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One Quiet Voice: A conversation with Rebecca Martin

13 mins read


Rebecca Martin and Larry Grenadier at Carnegie Hall. (myspace.com photo)

It’s a warm August morning and the day is getting a little sticky already. Finally, summer is here. The kitchen, though, is cool from the evening air. Rebecca Martin – lyricist, vocalist, musician, mother, wife – is at her mother’s table in Rangeley, slicing tomatoes, onion, mashing avocado and rubbing in spices.

If there is a recipe for this guacamole, it’s somewhere in Rebecca’s head. As she grabs, chops, hand-mixing it all in, our kitchen conversation scoops up jazz, community gardens, the joy of singing, writing. We reminisce about childhood in western Maine, Rebecca’s memories of the farm in Andover lifting my early years on a farm in West Paris clearly in front of me.

But Rebecca Martin had an inner knowledge, from the time she was a sophomore in high school.

“I knew I would leave for New York City, I had no idea what I would do, but I knew that I would go,” she said. A self-confessed “wild child,” she was clearly becoming a handful. Obstinate, yet with no clear goals. A dangerously blank slate, waiting for chalk.

And one strong connecting factor between Mom and her – a love of music. Her mother, Terry Martin, tended to play piano in the house as Rebecca grew up, running through the repertoire of standards, some of which stuck. Call it serendipity, call it synchronicity, Mom enrolled Rebecca in a jazz program. Rebecca found her chalk.

Move forward a few years. Rebecca has fulfilled her inner plan and moved to NYC, where she forthrightly got her butt kicked (she shrugs and keeps making guacamole). And that was fine and necessary. Eventually, serendipity happens and soon she connects with musicians as focused as she.

Playing in small clubs, connecting with other butt-kicked musicians, the soup is stirred and a group formed (Once Blue). And it worked quite well for awhile. But, as Rebecca puts it, “we’re 25 and we’re getting all this and some people can deal with it and sometimes you deal with it by leaving it.”

In her case, she just could not continue, she was drinking heavily and realized that it was a wrong path. In survival mode, she left the band after a brilliant album, and on the cusp of success.

And once again, her willingness to jump into the stream is rewarded, eventually. The daughter of community organizers, she looked at the music industry, saw a different path, and the Independence Project came to be. Self-governing artists, touring and performing across the U.S. in a shifting model that was not obliged by corporate contract or governance as to when to play, for how much and where. Nice. And it worked quite well for awhile.

Move forward a few years, and here we are. Rebecca headlines at the Vanguard, one of the few vocalists to have done so for the past 15 years, and more impressively, performing standards not heard there for 50 or more years. And last Friday, she and her husband, bassist Larry Grenadier, once again supporting community, performed two sets combining her own works and standards for the benefit of Rangeley’s Friends of the Performing Arts.

Larry is very well-regarded in his own right, having performed with jazz musicians such as John Scofield and Brian Mehldau, as well as his own group “Fly,” with fellow musicians Jeff Ballard and Mark Turner.

This summer, Rebecca and Larry decided to tour minimalist and it works. Her voice and guitar, coupled with his interpretive, supportive, innovative bass find the interior of each song selected, and importantly, push the lyrics forward. Not only in her works, but more especially in her full resurrection of standards. Many standards as now performed eliminate melodic verses, going for the refrain or chorus. A clear example is “Tea for Two,” which Rebecca and Larry presented for the Rangeley audience.

Most people remember (especially if they took piano lessons) the endlessly perky “Tea for Two” structure. However, when Rebecca and Larry perform the work, they include the introductory melodic verse, which is a clear expression of frustration, starting right off with the words “I’m discontented.” If you don’t know the whole song, then the perkiness of the refrain can seem unreal. But when you hear the introductory verse, you understand the lyricist, creating this idyllic tea for two out of the whole cloth of frustration. He’s trying to perk things up. Someday, baby, it’ll be so much better. The background frustration allows Larry and Rebecca to explore the hesitancies within “Tea for Two,” the hopefulness, the fear that it might not work. Larry’s bass suggests desire, resilient hope, deep promise as Rebecca voices the writer’s tired optimism. When will we have that tea for two?

