded a 45 titled The Price of Silence. However, she credits a fellow student at Miami Killian, pianist David Roitstein, with turning her on to jazz, sharing LPs of artists such as Bill Evans, Cannonball Adderley and Miles Davis with her.

At the University of Miami, where Lundy was an opera major, it was Roitstein who pulled her into the jazz program; off campus, she began gigging with his bands. On her first job, at Miami’s Eden Roc hotel, Lundy recalls hearing a bandmate’s cassette of Ella Fitzgerald tearing up How High the Moon from the classic live-in-Berlin recording.

“When I heard that record,” she says, “that was it. That’s when I knew for sure that’s what I was going to do for the rest of my life.”

What Miami scene taught her

In her sophomore year at UM, Lundy’s younger brother, bassist Curtis Lundy, came to the university, as did saxophonist Bobby Watson. A personal and musical triangle formed that continues to this day. Spurred by Watson and other student player-composers, Lundy became increasingly inspired to pen her own music, gaining the tools with courses in composition and arranging.

“When I began to perform professionally is when it really began to click,” she says. “We would come out of the classroom and take those ideas to our gigs. And I think that’s where I really began to hone a sense of whatever it was to do jazz singing.”

“What impressed everybody at the time,” remembers UM classmate and current faculty member Robert “BeBob” Grabowski, “was her being able to sing what most people couldn’t even play. All the jazz vocal majors [now] take improvisation for jazz vocal majors. She did it with the instrumentalists. It was just unheard of across the nation. For her to do that vocally was just nuts.”

Lundy established herself as part of a Miami jazz scene that included the likes of Phyllis Hyman, Alice Day, Joe Donato and Ira Sullivan. She held down regular engagements at the Village Inn in Coconut Grove and Les Jardins off Le Jeune Road with fellow UM grad Bruce Hornsby.

“That was one of the things about Carmen that was just so wild,” says Grabowski, a bassist and WLRN-91.3 FM jazz radio host, who would catch Lundy’s act at hip Miami rooms such as Cy’s River Gate and The Checkmate. “By day she’d be doing this heavy, heavy academic [stuff], and at night she’d be playing, not really Top 40 by any means, but she was doing like Stevie Wonder tunes along with jazz standards.”

Sultry, like the climate

Although she moved to New York City in 1978 — and later to Los Angeles, her current home — Lundy acknowledges the profound influence South Florida has had on her art. (The affection is mutual: The city of Miami officially proclaimed Jan. 25 as Carmen Lundy Day.)

“Someone told me once that the sound of my voice had the wind in it, the air or humidity,” she says. “The climate in Florida, the body reacts to that humidity. It’s the difference between the pace of New York and the pace of the tropics. There’s more breath in between each note.

“There’s no way bebop could have happened in Miami,” she adds with a chuckle. “No way.”

Nor can you discount the cultural mix of Latin and Caribbean cultures that Lundy was exposed to growing up in the predominantly black Richmond Heights neighborhood. A similar sensibility permeates the music of artists such as Jaco Pastorius and Pat Metheny.

“You can always tell someone who went through the Miami scene,” Grabowski says, “not only because of their chordal structures, but because of that sense of air, that sense that it’s not real crowded.”

New CD gets personal

Come Home showcases Lundy at her best. Her silky contralto surfs the swells and dips of rich, complex compositions that surge in unexpected directions. Mentors such as Betty Carter, Sarah Vaughan and Shirley Horn inform her craft; their echoes are evident as she explores the upper registers of her range in the joyful cry concluding My Wedding Vow or offers an intimate toast on the shimmering piano ballad Happy New Year.

The backing musicians, many of whom she performs with regularly, provide beyond-empathetic support, particularly pianists Anthony Wonsey and Geri Allen, guitarist Lage Lund and, of course, brother Curtis on the upright. (Bassist Robert Hurst will be performing with the band on Friday.)

The album feels quite personal, from the heartfelt, nearly all-original songs to the CD’s cover, a family portrait painted by the singer around 1994. Gathered in Miami for her grandmother’s funeral, the Lundy clan was more populous than it is now, the vocalist says.

“I saw my family shifting because we lost a matriarch,” she says. “This painting was a way for me to take a snapshot of that point in time. It was a way of holding onto a memory and also to honor the family.”

Also adding to the family feel on Come Home is the chorus that la-la-la’s the intro and outro to Lundy’s multicultural meditation Afrasia. It comprises her 5-year-old niece and 9-year-old nephew — Curtis’ kids — as well as producer Elisabeth Oei’s niece and the daughters and son of pianist Allen and trumpeter Wallace Roney.

Bringing another generation into the embrace of jazz is daunting but essential. That’s part of her mission as she wraps up the program at the Kennedy Center along with fellow musician-educators and up-and-coming musicians from around the world. The latter were scheduled to play a concert for junior high school students who are about the same age as Lundy was when she embarked on her career.

“I’m conveying to my group of young professionals that these impressions they make will be the first concert some of these kids have ever gone to,” she says. “So the way they reach out and grab these young kids is going to make the difference. We want them to go out of there going, ‘That’s what I want to do when I grow up.'”

Bob Weinberg is a freelance writer in Hallandale.

If you go

Carmen Lundy performs at 8 p.m. Friday at the Miniaci Performing Arts Center, 3100 Ray Ferrero Jr. Blvd., Davie. Tickets $30. Call 877-311-7469 or visit southfloridajazz.org.