Rebecca Martin could forge a long very accomplished career if all she and Larry Grenadier did was resurrect and fully reveal the standard repertoire. But as she pointed out in the concert “ya gotta do both.” She has been writing as long as she has been singing and neither can be ignored. The wonderful thing about her writing, perhaps influenced by her experience with complex standards, is that she maintains focus on verse, beyond perky arrangement, or memorable hook. Her lyrics stand poetically, outside obvious rhythm or song structure. Rebecca’s subject matter is mature and heartfelt, exploring life completely from issues of aging, to community, child-rearing, women’s rights and the abuses against them. And yes, love songs as well, but not the sugar-coated kind. The closest pop comparison would be Joni Mitchell’s painterly words, which forcibly break rhythm and pattern.

Setting lyrics to a jazz structure is a huge advantage not only to Rebecca as lyricist, but also for Rebecca as vocalist. Jazz is an open form with musicians creating shapes and colors outside the confines of the more formalized pop song idiom. Songs stretch, musicians find a core rhythm to the set of lyrics or use instrumentation to push words by accenting a syllable here or lifting a vowel there, flowing under a line of words. The voice, as instrument, has that same nuanced energy and sense of mission.

This musicianship is close to the idea of communal painting. An artist draws a series of lines or daubs a few colors on the canvas. The next painter adds a few colors, maybe draws another line or two, and on and on. Rebecca and Larry as an intuitive duo, do that as well, building the song between them. An observation which (again) affirms my love of live performance.


Rebecca Martin’s latest CD “The Growing Season”

Rebecca Martin’s latest CD “The Growing Season” is lovely and positive and a pleasure to listen to. But I will always prefer Larry and Rebecca’s Rangeley takes on “You’re Older” and especially “The Space in a Song to Think” as she pushed on the empty page within the song, waiting for the writer, and Larry nudged the notes and chords, accenting the blank slate, waiting for the chalk.

Rebecca, still chatting as she chops and mixes, is asked about her Web site and the encouragement she gives to her visitors to get involved in local issues, in community. What is she up to now, after the Independence Project and such? That’s when her smile explodes and her face radiates as clearly as in the joy of singing. Community Gardens!

When she and Larry moved to their home in Kingston N.Y., they also had a new baby and, well, you start to think a lot about community and atmosphere and nurturing neighborhoods. As a community leader, she was a founder of KingstonCitizens.org and became involved in The Kingston Victory Garden Project. What better way to connect community to the thread of life than to create vegetable gardens within it? Working with concerned neighbors and community leaders, Rebecca set about creating a series of gardens throughout Kingston. The gardens demonstrate the power of self-sustaining community and give young children not only an idea of where food comes from, but also the knowledge to produce crops, utilize them and market them. The children take an active role in this and see the results of their efforts. It’s very much different than X-Box, and a lot healthier.

Rebecca Martin is a true believer in the power of the sole, sustained impassioned human voice, and the eventual success of community. But when I say “impassioned” I do not mean strident. In songs such as “To Prove Them Wrong” she demonstrates her philosophy of quiet, sincere individuality. The song entwines around the belief that the importance of a statement is not to prove another person wrong, but to quietly express individual belief. This approaches heresy in modern American dialogue, where screaming at each other seems to be expected, if not demanded, by demagogues of every stripe. But passion can be quiet and brings a heavy power with it. Think of Billie Holiday’s version of “Strange Fruit,” a song about the random lynchings of blacks, sung with a sinewed sadness beyond outrage, so beyond even tears. Then listen to Rebecca Martin’s “As For You, Raba,” and you have that same sense of righteous grief, so deep it is beyond sadness and becomes a will to be heard. Can a quiet voice be heard?

Partial Discography:
The Growing Season (New York Times Critic Pick)
On Broadway vol 4 (New York Times Top 10 of 2006)
People Behave Like Ballads (New York Times Critic Pick)
Once Blue (re-release/additional tracks)
Middlehope (New York Times Top 10 of 2002)

For further information on Rebecca Martin, Larry Grenadier and the Kingston Garden Project, check out these Web sites: www.rebeccamartin.com
www.kingstonlandtrust.org

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1 Comment

  1. Ernie,
    What an exciting article! Your perceptive look at Rebecca Martin’s talent, history, and continued growth as a musician was well written with your usual dose of “quirky-good” (my new phrase) insight.
    Thanks,
    Margaret

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